Mozart's Spaceship and Female Genius

Or, genius isn't gendered or numbered

Artist’s illustration of an O’Neill cylinder, a space colony design Jeff Bezos is a big fan of (adapted from Wikimedia Commons)

Mozart, but not that one

I’m sure Amazon chief Jeff Bezos is an intelligent man, but when he makes statements like,

If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins… The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. The planetary surfaces are just way too small.

I suddenly have my doubts, because it feels like he’s missing an important point.

Space exploration is great and I think we should invest more in it. But expanding the human home range for the sake of breeding more people in the hope that genius might pop up misses the second half of the genius equation. It’s not only about innate talent, but also about cultivating it.

If Bezos wants another Mozart, let’s talk about Mozart. No, not Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but Maria Anna Mozart (affectionately known as Nannerl).

Nannerl Mozart was Wolfgang’s older sister and she was the original musical prodigy in the family. Several Mozart biographers suggest that Wolfie only picked up music because he was inspired by watching his older sister. The siblings were close while growing up and Nannerl eagerly helped teach her baby brother. It remains a topic of debate how much Nannerl’s genius contributed to that of little Wolfie, but we know that (very) early exposure to music and musical practice rewires the brain, so if Nannerl was part of Wolfie’s early musical exposure, she might have literally shaped the more famous of the Mozarts’ brain. Some scholars speculate that sister and brother collaborated on Wolfgang’s earlier works.

What happened to Nannerl? Why isn’t her name etched into our societal tomes of cultural history? Brief answer: her parents encouraged her to stay put in Salzburg when she reached marriageable age, find a spouse, and be a good wife. She continued to play and write/teach music, but all that remains of it is a letter from her younger brother in which he writes,

My dear sister! I am in awe that you can compose so well, in a word, the song you wrote is beautiful.

Or what about Clara Schumann or Fanny Mendelsohn, whose last names probably ring a bell? They were both distinguished composers and musicians. Today, we mostly remember their husband and younger brother, respectively. (EDIT: changed the sentence to correct that Fanny was Felix’s older sister, not his wife.)

Nannerl’s (and Clara’s and Fanny’s and…) story means I need to tell you about Matilda.

The Matilda effect

The Matilda effect is named after 19th-century activist and writer Matilda Joslyn Gage and refers to the bias against acknowledging the work of female scientists.

Rosalind Franklin and her work on the structure of DNA is an obvious example. But do you know Nettie Stevens? She discovered the XY sex chromosome system, often attributed to her Ph.D. advisor Thomas Hunt Morgan. Do you know Marthe Gauthier? She discovered the chromosome abnormality in Down syndrome, still often attributed to Jérôme Lejeune. Jocelyn Bell? She discovered the first radio pulsar, which led to a Nobel in physics — for her two (male) supervisors. And so on.

The Matilda effect is still alive. For example, women in academic STEM are still more likely to hold non-tenure-track positions, which are associated with lower job satisfaction and lower salaries and a recent preprint finds that 1) women are more likely to get their papers rejected and 2) they are not cited as often as men. Teaching evaluations of female instructors focus more on their appearance and personality rather than, you know, the quality of their teaching. On the student side, reference letters for female students more often express doubt and comment on the personal life and appearance of the student. Katalin Karikó - who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for her pioneering work on mRNA vaccines - had her research underfunded, deprioritized, and her tenure denied before joining BioNTech.

How many female ‘geniuses’ do you know? How many have remained invisible?

One of the common ideas about the (seeming) overabundance of male versus female geniuses is the greater male variability hypothesis — in many traits, men display more variance than women¹. In the genius context, this is often framed as ‘there are more men with very high and very low IQs; women remain closer to the average’. Here’s an illustration (x-axis would be the value of whatever trait you’re interested in, and the y-axis the frequency of individuals with that trait value):

Wikimedia Commons

In our IQ example, men would be green, women blue, which implies that male geniuses would be more prevalent (the right side of the graph). Can you spot the problem(s)? I’ll give you a hint: genius is not a singular trait. Even IQ, often measured as a single ‘g factor’, has different subscales… And we’re not even talking about artistic genius (Mozart, remember?). In terms of creativity, a recent meta-analysis of 194 studies suggests that greater male variability isn’t really a thing.

Sticking to IQ, several studies find more male high-end outliers in mathematical reasoning. Care to guess what happens when we look at verbal reasoning? Look at that,

Boys were overrepresented relative to girls at both the top and the bottom extremes for all tests, with the exception of the top 10% in verbal reasoning.

As an aside, across grades, the top achievers in reading and writing comprehension and ability are more likely to be girls and young women.

Girls run the literary world².

But, you might think, for a lot of stuff men are overrepresented at the higher (and lower) end of cognitive ability. Hold on. We’re not done. First, even if greater male variability is present, that doesn’t necessarily translate into higher achievement. For example, two population-wide surveys of general intelligence in Scotland found,

Though present at the high end of the distribution, sex differences in variability did not appear to account for sex differences in high-level achievement.

Wait. We’re still not done. The original 1983 study that is the root of many of these claims found a 13.5:1 ratio of men to women in the highest echelons of SAT math scores. But what happened in a 2006 study that looked at data from over 1.6 million SAT tests? The ratio had dropped to less than 4:1. The authors are clear,

It is extremely likely that sociocultural factors played a role in the rapid decline from a 13.5 to 1 ratio in the early 1980s to a 4 to 1 ratio by the early 1990s in the top 0.01% of SAT-M scores.

More broadly, a 2019 study that looks at many countries finds that greater male variability seems to be the norm, but not in all countries. What’s going on here? It seems to depend on the type of test, the age of testing, and… measures of the Global Gender Gap index³. More specifically,

Increasing female economic participation appears to increase levels of female variance across all three domains… Taken together, it suggests that cultural practices tied to increasing female participation generally appear to increase variances for females…

There might as well be greater variability in some cognitive traits in men and a 4:1 ratio is still significant, but a drop from 13.5:1 to 4:1 is arguably more significant because it shows that in a decade(!) cultural changes can seriously moderate the (variance in) expression of the involved biological factors⁴.

Innate differences (between individuals and beyond gender) obviously exist, but genius only grows when it’s cultivated.

All aboard the spaceship.

Genuis, today, tomorrow

The perforated metal of the entry ladder greets your booted steps with a symphony of sharp clangs. The robot flight attendant - smile wider than the uncanny valley - waves you to one of the cramped seats a little too close to the rocket’s exhaust for comfort. No business class for you. You’re not tall but still have to squeeze yourself into the seat. Ironically, on a spaceship space comes at a premium and premiums cost a lot of money. The whole point of this journey is a new start and you don’t have the finances to buy one on earth.

You put on the entertainment visor and attach the catheter — always uncomfortable, but you’d rather do it yourself than trust the robot with it. You’ll be stuck in this seat for two days, watching personalized movies plucked from your brainwaves and listening to AI-generated Mozart symphonies, trying to sleep, and being fed reconstituted… stuff.

Eventually, you arrive at Bezos I, the space cylinder (with a giant blue feather as a logo) that maintains gravitational equilibrium at Lagrange point 1. You’ll spend the next six months doing ten-hour shifts of robot maintenance in the microgravity helium-3 refinery. That might just qualify you for a mortgage back on earth. Ninety percent of Bezos I’s population does this type of essential yet underpaid work. The other ten percent lounges in the exclusive luxury suites inside the shiny onyx bubble on the top of the space cylinder.

Bezos I is only the first of many.

How many Mozarts and Einsteins will live on those space stations? And of those that do, how many will have the time, support, and resources to reach their full potential⁵?

Today’s Mozart is a Bangladeshi girl with permanently stained fingers from working in a textile factory that makes our fast fashion. Today’s Einstein is a Ghanaian young man who is slowly poisoned by the world’s largest e-waste landfill in Agbogbloshie while he struggles to feed his family. Today’s Lise Meitner is a non-binary immigrant who fears for their safety while working sixteen-hour shifts in an Amazon warehouse with timed bathroom breaks that give them a persistent UTI. Today’s Hedy Lamarr is abused by her boyfriend who pours beer over her notebooks and prototypes before forcing her to have sex.

But addressing those issues doesn’t give billionaires a shiny spaceship or space colony they can slap a logo on.

Thanks for flying along — sometimes genius is all about clicking the right buttons…

1. Variability is a broader term that refers to the extent to which data points differ from each other. Variance is a more specific measure of variability, which quantifies the spread of data points around the average of a dataset.

2. I’m trying to hold my own here, but the female talent on Substack is intimidating. Then again, I do like a creative-cognitive challenge.

3. Already in 1922, (female, obviously) psychologist Leta Hollingworth pointed at gender roles, suggesting that while most women were restricted to ‘home roles’, men were allowed a greater diversification in education and environments and that this might explain (part of) the perceived variability. And in 1992, (female, obviously) philosopher Nel Noddings, called greater male variability a ‘pernicious hypothesis’. She points out that girls will work hard not to be at the bottom of the distribution, but they are also often pressured not to develop to their full ability at the top.

4. There is a lot of debate around this. Early theories suggested heterogamy (XY chromosomes in men) as an underlying cause for this greater variability. Others point to sexual selection, with females being more selective, which may have led to greater male variability. Still others (see also footnotes 2 and 3) suggest that it may well be culture all the way down (with the caveat that culture too has biology bubbling beneath the surface). Also, a recent meta-analysis in animal behavior, which includes over 200 studies in 220 species finds no evidence for the greater male variability hypothesis in several behavioral traits. Caveat: this did not include humans, but it does provide a challenge for the ‘biology first’ idea concerning greater male variability, at least in common behavioral traits.

5. As a former orchid, I’d be remiss not to link to an older post on orchid children.