There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper

[fetishdj]

Myelin increases the speed transduction of nervous signals and therefore increases speed of thought but not necessarily intelligence...

As for Autism, I suspect that what causes it varies a lot. Like many conditions, I think it may suffer from the inevitable but inavoidable problem of our symptom led diagnostic system which tends to group conditions with similar symptoms into the same group and assume they have the same cause when often this is not the case. IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) is one such as is Bechet's disease and a number of other genetic conditions. Basically, we class Autism as a condition characterised by specific symptoms which could be caused by any one of a hundred or more different causes - gene mutations, drug therapy in the womb, steroids, the list is endless (though I think the evidence is mounting to discount MMR vaccine now - the original evidence was based on 8 subjects, one of whom was Autistic at the end of the study and there was no way to know if the child was not already autistic before the trial and proper diagnosis is difficult at a very young age. Plus the results have yet to be verified by independent sources). Modern medicine is edging slowly towards the idea that the cause is more important than the symptoms and should determine classification more than the symptoms and modern techniques can now find these out more accurately. This method may allow better prevention and maybe even treatment of some conditions such as Autism.

The too many connections thing is a viable theory as to why autists think and see the world differently to others. It also explains thier other symptoms. Its evolution trying something new to see if it works and finding that it doesn't quite work well enough. Its also my theory about Downs as well - Downs patients have a whole extra chromosome of genetic stuff so again new things being tried.

[MissElizabeth87]

Just to clarify, I was in no way trying to explain where Autism comes from. Like you said, there is multiple reasons, and it's just a name to explain symptoms. I was just trying to explain those symptoms on a cellular level. Basically, the brain thing does happen to all autistics, but they just don't know WHY it happens. It's similar to Alzhiemer's disease. They know what happens to the brain-they don't actually know why-except that it may be genetic.

[MMI]

I've just skimmed through this (most of it's too hard for me) but in case no-one else has, I thought I'd mention that, in the UK, the public school-leaving exams were always marked with a bias towards boys (in other words, boys gained marks because they were boys), and that way, boys were shown to perform better than girls.

Like cats do, this eventually got out of the bag, and a fairer system of marking had to be introduced. Since then, girls' results have always improved more than boys'. (It is an inviolable "natural law" in UK that pupils' results improve year after year after year, no matter how low standards must drop to achieve this.)

And now, there are more female undergraduates at university than there are males.

I don't know how the balance of sexes within the population affects this outcome, but I do think the "feminisation" of the British education system has had a lot to do with it, and I know that a few boys now suffer at the hands of misandric teachers, just as many girls suffered at the hands of misogynistic ones before, but it cannot be denied that, in the UK at least, girls seem to have greater academic intellect than boys do.

[lucy]

I don't know how the balance of sexes within the population affects this outcome, but I do think the "feminisation" of the British education system has had a lot to do with it, and I know that a few boys now suffer at the hands of misandric teachers, just as many girls suffered at the hands of misogynistic ones before, but it cannot be denied that, in the UK at least, girls seem to have greater academic intellect than boys do.

It's the same here in Switzerland, more girls than boys enter Universities by now. But i think it hasn't anything to do with intellect at all. It's simply because school subjects that appeal more to girls than to boys, i.e. languages, have become more important in recent years.
Furthermore, boys drop out of high school at a much higher rate than girls.
So i think the process of making the school system fairer for girls has created unfairness for the boys.

Back to the topic i think Tom pretty much summed it up: Men just want to win harder than women. That's why more of them achieve really outstanding things.