Today I was reading some argument somewhere about men's and women's brain sizes and relative intelligence, blah-dee-blah. I was lost in the comments to a blog post the article I had previously been reading linked to, and the commenters went back and forth quite a bit over a "proof" about women's lower intelligence on average.

The "proof" seemed to be that on IQ tests, men more often showed up in the extreme ranges, whereas women clustered together in the middle. This supposedly means that the geniuses are men, which naturally means that women are stupid.

What made me laugh is the consistent way everybody ignored the factor of the men who tested in the low extremes, versus the high.

The only thing these test results show is a generalization about women's IQs being somewhere in the middle. You can generalize about women's IQs, at least if you ignore the fact that IQ tests are bogus to begin with.

What you can't say is that men are smarter. In fact, the only thing you can say about men from the IQ scores is that with a man, you might get a genius... but you might just as well get an utter moron.

If you need smarts, wouldn't you be wiser to bet on that cluster in the middle range?

For stuff on gender and IQ, you can review the Wikipedia entry. Scroll down to "Variance in IQ" for a summary of the distribution.