Regarding the Tracery and the Whale-Mothers.
First, the Tracery seems a pretty lame test of intellectual acuity. On the surface, its great. Only the most brilliant and fastest mental processors will be able to pin a leaf under a spinning coin. That's crazy.
However, once you get older and your reflexes dull, the mind clouds, that doesn't make you're genes less viable. I would expect something more elegant.
Important for later, but its mentioned that the ones that don't breed are sent into the mines to do manual labor - excavating the Thousand Thousand Halls.
The whole Whale-Mothers scene was very disturbing Thoughts of mine from another thread
Brings up Whale-Mothers. Why would men be selected for physical and mental acuity and women selected for being giant whales? The only reason I can come up with is because the Dunyain needed to breed as much and as frequently as possible. Shorter generations means less time to breed the intellectual acuity to become a self moving soul. This can be achieved in several ways:
Breeding at younger ages. The early a woman can bare children, the more children she can have.
The older she can still bare viable children, the she can have total in her lifetime.
Shorter time period between birth and the next pregnancy
Shorter time to reach full term baby. I'm not sure the mother affects this, but I'm guessing a healthy momma that gives neutrants to babies more quickly means the baby grows faster.
These things might have selected for large women with wider hips, lead to retaining more fat and nutrient stores, and potentially selected against intellect.
Sorry if my misunderstanding of biology and pregnancy are grossly inadequate.
It seems the decision was made to select, when breeding women, for those most capable of bearing children, and lots of them. I imagine everyone, men and women, came to the consensus to select women's physical features for child bearing/rearing, and men's for physical fitness. However, they couldn't just stop selecting for intellectual acuity, otherwise they'd basically be canceling out the effects of what they were trying to breed into the men. That has interesting implications.
Did the dunyain males just brainwash all the women to consent to their role?
Did the women themselves consent without provocation? They might have been just as interested in obtaining the Absolute, and realized their role in the matter. Without them, it would have been impossible.
Maybe the women had their intellects artificially stunted at some point. It would be important to still only allow the most intellectually acute to breed, even among women. That means they'd have to be shackled/convinced/brainwashed/etc after they passed through the thousand thousand halls - or some other test just for intellect (as the TTH was also a physical test). With neuropuncture, this should be fairly trivial.
Aside from all that, I doubt they should really ever have been able to have such a difference between sexes, for much of the same reason that they couldn't just make all the women dumb and the men smart. Because they are breeding, those genes would get mixed together constantly. If the women were tending to get fat and big-boned, genetically speaking, then so too should the sons of those women. They all had to be bred to be smart and physically fit, so really the physical changes seen, other than perhaps wider hips, would need to be induced phenotypically post-selection for breeding. Some difference in diet and exercise ...