Ha ha, "Women of enormous intelligence can do one thing that benefits everybody: pass it on. Have children. Preferably male children.), well I passed MENSA at 16 with 164 and I have two sons, so that's something.

You failed to mention while there are more men who score very high on IQ tests, there are also more men scoring very low. THAT is how the average is so close.

But IQ tests are a crock anyway - originally girls did better on them than boys, so the test was tweeked until boys started getting higher results. So not exactly an objective and fair test.

BRAVO Janet !!! You have just proven that even though women have the same potential as men, they choose the easy way out. why? For the money and fame. This satisfies their need for constant attention. This "attention whore" quality is most women's weakness. They spend all their time and energy trying to be the center of attention that they don't live up to their full potential and sell themselves short, but that's o.k. , go ahead and have genius sons. You can make the world a better place that way. Brilliant Janet, just brilliant.

Sorry to break it, but Einstein, Hawking, Gates and Sharon Stone never took IQ tests. You might find this interesting too.

After practicing a bit I scored 154 on an online IQ test. I don't kid myself. I have below average learning ability.

Hm. Cherry picked examples are cherry picked.

A man I know who also has an IQ of 160 is unemployed, single, and spends most of his time playing World of Warcraft.

Perhaps IQ does little to indicate a person's drive, work ethic, persistence, confidence or sense of responsibility? Nah...

I'm not convinced we can rely so heavily on I.Q. measurements to accurately denote the ratio of intellect between the sexes. There are also plenty of smart men doing stupid things with their lives. It is foolish to assume that only women of high intellect can be shallow and self-serving. Most high intellect oriented men never amount too much more than employees who make money for those with business acumen and large egos. Lauren, being the smart girl she is, should marry Jack's future boss- not him. Sometimes smart people can be so stupid, the only difference is the level of self-satisfaction.

I challenge the validity of Sharon Stone's IQ. She lied about being part of Mensa and she retracted her claim. Afterwards she said she was part of the Mensa school, which again was proven false by Mensa.

Unlike some of the people who has at least SAT scores and prestigious Universities to back up their claim, Sharon Stone is a self-proclaimed IQ score.

IQ is still a confusing concept. For one, when they say this girl's IQ is 160 in the Cattell test, it's basically ~130 in other scales, meaning she's probably about as intelligent as the rest of us here.

For some reason, being able to string together sentences means at least 125 IQ in older scales. so everyone here in the 'sphere is probably at least 140 in the scale this girl was tested in. In my opinion it's a "functional" IQ level, a level at which I think people become smart enough to think for themselves, which is scary considering how many people would be below that level. As we've noticed with average body weight in America, "average IQ" is not something to be comfortable with.

I'd reckon that the biggest issue of high IQ people is motivating them to cultivate their talents. I don't think there's an "evil patriarchy" holding down high-IQ people, female or otherwise, so much as a broken system that is designed (jealously?) only to suit the needs of the lowest common denominator, rather than to cultivate the best and brightest for the sake of the greater good. That and the higher-ups don't want too many smart people because they don't make very good stepping stones for the entrance to their megalithic empires. lace that water with fluoride...

Anyway, you're not far off the mark for imploring Lauren to marry Jack. She probably figured that her most advantageous life strategy would be to pursue those stereotypically womanly things than to go all STEM. Not enough testosterone for her to care, I don't really blame her. If women had genius IQs what would they do with that potential? But there's not a lot of motivation for nature to grant woman with great intelligence when she only needs to fend off danger from her young, and leave all the heavy lifting to the man.

At least that's my theory as to why testosterone + IQ is the formula for STEM genius. A woman could have high test and this testosterone-induced STEM type genius, but she would also reach a point of looking too masculine for her own good. Perhaps this is why they say when it comes to heritability of IQ, the woman's IQ is not as significant as the man's IQ in relation to the potential IQ of their offspring. She carries the potential for genius in her genes, but for a female it's not that necessary to have abstract supercomputer levels of problem-solving skills when you're oriented toward more pragmatic needs as opposed to sitting in a dark corner pondering astronomical, borderline schizophrenic things. Creativity and conscientiousness is a nice benefit of high IQ though, so with that an ideal woman for a relationship would have a good head on her shoulders.

By the way, fun fact: Porn star Asia Carrera is a Mensa member with an IQ of 156 or so. I think she used her intellect to rationalize her career decision as "independent and empowered." lolzlozlz

Most the information presented as fact by the Daily Mail is a load of tripe. It seems nobody there did any research at all before publishing.
First, Einstein never took an IQ test. The 160 number is simply some unknown person's estimation. As we do not know what methods or criteria they used, there is no reason to accept this number simply because it looks high.
The same is true for the other ranking people on the spurious IQ list: Dickens, Darwin, and Livingstone were adults or dead when the Piaget-Simon test was introduced in 1905 to identify mentally-retarded children.
http://news.ie.msn.com/enterta...

"Think I’m going to rail against that and demand that women start using their intelligence in more socially productive ways?"

You should, or at least someone should. A person who is really naturally brilliant absolutely should be encouraged to use their brilliance in productive ways. Even more than they should be encouraged to reproduce too (intelligent people generally have intelligent children, but not always, and 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush). If I met a woman who was a showgirl who could do advanced harmonic analysis, I'd be rather annoyed, as it'd be kind of a waste. This makes me think of the theme of the movie 'Good Will Hunting.'

Also, I disagree with your sentiment in part. I think women/girls should be encouraged every bit as much as men/boys to make use of their intelligence professionally if possible. But they have to accept the fact that they aren't entitled to a fellowship or to recognition or success, and (in STEM fields at least) the ones who do succeed have to get comfortable with being a minority.

I mean if someone, man or woman, can do math like this: http://arxiv.org/pdf/0708.0039... , then we should definitely be giving them a grant, a nice salary, a window office, a pension plan, and as much chalk as they need. 'Cause to me most of it just looks like assorted Greek letters and weird picture.

She doesn't have Asian parents, that's why.

Yep.

It's a tautology, but a useful one.

Not sure if it submitted. Testing. Ignore this.

Have to go, but realized this and wanted to post something here before I forgot. May expand on this later. Hope it's clear anyway. xD

I'm reading “Thinking fast and slow”

Had a thing on smart women being more likely to marry a man less intelligent than her (Had my doubts.)

Reminded me of the stats you put up about men having higher var in intelligence

Made me think about var in men and women

Realized simple explanation for this: X chromosomes: 1 vs 2.

Assume two groups: group A: 500 numbers normal dist mean of 100. Group B: 1000 numbers normal dist mean of 100. Randomly pair up numbers in Group B and take the mean to get 500 numbers.

Would expect lower var in group B, right?

BAM! => Expect higher Var in men across many things, which is true.

Assume Two groups of 1xn matrices, each number representing an axis of ability. Each individual number in Group A's matrices iid normal dist. Group B's iid normal dist w/ two numbers, then average those numbers.

Expect groups A to be more “Specialized” higher on the stuff that's high, lower on the stuff that's low.

W/ division of labor specialization higher paid=> in a true meritocracy we would expect to see men higher paid than women, not because of sexism, or even culture, but because of higher pay being caused by specialization caused by higher variance caused by only having one X chromosome, ie just (clearly) biologically-based higher variance.

Not only are there twice as many men as women above 130, the higher you get above 130 the more men there are per woman. I don`t remember the numbers exactly but I think at 145 there are eight men to every woman or something along those lines. Further up the difference increases even more.

I`ve always noticed this difference between men and women. Lots of fairly smart girls but very, very few that meet my threshold for really smart compared to how many men meet that threshold.

The saddest part is, most men (or at least the fairly nerdy ones, like me) would dearly love to meet a super smart woman who is actually doing something productive with those smarts. I'd love to have a conversation with a date about my layman's interest in physics, cosmology, philosophy, etc.

Even in college it seemed like most of the women I met were just about completing the assignments, rather than true intellectual curiosity about the subject matter. It was so disheartening to meet someone in an interesting field, and then find out on the first date that she wasn't really excited by the field, it was just a means to an end.

The funny thing, though, is that men ALSO make up 2/3 of the very bottom echelon, too. It seems like the overall trend, then, is that women cluster around average intelligence whereas males are more prone to extremes on either end.

This article is incredible.

I hade figured this out a year or so ago, but would never dream to hear a woman say it before anybody else.

You are doing humanity a favor.

This is exactly what I spent years struggling to accept. I have an IQ of 163, and for years now I've been unable to find a female friend to talk 'nerdy' with. Plenty of male friends, and I've always got on well with my girl friends, but we talk about our hair and families when we hang out, and maybe play piano. It always annoyed me, because adults round me seemed to hold me up as an example of how women could be academically inclined, when in fact I saw myself as a somewhat lonely exception to the rule.
That said, all my nerdy tendencies have led me to teaching and caring, which really aren't very masculine professions. I used to want to be a researcher and politician, but since meeting my fiance? I only want that if it all fits in around the kids.

Hmmm, if there are twice as many men with IQ's above 130 than women, could this also be a factor why there are more men than women in STEM and boardrooms? It will be interesting to see what effects gender-based quotas will have in the long term.

Marilyn vos Savant has the highest IQ on record. She writes an advice column for a Sunday paper. Yep.

Ha, what is intelligence anyway; the ability to solve problems, right? My Mr. is a Mensa member with 147 IQ, and he's not got an iota of common sense in that big brain of his, but he is great at puzzles.

We went together to a Mensa meeting years ago at our local University. Jeebus, what an awful, boring evening, spent listening to truckers, carpenters, lawyers and professors whining pompously about how difficult it is to be so much smarter than everyone else (they thought I was a member too, not just a spouse, LOL).

Dabnabbit, they beat me at Scrabble too which was to be my penultimate satisfaction! It wasn't my fault - I never got any vowels ;)

JB, you should have added this woman to that list of intelligent people!

May I present to you Jessica Steinhauser - "studied piano as a child, and performed at Carnegie Hall twice before the age of 15. By 16 she taught English at Tsuruga College in Japan.

She won a full academic scholarship to Rutgers University and is a member of Mensa, with an IQ of 156."

Just one catch: Miss Steinhauser is known to most people as the porn star Asia Carrera, star of ~370 adult films. Grrlpower!

I am EXTREMELY dubious about this girl's I.Q. score. Sorry, I'm not buying it. I've read so much about how testing is fiddled with nowadays & for some uncanny reason there are so many kids with enourmous I.Q.s nowadays, yet I meet very few of them who even halfway intelligent. I passed a teenage girl in the produce section of my gracery store last week who was picking up a bundle of carrots and asked her mother, "so do these come from the ground?" The best I can guess is all they teach children anymore is Marxist theory and Feminism. Maybe those were the questions on this 'I.Q. test' amounted to.

They've just simply lowered the standards & this girl would have been nothing more than a slightly above average student 30-40 years ago.