9th July 2010, 8:16 PM
ABF, there's plenty of studies that do exactly this. It's all about double blinded studies with large samples controlling for as many variables as possible. The basic idea is simply to compare two groups where only one variable is different. Reducing down to that is very tricky of course, but not impossible. This is what I meant when I said looking at lists of successful women is too "noisy", there's too many uncontrolled variables because those lists weren't made for the purpose of telling if women are better or worse at gambling. It's done all the time, and the end point is that testing for mental differences in PROPERLY CONTROLLED studies tend towards no genetic tie between gender and mental capacity. Take away the controls, and you can probably derive whatever conclusions you want, but they'd all be invalidated by how noisy the data is.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)