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Firstborn Get the Brains
Dekortage writes "Eldest children have higher IQs than their siblings, according to a recent study by Norwegian researchers. The study focused on men, particularly 'on teasing out the biological effects of birth order from the effects of social status,' but indicates that the senior boy in a family (either by being firstborn, or if an elder brother died) has an average IQ two or three points higher than younger brothers. As noted in the New York Times coverage, 'Experts say it can be a tipping point for some people — the difference between a high B average and a low A, for instance... that could mean the difference between admission to an elite private college and a less exclusive public one.'"
And what is the standard error on the particular IQ test they used?
How does the eldest sibling being a girl effect this?
Sounds to me like this study is meaningless anyway. They focus on men from one country, an affluent country with little liklihood of malnutrician being a factor, and all at the same point in their lives, being during compulsary military service. That carries with it the further distorting factor that none of these men were disqualified for reasons of physical/psychological disability, and to be honest, if you're educationally sub normal, you ain't getting to play with guns...
Reality is that which, when we cease to believe in it, still exists. - Philip K Dick
better than public? Not really. For example, in CS you have places like UC Berkley, University of Maryland, University of Washington that are competitive with places like MIT and CMU. All those schools are public(though they might as well be private for students out of state, but I digress)
A lot of people like denigrating public universities, but I don't really understand why. To be honest, they are some pretty bad public universities, but there are also bad private schools as well (Patriot University, Regent University etc)
Monstar L
I do not want to make this sound like flamebait, but if I had 50 graphics/web designer/computer geeks and 50 scientists, only 50% of them would say that the difference between them is slight. And they would all be from the first group.
I myself am an engineer who looks down upon both scientists and web designers, but I think scientists are smart (high IQ). Web designers are creative - they COULD have high IQs, but need not necessarily have high IQs. This is why DeVry has a program in web design and not in molecular biology. Cheers! -- Vig
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
Ender wasn't smarter than Peter or Val, he was more emotionally suited for Battle School. Not too cruel, not too merciful.
George W Bush, eldest son of George H W Bush.
While I agree that often times an IQ test does not mean much with respect to a person's success in life, IQ tests are generally designed to test aptitude and ability to learn...NOT training and knowledge. Whether or not these tests successfully do this is a matter of debate, of course...but the intention IS to test aptitude not knowledge.
Grades aren't meaningless if you have any plans to attend University. They aren't meaningless if you plan to earn an MBA, MD, LLB, or a graduate degree (Masters, PhD, etc.).
It's true that a lot of people have earned a great living despite poor grades or lack of education, but these people represent a minority. For many people, grades are a major factor in determining acceptance or rejection to paths of life that guarantee some amount of financial success.
It's fairly easy to figure out how school grades can translate into money. If you've got top grades, you earn a chance at being accepted to a Law school (for example). Once you've done your time, you are practically guaranteed a six-figure income: that's money in your pocket because you excelled at school. However, if you act as if grades are irrelevant, you're success might just be dancing with Lady Luck.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
A valid idea except for the fact that the older kid starts out ahead of the younger kid so the younger kid spends his/her energy catching up. Usually the younger kid has more time for such things.
I also think it depends on the atmosphere and age difference. If the kid is 8 years older than the younger then the order probably makes no difference. An even more extreme circumstance is my cousin's girlfriend. She has a daughter who is 26 and 24 years later she had twins. I'm willing to bet the experience she gained from being a parent will help the twins and ultimately the twins will be much more intelligent as her older daughter is making a lot of the same mistakes she did.
Of course we're all aware that IQ isn't everything, certainly not the difference between attending one of them fancy schools versus community college.
I have a bone to pick with that statement.
IQ may not be the *only* thing that corresponds to intelligence, but it definitely is an objective measure of some factors that we consider to be the hallmarks of an intelligent person.
Now, there may be other measures and metrics (objective and subjective) that may correspond to intelligence - good language skills, good social skills, good game playing skills and so on. However, that does not necessarily mean that good quantitative and problem solving skills is also not a good measure.
A quarterback who can gauge how the field looks at a given moment and decide upon a particular action is just as intelligent (in a different way) as someone who is excellent at arithmetic. Similarly, someone who has excellent social skills (i.e. read emotions) is just as intelligent as someone who has a prodigious memory. A marketing person is just as intelligent as a computer programmer in a different way, and a tennis player is just as intelligent as a musician, in a different way.
But none of that means that IQ is *not* a measure of intelligence - it is. It just is not the *only* measure of intelligence.
I think there is a difference. A subtle difference, that's for sure, but a difference nevertheless.
Ummm... no.
I'd provide a full explanation, but something tells me that if you were interested in one, you wouldn't have ended up posting this comment.
The first sentence alone on the Wikipedia article for evolution provides enough information to dispute your claim.
Also oldest kid is given more attention during first years and she will be more stimulated by her parents than younger siblings coming afterwards. When younger siblings born, parents are focussed in older son as well, so they not have all the resources (time) they "spent" on the first son.
At least, this is my experience. With 3 children@home, I'm pretty run out of time lately...
That kids at different points in the family structure get different amounts of parental attention. And that's just to start with. The firstborn gets usually, years of exclusive attention which the younger kids by definition can never have.
Deleted
I can't put my hands on the exact set of studies right now so this will only be anecdotal evidence, but there are examples of "quite young" siblings being quite brilliant compared to next older siblings precisely because there was just enough age difference between the youngster and an older (teenage plus) sibling that was close enough to an adult to provide direction in problem skills at a nearly adult level AND still be young enough and close enough to how a little kid thinks to teach those skills in a way that makes sense to littler kid at their lower developmental level.
What I am really saying is that an article built around an averaging statistic like those quoted are useless news, not stuff that matters.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Clearly, the first born gets all of the parents attention for some period of time, before the second is born. The second gets only (roughly) half of the parents attention. I would be very surprised if parental attention at a young age does not have a large effect on the child. Giving one child twice as much parental attention as the other, for the first year or two of their respective lives, seems likely to give the one an advantage over the other. A small difference in communication or learning skills acquired during that first year might make the first born better able to learn other things later in life.
The observation that first-born children score higher on standardized tests does not speak to the cause of that difference. A correlation does not imply a cause.
Coincidently, I am the first-born of three. I have a Ph.D., the middle sibling has a masters, and the youngest has a bachelors.
Right, I can't even imagine matching wits with my cat stalking a bird.
And a bat integrating sound reflections to identify and catch a mosquito, all while flying so fast we can barely perceive it, must be as intelligent as Einstein.
"A quarterback who can gauge how the field looks at a given moment and decide upon a particular action is just as intelligent (in a different way) as someone who is excellent at arithmetic."
It would be interesting to see how well those quarterback qualities correlate with IQ scores, I would assume there's a good correlation...
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Children in multi-child families have an advantage of forced socialization, which means they probably have more experience and better response to interacting with others. Exceptions to this would probably occur when parents don't discipline children, or don't do so equitably.
And for your master's and all that, you still don't understand what "average" means? Maybe your CPA sister can explain it to you.
either by being firstborn, or if an elder brother died)
Well then it isn't biological if the death of someone older occurs. It means that the parents paid more attention to the child. This isn't something new. My wife and I were looking into overseas adoption and the person we were talking to said that with infants you find about 1 month delay for every 3 months in an institution aka orphanage. She said that she saw this with both of her adopted children and the remarkable thing was that they did catch up at a remarkable rate once they were in their home. Almost like going from crawling to walking in mere days.
I would be more interested in a study showing the learning rates between children with a parent who stays home compared to ones who are in daycare part-time, full-time and the sad cases where they spend majority of a 24 hour period in daycare cause mom and dad need a new Beemer.
Average IQ is not the same thing as getting a higher degree. Simply because your brothers are laborers doesn't make them idiots. Though, the fact that you would "never believe a study that some moron publishes" doesn't go out of it's way to show how brilliant you are. Rather than finding some methodological problem with the study, you resort to calling the publisher a moron. Could it not be true that the study found higher IQs in the elder children because they were older, or because of the deaths of the previous eldest child. Studies have found that over ones lifespan the smartest people were still alive. They lost a set of Scottish IQ scores from about 50 years ago, found them again, then brought back in some of the people. The only people left were those who scored the highest on the test previously and they improved their scores for the most part. These two items could cause the skew in the study. The eldest child male might have been a died leaving a smarter second child to stand in his place, or the eldest male might have just been older and as a result done better on the test.
Though, all of that has nothing to do with your objections. You objected because it's doesn't apply in one case? How about all those people who kept cackling that "I'm the youngest and I'm not gay" - after that study which found rather than 3% youngest children stand a 5% chance of being gay. Average means it doesn't apply to everybody, just applies more often than it doesn't.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.