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#14764638
It may be true for Icelanders according to this study:


Study shows that genetics play an important role in the attainment of education and number of offspring

A team of researchers with members from Iceland, the U.K. and the Netherlands has found a genetic factor that plays a role in how much education a person might attain over their lifetime and that the factor is becoming less common. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes how they analyzed genomic information in a national database in Iceland and what it showed.

Prior efforts have demonstrated that the more education a person has, the fewer offspring they are likely to produce. This has caused some concern among social scientists, as it suggests that we as a species might be evolving to become less intelligent beings. In this new effort, the researchers sought to determine if there might be a way to see this process at work.

To learn more, the team accessed the deCODE genetics genealogical database that the government of Iceland has been assembling—it holds both genetic and educational information for hundreds of thousands of people living in Iceland going back over a century. The researchers used data for the years 1910 to 1975 to find patterns between the number of children people had compared to how much education they had. They then compared their results genetically and found that there was a genetic factor related to a likelihood of attending school longer. They next compared that factor with the number of children people had and found that those people with a genetic propensity toward more schooling tended to have fewer children. What's more, they also found that the genetic factor had become less common over time, which meant that fewer people had a genetic tendency to attend higher education, which, they note, makes sense, because they as a group have fewer offspring.

Interestingly, the researchers also found that those people who carried genes for longer school attendance but who did not have a prolonged education still had fewer offspring on average than did those without the genetic factor.

The researchers suggest that their findings indicate that it is possible that the same genes responsible for pushing people to have more education are also at the root of IQ level, which in turn suggests that as a species, we may, indeed, be losing some degree of intelligence—by about 0.04 points per decade they calculate.

Medical Xpress


Actual study: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/10/1612113114

The second to last paragraph is somewhat disconcerting. We tend to assume that it is the long time spent in education that is the culprit for getting less children, but apparently the effect exists - at least in this study - even without a long education.
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#14764639
ye, basis for 'idiocracy' right. great point.

One reason I love China so much. One-child policy. Not only does it delimit and shrink the population, but it is also indirectly practical eugenics. With new the 'two-child policy', many CAN have two children... IF they can afford if. Which most admit that they can't, really, and so don't -- already accustomed to the single-child culture. The people who DO have two children will be wealthier and better educated. These trends towards idiocracy as you point out are effectively reversed.

give it another 100 years on this trajectory and China will be a virtual utopia.

US, on the other hand, will sink into deplorable third-world status. fuck those people.
#14764880
Rugoz wrote:I haven't read it yet, but please tell me they don't sell correlation as causation...

I don't think this is available without subscription and I don't have access, but I suspect they do.

Please also note that my thread title is not meant to be taken as a scientific statement.
#14764906
I think that they are two types of intelligence, the scholarly IQ type and then you have the world-minded experience IQ.

Since people are having less kids, I think that shows that there are more scholars who realize that it is about quality and not the quantity of kids that you have.

The ones that tend to have a lot of kids are the ones who are farmers, religious peoples who want to spread their seed, or the ones who just do not understand how painful it is for women to have an inflating stomach for nearly a year and most guys do not understand what that does to a woman's bladder control and her heart. It puts a lot of strain on her. I do not see the benefit to a woman of inflating and deflating her stomach year after year just to have a big family.

Plus, the older a woman gets while she is pregnant...the more likely it is that the child will have birth defects or that the birth will be more than one baby at a time. And those types of births are more complicated and could put the woman at a much greater risk than a one-child birth.

We now have a better understanding of women's health and pre-natal care so I think that we are smarter.
User avatar
By Rugoz
#14764993
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:I don't think this is available without subscription and I don't have access, but I suspect they do.

Please also note that my thread title is not meant to be taken as a scientific statement.


They rely on the methodology in this paper

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27225129

in which a causal interpretation is rejected. Here:

Studies of genetic analyses of behavioral phenotypes have been prone to misinterpretation, such as characterizing identified associated variants as “genes for education.” Such characterization is not correct for many reasons: EA is primarily determined by environmental factors, the explanatory power of the individual SNPs is small, the candidate genes may not be causal, and the genetic associations with EA are mediated by multiple intermediate phenotypes.


Something the authors of your paper seem to straight out ignore.

Moreover, POLYEDU (their polygenic score) explains 3.74% of the trait (EA, educational attainment) variation. So they come up with this:

Most importantly, POLYEDU is just a fraction of the full genetic component of educational attainment, which we denote by POLYFULL. It is the rate of change of POLYFULL that is of ultimate interest. Under an assumption that the part of POLYFULL that is not captured by POLYEDU behaves in a similar fashion in its impact on reproduction, the rate of change is proportional to the square root of the variance explained (SI Text).


:eh: Wtf?
#14765178
Rugoz wrote:
They rely on the methodology in this paper

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27225129

in which a causal interpretation is rejected.

Yes, that's what I said: I believe they do talk about correlation.

Rugoz wrote:
Something the authors of your paper seem to straight out ignore.

I doubt it. The caveats are usually somewhere in the paper (just like with the paper you quoted). It's most likely the article or if it's based on a university press release it's the university that overstates things. Abstracts also tend to be written to elicit attention and curiosity.

My impression is - without having read the full paper - that they are saying that their findings agree with what epidemiological studies have found and furthermore that the reduction in the number of children isn't fully explained by people attending education longer, opening up the possibility that there is a genetic component that links the two. They acknowledge that the score they are using only covers a part of the genetic component.
User avatar
By Rugoz
#14766186
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:I doubt it. The caveats are usually somewhere in the paper (just like with the paper you quoted). It's most likely the article or if it's based on a university press release it's the university that overstates things. Abstracts also tend to be written to elicit attention and curiosity.


They do, read the last paragraph before the discussion. In fact they speculate on how much IQ will decrease as a result.

Why do you say you don't have access to the paper?
#14775390
No. The reverse is true.
IQ is rising in many parts of the world. What's behind the change and does it really mean people are cleverer than their grandparents?
It is not unusual for parents to comment that their children are brainier than they are. In doing so, they hide a boastful remark about their offspring behind a self-deprecating one about themselves. But a new study, published in the journal Intelligence, provides fresh evidence that in many cases this may actually be true.
The researchers - Peera Wongupparaj, Veena Kumari and Robin Morris at Kings College London - did not themselves ask anyone to sit an IQ test, but they analysed data from 405 previous studies. Altogether, they harvested IQ test data from more than 200,000 participants, captured over 64 years and from 48 countries.
Focusing on one part of the IQ test, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, they found that on average intelligence has risen the equivalent of 20 IQ points since 1950. IQ tests are designed to ensure that the average result is always 100, so this is a significant jump.
The gains have not been evenly spread. IQ has generally increased more rapidly in developing countries, with the biggest leaps seen in China and India. Progress in the developed world has been chequered - the data seem to indicate steady increases in the US, for example, but a decline in the UK...........
If Americans today took the tests from a century ago, Flynn says, they would have an extraordinarily high average IQ of 130. And if the Americans of 100 years ago took today's tests, they would have an average IQ of 70 - the recognised cut-off for people with intellectual disabilities. To put it another way, IQ has been rising at roughly three points per decade.

BBC

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#14775393
MistyTiger said:
"I think that they are two types of intelligence, the scholarly IQ type and then you have the world-minded experience IQ."

The scholarly IQ type is often called the "educated fool" and the second type IQ based on experience in living is called "common sense" among those I admire. Examples are inventor and businessman, Thomas A. Edison and U.S. President and businessman, Donald J. Trump.
#14775401
Suntzu wrote:I.Q. has risen 15 points since 1950, BWAHAHAHA!!! :lol: :lol: :lol:

Obviously there are exceptions and the reverse is true. As in your case. lol
#14775402
For those that do not know about Thomas A. Edison, here a a short bio.

Edison is famous for such inventions as the first practical light bulb, the first electric grid to light cities, the phonograph, and records to play on that phonograph and something else that stunned the world, movies. Yet he invented those things despite having little formal education.

In all, Edison had just three months of school because his teacher thought he had a short attention span and was not very smart.

Instead Edison’s mother took him out of school and personally taught him how to read and write and do arithmetic and she assured him he was very intelligent.

But Edison also had another serious problem, one that could have destroyed his career. He had a severe hearing loss, thought to be from a childhood bout of scarlet fever, later made worse from middle ear infections.

Ultimately, he was 100% deaf in his left ear and 80% deaf in his right ear. But he never let this stop him, always finding ways to compensate for his hearing loss.

At 13, he became a newsboy, selling newspapers and candy at the railroad depot in Port Huron, Michigan, his family having moved to Port Huron when he was seven. At 16, Edison moved from his parents’ home and went out on his own, after getting a job.

Edison didn’t let a lack of money, lack of formal education, deafness or the failure of an invention stop him. He persevered.

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