Intelligence, Attentional Control and Processing Speed:

>If controlled problem solving is the central competency that defines fluid intelligence, then many of the same cognitive and brain mechanisms that support controlled problem solving should support performance on measures of gF, and this is indeed the case (Duncan et al., 2000; Kane & Engle, 2002). The most important of these cognitive systems is working memory, specifically the ability to explicitly amd consciously represent information patterns, manipulate these patterns in a controlled fashion, and draw inferences about relations among the patterns (Embretson, 1995). There is debate as to the processes that support working memory and that mediate the relation between working memory and performance on measure of gF. The debates have, nonetheless, narrowed the mechanisms to individual differences in the ability to control attention and inhibit irrelevant information from intruding into conscious awareness (Engle, 2002) or (or perhaps and) individual differences in the speed of processing bits of information (Fry & Hals, 2000; Jensen, 1998). The latter would explain the consistent relation between performance on measures of gF and measures that assess the speed and consistency with which information is processed. Basically, high gF scores are associated with faster information processing and more consistency in the speed of executing the same process across time (Deary, 2000; Kranzler & Jensen, 1991; P.A. Vernon et al., 2000). However, performance on these measures also requires controlled attention, and thus the issue of wether atttention, speed of processing, or a combination underlies individual differences in working memory capacity remains to be resolved.<

David C. Geary, The Origin of Mind, 2005

[If attentional control enables the thinking subject to distinguish between highly relevant, average relevant and irrelevant information and to focus its attention only on highly relevant information while the reasoning process, it would seem very plausible that attentional control strongly correlates with intelligence. ... Unfortunately Engle's research tends to ignore the importance of short term memory.]

Thoughts Beyond Words...

Thoughts Beyond Words: When Language Overshadows Insight
J W Schooler, S Ohlsson, K Brooks; 1993

http://einstein.pslc.cs.cmu.edu/research/wiki/images/9/90/Schooleretal.pdf

[Perhaps extensive psychotherapy also shows some kind of an overshadowing effect through making some aspects of life too explicit - so to say the "extensive psychotherapy overshadowing effect".

see also: Skimming the Surface, Lane and Schooler, 2004; http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/meta/publications/Brett/Schooler's%20Publications%20copy/16.pdf - sometimes it makes sense to let the implicit stay implicit.]

Working Memory:

>Working memory is the ability to explicitly form and maintain mental representations of information (e.g., a visual image, a word) and to manipulate these representations.<

David C. Geary; Male, Female; 2010

[Working memory and IQ are two sides of the same coin.]

Sex Differences in Psychological Abilities / Sex Differences in Emotion Judgments:

>Girls and women were more accurate than boys and men when judging emotion cues on the basis of facial expressions, body posture, and vocal intonation (Rosenthal et al., 1979); These sex differences were found in all nations in which three or more samples were obtained - Australia, Canada, the United States, Israel and New Guinea - and were of the same general magnitude in all of these nations (J.A. Hall, 1984). J.A. Hall concluded that the advantage of girls and women in the decoding of nonverbal messages "is most pronounced for facial cues, less pronounced for body cues, and least pronounced for vocal cues". When all nonverbal cues were provided - offering a more accurate assessment of nonverbal decoding skills in the real world - about 17 out of 20 girls and women were more accurate at decoding the emotion cues of another individual than was the average same-age boy or man (J.A. Hall, 1978).< [This is roughly the effect size of the sex difference on the people-things dimension.]

David C. Geary; Male, Female - The Evolution of Human Sex Differences; 2010

Der Faktor 'Nachdenklichkeit':

>Intellektuelle Fähigkeiten sind im Big-Five-Modell durch den fünften Faktor repräsentiert, der oft als Intellekt bezeichnet wird. Faktorenanalysen der Items dieses sehr breiten Faktors ergeben meist 2-3 Faktoren, nämlich Kreativität, Intelligenz und Nachdenklichkeit. Intelligenz und Kreativität entsprechen gut untersuchten psychologischen Konstrukten gleichen Namens; der Faktor Nachdenklichkeit wurde bisher kaum untersucht.<

Jens Asendorpf & Franz Neyer, Psychologie der Persönlichkeit, 2012

What does an IQ-test measure?

The speed of understanding and the effectiveness of thinking. (roughly spoken)

[An IQ-test measures the relative effectiveness of explicit information processing. Clever persons have large working memories and possess the ability to manipulate information very effectively.]

Mammals & Affects:

>The BrainMind is clearly an evolutionary layered organ, grounded on affects, where major passages are still evident in brain organization - the more ancient functions are concentrated in lower and more medial brain regions, and the more recent ones are in higher and more lateral regions. Within an evolutionary framework, animal brain research can provide most profound guidance in understanding the foundations of human feelings. Indeed, with such work, we may eventually come to understand how much human affective experiences arise from mammalian brain dynamics. This is not to suggest that animals develop the sophisticated cognitive-affective sentiments of humans, nor do they ruminate about their misfortunes the way we do, but we should come to recognize that the primary process affects, genetically built into animal BrainMinds in their raw form, are not all that different from the ones that come to guide the affective proclivities of human brains. Sadly, the seemingly endless conceptual debates in human psychology and philosophy often drown out the empirical signals that neuro-evolutionarily sensitive animal research has long provided: All mammals are intensely affective creatures.<

Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MIND, Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, 2012
[Emotions are not luxuries. For mammals emotions are indispensable to survive and reproduce successfully.]

Seven basic affective systems:

[The] ancient subcortical regions of mammalian brains contain at least seven basic affective systems: ... SEEKING (expectancy), FEAR (anxiety), RAGE (anger), LUST (sexual excitement), CARE (nurturance), PANIC/GRIEF (sadness), and PLAY (social joy).
Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MIND - Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, 2012

Consciousness:

>Consiousness can be defined as knowing what you are thinking about and being able to tell others about it and act on it as a matter of self-understood choice among envisioned alternatives in subsequent social or other situations. It implies the ability to think about times, places, and events separated from your immediate circumstances and the ability to use the understanding so gained to anticipate and alter the future, build further scenarios, plan and think ahead, anticipate different possible outcomes, and retain the potential to act in several alternative ways, depending on circumstances that can be only imperfectly represented at the time the plans or scenarios are being made. Language is a concomitant of consciousness, characterized by features that make communication of useful information about mental scenarios possible: signs, symbols, and displacement in time or space (Hockett 1960; Alexander 1979a, 1983; Pinker 1994, 1997).<

R. D. Alexander, Darwinism and Philosophy, 2005

Veröffentlichungen von R.D. Alexander über die Humanevolution:

HOW DID HUMANS EVOLVE?, R.D. Alexander, 1990
http://courses.washington.edu/evpsych/Alexander%20-%20How%20did%20humans%20evolve%20-%201990.pdf

EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN PSYCHE, R.D. Alexander, 1989
http://qcpages.qc.edu/Biology/LahtiSites/RDAlexander/Pubs/Alexander89.pdf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Übersicht der Veröffentlichungen:
http://qcpages.qc.edu/Biology/LahtiSites/RDAlexander/publications.html#proarticles
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Darwinism and Philosophy, 2005
http://qcpages.qc.edu/Biology/LahtiSites/RDAlexander/Pubs/Alexander05.pdf

The riddle of monogamy:

>Evolutionary psychologists have stressed, perhaps even overstressed, the philandering nature of men. In their defence, they often cite the fact that 84 per cent of world societies condone polygyny. (The implicit or explicit contrast is with the tiny prevalence of polyandry (0,5 per cent) which is often used to document the greater sexual appetite and sexual proprietariness of males compared with females.) But counting societies is not the same as counting people. The vast majority of the world's population inhabitat societies that prohibit polygyny and, even where it is legal, only about 10 per cent of men take multiple wives. A central question about human behaviour therefore is why men, who can gain such reproductive advantages from promiscuity and polygyny, in the main elect to be monogamous? As yet there is no definite answer, but there is no shortage of contenders. Some believe that monogamy was driven by women, some by men, but most agree that it was a compromise that benefited both sexes.<

Anne Campbell, A mind of her own, 2002

Sex Differences in Psychological Abilities:

We know that, on average, women can do a better job than men can of initially figuring out what their social targets might be feeling, what they might be like in terms of personality traits, and how they might be inclined to behave (Ambady et al., 1995; Driscoll et al., 1998; Hall, 1984; Rosenthal et al., 1979).

T. G. Horgan et al., Gender Differences in Memory for the Appearance of Others, 2004

Sex Differences in Mathematical Reasoning:

Sex Differences in Mathematical Reasoning in Gifted Students

>Mills, Ablard, and Strumpf (1993) documented sex differences among intellectually gifted students in mathematical reasoning as early as second grade (average d =  .43). Robinson et al. (1996) reported sex differences in mathematical precocity before kindergarten (average d = .37). More significantly, these latter sex differences were maintained following exposure to mathematical enrichment opportunities aimed at both males and females. Males gained more than females did on quantitative and visuospatial measures after an average of 28 biweekly intervention sessions (Robinson, Abbott, Berninger, Busse, & Mukhopadhyah, 1997).

The implications of these differences, and especially of the disparate ratios at the top for the math-science education pipeline, are clear: Given an early advantage in these fundamental quantitative skills, a greater number of males than females will qualify for advanced training in disciplines that place a premium on mathematical reasoning. As Hedges and Nowell (1995) stated, ‘‘Sex differences in variance and mean lead to substantially fewer females than males who score in the upper tails of the mathematics and science distributions and hence are poised to succeed in the sciences. The achievement of fair representation of women in science will be much more difficult if there are only one-half to one-seventh as many women as men who excel in the relevant abilities’’ (p. 45).

Other cognitive and noncognitive sex differences expand our understanding of the factors that influence the way precocious youth develop in math. Table 1 contains data on abilities and values of gifted students in the Midwest who were identified by SMPY from 1988 to 1991 and who attended a special summer program (Lubinski & Benbow, 1992). Again, sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability were consistently observed (average d = .84), but sex differences in the SAT-V were not observed. Table 1 includes other cognitive measures of general intelligence and specific abilities. No meaningful differences were observed among scores on the Advanced Raven Progressive Matrices (Lubinski & Benbow, 1992), which is a nonverbal measure of general intelligence. There were, however, substantial differences in spatial and mechanical reasoning abilities (average d = .92). In addition to these differences in specific abilities, there were also sex differences in vocational interests and values. Table 1 presents the differences in values. As can be seen, males are higher on theoretical values, and females are higher on social values, among other trends. Strongly held theoretical values are characteristic of physical scientists, while social values are negatively correlated with interests in the physical sciences (Achter, Lubinski, Benbow, & Eftekhari-Sanjani, 1999). Similar preference distinctions between males and females have been found using the Strong Interest Inventory (Lubinski & Benbow, 2006), with the SMPY males having stronger investigative and realistic interests and the SMPY females having stronger social interests (Achter, Lubinski,&Benbow, 1996, Appendix B, p. 76). Thus, it appears that early differences in mathematical skills may occur along with other factors relevant to the development of scientific expertise.<

D.F. Halpern, C.P Benbow, D.C. Geary et al.; The science of sex differences in science and mathematics; 2007

http://134.173.180.115/berger/pdf/Halpern2007.SciSexDif.Pub.pdf

[Schließlich ist es so, dass sich unter den Hochbegabten nicht bloß Männer durchschnittlich mehr für die "harten Wissenschaften" interessieren, sondern sich diese auch von ihren Begabungsprofilen bzw. kognitiven Fähigkeiten her durchschnittlich besser für die "harten Wissenschaften" eignen.]

Women in Science and Technology:

>Although women’s representation in many scientific fields is lower than that of men, it is not uniformly low. Rather, it varies widely from field to field. It is a reasonably accurate generalization to say that the ‘softer’ the scientific field, the higher the frequency of women. In the U.S., for example, women in 2002 earned 16 per cent of physics doctorates, 18 per cent in engineering, 29 per cent in mathematics, 34 per cent in chemistry, 45 per cent in biology, and 67 per cent in psychology (National Science Foundation, 2003). In the social sciences, women are relatively scarce in economics but abundant in anthropology and sociology. Even within fields, there is marked differentiation by subfield.Women earn relatively few doctorates in mining/mineral engineering, biophysics, and psychometrics, but considerably more in bioengineering, nutritional sciences, and developmental and child psychology.

... The fields in which women are scarce tend to have the lowest social dimension, while those attracting larger numbers of women tend to have a higher social dimension. Lubinski, Benbow, and Morelock (2000) have characterized this distinction as being between the ‘organic’ and the ‘inorganic.’ The fields avoided by women tend also to be the most mathematically and spatially demanding. Given the relative positions of the sexes on the ‘people-things’ dimension and the abundance of men at the highest levels of mathematical ability, it would be surprising not to find differing sex ratios in these widely differing fields, at least if people sort into occupations based upon their interests and abilities.<

K. R. Browne, Evolved sex differences and occupational segregation, 2006
http://faculty.law.wayne.edu/browne/Documents/Articles/Evolved%20Sex%20Differences%20and%20Occupational%20Segregation_Browne.pdf

Sex Differences in General Knowledge:

>[Recent] evidence suggests that boys and men tend to have more general knowledge than girls and women do. Analyzing data from six large samples used to create norms for the Wechsler Intelligence Test, Norther Ireland psychologists Richard Lynn, Paul Irwing, and Thomas Cammock (2001) found that men consistently score higher than women on the Wechsler information subtest (mean, d = 0,36). They also developed a 182-item test of general knowledge, and when they gave their test to a group of northern Ireland college students, they found that men generally possessed more knowledge than women did (overall, d = 0,51; which implies that 69% of men had more general knowledge than the average woman did). For some knowledge domains the male advantage was quite large: d = 0,82 for current affairs knowledge (which comprised knowledge of politics, finance, history, and geography), d = 0,75 for knowledge of physical health and recreation (biology, games, and sports), and d = 0,58 for science knowledge (general science and history of science). Two knowledge domains that showed a female advantage were medicine (d = 0,32) and food and cooking (d = 0,48).

Similar findings come from a study by Philip Ackerman, Kristy Bowen, Margaret Beier, and Ruth Kanfer (2001), which assessed various kinds of knowledge in more than 300 students at selective Georgia universities. Men showed higher overall knowledge than women did (d = 0,68). Ackerman and his colleagues also found significant sex differences in subdomains of knowledge. For excample, men exceeded in their knowledge of technology (d = 1,04), electronics (d = 0,98), physics (d= 0,72), geography (d = 0,66), and history (d = 0,56). Knowledge domains showing no significant sex differences included literature, business, art, and psychology. In this study no knowledge domains showed a female advantage. Other recent studies pointed to cross-cultural consistency in sex differences in knowledge. For excamle Evans, Schweingruber, and Stevenson (2002) found that boys possessed moderately higher general knowledge than girls in samples of 11th grade students in the United States, Taiwan, and Japan; Lynn, Wilberg, and Margraf-Stiksrud (in press) reported similar findings among German high school students.<

Richard A. Lippa; Gender, Nature, and Nurture; 2005

[Ergänzend hierzu finden sich auf Alles Evolution folgende Überlegungen: >Wenn Männer zum Buch greifen, lesen sie überwiegend Sachbücher. Romane sind für sie meist nur interessant, wenn sie einen politischen, wirtschaftlichen oder geschichtlichen Hintergrund liefern. Christiane Barthel, Buchhändlerin in Idstein/Hessen, berichtet von ihren Kunden: “Hauptsächlich Bücher, mit denen man noch etwas lernt oder die zumindest spannend sind, wecken bei Männern Interesse.” Wenn Frauen hingegen Sachbücher lesen, so die Expertin, seien es oft die Bereiche Psychologie, Erziehung und Wellness. Grundsätzlich aber lesen Frauen mehr Schöngeistiges. Romane werden überwiegend von Frauen gelesen. Der britische Schriftsteller Ian McEwan zieht in der FAZ sogar das drastische Fazit: “Wenn Frauen nicht mehr lesen, ist der Roman tot.” Da könnte er durchaus gar nicht so falsch liegen.<]

[Nachträgliche Anmerkung zur Anmerkung -: Folgende Studie von Lynn und Irwing (2002- Sex differences in general knowledge, semantic memory and reasoning ability) scheint die Annahme zu widerlegen, dass jener Geschlechtsunterschied im Allgemeinwissen in unterschiedlichen Leseerfahrungen fußt: "The results are interpreted that sex differences in general knowledge cannot be explained as a function of differences in either Gf or experience. It is proposed further that general knowledge should be regarded as a new second-oder factor and designated as semantic memory."]

Hjernevask - Brainwash - Norway Documentary

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd9_g7lAICxtlGbxh4_z8ik178o8CDPnv
[spannende Doku über "Gehirnwäsche"]

Gender Differences on the People-Things Dimension:

>Men and women differ substantially on the people-things dimension (mean d = 1,29; Lippa, 1998) ... . A d value of 1,29 is quite large and implies that 90% of women are more people-oriented than the average man is, and conversely, that 90% of men are more thing-oriented than the average woman is. Interestingly, these sex differences are allready apparent in 2- to 4-year-old children (Goodenough, 1957).<

Richard A. Lippa; Gender, Nature and Nurture; 2005

The Variability of Parenting Qualities:

>But we know there is considerably variability between females in their ability not just to produce children but to raise them.<
Anne Campell, A mind of her own, 2002

The reproductive task can be broken into two stages and two kinds of problems:

>The reproductive task can be broken into two stages and two kinds of problems: finding the right mate and raising offspring to maturity. Males direct a greater part of their energy to the former, females to the latter. The study of mating drew far more research attention than the study of parenting. It is tempting to think that this was the result of the predominance of male researchers whose interest was understandably in their own sex's agenda and desires.<

Anne Campbell, A mind of her own, 2002

Do Opposites Attract?:

>Nevertheless, "that first fine careless rapture," as Robert Browning called romantic love, is generally directed toward someone much like one's self. Most people around the world do feel that amorous chemistry for unfamiliar individuals of the same ethnic, social, religious, educational, and economic background, who have a similar amount of physical attractiveness, a comparable intelligence, and similar attitudes, expectations, values, interests, and social and communication skills.<

Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, 2005

Women & Relationships:

>The result is fairly clear that women more than men are relationship specialists. Women's interpersonal sensivity has been examined by looking at the ability to read non-verbal information from other's behaviour such as posture, vocal inflection and facial expression. Many studies have examined sex differences in accuracy and the result clearly favour women (Hall 1984; Hall et al. 2000). This difference in the accuracy of facial expression processing is allready apparent in infacy (McClure 2000). As well as decoding emotion, women seem to be more effective senders of signals that foster intimacy and closeness. They demonstrate greater involvement in the conversation and a greater interest in tracking the state of the other person's mind than do men by smiling more, gazing more, displaying greater facial expressiveness, reflecting their own emotional state more clearly in their facial expression, using more hand gestures and approaching others more closely. In short women seem keen to establish a mutuality in their conversation by engaging and monitoring their partner's state of mind.<

Anne Campbell, A mind of her own - The evolutionary psychology of women, 2002
[Neuauflage bereits in Planung]

"The basic idea of a creative minority seems sound.":

>The basic idea of a creative minority (or aristocracy) seems sound. Most creativity and innovation will come from only a fraction of any given population, those on the right hand tail in the distribution of talents and energy. But aristocracies can in practice also be merely dominant, predatory, blocking minorities. For a creative minority to exist there seem to be two preconditions: first a sizeable fraction of the overall population needs to be highly talented and motivated; and second a dominant, blocking elite needs to be prevented.<

Hewson Martin, Multicultural vs Post-Multicultural World History, 2012

Historical and recent levels of economic development:

"A review article (Spolaore and Wacziarg 2012) concludes that relative levels of economic development today in different regions are predicted by relative levels a millennium and more ago."

Hewson Martin

Link:
http://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/61054/1/720562503.pdf
How deep are the roots of economic development?, 2012

"In general, women researchers find living things more interesting, especially young living things."

Academic specialities by sex

...

For the last 20 years, the most male dominated field studied is math, then operations research, then philosophy, and economics. In philosophy, the most masculine subfields include space and time and set theory, and the most feminine moral philosophy.

In general, women researchers find living things more interesting, especially young living things.

...

The single most masculine subfield in the study is the mathematics of Riemannian manifolds.

The usual way to think about this is that this represents a crisis. Steps Must Be Taken to smash the glass ceiling holding women down in Riemannian manifolds so that they can bring their valuably diverse insights to solving Riemannian manifolds, whatever those are.

On the other hand, my view (being a Larry Summers-like thought criminal) is that children and other living things are important, and I'm glad that smart women are working enthusiastically on subjects that they find fascinating.

...

Steve Sailer

http://isteve.blogspot.co.at/2013/01/academic-specialties-by-sex.html

[Eine weibliche Eigenart auf den Punkt gebracht... Ich empfehle es, den Artikel auf der Originalseite ohne Auslassungen zu lesen. Überhaupt sind mehrere Artikel von Steve Sailer lesenswert.]

Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits:

http://www18.homepage.villanova.edu/diego.fernandezduque/Teaching/PhysiologicalPsychology/zCurrDir4200/CurrDirGeneticsTraits.pdf
Thomas J. Bouchard Jr., Genetic influence oh human psychological traits, 2004

[Sehr guter Überblick: table 1]

 

siehe auch: http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/all-human-behavioral-traits-are-heritable/

"London is arguably the first great western capital city to pass this landmark..."

"A couple of weeks ago it was announced that London no longer contained a majority from the UK’s main ethnic group, known in the demographers’ jargon as the “White British”.

London is arguably the first great western capital city to pass this landmark, though that depends on where you draw the boundaries around Washington and on excluding Brussels as a special case because it is an “embassy capital”."

...

"[The] studied indifference of London’s political and media elite appears to be in sharp contrast to the feelings of many of the white British people who live in less salubrious parts of the city. For it is important to understand that the proportion of white British Londoners fell so dramatically – from 60 per cent in 2001 to 44.9 per cent in 2011 – not only because of high levels of immigration but also thanks to a mass exodus of white Britons."

...

"The "studied indifference of London's political and media elite" shouldn't surprise anyone, since this is what they wanted all along, but without drawing anyone's attention to it. So they're not going to draw anyone's attention to it now."

...

http://mangans.blogspot.co.at/2012/12/london-no-longer-majority-white-british.html