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I'm sure I'll be downvoted into oblivion for making the observation but surely this isn't surprising given that people with lower IQs tend to have more babies and have babies earlier in life than do people with higher IQs. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence

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That's a common myth. Higher than average IQ men have significantly more kids it's less significant and possibly negative for women.

"More rigorous studies carried out on Americans alive after the Second World War returned different results suggesting a slight positive correlation with respect to intelligence."

Critically these children are often had latter in life making studies based on younger age cohorts give different results.

Higher education also has a negative impact.

Dysgenics is, unfortunately, starting to look undeniable:http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2017/01/10/1612113114...

IQ slightly increases male reproduction but massively reduces female reproduction. This may select for dimorphism in the long term, which does not seem like a good outcome.

We will have the means to select for high IQ with embryo selection or iterated embryo selection. Hopefully we are not so in denial about what we are losing that we fail to allow this technology to be used.

I know China and Korea will not shun it.

[flagged]

Please stop posting unsubstantive comments or we'll ban the account.

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> ...possibly negative for women.

I hope I won't be downvoted crazy for this, but wasn't feminism offered as an answer to this? Better educated women have a bit more trouble having babies and keeping their career, since lots of men find it offputting to be dependent on their wives, due to traditional gender roles. Some developed countries have experienced normalization of fertility rates, and I've heard that more gender equality was a possible good explanation for this - more women can have both the baby and the career... This would also fit with the phenomenon you describe, of educated men having more kids, but educated women having less.

IMHO there are a lot of factors for this link and concluding negative dysgenic scenarios is probably hasty. It may not necessarily be "all bad", and it may not necessarily directly relate to intelligence per se.

Speculative: Infant mortality, for instance, is not much of a concern anymore in developed economies. Knowledge in the mean time is a far more valuable commodity than ever. In such an economy, it makes more sense to concentrate parenting resources (which include far more schooling than in earlier times) on a smaller set of offspring. I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing personally.

Also speculative: For women, the conflict between career and parenting is indeed very significant, especially in countries which do not seem to value work-life balance very much (inflexible work schedules, lack of priority on child services, etc.) and/or still have a lot of the traditional parenting roles in place. Motherhood has shown to be a significant explanation of the gender pay gap for instance. I would not be surprised if the negative penalty for fertility for intelligent women is largely due to this phenomenon as well. It would be interesting to see if this "intelligence penalty" for women does indeed lessen in countries with more family friendly employment policies.

>since lots of men find it offputting to be dependent on their wives

Source please. It could very well be the other way around or more likely a mixture of both.

The ideology of male breadwinner is quite alive in more conservative and evangelical circles. Man living in such social group whose women earn more have lover social standing and consequently don't want it. Then there are people who don't care and I know of no groups that would believe in women being expected to he breadwinners.

So the bias would be toward that way.

Ideology of independent working woman seems far more pronounced to me. We all are expected to work, which necessarily makes having children – especially early in life, when they have the highest chance to be healthy – a big bother for women, and feminism doesn't help here in the least, even if it slightly compensates for the issue of "ideology of male breadwinner".

"Ideology of independent working woman" is basically ideology of same expectation on men and women. It does not compensate anything, bias in who is expected to earn more goes other way. A single women does not need to earn more then non-existent husband to feel enough feminine.

It's men's fault that men aren't putting themselves into female roles that will guarantee for many of them divorce, no reproduction, no attraction from women? Such twisted logic! Why are we saying "men and women IQs" when this is way too general. It's the west that isn't reproducing at replacement rates, and then having lower IQ immigrants replace them. Please note the lack of value judgement on my part about IQ - a society is allowed to increase lower IQ populations, but don't act like it isn't happening.

This is wrong in at least two respects.

1) X can be morally desirable and yet yield as a consequence effect Y, without thereby vitiating X. That is, the problem clearly isn't 'gender equality'. If you think there really is a problem - and I'm doubtful because it's more than offset by environmental factors - then it's on account of something else: the fact that women have to choose between work and home life, the anti-social work ethic forced upon everyone by capitalism, etc.

2) Some early feminists argued in favour of the pill because of its dysgenic potential. They believed it could be used to lower the birthrate of racial/class inferiors. 'Feminism' is an incredibly diverse ideology.

> That's a common myth

No, it's not. It's a matter of measure and perspective. The pareto principle guarantees that lower IQ men in aggregate, have more kids (with similar IQs). Regardless of other trends.

Absolute numbers are not important over time it's rates that matter. Actual studies show high IQ men having more children and those children having increased survival odds. This likely relates to status, and having more kids does not apply to women.

PS: Do you really think the sub 60 IQ population which is about the same size as the 140+ IQ population has more kids?

> The pareto principle guarantees that lower IQ men in aggregate, have more kids

I'm sorry, what? I am familiar with the Pareto principle but I do not see how this follows from it. Could you elaborate?

First of all, IQ always changes. 100 points of IQ in 2018 is not the same as 100 points of IQ in 1918. This is because IQ 100 is defined as the mean score.

Many things affect IQ, one of them being nutrition. If a couple with median income has 10 kids, compared to 2 kids, their ability to provide proper nutrition to those 10 kids, or the time to ensure those 10 kids are properly fed will not be as good.

Fertility rates have to do with many things. Historically, fertility rates were higher because infant mortality rates were higher: fewer live births, and lower survival rate through childhood. Also, culture and religion. Some religions are against contraception of any kind and promote abstinence as the main form of birth control.

Birth control requires certain form of exposure to sex education. If you had no access to education, or if your education was provided by a religious organization, it is likely you will have no proper sex ed and your risk is higher.

preface: the following comment is about environmental factors, not race!

Also, Norway has been a popular country for migrants for decades. If you come from a less developed country where, for instance, the quality of food and health care (factors relevant to IQ) aren't as good as in Norway then this surely influenced the IQ of your predecessors and hence you. If the share of such migrants is big enough to influence the average (I don't know!) then this could be an explanation.

https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/statistikker/innvutv/aar/_i...

I think they control for this by saying inter-family variation explains almost the entire effect. So that suggests the problem is something with the Norwegian environment (and possibly the rest of the developed world) rather than the relatively poor environment that many immigrants and refugees come from.

> Using administrative register data and cognitive ability scores from military conscription data covering three decades of Norwegian birth cohorts (1962–1991)

I can't access the full study, somehow it's not published yet for me. But it doesn't appear like migration played a role.

Correct. Was pretty obvious during my stays in Scandinavia that the people trying to sell me drugs and fighting in the train stations were not locals. Not that those actions in any way would be a correlate of IQ /PC logic.

"we show that the observed Flynn effect, its turning point, and subsequent decline can all be fully recovered from within-family variation. The analysis controls for all factors shared by siblings and finds no evidence for prominent causal hypotheses of the decline implicating genes and environmental factors that vary between, but not within, families."

"Stupid people have more kids" is exactly such a prominent causal hypothesis.

The main point of the paper being reported on here (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/06/05/1718793115) is that this is not the explanation for the Norwegian IQ trends.

Perhaps regression toward the mean counteracts this?

That’s what the intro to the movie Idiocracy says :P

Please don't refer to those as "movies". They're really documentaries, just like Terminator et al.

Humor is frowned upon as a vehicle for dialogue it seems

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