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Comment by carlmcqueen | Hacker News Reader

Not a huge fan of the 'have kids, the world needs smart people' this seems to pretend that his intended audience holds the key to wisdom and the only way to keep that going is for his audience to have kids.

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It's been well established that children of parents with high education levels, formal or informal (which describes the HN audience well), are themselves more likely to be successful and well educated. Nothing really controversial about that.

I don't think "smart children" is the same as "successful and well educated children". While your statement is indeed backed my most research, the article seems to suggest that because your smart, your children will be as well. This is not backed by most research. Perhaps the reason most children of parents with higher education also tend to get educated is because the parents were smart enough to not have children until they were financially able.

That interpretation is a bit too literal in my opinion; I'm guessing the author meant "smart" in a more colloquial sense. People who have some combination of being well educated and intelligent are often simply referred to as "smart".

Huh? I thought it was well established that intelligence is at least 50-60% hereditary. I believe various adoption studies showed this in a very convincing manner, as the kids who were adopted had intelligence that correlated with their bio parents, not the adoptive parents.

That's true, but in that case "keep adopting kids" would also work.

Not necessarily. Intelligence is in big part determined by genetics.

No, IQ is extremely hereditary.

The heritability of IQ is often estimated at 0.4 according to Wikipedia. Not very high, but not insignificant. Height has 0.8 heritability.

Even if you're a genius, it doesn't mean your child will be. I think 0.4 suggests environmental factors are more important.

It's 0.4 in childhood, rising to 0.7 to 0.8 in adulthood.

Saying that you can adopt a child and raise him to be smart is approximately as foolish as claiming you can adopt a child and raise him to be tall.

Nope it's .75. IQ heritability is only .4 for children but it climbs to .75 as the children age into adulthood adults. So it's basically as heritable as height.

Wikipedia Quote

"The general figure for the heritability of IQ, according to an authoritative American Psychological Association report, is 0.45 for children, and rises to around 0.75 for late teens and adults"

You're assuming that any child I adopt would be genetically predisposed to lower intelligence than a child I would biologically have. That's not necessarily the case.

It's actually not that simple for adopted childen, unfortunately...

There's preliminary evidence for weak but steady selection against cognitive ability and/or educational attainment over the past century.

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/05/037929

http://www.pnas.org/content/113/24/6647/F2.expansion.html

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615...

https://jasoncollins.org/2016/07/22/kaufmanns-shall-the-reli...

The main driving factor seems to be educated people (and women in particular; some studies have found positive selection for men) not having children.

The rich get richer, and the poor get children.

There's a book I read recently that I thought did a good job looking into the demographic and social shifts associated with women having high workforce participation. It's 'XX Factor' by Alison Wolf, in case you're interested. She gives a convincing tour of some thorough data, but also makes it into a manageable narrative. She also did a decent Podcast interview on Econtalk, if you want a short version.

In his defense, he is probably closer to correct than other organizations that push such messages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiverfull

Quiverfull are actually pretty smart with their strategy - why try and convert everyone if you can outbreed them in two or three generations and become democratic majority? About the only thing protecting everyone else here is poor belief retention rate among their children.

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