Dr. Helena Cronin is a noted Darwinian philosopher and rationalist. She is the co-director of the CPNSS and the Darwin Centre at the London School of Economics. She achieved prominence with her book, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today (1991) but has published and broadcast widely since.
In her youth, she attended Henrietta Barnett School in Hampstead Garden Suburb.
She is married to another critical and questioning academic, the "radical dentist," Dr. Aubrey Sheiham, professor of dental public health at University College London. Her nephew Paul Cronin has published several books on cinema, and her first cousin is Professor Sir Michael Marmot, the noted epidemiologist.
Dr. Cronin is a 'Distinguished Supporter' of the British Humanist Association.
"I used to think that these patterns of sex differences resulted mainly from average differences between men and women in innate talents, tastes and temperaments. After all, in talents men are on average more mathematical, more technically minded, women more verbal; in tastes, men are more interested in things, women in people; in temperaments, men are more competitive, risk-taking, single-minded, status-conscious, women far less so. But I have now changed my mind. It is not a matter of averages, but of extremes. Females are much of a muchness, clustering round the mean. But, among males, the variance—the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst—can be vast. So males are almost bound to be over-represented both at the bottom and at the top. I think of this as 'more dumbbells but more Nobels'." [1]