Left: Assyrian archer (now Iraq) ca. 600 BCE. Right: American soldier in Iraq, 2400 years later. This photo shows rare insight into the lack of progress in male intelligence, which is limited to the technical advancement of violence. Below: Ridicule of the enemy, which is a symptom of overconfidence, characterizes the male belief in his supernatural superiority. A photo-shopped image of a missile test-fire by Iran taunts the Iranians as being technically inept, a tactic that is as old as the male mind, and which often often proves fatal.

Counter-evidence for male intelligence

x

Early people did not have millennia of conjecture to ponder when deciding what started it all. No Big Bang Theory, no sci-fi films, no texts that claim to be the word of god, no gods!
x

Too often the assumption is made that early people shared our state of mind because their brains were the same size as ours, but what goes on inside those brains is what counts. We must try to set aside thousands of years of culture to understand their relationship to the environment. Early humans inhabited natural environments, and they sought to explain their experiences by what was present in those environments. Modern people live in complex artificial environments that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. We are not a better-fed and better-dressed version of early humans; we possess different ideas about being human.
x

There is one experience that all humans share; birth and the liberation from childhood chaos is a personal experience. Subjective awareness arises in the brain-sensory system of our bodies, and it is here that we find the coming of order out of chaos. The human fetus is delivered unfinished; the essential body parts are in place, as well as the basic functions of breathing, sucking, crying out, and waste elimination, but the neural connections needed to operate an adult body must be selected and reinforced by repetitive training over the extended period of childhood.
x

Human infants are utterly dependent on gigantic all-powerful beings called parents, who must participate in completing the connections between sense organs, nerves, and muscles so that the brain can make sense of the environment and direct the growing child's movement and action within it. Language, which is an instinct and social necessity, also must be activated during a specific period of brain growth in childhood.

xOur ability to learn, which is enhanced by finishing the brain post-birth, is often said to contribute to our superiority among animals, but our unfinished brain also leaves us vulnerable to the damage that results if children are neglected, abused, forced to adapt to poor parenting, or are raised in an unhealthy cultural environment.

x

If a child is not told that nature is its proper home, but instead that it owes its existence to a supernatural realm, then it cannot become fully aware of whom it is. The child will not experience the self-confidence that comes from belonging to the physical environment and adulthood may be delayed indefinitely. Cultural adulthood consists in playing a role, a safe but restrictive tradition in human societies that can waste individual potential. In traditional societies this may work well, but the rate of change in modern cultures demands educated and adaptable individuals.
x

We see a tragic disconnect between technology and social development in the United States, where comparative freedom has produced the inventions and that benefit mankind, but solutions to critical social issues remain trapped in an archaic religious model of male despotism; this Stone Age mind set is inadequate to meeting complex challenges. Stone Age social structure, which is characterized by rigid and violent male dominance, keeps millions of women and children in poverty: Top Males corner the earth's resources and dictate their distribution and use. The earth’s resources are not being used intelligently, but are being exhausted, not replenished or conserved. Disaster does not lie ahead, it is already with us.

x

The United States has made progress toward social equity, but fundamentalist thinkers desire to drag us back to the dark vision of man in the Bible, with its wildly violent and unjust Top Male, Jehovah, leading us to Armageddon. Fundamentalists want to collapse the world of Archimedes into the flatland of the Bible. Magical minds that are trapped in patriarchal oppression, that believe wholly in a violent myth that was current two millennia ago, are not equipped to manage a dynamic world of our own making.
x

Human population has flowed across the planet, a feat of adaptation made possible by clever invention, but this success has been at the expense of earth's environments and thousands of plant and animal species. The belief that a life-hating supernatural being has ordered man to exhaust and destroy everything he encounters, has cut a wide swath through the resources of the planet, and the result is that the much of the environment has been ruined by the trash and toxins we have created.

x

Domination by a Top Male and his hierarchy continues to be the most popular means of organizing human beings. Force, intimidation, brutality, degradation of the land, religious war, torture, poverty, legal gridlock, and pathological killing persist worldwide, and rather than decreasing, the horror of war continues to expand.
x

The Top Male model of power guarantees that violent interaction, destruction of the physical environment, and the wasted potential of 'lesser' humans, will continue unabated. Killing is what men do. Man's technical excellence serves his passion for death and power: that is the reverse of intelligence.