Men are More Intelligent than Women?
On Start the Week, on Radio 4, tonight, Jeremy Paxman asked Professor Susan Greenfield, well-known neuroscientist (and Director of the Royal Institution) "You claim, don't you, that the more emotion you have, the less mind you have?"
"That's right," she answered.
Indeed, it is one of the main propositions in her new book, The Private Life of the Brain.
She went on to say, "[For example] One might say that, in meditation, one is developing a very deep consciousness, where you are accessing your inner states, and ignoring the outside world. This could be an example of where you are NOT experiencing an emotion, as such. The opposite would be, [perhaps], a baby, or someone with road rage, or a bungy jumper, awash with emotions and who is not [therefore] 'accessing' [with the mind] the past, or the future, or anything 'inside'."
Thus, Prof Greenfield is saying that the more 'emotion' you experience, the less 'mind' you have.
Now, which of the two possible genders, statistically speaking, experiences more emotion - and would claim to?
Mmm! The female gender, one would suspect.
And it follows, therefore, that, statistically speaking, this gender has less 'mind'. It is less in 'contact' with it.
Putting this another way: Relatively speaking, compared to men, women are less often 'accessing the past, or the future, or anything 'inside' ' - statistically, that is.
Well, that's what follows from Professor Greenfield's observations.
And most men and women would agree with them, openly, if they weren't having to be so politically correct.
Women, thus, statistically speaking, function less 'mindfully' than men, or, putting it less euphemistically, less 'intelligently'.
It cannot have escaped even the most ardent feminist's notice that it is men who are the focused, the possessed, and the obsessed. It is men who push forward the boundaries of science, music, technology and art. It is men who build great cities and great religions.
It is men who tinker well into the night, studying and prising apart the boundaries of even the most obscure and intractable.
I know one man who spent six years studying locust legs.
Not locusts. Locust LEGS!
FOR SIX YEARS!
I knew another who was a mathematician and who struggled daily, FOR YEARS, with some obscure problem in which only one other person in the entire world seemed to have any interest - and it wasn't me.
Just look at any science programme on TV and notice the 'workers' labouring in the various scientific fields. The 'experts'. The ones who sneak into their laboratories even on Christmas Day to skulk around engines, chemicals, computers or insects. The ones who spend hour upon hour, year upon year, squashed into their little rooms to study the contents of test-tubes or tissues. The ones who wander into the most hostile and desolate parts of the planet to scrub around for clues, artifacts and ideas.
They're nearly all men!
It is men who lead, explore, push forward and calculate.
And, to the extent that intelligence is based on factors in the environment, as opposed to genetics, or based upon learning and studying, as opposed to 'emotionalising' (and, so, losing 'mind') then the intelligence of men must creep forward more quickly, and further, than that of women, throughout their lives - because, statistically speaking, they choose to take on more of the intelligent-provoking 'environment', and they interact with it in much more of an objective and emotionless way (i.e. with more 'mind').
When it comes to intelligence, men have got what it takes. They drive in straight lines, they focus their attention, they do not multitask, they obsess, and they do not spend so much time emotionalising.
And they actually increase their intelligence by doing such things.
And the whole species benefits from their pursuits.
Statistically speaking, men are taller than women. Not much, but significantly so. The picture below is of some men and women. Some of the women, quite a few of them, are actually taller than quite a few of the men.
http://www.angryharry.com/esMenareMoreIntelligentthanWomen.htm
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