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Earlier: “He Kept The Faith”—A Conversation With Richard Lynn
Sex Differences in Intelligence: The Development Theory , the latest book by the Grand Old Man of psychology Richard Lynn, systematically demonstrates something that has long been obvious to most people (including women, if you know any): On average, men are more intelligent than women—by about 4 IQ points.
(Full disclosure: I have known Lynn since 2012, consider myself his protégé and in 2015 we co-authored Race and Sport: Evolution and Racial Differences in Sporting Ability .
In a dry and dispassionate scientific style, as ever with Lynn’s books, the 91-year-old psychologist takes us on an extremely in-depth tour of all of the available data on sex differences in intelligence, carefully explaining the findings in evolutionary terms. In essence, prior to the development of IQ tests, it was assumed that males must be more intelligent than females because males have larger brains in comparison to their size; and also have accomplished so much more. Lynn cites Charles Darwin himself in this regard: Darwin actually remarked in The Descent of Man that
The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain—whether requiring deep thought, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands
How much longer before he is Cancelled?
The problem, as Lynn explores, is that, as IQ testing developed across the twentieth century, generally using samples of school children, there were no clear differences in IQ between males and females. They appeared to have the same average IQ.
This was widely accepted until, in the 1990s, Lynn began to propound the “Developmental Theory”—hence the subtitle of his new book. Lynn explored not merely IQ samples from schoolchildren, but also those from adults. In doing so, Lynn discovered something fascinating: Males and females do indeed have approximately equal IQ until about the age of about sixteen. However, by early adulthood, males have a higher IQ. This is because males undergo puberty later and puberty involves a period of intense brain growth, which ultimately results in males having bigger brains—and thus higher average IQs.
Lynn presents an evolutionary theory for this difference: In order to acquire females, who sexually select for status, males had to reach the top of their group’s hierarchy and attain more resources than other males, through the cognitively-challenging means of solving novel problems and creating successful alliances with other males. This would have strongly selected for intelligence.
Interestingly, Lynn notes that the magnitude of sex difference in intelligence is smaller among those races that, on average, have lower IQs, such as Sub-Saharan Africans. Lynn hypothesizes that this is because their environment’s easier ecology meant that the problems to be solved were less taxing, so that that intelligence was less intensely selected for.
I would add that, in such ecologies, social status would be more a matter of physical toughness than high intelligence. And, further, the tendency to abandon females in such “Live Fast, Die Young” environments would result in females having to be relatively more masculinized in order to survive and thus in females being relatively more intelligent.
Having demonstrated this, Lynn supports his theory with a variety of different kinds of IQ tests, before exploring sex differences in robust correlates of intelligence, presenting evolutionary reasons for why they have developed.
Thus, he shows that males have faster reaction times than females and that males score higher on “General Intelligence,” the strongly genetic construct which underpins different kinds of intelligence, such as spatial, verbal and mathematical reasoning.
Adult males also score higher than females in certain weak correlates of intelligence, such as general knowledge. As Lynn notes:
A likely evolutionary explanation of the male advantage in general knowledge is that much of general knowledge is concerned with activities of and conflicts between men, e.g., in history, the arts and politics, and males have more interest in these and hence more knowledge of them.
However, on some measures of intelligence—those that more weakly correlate with General Intelligence—evolution has given females an advantage. Thus they are more verbally fluent. Lynn says: “The likely evolutionary explanation for this is that females who produce a lot of words promote the acquisition of language in their children.” They are also considerably better than men at learning foreign languages. Lynn says: “The likely evolutionary explanation for the female advantage in second language ability is that normally in the great apes, including evolving hominids, females were exogamous” a.k.a. females were more likely to be married off to neighboring tribes.
(It is also true that females appear to have been more likely to be captured and kept alive by other tribes, and to have survived their menfolk being wiped out during an invasion. A recent study presented a huge body of evidence that the Y (= male) chromosome of an ethnic group tends to be that of the most recent invader (Spaniards in the case of Hispanics) while the X (=female) chromosome is aboriginal, from the lower status group. This has been termed “Dutton’s Rule” [Exchanging Fluids, by T De Baca et al., Politics and the Life Sciences, 2020]. Second language-acquisition would improve female survival chances in these circumstances).
Females have better visual memory, probably an adaptation to foraging, and are better at spelling because they can better visualize the shapes of words.
Females also have better fine motor skills. Lynn comments: “There is no apparent evolutionary explanation for this female advantage.” However, I would have assumed that this was also an adaptation to foraging.
Conversely, males also have greater throwing accuracy, presumably due to its use in hunting.
Lynn’s theory has been criticized, notably by the late James Flynn, who is credited with having discovered the Flynn Effect (although some call it the Lynn-Flynn Effect because Lynn earlier recorded the same phenomenon). Flynn presented a meta-analysis of IQ data from university students indicating that males and females had equal IQ. However, Lynn noted that in all large and representative population samples—except Argentina, for some unknown reason—adult males in fact score higher than adult females [Sex Differences in Intelligence: Reply to Comments, by Richard Lynn, Mankind Quarterly, 2017]. (University students may be a problematic sample anyway, because in some cultures the admissions process effectively discriminates in favor of female personality characteristics, such as Conscientiousness).
VDARE.com has noted this as early as 2005, when Lynn published an article on it in The British Journal Of Psychology, which received a favorable notice here on VDARE.com—The Silly Sex? by Ilana Mercer, January 6, 2005, and of course negative notices in the MSM: Is this a clever thing to say about women’s IQ? by Tony Halpin, Timesonline.co.uk, August 25, 2005.
Sex Differences in Intelligence: The Development Theory is an extremely useful and interesting book. I was surprised, however, that it only passed the briefest comment on the fact that the male IQ range is wider than the female IQ range—in other words, the male Bell Curve has longer tails than the female male Bell Curve—leading to more male geniuses but also more male criminals and vagrants. I would have expected this important difference, and the related male variability hypothesis, to merit a chapter. (F. Roger Devlin made the same point in his otherwise favorable American Renaissance review).
Males are more variable because they are under higher levels of sexual selection. Humans are a polygynous species in which the females, historically, gathered around the most dominant male, as he seemingly had the best genes. Traits that are sexually selected tend to have high variability because a high mutation rate increases the probability of a beneficial mutation. The carrier of this mutation will come to dominate the gene pool. So males are operating a very risky strategy—but this makes sense because, as Lynn noted in his book Dysgenics, among hunter-gatherers only about 40% of males father any children.
Besides the male variability issue, my second criticism is stylistic. Lynn tends to write his science in a very dry, scientific style. But he can write extremely engagingly, with a novelist’s ability to bring his observations to life, as he did in his autobiography Memoirs of a Dissident Psychologist, published last year.
I would like to see his next scientific book mix the two styles, thus rendering it more appealing to a non-academic readership.
This is especially important as Lynn’s findings are now systematically suppressed in an increasingly Woke-dominated academe—which still unfortunately does ultimately impact the “educated layman.”
Recently, Lynn’s research on racial and sexual differences saw him stripped of his (purely honorific) emeritus professorship at the University of Ulster. The Woke Mob has to do this because they can’t logically fault his arguments.
It’s further evidence that we’re entering a new Dark Age, in which universities are making themselves increasingly irrelevant. Intellectual guerrillas, like Lynn’s Ulster Institute (and, indeed, VDARE.com) will become correspondingly more important.
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Thanks for posting and for The Jolly Heretic podcasts.
This is the greatest long-term threat to Western Civilization.
Thanks for the excellent synopsis.
Does anyone know what happened to Dutton’s famous co-author, Michael A. Woodley of Menie?
“the Y (= male) chromosome of an ethnic group tends to be that of the most recent invader (Spaniards in the case of Hispanics) while the X (=female) chromosome is aboriginal”
I guess Iceland is the exception here, where IIRC Y chromosomes are overwhelmingly Scandinavian, while mitochondrial DNA is split pretty evenly between Scandinavia and Ireland/Scotland. Because there weren’t any women in Iceland when the Vikings arrived, so they would “grab and go” when raiding other shores.
Doubleplusungood reference to nonpersons verging crimethink. Correct fullwise upsub.
I think the recent Jeopardy champion proves this thesis. Amy Schneider is actually a man trans-posing as a woman.
Why is YouTube full of men showing off their language acquisition skills and not women?
He still submits papers to be published, see https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=mmoY0-kAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
However, I can only speculate on why he left the Jolly Heretic. He himself stated on the show that he was offered a multitude of employment opportunities, such as training PhD students and carrying out various research funded by grants, and that he thus no longer had time to also be part of Jolly Heretic. However, he then went into public hiding and removed all his online content. I speculate that the jobs offered to him was conditional on him renouncing all non-Cultural Marxist thought. I can sympathize – he has to make a living,
Is the idea that there is only a General Intelligence a matter of practicality, instead of biological reality? Does not the existence of ’tilt’ indicate that there are actually three separate intelligences: verbal, quantitative, and visuo-spatial? At the anatomical level, could each of these intelligences comprise different parts of the brain? We know that the parietal lobe plays a big part in visuo-spatial intelligence, and the temporal lobes plays a big part in verbal intelligence. Could not looking at each of the three intelligences separately predict even better one’s performance at various jobs than just looking at General Intelligence? For example, let’s say we have two individuals with an IQ of 120, but one’s component-level profile is verbal 130/visuo-spatial 120/quantitative 110, while the other’s profile is quantitative 130/visuospatial 120/verbal 110, then wouldn’t the first person do better at jobs like law, politics, advertising, etc., while the second person would do better in science jobs, engineering, accounting, etc? I’ve read that in reality, there is a .8 correlation between all three intelligences, meaning that evolution has found that for the majority of people, it is more advantageous to have all three intelligences at about the same level. Yet, the existence of ’tilt’ for a significant amount of people could indicate that these are actually three separate biological processes in the brain. I personally have extreme tilt.
In essence this is what Otto Koenig said forty years ago (and for which the
feminists drove him to an early grave).
Everything evolutionary biology and function analysis is by nature a bit
speculative – so what? All the differences are obvious –
Vive la différence! 😀
The link to arktos.com doesn’t work; I get a message indicating a server problem. I wonder if it has been attacked.
‘… The Development Theory , the latest book by the Grand Old Man of psychology Richard Lynn, systematically demonstrates something that has long been obvious to most people (including women, if you know any): On average, men are more intelligent than women—by about 4 IQ points…’
That’s really not a very large difference. It only acquires significance if one is wedded to the notion that the sexes must be be equal in all respects in the first place.
If one isn’t, it immediately becomes obvious that the other differences between the sexes are far greater and of far greater practical importance. In all probability, a man will surpass a woman because he is more aggressive, more competitive, more focused rather than because he is more intelligent. In all probability, a man will lose a fight a woman wouldn’t have gotten into in the first place because he is less empathic, more aggressive, more competitive…
So men are a little smarter than women, on the other hand. So? As I’ve found out, since we’ve started to take intelligence as the measure of human worth, it’s a good way of getting people to argue with you, but otherwise…
As far as social planning goes, I’d worry more about the other differences.
The 4 IQ point average difference is overshadowed by the bilateral asymmetry of sex differences in IQ. IQ is a composite score of verbal and performance IQs.
Well now, that would defeat the whole purpose of this exercise: to justify a reactionary backlash against women desired by so many on the Right.
I note from the review:
Gosh, it almost sounds like “general intelligence” just means “things men are better at” according to this old codger.
Anyway, the female verbal advantage appears to be quite real. Fifty-four percent of law students are now female, and their bar passage rates indicate this is merit not preference. And by the way…
Stop blaming us for your tendency to wholesale mutual slaughter. It’s not our fault men tend to monopolize resources to exclude their competitors from reproductive opportunities. (You’re still doing it by the way. There’s nothing men like more than increasing profits by putting other men out of work in a beggar-they-competitor strategy.). Seriously, imagine being this stupid: “females, historically, gathered around the most dominant male.” Because every teenage girl dreams of being married off to someone three times her age who already has two wives. “Gathered around” lol my achin’ sides!
Note the assumption that the grasping, semireptilian female of the species would never value intelligence in a mate for its own sake. It stands to reason that women of the more intelligent races would be more discriminating in this regard, but that explanation doesn’t further his agenda so he ignores it.
This, all by itself, shows what an assclown Lynn is.
https://northernwomen.org/2020/11/19/early-medieval-embroidery-women-and-creativity/
No, indeed.
And even then, it only matters in a few very specific fields where superlative math and/or spatial abilities are required.
More importantly: Will White men feel better about being outcompeted and displaced by Asian men rather than White women? How about when they’re elbowed out of the way by careerist and highly intelligent Asian women? This is the wrong issue at the wrong time for White men, who have more than enough enemies as it is without picking fights with White women.
Women score lower on the LSAT than men do:
https://www.lsac.org/data-research/research/lsat-performance-regional-gender-and-racialethnic-breakdowns-2007-2008
There are at least NINE types of ‘intelligence’-spatial, naturalist, musical, logical-mathematical, existential, inter-personal, bodily-kinaesthtic, linguistic and intra-personal. Are women ‘inferior’ in all these?
Mushrooms grow very haphazardly and have to be picked by hand, not by machine. I once worked at a mushroom farm and the women were all substantially better at the task than the men.
The difference is easily big enough that you don’t need a large double-blind clinical trial to demonstrate it at p < 0.05. You can just look.
p < 0.05, even when used correctly, means 5% of your data is wrong. If you collected it again it would likely be some other country which showed a strange inversion. Of the many reasons science is supposed to replicate, this is one of them.
There is no seeming, dominance is merit as far as Darwin is concerned. Hominids have been ecologically overpowered ever since they started using cooking fires, meaning the only real variable regarding descendent survival is intraspecies competition. By definition, the dominant male has won the intraspecies competition.
Thanks for the interesting post.
No mention of the dominance behavior of the X chromosome possibly being partly responsible for higher variability in males? Some discussion of that under
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/sex-on-the-brain/