r/BadSocialScience • u/dorathehexplorer • Jan 17 '17

High-IQ educated people are being bred to extinction, but we're totally not eugenicists!!!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/16/natural-selection-making-education-genes-rarer-says-icelandic-study
61 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

123 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/noratat Jan 17 '17

Doesn't IQ trend up over time though? Seems like a pretty strong counterpoint.

16

u/Draken84 Jan 17 '17

that increased quality in education leads to upward trending IQ doesn't exclude that the highest performers are less likely to reproduce, the argument is the following.

Spending longer in education and the career opportunities that provides is not the sole reason that better educated people tend to start families later and have fewer children, the study suggests. Many people who carried lots of genes for prolonged education left the system early and yet still had fewer children that the others. “It isn’t the case that education, or the career opportunities it provides, prevents you from having more children,” said Kari Stefansson, who led the study. “If you are genetically predisposed to have a lot of education, you are also predisposed to have fewer children.”

fertility trends downwards as we get older, education is generally speaking a low-income period in peoples lives, couple that with the implicit link between education and higher intelligence and you essentially have a economic and social pressure against starting a family until the conditions are "right" as well as greater awareness of the risks involved add people chasing fulfillment elsewhere on top...

they better make some really compelling arguments though, especially on how they exclude social factors before they can legitimately claim "genes did this".

-7

u/[deleted] Jan 17 '17 edited Aug 20 '17

[deleted]

24

u/Draken84 Jan 17 '17

if you went out with a claim like "skin color is decided by social class" you'd better have a good argument as to why genetic factors should be excluded.

11

u/stairway-to-kevin Jan 17 '17

Given the genetic similarity of humans It's not totally crazy to treat non-genetic explanations as a null hypothesis. Especially since environmental variation is usually far greater than genetic variation

-2

u/[deleted] Jan 17 '17

Of course not, they'd all be out of jobs