Related theory: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis</a><p>I first heard of this when researching chess. Men rank ~200 ELO points higher than women at chess, which is a fairly significant amount. Men also seem to do better at several other non-physical competitions like Go, video games, and Jeopardy. Plus, the history of math and science is dominated by men at the top.<p>It seems like men are not smarter on average, but they do peak higher (and valley lower).
A president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, was forced to step down after a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering could be due to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end".<p>Could this regional brain structure account for the higher variance in male intelligence?
Females don't have chromosome Y, they have two chromosome X's.<p>Therefore they don't get any Y stuff. And a mutation in one chromosome X can be mitigated by a non-mutation in the other chromosome X.
That is a lot of authors on a paper.<p>As a layman reading the paper, my understanding is that greater male variability has already been observed in "personality, coginitive abilities, and school achievement". The question here whether and to what extent that variability is due to "early life genetic or gene-environment interaction mechanisms". The implication of this paper seems to be that since pervasive brain-structure differences in variability can be observed throughout the lifespan of individuals, the variability in high-level traits are likely to have strong genetic component.<p>The introduction in the paper focuses on the "downside" of high-variability in males (their propensity for neurological disorders). Unless I've missed it, any "upside" to high-variability was left unstated.
measure this versus age in different cultures and we'll <i>finally</i> have some evidence on nurture versus nature.<p>it's nurture + nature + serious amounts of work that makes extraordinary levels of talent; you can't get away with anything less.<p>imho, schools and the popular culture cause brain damage, so who knows what the actual situation is.<p>I know the article doesn't do this specifically, but since people <i>will</i> and <i>do</i> cite results like these as prescriptive facts which guide the people are waaay too complex and adaptable for helping us guide our lives.<p>also interesting: explore similarities in background between structural brain outliers.