Smart and SeXy

published

2020-04-21

rating

5

This book is one of the most information dense books I've read, it felt like almost every sentence was providing a new fact and there are a ton of citations. Also one of the least politically correct books I've read. The first half of the book goes pretty deep into genetics related to sex chromosomes and their connection with intelligence. I learned about hemizygous exposure and X inactivation which are the type of thing I would have expected I'd heard about a long time ago, so this was really exciting to learn about. The second half of the book gave a lot of arguments against feminism supported by data. Even though I've heard a lot on this topic before, a lot was new to me and I found it really interesting. There were a couple points that I think may be incorrect, such as the explanation for why intelligence evolved in humans; the explanation in The Mating Mind seemed more persuasive to me. Also, he makes the claim that preservation of civilization is of utmost importance, which doesn't square well with the ideas from Civilized to Death. Also, the false rape accusation statistics he provided were higher than most of the studies listed on Wikipedia and there wasn't any discussion of the studies with lower rates, which suggests there may be some cherry-picking of data. But as long as it's read with a grain of salt, I think the book is excellent, very informative, and very fun to read.