[scotty79]

Some answers here: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7093/do-men-show...

Intuitively it made much sense for me when I was in high school and trying to figure out the world.

People perceive high, even extreme intelligence as some beneficial trait, but I don't think that's how we should look at things. Evolution does not care about men as much as it does about women. Man can be far from being best fit for raising children and still forward his genes to next generation. Women need to be much more optimized, stable. Too high or too low intelligence is a neurological flaw in men that makes them worse parents from evolutionary perspective but they can get away with it. Women can't.

It might change after many generations of society that takes care of children of deranged or disinterested mothers. Having extra copy of X chromosome sure does help with stability but there are many examples in biology where simple obvious mechanism are overruled by special contraptions forced by evolution to result in the opposite of what simple logic would dictate.

[philh]

> Man can be far from being best fit for raising children and still forward his genes to next generation.

This would seem to predict that men show less variance than women in whether or not they forward their genes. They actually show more.

Why would too high intelligence make someone a worse parent?

[x0054]

Helicopter parents = bad parents, usually = high intelligence parents. Same thing can be true in reverse.

The GP is arguing that men have the luxury to propagate their genes even if they do not make good parents, while women have to be a good parent in order to make their offspring survive to adulthood.

[scotty79]

>> Man can be far from being best fit for raising children and still forward his genes to next generation.

> This would seem to predict that men show less variance than women in whether or not they forward their genes

Not necessarily. Ratio of variance of whether women and men forward their genes is influenced with many factors. Extreme men can have less variance then equally extreme women, but average women can have less variance because there is very few extreme women. Also what I'm referring to is about times that shaped modern day men and women. Child of extreme woman had very small chances of surviving back then. Child of extreme man would have had better chances.

> Why would too high intelligence make someone a worse parent?

I'd want to back that up with something solid but only things that come to my mind are anecdotes of absent minded geniuses, emotional volatility associated with intelligence, social misalignment that could get a person in serious trouble (Archimedes?) or simply loosing interest in own 'plain' children.