Sometime back one of my friends put forward the question about “Who is the superior of the two Sexes in humans?”
Well to give an answer to the question, whether the human male has any superiority over the female of the species cannot be directly summarized. There cannot be a definitive answer, but it can be said that the human male has certain advantages over the human female with regard to certain specific tasks, while the counter is also true by the fact that the human female has also certain definitive advantages over the human male when concerned with certain other tasks.
The brain of both the human male and female vary in many respects. Richard J. Haier and colleagues at the universities of New Mexico and California (Irvine) found, using brain mapping that men have more than six times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly ten times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men.
"These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," according to Haier. Gray matter is used for information processing, while white matter consists of the connections between processing centers. Brain differences also have a statistically measurable effect on an array of abilities. In particular, on average, men are more capable in space and logic while female brains tend to be good at sensory processing. These are examples of different averages between two statistical populations. On the other hand, the average scores of young men and women in mathematics, for example, will be close, but there will be more men than women in the very low scores and in the very high scores. There is evidence to suggest that forms of autism may be essentially extreme expressions of certain typically male characteristics. Hormones have also been linked with male aggression.
In 1861, Paul Broca examined 432 human brains and found that the brains of males had an average weight of 1325 grams, while the brains of females had an average weight of 1144 grams. A 1992 study of 6325 Army personnel found that men's brains had an average volume of 1442 cm³, while the women averaged 1332 cm³ (Ankney, 1992). The differences are smaller but persist when adjusted for body size (Ankey, 1992).
In 2005, Haier et al. reported that compared with men, women show more white matter and fewer gray matter areas related to intelligence. They also report that the brain areas correlated with IQ differ between the sexes. They conclude that men and women apparently achieve similar IQ results with different brain regions.
Although women may have smaller brains than men, they appear to have greater neuron density in their prefrontal lobe, which is involved in higher functions such as planning, judgment, and language, although men still have higher absolute grey matter volume than women in their prefrontal lobe
There is a lot of variation in men and women that is not yet understood. It cannot be proven that male-ness or female-ness is 100% biological (in fact it almost certainly isn't), but what has been shown is that male-ness and female-ness are certainly not 100% determined by upbringing and culture (social determinism). These issues remain an area of ongoing research, with profound relevance for people of many different types.
A 2001 report by Richard J. Coley of the ETS found that females often outperformed males on various measures of verbal ability, while males tended to outperform females on measures of mathematical and spatial ability.
·Spatial abilities: large differences favoring males are found in performance on visual-spatial tasks (e.g., mental rotation) and spatio-temporal tasks (e.g., tracking a moving object through space). The male advantage in visual-spatial tasks is approximately 1 standard deviation.
·Quantitative abilities: female have an advantage in quantitative abilities in the early years of school. This trend reverses before puberty, after which time males maintain an advantage.
·Verbal abilities: a range of differences, some large, favoring females are found in performance on verbal tasks. Males also show higher levels of dyslexia and other reading disabilities. The incidence of stuttering is also higher among males.
·Memory: Several studies have shown women are better at certain types of memory.
·General knowledge: A study by Richard Lynn showed that men have more general knowledge than women.
.Education: In the United States, women tend to outnumber men at colleges and universities, except at technical institutions that emphasize math and science such as MIT and Caltech, where men predominate.
·Academia: Men outnumber women in tenured faculty positions in math and science. Women outnumber men in tenured faculty positions in humanities fields.
.High IQ societies: In many "high IQ societies" men outnumber women, e.g., in Mensa the male-to-female ratio is 2:1. However, these societies are self-selecting, with voluntary membership.
·Boys tend to have a higher incidence of behavioral problems in schools which may impact academic achievement
The reasons for Differences:
The importance of testosterone and other androgens as a cause of sex differences has been a subject of study. Adult women who were exposed to unusually high levels of androgens in the womb due to a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia score significantly higher on tests of spatial ability. Girls with this condition play more with "boys' toys" and less with "girls' toys" than unaffected controls. Many studies find positive correlations between testosterone levels in normal males and measures of spatial ability. However, the relationship is complex.
It is possible that sexual dimorphism may exist in regard to intellectual abilities in humans. Men may have evolved greater spatial abilities, possibly as a result of certain behaviors, such as navigating during a hunt, that they were more likely to be involved in during humans' evolutionary history. Similarly, women may have evolved to devote more mental resources to gathering food, as well as understanding and tracking relationships and reading others' emotional states in order for them to be able to better understand their social situation.
Another possibility is the effects of socialization. Girls are sometimes discouraged from studying math or science. Similarly, boys are sometimes discouraged from displaying empathy, or from spending excessive time reading for pleasure.
The observed differences in the variability of skills between the sexes can be explained genetically: many brain-related genes are located on the X chromosome, of which women have two copies and men only one. A mutation in one of these genes, whether positive or negative, will thus have a higher impact in males than in females (where the second, presumably non-mutated copy will mitigate the effect of the mutated one).
The Chromosomes
The X chromosome contains about 2000 genes compared to the Y chromosome containing 78 genes. Thus the Y chromosome has far fewer no. of genes than the X chromosome. It is also believed that at a certain period in time the Y chromosome was equal in size to the X chromosome, but with time it became smaller, leaving it with just 78 genes today. It is also believed that a stage will come when the Y chromosome will become nonexistent.
One certain interesting point of note is the Whiptail lizard. The lizard is a female only species that reproduces by producing an egg that is a perfect clone of itself. One downside of this reproduction is that the lizard is unable to naturally evolve as other animals have 50% of their DNA donated by each parent. An interesting aspect to reproduction in these asexual lizards is that mating behaviours are still seen, although the populations are all female. One female plays the role played by the male in closely related species, and mounts the female that is about to lay eggs. This behaviour is due to the hormonal cycles of the females, which cause them to behave like males shortly after laying eggs, when levels of progesterone are high, and to take the female role in mating before laying eggs, when estrogen dominates.
Well if a conclusion has to be made then, both the male and the female of the human species is different from the other and have their advantages and disadvantages. An all female society can exist but it may be quite different from the current society. Whether it would be better is debatable as even the human female have their pitfalls albeit different from the human male.
References:
Wikipedia.(two links are given below)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnemidophorus_neomexicanus
