What justifies my position is that for another supposedly matrilineal society that academics love as absolutely wonderful and highly functional, the Mosuo, folk wisdom is that it is composed of whores and pimps, similar to the culture celebrated in rap music and game blogs, where there is no significant transfer of consumables to women and children, and large transfer from women and children to a minority of men. Thus in addition to sociobiology, I have folk evidence, evidence from low status people, that academics are making stuff up.
He explained it in another post. To be honest if when I first read this I was a step or two nearer to him in inferential distance I would have probably found the comment witty. Considering he has spent some effort to shorten the chain, I'm changing my vote on it.
"In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society."
It is presently a commonplace of Western culture that women are worse at spatial reasoning than men, and this is commonly attributed to intrinsic biological differences.
It turns out this may be highly questionable. A study in PNAS studied two nearby tribes in northeast India, one with a strongly patriarchal organisation, one with a strongly matriarchal organisation. Both share the same agrarian diet and lifestyle and DNA tests indicate they are closely related.
In the patriarchal society, women did noticeably worse on spatial reasoning. In the matriarchal society, women and men did about the same.
The authors carefully do not overstate their results, claiming only that they demonstrated that culture influences spatial performance "in the task that we study." However, this promisingly suggests quite a bit of room for improvement of measurable aspects of intelligence may be feasible with proper attention to culture and nurture.
What measurable aspects of intelligence do you attribute to genetic causes? Can you test it this well? How would you fix it and help people be all they can be?
News coverage: ArsTechnica.