Hair follicles and intelligence follow different signals
Body hair grows when hair follicles respond to hormones, especially androgens. The amount and coarseness of hair depend on inherited traits and on how sensitive a person’s follicles are to those hormones; age and other biological differences also matter. That is why people with similar hormone levels can have very different patterns of body hair.
Intelligence, meanwhile, reflects many influences on how people learn, reason, and solve problems. Visible hair growth is not a measure of those abilities. Even when a survey finds that a group with a particular trait also reports more body hair, the result describes a pattern across that group—not a biological link that can identify an individual’s intelligence.
Why a group pattern can be misleading
People who join an organization such as Mensa are a self-selected group: they have chosen to take part, and they may differ from the wider population in ways a survey does not capture. A reported association could arise from the makeup of the respondents, how questions were asked, or chance. Without evidence that rules out those possibilities, it cannot establish what caused the pattern.
The practical distinction is simple: hormones can affect follicles, but hair is not an IQ test. Two people with very different amounts of body hair may have similar intellectual abilities, and appearance alone cannot tell you what either person can do.
