Super Mario Galaxy 2

[A Black Falcon]

But my point was, with Western culture particularly so dominant around the world, trying to account for all the variable to really figure out which is which is incredibly difficult, and in some cases perhaps impossible...

I mean, you're right that that's what you have to do, but how useful the results will be will really depend on what kind of question you are asking, I think... the deeper, more complex ones will be the ones much harder to find any kind of answer to. Still though, sure, it's not impossible... but I think the quite unsure nature of our current understanding says something about how hard it, or really anything dealing with the brain and how people think, is.

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.

Do you mean that men and women are exactly equal in average intelligence? That is what I have always heard, yes. Then it's said that men are more likely to be very smart or very stupid (flatter curve) while women are more bunched in the middle (steeper curve), but I don't know if that is really from nature. Or are you saying that that's wrong too?

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.

That was my whole point, the cultural (socially learned) elements so overwhelm the natural ones that it's pretty obvious that you can't just look at a list to tell possible intelligence, because the lists are quite biased against women because of our society.

On that note, one very good question would be why men have dominated nearly every political system in almost every culture I know of worldwide... historically pretty much the "better" ones just seem to be the ones that are more equal; fully equal? Fully equal? That seems the realm of legend and "maybe it was"... Recall those hunter-gatherer groups where even though the women provided the majority of the food, the mens' catch was what was celebrated (large animals vs. plants and such).

All that proves, though, is that men seem to take power. It doesn't say anything about actual capability. Also, some of it does seem to be because of historical chance -- for instance, Japan and Korea were much less sexist than they are now before China's influence got so strong... 600s Japan was more equal than 1300s Japan which was more equal than 1800s Japan. And in the West we have all those myths and theories about the Minoans, etc. So while men do always seem to dominate, the exact degree to which they do so can vary greatly. We can see that in the modern world of course, comparing the West to China to the Arab world... big differences there. I don't know, it's interesting stuff to think about.