Enjoy (video, 35:12).

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Followers of this website are aware that neither I nor Elizabeth Hobson, our Director of Communications, draw any income from the party’s income streams. We both work long hours on behalf of the party, and felt it was time to appeal to those who appreciate our work, for some personal financial support. We’ve set up Patreon pages for this purpose, mine is here, and Elizabeth’s is here. Thank you.

Recently published.

Our last general election manifesto is here.

Our YouTube channel is here.

If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Followers of this website are aware that neither I nor Elizabeth Hobson, our Director of Communications, draw any income from the party’s income streams. We both work long hours on behalf of the party, and felt it was time to appeal to those who appreciate our work, for some personal financial support. We’ve set up Patreon pages for this purpose, mine is here, and Elizabeth’s is here. Thank you.

It would be difficult to make a case for Boris Johnson being a fine upstanding example of Christian manhood. Yet the prime minister’s Christmas address was refreshingly clear with its emphasis on the birth of Christ and in his support for persecuted Christians:

‘I want us to remember those Christians around the world who are facing persecution. For them, Christmas Day will be marked in private, in secret, perhaps even in a prison cell.

‘As Prime Minister, that’s something I want to change. We stand with Christians everywhere, in solidarity, and will defend your right to practise your faith.’

Johnson has a great deal of work to do to clear out the institutional bias within the UK Home Office against Christians. One independent report claims that when it comes to offering asylum, the UK ‘appears to discriminate in favour of Muslims.’

Statistics quoted in the report appear to confirm this: ‘Out of 4,850 Syrian refugees accepted for resettlement by the Home Office in 2017, only eleven were Christian, representing just 0.2 per cent per cent of all Syrian refugees accepted by the UK.’ It is widely accepted that Christians made up 10 per cent of Syria’s pre-war population.

When three Christian archbishops from Syria, celebrated for their heroic efforts to aid persecuted Christians in Syria and Iraq, were invited in 2016 to attend the consecration of the UK’s first Syriac Orthodox Cathedral they were not only denied entry, but mockingly told there was ‘no room at the inn’.

Some of the ‘reasons’ cited by the Home Office for refusing visas for Christians appear bizarre. Most people would realise that, except in rare instances, it is a requirement of priests in the Roman Catholic church to be single. Fr Len Kofler, founder of the Institute of St Anselm, a Catholic institute training priests and nuns in Kent, said that one Catholic priest was refused a visa to study at the Institute because he wasn’t married.

In another case a nun wishing to study at the Institute was denied entry to the UK because she did not have a personal bank account. Members of religious orders don’t have personal possessions. The Institute was forced to close due to problems with visa applications from foreign students.

Two of the strangest individual cases of anti-Christian bias were reported earlier this year. The UK has denied asylum to persecuted Christians by bizarrely citing the Bible and Islam. A man and a woman, both Muslims converts to Christianity, were separately seeking asylum from the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s ninth-worst persecutor of Christians, where converts can face a death penalty.

In his application the man said that he converted to Christianity after finding it was a ‘peaceful faith’ unlike Islam. The rejection letter from the Home Office cited the Bible as supposed proof that Christianity is violent. The letter said Revelation was ‘filled with imagery of revenge, destruction, death and violence’. It concluded:

‘These examples are inconsistent with your claim that you converted to Christianity after discovering it is a “peaceful” religion, as opposed to Islam which contains violence, rage and revenge.’

In the second case, an Iranian female asylum seeker was sarcastically informed in her rejection letter:

‘You affirmed in your AIR [Asylum Interview Record] that Jesus is your saviour, but then claimed that He would not be able to save you from the Iranian regime. It is therefore considered that you have no conviction in your faith and your belief in Jesus is half-hearted.’

Discussing her experiences, the rejected woman said:

‘When I was in Iran I converted to Christianity and the situation changed and the government were looking for me and I had to flee from Iran . . . in my country if someone converts to Christianity their punishment is death or execution.’

The Christian woman claimed that whenever she responded to her Home Office interviewer, ‘he was either chuckling or maybe just kind of mocking when he was talking to me. For instance, he asked me why Jesus didn’t help you from the Iranian regime or Iranian authorities.’ She was forced to conclude, ‘I don’t think that he was treating me fairly or was not giving the decision fairly and not understanding my faith and myself and how I talked about Jesus.’

The discrimination is apparently so obvious in the United Kingdom that Lord George Carey, one-time Archbishop of Canterbury, has alleged that the Home Office is ‘institutionally biased’ against Christian refugees and therefore complicit in what he calls ‘the steady crucifixion of Middle East Christians’.

Lord David Alton of Liverpool, a life peer and one of the UK’s leading Roman Catholics, wrote to Sajid Javid when he was Home Secretary:

‘It is widely accepted that Christians, who constituted around 10 per cent of Syria’s pre-war population, were specifically targeted by jihadi rebels and continue to be at risk . . . As last year’s statistics more than amply demonstrate, this is not a statistical blip. It shows a pattern of discrimination that the Government has a legal duty to take concrete steps to address.’

If all would-be asylum seekers faced the same stringent tests it would be possible to argue that the Home Office was doing its best to protect the UK from unwelcome immigrants. However, it regularly grants visas and refugee status to extremist Muslims. We have yet to hear about a Muslim asylum seeker being denied entry because the Koran is ‘too violent’, or because she was ‘half-hearted’ in her faith in Muhammad.

Ahmed Hassan, despite having no papers and admitting he was a ‘trained ISIS soldier’, was granted asylum just two years before he launched a terrorist attack on a London train station leaving 30 injured in September 2017.

According to another report, British teenagers are being forced to marry abroad and are raped and impregnated while the Home Office ‘turns a blind eye’ by handing visas to their [mostly Muslim] husbands.

When Asia Bibi was finally cleared of the trumped-up charge of challenging the authority of Muhammad in November 2018, Muslims rioted throughout Pakistan; in one demonstration, more than 11,000 Muslims demanded her immediate public hanging. She was refused asylum in the UK out of fear of ‘community tension’. At the same time the Home Office allowed a Pakistani cleric who celebrated the slaughter of a politician who had defended Asia Bibi and who has been banned from preaching in Pakistan to enter the UK and lecture in mosques.

Boris Johnson has a task on his hands to eradicate the apparently ingrained prejudice against Christians in sections of the Home Office.

On October 21, U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Administrator Jim Bridenstine told the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology that he foresees NASA will land astronauts on the moon by 2035. “We need to learn how to live and work in another world,” he told lawmakers. “The moon is the best place to prove those capabilities and technologies.” 

The article that follows comprises the third instalment in “Our Martian Moment,” a multi-part Quillette series in which our authors discuss what kind of society humans should build on Mars if and when we succeed in colonizing the red planet. Our editors invite submissions to this series, which may be directed to pitch@quillette.com.

A century from now, Mars is a desert world dotted with autonomous, corporatocratic, oases-like city states in competition with each other for citizen customers. Land ownership is anathema to Martian identity, and notions of democracy are quaint artifacts from terrestrial history. Voting is a thing that cavemen did. Weird? Absolutely. But where imagining the future is concerned, if it isn’t weird it isn’t relevant.

Even the most vocal mission-to-Mars skeptics often have a strong opinion on Martian government. We will never get to Mars, they say. And if we do get to Mars, we will never terraform Mars, or colonize Mars. But if we do colonize Mars, the government should certainly be socialist, anarchist, populist, globalist. It should be run by humanities majors, controlled by robots, managed by lottery!

When we think about the future, we tend only to abstract a colorful but nonetheless straightforward projection of ourselves, from our morality and our immediate desires to our twenty-first-century political, environmental and spiritual struggles. As such, depictions of the future in popular culture tend not to be so “alien” at all. The crowded, polluted, war-torn dystopian view that dominates our media today reflects a series of anxieties about our world as it currently stands. The most popular, ostensibly utopian view of our future is no less grounded in the present: look, a sparsely populated city of towering glass, endless green fields, and a few flying cars flit across a rainbow sky.

In our well-storied Tomorrowland, skyscrapers are still the same height. We may be flying through the air, but automobiles remain our chosen mode of transportation, and our demographic fears are all assuaged in an antiseptic 1940s vision of the future that was only ever superficially different from the present.

This is not to say prediction of the future, especially shorter-term prediction, is impossible, but rather only to stress the importance of our attempting a prediction of future challenges before we speculate on any possible solution to such challenges. Government on Mars will not—cannot —look like government on Earth because the challenges mankind faces on Mars are alien. Our progress on that planet can therefore only be alien in kind.

The American metaphor has informed our dreams about the future of space exploration since the emergence of modern rocketry, but the challenges we face on Mars will be nothing like the challenges Europeans faced when they settled their New World. America has a temperate climate with abundant natural resources. Mars is a barren, frozen, highly-irradiated hellscape with no breathable atmosphere. It is absolutely lethal to every known living creature. Settlers can terraform the planet into something similar to Earth—big, puffy, white clouds, an ocean, genetically-modified fields and forests—but given present technology, this process might take hundreds of years.

Early Martians will therefore look nothing like early Americans. The technological requirements of survival will be too high for a first-wave population of religious refugees and impoverished explorers. If such a population is ever included on Mars, it will only be alongside a highly-skilled population of professionals in every field from chemistry and botany (including synthetic biology) to engineering, medicine and robotics.

As technology has advanced in complexity these past several hundred years, so, too, has the specialization of labor. The co-operative needs of modern humans are already far greater than they were among colonial Americans (many of whom could make their own homes and clothes, and grow their own food). And on Mars, these needs can only be greatly exacerbated, with success weighted strongly in favor of proximity to other people. Higher concentrations of people lead to higher degrees of urbanization, and successful urbanization on an inhospitable planet will likely require a powerful central authority. So while any given Martian city may be free in many, or even most, dimensions, it is impossible that any early Martian city would be democratic.

From our first steps across the rust-red regolith, human survival on Mars will require considerable and constant protection in the form of body suits, specialized transport and smaller, temporary habitats. But no technological challenge will be as ambitious as the construction of the first Martian city—an intricate, delicate clockwork whose malfunction could mean death for thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. The production of such technology requires a highly-coordinated application of resources and skill from legions of people. And as large state governments have thus far managed the human journey through space, it is generally assumed they will manage this process.

But even were some government from Earth willing to fund a single trip to Mars—a fairly popular project that NASA has been pretending to work toward for many decades—full-scale Martian colonization is just not politically viable. With the cost of building even a single Martian city so high, and the fruits of Martian colonization so initially ambiguous, it is unfathomable that a majority of voters in any nation capable of managing such expense would accept the burden. Our great, Martian task therefore falls to a different kind of co-operative body capable of managing such a production: the corporation.

For the first time in history, the cost of rocket transport is rapidly falling, and with it the once seemingly insurmountable barrier of entry to Martian colonization. The catalyst for improved efficiency was the emergence of a private space industry in the 2010s, and its positive impact on the probability of Martian colonization has been no accident. From the time SpaceX was founded, Elon Musk argued that a reduction in the cost of one-way Martian passage to something close to the median price of an American home, say $200,000, would almost invariably lead to a mass migration of humans from Earth to Mars. This was, and remains, an explicit goal of his company.

If a market incentive is the only thing capable of motivating humanity forward, we need not lament our culture’s formerly lacklustre efforts in the race to space; we need only build a market incentive. Once the private space industry succeeds, and cost of one-way passage to Mars is within financial reach of the average person, only a tiny fraction of the human population will find attractive the prospects of an historical life on a new world. But a tiny fraction of 7.5-billion people could still populate a small country—or a large Martian city.

As our western belief in democracy is sacred, speculation concerning its erosion far from home may come as shocking—perhaps frightening. But democracy and freedom are not synonyms, and a world without a vote is not necessarily a world without choice. On Mars, that choice will be between habitats, the habitats will be run by companies, and we’ll be voting with our pocketbooks.

There is a great libertarian belief in emergent civilization, not entirely unlike the popular notion in Silicon Valley that one can iterate a company to success. Central to both beliefs is a trust in a selection process that emerges from randomness. And neither the ideologically motivated libertarian nor the profit-seeking Silicon Valley entrepreneur is wrong to think that good things do often randomly occur—on Earth. In a world of relative abundance there are as many examples of random, fortunate phenomena as there are counterexamples; and intelligent people will surely be arguing whether success is determined primarily by luck or planning for generations to come. But when it comes to Mars, our questions now are not pertaining to patterns of street, to density of building, or to acreage of park, all of which come in great variety of acceptable possibilities. There is no such flexibility on an alien world. To survive on Mars we need in-tandem machines that generate oxygen, carbon dioxide and water; that protect people from radiation; that generate food (along with the abundant nitrogen and other essential organic elements required for such generation); and that provide a highly reliable source of energy, many times redundant, to power this slender thread between life and death. In any single piece of this, a belief in luck is lethal. Every Martian city must be planned.

Government of the Martian city will be deeply shaped by these precarious circumstances. Differences from government in America, for example, will manifest well beyond the skillset of Martian leadership. For instance, there will very likely be a preference for engineers, architects, and proven operators over lawyers, celebrities and charismatic bartenders.

More important than the realities of Martian dependence on strong management, however, will be the utter rarity of private land ownership. Even on Earth, as urbanization increases, the partitioning off of land in densely populated regions is increasingly problematic. How many of our infrastructural problems can be ascribed to an inability to build, rebuild, and reimagine the world around us as we meet problems the likes of which men and women a hundred years ago—a thousand years ago!—could not even dream?

In San Francisco, where I live, an utterly suffocating torrent of corrupt supervisors and hysterical public meetings prevent even a thing so overwhelmingly popular as the construction of new housing. San Franciscans accept such incompetence and outright antagonism from their government because their life is not literally dependent on their government’s success. On Mars, the opposite will be true. If a Martian neighborhood needs to be rearranged in order to adequately protect it from lethal radiation, the neighborhood will be rearranged. If new housing or nuclear power plants need to be built, they will be built. If the city itself needs to move, which will likely be the case as Mars is terraformed and environmental conditions dramatically change the Martian geography, the city will be moved.

Such dynamic flexibility in government requires an incredible deal of managerial authority. To maintain such authority, the city, which will be a corporate entity and managed as such, will never sell land. Citizens of such a city, comprised in significant part of employees, will naturally desire some assurance of the company’s benevolence, and an alternative to the vote will be normalized. The obvious solution is still in private ownership, just not in private ownership of land. The employees will receive an ownership stake in the company with their moving costs and salary, benefits not entirely unlike what they would receive for a new job at a big, American technology company that requires relocation to the other side of the country. But non-employee citizens may need to own a piece of it as well—not a lot, or a building, but a share of the city itself.

The Chief Executive is responsible to the shareholder, and on a desert world of many cities in competition for talent and citizens, the only thing that could possibly impress a shareholder is effectiveness at building and managing an incredible place to live. The essentials of life all earlier listed will of course be met, and structurally the city will likely be modular, and mobile. Possibly domed for protection, and semi-covered underground until the Martian atmosphere is thickened up enough to provide some protection from radiation, every city will support a complex tapestry of hydroponic gardens, desalination plants (for the perchlorates in the regolith), recycling and waste management centers, power plants, self-driving cars and—possibly underground—habitats and gardens.

But cities will vary, and compete, on culture and aesthetic. Cities might be themed. There could be highly-religious cities, or microcities within cities built for hippies or scientists or the eternally young, newly gifted with prodigious genetic therapy, who just want to party. Imagine medieval cities, gothic cities, goth cities. With no ownership of land, people can grow emotionally, or philosophically, and simply move—physically—to areas populated by like-minded neighbours.

What’s your fantasy? Because in a world where physical spaces are competing for your attention, the construction of such fantasies in our physical reality will be powerfully incentivized, and incentives shape civilization.

There’s an XKCD comic strip that speaks well to the youthful heart of this wild cosmic trip. In the first panel, a boy approaches a girl wading through a room of rainbow colors. Shocked, he asks her what she did to her apartment. “I filled it with playpen balls,” she says. “Why,” he asks. “Because,” she says, “we’re grown-ups now, and it’s our turn to decide what that means.”

If you could start the world over, what would you build? Fundamentally, the question itself is the answer: the future is a malleable world that changes for its living citizens, a world where asking this kind of question—how do you want to live?—is more than a fun thought experiment. It’s a practical component of the human condition. The future is a world shaped by our current needs, desires and curiosities. The future is a hundred such worlds, a thousand, and they dot the stars as cities dot their terraforming fields and forests. We follow our hearts through the galaxy to like-hearted brothers and sisters, and we live together as we choose.

The universe is a big place. To the question of what we want to be, and how we want to express that being, compromise is canceled.

Michael Solana lives in San Francisco and works for Founders Fund, a venture capital firm committed to the investment in and support of radical technological innovation. He Tweets at @micsolana.

Featured Image: Still frame image from 2017 KieranTimberlake conceptual video, Mars City.  

The post In Mars Co. We Trust: Understanding the Coming Interstellar Corporatocracy appeared first on Quillette.

In a previous post I examined the biological and social influences on sex and gender identity. Evidence suggests that biology plays a powerful role in the determination of sex as well as of gender identity, although social forces are also important particularly as they relate to gender role expression. In this essay I’ll examine the evidence surrounding a related controversial topic: whether or nor there are cognitive differences between the sexes and, if so, whether they are biological or social in origin.

In what follows, I’ll focus on individuals whose gender identity matches their biological sex. This leaves out nonbinary and transsexual persons, about whom there is far less research evidence. Nevertheless, given that transsexuals tend to have hypothalamuses that match their identified gender not their biological sex, it would be interesting to know if this produces cognitive differences as well. Some evidence suggests that the administration of sex hormones to those undergoing transition does influence cognition in expected ways. Other studies suggest that cognitive differences exist prior to hormone treatment, and that the cognition of transsexuals resembles that of their identified gender more than that of their biological sex (a finding that appears to lend further support to the hypothesis that gender dysphoria is produced by women’s brains in men’s bodies and vice versa).

This essay offers an exploration of mean group differences. Nothing here should be taken to imply that either sex should be excluded from certain cognitive tasks or professions. Nor should mean group differences, which are often quite small, be used to infer the capabilities of any given individual.

Are there Sex Differences in Overall IQ?

Most of the available evidence suggests there is very little difference in overall IQ between males and females. Controversy arises around the question of whether there is more spread (what statisticians call standard deviation or the degree to which most people deviate from the average or mean) among males than females. For IQ tests, the mean is typically set at 100, with a standard deviation of 15. This means that most individual scores fall between 85 and 115. Not everyone, even those with “normal” IQs, is going to score exactly 100. The Gender Variability Hypothesis suggests that boys tend to have more spread or higher standard deviation than do girls—in other words there are proportionally more geniuses and cognitively impaired individuals among males, whereas females cluster closer to the mean. This hypothesis can be very provocative. It was at the center of a 2005 controversy involving then-president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers, who suggested that it might partly explain why males outnumber females in high-echelon STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers. An outcry ensued, and Summers resigned a year later.

Boys and men tend to be overrepresented among individuals with lower IQs including those with intellectual disabilities. Few people seem to be interested in discussing that. But some studies indicate that boys are also overrepresented in the superior range of IQs (130 and above). In a 2003 study of Scottish youth born in the early twentieth century, girls actually tended to outperform boys until roughly the 115 IQ mark (because there are fewer girls with lower IQs, and more girls in the average to high average range). Only once we pass the 115 IQ mark do we start to see a male advantage. For instance, for IQs 130 and above, boys represent 57.7 percent of the high performers as compared to 50.4 percent of the underlying sample. Biologist Heather Heying recently tweeted a graph from this study. Note that there were still plenty of girls in the highest IQ ranges. So, if IQ differences were the only explanation for, say, STEM Ph.D. discrepancies, we’d still expect 42.3 percent of STEM Ph.D.s to be awarded to women.

Some of the differences between the sexes are differences of variance—average values of men and women may be the same, but the spread is different. In many traits,, men have greater variance, and so are “over-represented” at both the top and bottom. 11/ pic.twitter.com/eaUKfZ2EAq

— Heather E Heying (@HeatherEHeying) November 20, 2019

A 2016 cross-cultural analysis confirmed the gender variability hypothesis. However, this mainly benefited males in science and math, whereas females scored consistently higher in reading. A 2019 reanalysis of the same dataset confirmed these results, but also suggested that the difference between males and females decreases (but does not vanish) in countries that actively promote egalitarian female participation in the workplace and in education. This suggests that the greater male spread, at least in some abilities, is real and that both biological and social forces play a role.

There are, however, some cautionary notes. One study finds that differential dropout rates in long-term outcome studies may exaggerate the male advantage in IQ variability. Similarly, other analyses suggest that this effect is consistent within the US and UK, but not across all cultures, (although the calculations made by that research group in related contexts have sometimes been criticized). Further, any apparent issues related to sex variability at the top end of intelligence may be due to specific abilities rather than overall intelligence.

Are there Sex Differences in Specific Cognitive Abilities?

It is often said that women and girls perform better at cognitive tasks testing verbal abilities, whereas men and boys have better visuospatial skills involving mental rotation or hand-eye coordination. The evidence appears to bear this out. For instance, in a large sample of Portuguese youth, most cognitive differences between boys and girls were pretty trivial in size. However, mechanical reasoning showed significant differences, with boys outperforming girls. Another study in the US found that girls tend to outperform boys on memory and processing speed tasks, whereas boys once again have an advantage on visuospatial tasks. A very large study of English schoolchildren lends support to female superiority in verbal skills, with males showing an advantage in quantitative abilities.

These sex differences, with female advantages in verbal ability and memory, and male advantages in visuospatial cognition appear to be fairly consistent across samples and across time, subject to the caveats mentioned below. It’s important to note that most of these differences are quite small, and perhaps not worth worrying about. However, males do appear to be at a significant disadvantage in reading and writing whereas comparative male advantages in math and science may explain the greater proportion of males in STEM, at least in part.

Biology, Sociology, or Both?

If there is a sex difference in intelligence variability is it innate or socialized? When we’re discussing human psychology, it’s generally a safe bet to assume that both biological and social forces play a role in shaping behavior. Twelve years ago, a diverse panel of psychologists looked at this issue from every angle—evolutionary, biological, and sociocultural—and found that…it’s complex! Although sex differences in cognitive abilities may not be directly evolved, evolution, brain structure, and culture likely interact to produce various outcomes. The authors conclude that “early experience, biological factors, educational policy, and cultural context affect the number of women and men who pursue advanced study in science and math and that these effects add and interact in complex ways. There are no single or simple answers to the complex questions about sex differences in science and mathematics.”

Some studies suggest that, even in cultures where women are encouraged to participate in highly demanding activities like chess, sex discrepancies in top performers remain. However, other studies suggest that sex disparities favoring men tend to be most pronounced in cultures with overall high levels of sexual stratification, such as women being restricted from entering the workforce. Even in the US, sex disparities have declined over time, suggesting a clear sociocultural impact on such abilities, although stabilization appears to have been achieved more recently, hinting sociocultural forces are only one piece of the puzzle and biology is also important. More opportunities for women in education and occupation tend to at least reduce, though not eliminate, male advantages in some cognitive abilities. My impression is that there has been less emphasis on addressing male deficits in reading and writing, even as males fall behind in attending college.

Training also matters. For instance, some research suggests that women training with fast-paced video games increase their visuo-spatial cognition thereby reducing sex disparities. A study I conducted years ago found few overall male advantages for visuospatial tasks, with each sex better at visuospatial tasks involving items traditionally associated with each sex. By contrast, some beliefs such as “stereotype threat” (the theory that stereotypes such as “girls are bad at math” can negatively influence female performance) are now in trouble, potentially part of psychology’s replication crisis.

That said, some scholars probably go too far in denying the involvement of biology at all. For instance, one paper asserts that mathematics performance “is largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes.” Although this conclusion is no doubt well-intentioned, it probably goes too far, particularly given how powerfully involved genetics are in intelligence and cognition. Rather, it appears that biological and cultural forces interact in complex ways. Statements that suggest that cognitive differences between men and women are entirely innate are similarly reductive.

Being aware of the science can be difficult in a hypercharged political environment, where hyperbole rules on both sides. For instance, a 2005 Washington Post article made striking claims about brain similarities across the sexes, mainly by pointing to studies of sociocultural influences. This is a bit of a dodge, since few scholars who find evidence for biological differences claim sociocultural influences are unimportant. The author suggests that even sex differences in physical aggression may not be real, pointing to evidence of female equivalence in the perpetration of domestic violence. While that particular data point is accurate, males tend to vastly outnumber females in the perpetration of other violent crimes, a fact that went unmentioned.

In closing, there are several reasonable conclusions we can draw from the current data:

• There is little evidence for an overall sex difference in IQ.
• Males may show more variability in IQ, resulting in greater proportional representation at both ends of the IQ scale. However, these proportional differences are probably smaller than is often claimed and don’t fully explain outcome discrepancies, such as in STEM careers.
• Females appear to be generally superior at verbal and memory tasks, with males superior at visuospatial tasks. Male advantage on visuospatial and quantitative tasks may be one factor in explaining STEM discrepancies, whereas female advantages in verbal abilities may explain females outpacing males in higher education more generally.
• Sex differences in cognitive ability are most pronounced among cultures with more sex stratification.
• Genetics have a strong influence on IQ.
• Sex differences in cognitive abilities are likely due to a complex interaction of evolutionary, biological, and sociocultural forces. Exclusive focus on only one of these is likely to result in an incomplete theoretical model.

A final observation: Much of this debate focuses on perceived differences in ability related to outcomes such as STEM careers. There is also a wide range of literature regarding sex differences in interest, which is also complicated, and which may explain a larger portion of the sex discrepancy in STEM careers. Put simply, many women may have the ability to perform in STEM careers but display more interest on average in alternative high-status careers such as medicine or law.

Christopher J. Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University in Florida. He is author of Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong and the Renaissance mystery novel Suicide Kings. His forthcoming book How Madness Shaped History will be out in January 2020. You can follow him on Twitter @CJFerguson1111

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