Men are smarter than women — or not

The collection of studies touting who's smarter, men or women, could — and some would say should — fill a landfill.

Add to the heap a recent Canadian study of SAT scores purportedly proving men are smarter than women. At least they are by four points, according to one of the study's authors, psychologist J. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario. In the journal Intelligence, Rushton says men have a 4- to 5-point IQ advantage over women by adulthood. The difference was there all the time, but masked because girls mature faster than boys and thus appear to do better in school.

The study looked at 100,000 tests by American 17- to 18-year-olds and found a male advantage throughout and at every economic level.

In the world of gender studies, Rushton and his study challenge commonly held thought, based on previous studies, that men's and women's intellectual prowess may vary at different ages but generally evens out.

Studies abound on the many ways men and women differ, from men rating higher in map reading and other spatial abilities to women being superior in verbal abilities.

A new book, "The Female Brain," hypothesizes that women seem more emotional because the principal hub in the brain for emotion and memory formation — the hippocampus — is larger in a woman than in a man. Women, says the book's author, neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men navigate a small country road.

For many of us, that explains a lot.

Rushton doesn't claim his study is the final word on who's smarter. That's smart of him. Any correlation of SAT scores with IQ is troubling since the former is used as a predictor of college success and the latter is not a good predictor of any success.

There is also too much variation that Rushton doesn't account for. Not all males score higher than women on the SAT. The test itself, given to college-bound students, is a selective subset of a larger population that Rushton doesn't deal with.

The biggest question this latest study begs is whether a 4-point difference is really indicative of a significant intellectual gap between the sexes.

We think not. Rushton says only more data can determine the true nature of differences in cognitive ability between the sexes.

Rev up the bulldozers.