By David Futrelle
So an amateur phrenologist in the Men going Their Own Way subreddit has come up with a new (to him) bogus reason why men are smarter than women: their brains are a little bit bigger. (Never mind that brain size doesn’t actually correlate with intelligence.)
Then he has some thoughts on dogs and cats and the right to vote.
Speak for yourself, dude. I would totally let dogs and cats vote. Not so sure about humans, though.
My favorite response to this post?
Know wonder why they say there light on their feet. They have half a brain.
Know wonder.
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I’m pretty certain dogs can vote in Germany.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-dogs-must-be-walked-twice-a-day-under-new-rule/a-54627195
Once, I lost my keys in the grass. I asked a passing dog to help me. It sniffed out the keys in less than a minute. I gave the dog a bit of pizza in return.
I mean I like it better than, “Women don’t need to vote because their husbands or fathers will be influenced by them if they are any good women at all, so there’s really no need for it!”
But only because it’s more honest. Other than that this dude can go fuck himself with a comments policy violation.
But maybe women have the brain bit that knows the difference between less and fewer!!!
IIRC Albert Einstein’s brain was discovered after death to be smaller than average.
Point being, brain size isn’t what determines intelligence.
I can’t speak for anyone else’s pet, but I’d let my dog vote. She couldn’t make much worse choices than many humans have.
I’ve asked my dog for advice. She doesn’t usually respond, but I’ve asked.
Do men think they don’t have hormones? The majority of hormones are in common across all people.
Is this the outline for their new video game? Which resources do I need?
@Alan Robertshaw
I know, and my junior high English teacher, who was a woman, knew, so evidently some women know.
Even to the extent that brain size does correlate with intelligence (which it does, some…in studies comparing different species, not individuals within a species), it’s not absolute brain size but the ratio of brain to body size that counts. So men’s brains average 14% larger than women’s brains. Isn’t the difference in overall body size about the same?
Human brain size has actually diminished over recent time.
H. Heidelbergenis; H. Neanderthalensis, and even earlier versions of H. Sapiens sapiens, all had larger brains on average than contemporary humans.
Although as I’m a firm believer that all of the above are actually the same species and the supposed differences are just ones of morphology, I don’t find that surprising. We’re just generally smaller now anyway.
https://www.ancient-origins.net/human-origins-science/why-did-our-brains-stop-expanding-001791
ETA: Ninja’d by Karalora
@Naglfar
Hehe. Yeah I always find it weird when they use the term “resources”, which is a lot. They make it sound like life is a game of Terraria. The phrasing is just…off.
Nah it’s specifically female hormones, extra ones on top of estrogen and progesterone that totally exist but (((((doctors))))) won’t tell you about ’em because they’re protecting the gynocracy, something something.
Today’s Biology Troof brought to you by the same people who think that the female orgasm is a myth. And also that menstruation is a malfunction, apparently.
If we think gross brain size determines intelligence, then the only logical conclusion is that whales – and only whales – should be allowed to vote.
*waves hand vaguely* Oh, you know, abstract thingamajigs. In the cerebrainal doogummy. The whatchamahickey that gives me superior thinky-thoughts. You ladies don’t have it, so you can’t vote.
Someone’s never done a 4-point saliva cortisol test.
@sunnysombrera
Was thinking Minecraft, but same idea applies. I’ll go sneak into the PvP bases and take what’s in the chests.
How can I get these into a prescription? I should get these, seeing as I’m part of the trans agenda and Jewish.
My dog and cats want bones and tuna. I trust their judgement more than the humans who want fascism.
Pfft, everyone knows that the primary goal for women is to construct additional pylons.
@Schnookums Von Fancypants
(Disclaimer: not a Starcraft player)
But doesn’t that require a lot of Vespene gas?
Nah. Pylons are 100 minerals. Still annoying early on when you’ve got 10 jobs for every probe though.
Long time first time, and I just had to say my dog will gladly eat unidentifiable roadkill but also possesses a degree of empathy, so I trust her judgement more than the entire Republican Party.
Fun fact: Most of the mass difference between male and female brains is due to men having more of what’s called white matter tissue. Women have more grey matter. Until recently, it was thought that white matter was more structural, less involved in actual thinking. This is why “grey matter” is slang for intelligence. And women have more of it!
Turns out, it’s more complicated than that, of course, but it’s a fun bit to bring up against the sexists.
Have I missed something? Do dogs and cats want to vote? In the USA, women campaigned for 75 years before winning the right to vote. I haven’t seen even a single letter to the editor from a dog or cat advocating animal enfranchisement.
Relax, MGTOWs. You don’t need to fight this fight. This is just one of your own spouting bullshit. Same old, same old.
I’m reminded of Frances Hardinge’s book The Lie Tree , which takes place in Victorian England and whose young woman protagonist has to endure a lot of Victorian thinking, including, at some point, a whole lecture from the local doctor about the brain size thing meaning women are less intelligent.
She later meets a rather smart woman that the doctor hates a lot, and it turns out the reason is that the doctor tried to woo her with the big brain thing, and she told him that this is very interesting and she’s sure he’s right so she’ll make sure to marry the tallest man she can find, seeing as taller men have bigger brains on average. The doctor, being not especially tall, has resented her ever since.
(I’m sorry if this is a little bit spoilery, but it has nothing to do with the main plot of the book so I hope it’s okay.)
Also, can we give the less/fewer thing a rest? It’s fairly arbitrary, as far as I remember from reading about it. I mean, all grammar rules are, to a degree, because language is arbitrary, but it’s one of those like the split infinitive bullshit, where a grammarian just suddenly decided “you know what, there should be a differentiation, even though there hasn’t really been one before, I say it and so it must be true” (clearly a very big brained dude with no random hormones whatsoever). Cue decades of language snobbism.
[As usual in these cases of prescriptivism in language, Geoffrey Pollum of the Language Log does a great job of dismantling them – see for example https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2819 and related articles.]
In this case, the guy doesn’t even really seem to be a native speaker of English – his whole grammar structure is a bit off. But I think we should reserve criticism to the despicable content, rather than to the fact he doesn’t write perfectly in English.
Running out of edit time, so adding a source about the less/fewer thing here – as always, Geoffrey Pollum of the Language Log does a great job of dismantling prescriptivist ideas, see for example this article (and the linked earlier ones).
Edit: well, now I see my previous edit after all, so apologies for the repetition.
From what I’ve read, a woman’s hormonal balance is a lot less subject to a lot of outside factors. The time since the last period is usually very indicative of one’s hormonal state.
Meanwhile testosterone levels are affected by, among other things: are you employed, do you have children, have you had sex recently, your age, diet, body weight, stress etc.
And yet, it’s women that are deemed unpredictable and hormonal. Idiots.
@Alan: so it seems brains are like computers with the old models filling up a gymnasium where the newer ones can be handheld. Kind of. :p
@Battering Lamb
This reminds me a little bit of how some TERFs were insistent that only women have hormones. They seemed aware that men generally have more testosterone, so I’m not sure what they thought testosterone was.
Giving vote to every human isn’t because all human are intelligent enough to get the implications and vote correctly towards their ideas. It’s because there is no way to ascertain who is worthy, any system that try that will just exclude on arbitrary basis to favor some interests. Cats and dogs don’t vote because in a very real sense we don’t know how to make them vote, so even if we wanted to, we could not.
In addition to the fact we don’t have solid basis to evaluate intelligence or reasons to believe that bigger brains are more intelligent, I would also assert that homo sapiens sapiens might not have evolved toward more intelligence compared to neanderthals or whatever. There’s no way to check how thoses human species behaved, but being less cooperative, less sociales, or simply less able to speak could be bigger factors than intelligence. Maybe all neanderthals were able to solve differentials equations but didn’t do commerce because they hated big scale cooperation, after all.
@ penny
Well, ok; but I will never not stop whinging about double negatives.
@ battering lamb
Yeah, but as IBM confidently predict there’ll never be a need for more than five computers thats probably ok.