Higher Intelli-"gents"?

Listen, you know I'm the farthest thing from politically correct - but whoa, Nelly - there's some un-PC news out of Great Britain that even a nose-thumbing curmudgeon like me thought twice before reporting...

As it turns out, men really are smarter than women, if some UK research is correct.

Now, don't shoot the messenger here...

According to a recent article in The UK Daily Male, er, MAIL, a psychologist from the University of Western Ontario named John P. Rushton has examined the records of 100,000 college-level application tests and concluded that male student applicants had IQs averaging nearly 4 points higher than their female competitors. They also scored better on measures of creativity, reasoning skills, and conceptualization-indications of higher intelligence, Rushton maintains.

The scientist claims his conclusions hold true across all kinds of demographics (social classes, education of parents, etc.). The professor, who received his Doctorate from the prestigious London School of Economics, has also developed an explanation for why girls typically do better in lower school than boys...

They mature faster, which coincides with the middle- and high-school years.

Basically, his assertion is that because girls develop faster than boys, they are more advanced as children in their thinking and ability to comprehend their studies than their male counterparts. Rushton maintains that advantage is gone by the time both sexes reach 17 or 18. I also believe there's a cultural component to this "achievement gap" - that girls are raised to have a higher inherent desire to please others, so they try harder and apply themselves more completely in school.

But that's my own analysis, not Rushton's.

So, WHY are men smarter than women, according to this gutsy professor? It's not some genetic superiority or innate difference in wiring. True, it's a well-known fact that male and female minds are different - and that men typically score higher on test of spatial relationships and other common measures of "raw" intelligence. But that's not why Rushton believes men are smarter than women.

As simple and inarguable as this may seem, Rushton asserts that measurable differences in male and female intelligence have to do with nothing more than brain size. Males, according to the soon-to-be-despised-by-all-of-womanhood scientist, have heavier, larger brains - even when calculated relative to their body size...

Apparently, it's a simple matter of neurons. The bigger the brain, the more neurons. The more neurons, the better/faster said noggin is at processing information, original thought, problem-solving, etc.

I guess like in all other aspects stereotypical to men (height, bank account, sexual tackle), size matters in the cranium as well.

Interestingly enough, Rushton's study echoes some earlier British research that concluded that grown men do indeed have bigger relative brains and higher IQs than women, the Mail article reveals.

What's really ironic to me is this: Rushton's a man - and if really were as smart as he's claiming men are, he wouldn't have revealed the results of his research until AFTER HE WAS DEAD, or at least used a pseudonym to publish his findings. As it is, his research may have made him into the most hated man in the world, from the point of view of a whole lot of women...

That doesn't seem too smart to me.