In a newspaper article last month, Susan Greenfield, one of Britain’s best-known female scientists, bemoaned the lack of female science professors in the UK. Which prompted Richard Lynn, a retired psychology professor and possessor of crazy-ass thoughts, to ask, in last week’s Daily Mail, Is there really a glass ceiling? To which he quickly answered his own question: No (or is it yes?), because—wait for it—men are just, well, smarter. He writes:
Not only is the average man more intelligent than the average woman, but a clear and startling imbalance emerges between the sexes at the high levels of intelligence that the most demanding jobs require. For instance, at the near-genius level (an IQ of 145), brilliant men outnumber brilliant women by 8 to one. That’s statistics, not sexism.
All of that brilliance, Lynn continues, goes a long way toward explaining why, in almost 110 years of Nobel Prize history, only two women have ever won the Prize for physics, only four have won the Prize for chemistry and why no women have ever won the Fields Medal for mathematics “in eight decades of trying.”
He goes on to explain what he “means” by intelligence, why men have emerged as “the more intelligent sex,” why we can’t exactly explain this, and, oh—why, when it comes to verbal intelligence, women are actually smarter than men! (Because of our nonstop gabbing, of course.)
In our hunter-gatherer past, women needed verbal abilities to negotiate their relationships with both men and women and to teach and socialise their children.
Now, before we throw up all over ourselves (and we’re only halfway through the column), we should note that this is this Richard Lynn, eugenicist, and that the Daily Mail is, well, the British equivalent of the New York Post. Still, as the ladies over at Femonomics put it:
The fact that Richard Lynn can still call himself a scientist, and his theories and the evidence he provides to back them up can be thought of as scientific, is an embarrassment to every real scientist out there, and to those of us working our tails off to put the letters P, H, and D after our names.
We don’t have P, H, or Ds after our names, but we’ll leave you with this choice quote, care of Feministing, from the lovely Richard Lynn:
“What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the ‘phasing out’ of such peoples…. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”
