More Than 10,000 Studies Debunk Outdated Biological 'Explanation' For Male Success
This would have to be one of the most idiotic studies ever conceived. They argue from animal intelligence to human intelligence. But is precisely intelligence where humans are very different from other animals
What they are fighting is the leptokurtic distribution of measured IQ in women. Both very bright and very dumb women are rare. They want to say that this much-repeated finding is somehow wrong and does not reflect biological potential.
Their method is to show that other species do not show such differences in females so therefore there is really no such difference in humans.
Believe it if you want to
From world politics to top-ranking businesses, to the upper rungs of academia and even Nobel laureates, men outnumber women by a significant margin.
One claim to such disparity has been attributed to biology. The idea there's some kind of 'superdiversity' among male brains has been repeatedly cited in the scientific literature in recent decades; but according to a newly published meta-analysis, this argument for male success is entirely unsupported by evidence.
"Based on our data, if we assume that humans are like other animals, there is equal chance of having a similar number of high-achieving women as there are high-achieving men in this world," says biologist and lead author Lauren Harrison from the Australian National University (ANU).
"Based on this logic, there is also just as great a chance of having a similar number of men and women that are low achievers."
Most research on diversity within various species tends to focus on differences between the sexes. It's not hard to find numerous and extreme examples of dimorphism; even within our own species, contrasts in sex chromosomes are responsible for exaggerating a litany of anatomical characteristics, such as beards or boobs.
Since the late 19th century, with the writings of the famous English sexologist Havelock Ellis, the assumption that larger male brains equal greater potential for cognitive prowess has been used to explain why men 'deserve' positions of influence and command.
Much has since been written on whether statistical differences across the sex divide translate into anything truly significant (short answer - they don't), but few studies have looked into whether anatomical diversity within one sex provides for a greater spectrum of behavior.
Generalizing the assertion towards non-human animals, in this new meta-analysis the team investigated whether equivalents of our own personality traits across 220 species varied to any great extent within either of the sexes.
In spite of a thorough search of some 10,000 studies, the team couldn't find any compelling evidence demonstrating greater richness of variability within the personality traits of males or females of any of the species included.
That's not to say there were no differences across species as a whole. Some select characteristics, such as immunity or certain morphological traits, were also found to vary considerably within sexes in particular species.
But if we're to use nature as a proxy for our own expanse of variation within male brains as suggested in the past, we can only conclude the rich landscape of female brains provides just as much opportunity for genius (and nonsense) as the male's.
"If males are more variable than females, it would mean there are more men than women with either very low or very high IQs," says one of the authors, evolutionary biologist Michael Jennions from ANU.
"But our research in over 200 animal species shows variation in male and female behavior is very similar. Therefore, there is no reason to invoke this argument based on biology to explain why more men than women are Nobel laureates, for example, which we associate with high IQ."
A lack of evidence in favor of behavioral variation among men doesn't rule out other biological explanations for the shatter-proof glass ceiling that permeates so much of modern society.
It does, however, limit arguments for that ceiling being a result of our biological wiring, and thus being something that we can't – or shouldn't – do anything about.
Dismantling notions that male merit is cemented in biology might even help to break down the social structures that are actually responsible for gender biases.
"Instead of using biology to explain why there are more male CEOs or professors, we have to ask what role culture and upbringing play in pushing men and women down different pathways," says Harrison.
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Tucker Carlson: The Democratic Party is failing
The Democratic Party is made up of entitled White Liberals who rely on minoritieas to keep them in power. But what if one of those minorities is drifting away from them?
Has there ever been a news environment like this one? Every day feels like some weird new PSYOP from the government, as translated through the media companies designed to convince you of something that's just obviously false. Masks will keep you safe. Ukraine is essential to our national security. Rachel Levine is an admiral. Pete Buttigieg is a genius. And so on day after day. It's enough to make you feel like you're going crazy after a while. Am I the only person who sees that all this is total B.S.? You start to ask yourself that.
So to clear the mental palates night was to restore sanity, we're going to return to what we actually know, which is to say to the facts. Here is the most important fact in American politics right now: The Democratic Party just hit a brick wall. Democrats cannot continue to run the United States of America.
Why? Here's why. A new Marist poll, we told you about it last night, shows that only 33% of Latino voters support Joe Biden. Politically, that is fatal. Ask anyone who does politics for a living: Can a Democrat, can an elected president with 33% of the Hispanic vote, or, for that matter, with 43%, or for that matter, with 53%? No is the answer. No chance. It's impossible. That's the headline.
This is a huge change from what most people thought just three days ago. Certainly what Democrats thought. Democrats sincerely believe they were the party of oppressed racial minorities, a group that they alone could protect from White racism. That was the whole point of the party. And weirdly, Republican leaders seemed to kind of accept it as true. But actually, it turns out it wasn't true at all.
In fact, the Democratic Party is not the party of oppressed racial minorities, it's the opposite, it's the party of entitled White liberals and pretty much only entitled White liberals. Democratic donors live in Aspen and Martha's Vineyard in Bel Air. Democratic voters live in Brooklyn and Chevy Chase. In Newton, Massachusetts, in Boulder, Colorado. And increasingly, those are the only places they live.
Biden losing the country because he's a man of no hope: Dan Patrick Video
You know that lady who screeches at you in the airport about pulling your mask over your nose? That's the modern Democratic Party. No normal person likes that lady. She's awful. So effectively, as an electoral matter, that party is done. We're not going to have any more democratic presidents for a while. Sorry.
This is a big deal. You'd think it would be getting wide coverage in the media today, but no, it's not. Can't have that time for a new PSYOP. Time to crank up the fear machine. Now they're telling you you're going to die of a cold. They're calling it omicron. It's a terrifying new variant of COVID, which you remember is a name they picked to conceal the fact that the entire pandemic was likely created in a lab by the Chinese government with the help of American tax dollars.
But shut up. Stop talking. That's racist. And now omicron is here, so there's no time to think. Your job is to be afraid. And unfortunately, many people are afraid they haven't had time because they're so afraid to check the numbers and discover that as an epidemiological matter, this is all completely insane. Far more Americans have died this month from choking on entrees than have died from omicron. That is factually true. The CDC can confirm it for you
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-democrat-party-ruin-christmas
**********************************************When the truth is "disinformation"
Shades of Orwell
There is a new scourge befouling the media landscape, one that our self-appointed mandarins have declared themselves eager to combat: misinformation.
The Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder recently released a report that blamed misinformation for a range of social problems: “Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises… . Information disorder makes any health crisis more deadly. It slows down our response time on climate change. It undermines democracy. It creates a culture in which racist, ethnic, and gender attacks are seen as solutions, not problems. Today, mis- and disinformation have become a force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society. Hundreds of millions of people pay the price, every single day, for a world disordered by lies.”
With $65 million in backing from investors such as George Soros and Reid Hoffman, the newly organized Project for Good Information also vows to fight fake news wherever it roams. As Recode reported, the group’s marketing materials claim, “Traditional media is failing.
Disinformation is flourishing. It’s time for a new kind of media.” The project is run by Democratic operative Tara Hoffman, whose company ACRONYM created the app that spectacularly bungled the Iowa Democratic caucus vote in 2020.
And as Ben Smith reported in the New York Times, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University has been hosting a series of meetings with major media executives to “help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation.” Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for his platform’s role in spreading misinformation.
The origin of this new wave of portentous declarations and hand-wringing can be found in the Trump years. In an insightful piece in Harper’s, Joseph Bernstein labels this effort Big Disinfo. It’s “a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research,” he writes. “A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of ‘toxicity’ on social-media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platforms’ clumsy, dishonest, and half-hearted attempts to halt it.” As Bernstein argues, “As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a harm model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard.”
Big Disinfo has gained in popularity in mainstream media outlets in part because it claims to solve the problem of bad information while placing blame for it on anyone other than mainstream media. In fact, those diagnosing our illness and prescribing the cure are themselves purveyors of the “infodemic” they claim is upon us.
The Aspen Institute’s Commission, for example, includes several people who have actively engaged in misinformation efforts. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, one of the Commission’s advisers, Yoel Roth, was the Twitter executive who blocked his site’s users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop just before the 2020 election. Adviser Renee DiResta is something of a misinformation wunderkind as well: She was an adviser to American Engagement Technologies, which, the Beacon reports, is a “tech company that created fake online personas to stifle the Republican vote in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama.”
The commission’s co-chair, Katie Couric, is also familiar with manipulating facts to yield favorable outcomes. She admitted in her recently published memoir that she had removed and edited statements made by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about athletes protesting the playing of the National Anthem. Ginsburg’s criticism of the practice might have angered her fellow liberals, Couric feared. Commissioner Rashad Robinson, head of the activist group Color of Change, also helped spread misinformation by promoting the hate-crime hoax of actor Jussie Smollett even after it was clear Smollett (currently on trial for criminal charges related to the staging of the attack) was lying. And then there is commission member Prince Harry, an expat British ex-royal with few qualifications but a lifetime of evidence of his own questionable judgment (such as dressing up as a Nazi and, more recently, whinging to Oprah about the family that funds his lavish lifestyle). Earlier this year, Harry declared the First Amendment “bonkers.”
The Aspen Commission’s report says that there is no such thing as an “arbiter of truth,” and yet our media gatekeepers have claimed that mantle for themselves—with decidedly mixed results—for some time.
Consider the fact that Russiagate, a years-long effort to prove that Donald Trump was being blackmailed and controlled, proved untrue yet was given constant media attention, while the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents, which proved true, was actively suppressed with the explicit purpose of protecting Joe Biden’s chances of becoming president. We live in a surreal information moment when the lie was given ample airtime and featured prominently in print, while the truth was smothered and labeled disinformation.
And yet our self-appointed misinformation warriors have proven unwilling to engage in self-reflection. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center used the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer as the basis for one of its case studies during its recent misinformation sessions. The lesson that the Center’s leaders drew, however, was not the one anyone who values the truth should follow. According to the Times, the Shorenstein Center claimed that the Hunter Biden story offered “an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organizations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns.”
In other words, the suppression of information deemed by “experts” to be misinformation was precisely the kind of Good Information objective we should be pursuing. The research director of the center, Joan Donovan, told the Times that the Hunter Biden case study was “designed to cause conversation—it’s not supposed to leave you resolved as a reader.”
But what is there to resolve about the fact that the Fourth Estate eagerly embraced the role of Chief Information Censor on behalf of a Democratic candidate for president?
Misinformation and disinformation are nothing new. Propaganda, political dirty tricks, and deliberate lies have been with us a while—and have often been a point of pride for their practitioners. It was not that long ago that Ben Rhodes, then a top aide to President Obama, boasted about creating an “echo chamber” in the media to spread falsehoods about the details of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.
It is true that misinformation has taken on greater significance thanks to the scale and speed of the social-media platforms that spread it. But the new sanctimony about misinformation should be leavened with some healthy skepticism about the movement’s major actors. As Bernstein noted, in some sense “the disinformation project is simply an unofficial partnership between Big Tech, corporate media, elite universities, and cash-rich foundations.” The crusade against misinformation is an approximate mirror image of Donald Trump’s war against “fake news.”
Control of information is control of one of the most valuable commodities in the developed world: people’s attention. And people want their confirmation biases affirmed. But scholars and commissioners studying misinformation also suffer from confirmation bias. Contra the proposals made by panels and commissions on misinformation, the most radical thing we could do right now isn’t to give more power to elites or the federal government to control information. Their record of late—Russiagate, Hunter Biden, the Covington kids, the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, Border Patrol officers with whips, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial—has not been stellar.
It would be far better for the health of the “information ecosystem” that these supposed experts are always invoking if reporters focused on shoring up what were once unassailable tenets of journalism—balance, iron-clad sourcing, and critical independence from and skepticism about the powerful. Instead, they are power’s handmaidens.
https://www.commentary.org/articles/christine-rosen/media-misinformation-problem/
*****************************************************British Campaigners have called on police to delete 120,000 'hate incidents' from people's records
Campaigners have called for 120,000 'hate incidents' to be deleted from people's records after a court found that College of Policing guidance which saw tweets about transgender issues recorded as a 'hate incident' had a 'chilling effect' on freedom of expression.
Yesterday former policeman Harry Miller accused the College of Policing of operating as 'Stasi by stealth' after he won a landmark Court of Appeal challenge against police guidance on 'hate incidents'.
Mr Miller, who describes himself as 'gender critical', launched the legal bid after an anonymous complaint was made about dozens of allegedly 'transphobic' posts on his Twitter account concerning changes to gender recognition laws.
The 56-year-old was visited by police at work and threatened with prosecution if he did not stop discussing the issue, and was told that the matter had been recorded as a 'non-crime hate incident'.
'Non-crime hate incidents' were introduced in 2014 following recommendations by the independent Macpherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. They are 'any non-crime incident which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice', according to College of Policing guidance. Reports of 'non-crime hate incidents' can show up in criminal record checks for six years, yet there are no grounds to appeal against them.
Mr Miller's lawyers had argued that the College's guidance – which serves as national policy for police forces – was 'completely irrational'.
Following a two-year legal battle, senior judges ruled yesterday that the guidance breached the former policeman's rights to freedom of expression. They also advised the College to review its guidance to add in more safeguards for free speech.
Campaigners have now called on police forces – or failing that, the Government – to delete thousands of 'hate incidents' from people's records.
Speaking to MailOnline, pro-Brexit pundit Darren Grimes claimed 'Orwellian ''non-crimes'' are used 'to stifle speech and debate'.
And Toby Young, director-general of the Free Speech Union, today suggested that anybody who has lost their job because they had a 'hate incident' recorded against their name could now sue the police following yesterday's ruling.
Mr Grimes said: 'Thousands of us have had these wretched things attached to our names, wasting precious police time and resources. Let's get our coppers back on our streets and off of our damn tweets. I'm not sure further litigation is necessary, the judgment is there in black and white. It's time for the Government to get the police back to focusing on the people's priorities.'
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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