Male: The Gender Of Extremes.

Men have produced some of the most spiritually transcendent philosophies the world has ever seen. Christ, Buddha and Mohammed all lived at the dawn of history yet still remain revered by many. These were not just great thinkers, but great human beings.  But not all men are like this. The male gender has also produced some of the worst rogues on record. Two of them, in the shape of Hitler and Stalin, in the 20th century alone.

One theory is that whilst women converge to the mean on the spread of the population, men tend to have a broader spread across the population. The “average” man and woman may be the same, but the differences in spread accounts for why more men are to be found at the extremes.

Take intelligence as well documented example. On average, men and women are equivalent when it comes to IQ. Because women tend to converge to the mean, this means that in the “super intelligent” section of IQ, there is four times as many men as women. It also means that in the “super unintelligent” sector of IQ, there are also four times as many men as women. As a consequence, more men are either super intelligent or super unintelligent compared to women.

This difference in spread of IQ may help to account for why there are so many Nobel laureates who are men, but also why there are so many men in prison. Indeed illiteracy is phenomenally high in the prison population, which is, of course, a population of mainly men. Arguably you need a degree of literacy in order to participate and succeed in modern society, and indeed, defend oneself against the state. As a result there are more men who are ill equipped to succeed and prosper in society than women.

These patterns have not just been found in IQ but in other measures of personality. This does not restrict itself to psychological scores but can be seen in other areas of experience.  Take education as an example.  Girls are more likely than boys to be good all-rounder’s.  Boys, on the other hand, are more likely to be good in certain provinces of learning but bum out completely in other areas of learning.

Men, so it seems, are more likely to be found at the extremes of behaviour. As a gender, we seem to have evolved to be specialists rather than generalists.  Why this might be so, however, is an open question.  My best guess is that much of behaviour evolved as a ‘sexual ornament’ to attract a mate.  The selection pressures to develop unique talents were therefore higher for men than women.  But because you can’t be extremely good at everything, this means that men are consequently extremely bad at other things.  This might create a pressure in sexual selection toward the extremes of ability/inability in men.  But it’s just a thought.