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.'"

Comments

Re:Who cares..?

[hokiejimbo]

Sounds like someone has a little resentment... WIPE YOUR TEARS WIMP

Ugh IQ...

[blahplusplus]

... measuring IQ is like measuring whether or not a million angels can dance on the head of a pin. A difference of three IQ points seems almost within the margin of error and this says nothing of possible increase in co-morbid disorders with a higher IQ, now THAT would be interesting.

Next is pleiopetry (sp?) where genes code for more then one trait. I don't think a study like this is worth much without checking up on people later in life and comparing outcomes.

Re:Ugh IQ...

[blahplusplus]

"And, in fact, if the results were not statistically significant, they wouldn't get published very easily, and certainly not in Science."

Nonsense, much that is nonsense is published CERTAINLY in science, todays science is tomorrows superstition when dealing with crude measuring apparatus -- that being ultimately the human being which is prone to bias and overstating their interpretation of the data or doing folloup studies or later finding flaws in methodology that are not apparent, etc. Science is not immune from human frailty. One only has to look back 50-100 years to see how "scientific" many men were Freud, et, al. Even darwin looks almost like a religious mystic by todays actual *evidence* of sophisticated nano-molecular machines within all living beings. His origin theory in todays environment would be seen as crude and unsohpisticated by molecular standards.

For instance Darwin dismissed the question of the eye's ultimate origin:

How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated. He had an excellent reason for declining the question: it was completely beyond nineteenth century science. How the eye works; that is, what happens when a photon of light first hits the retina simply could not be answered at that time. As a matter of fact, no question about the underlying mechanisms of life could be answered. How did animal muscles cause movement? How did photosynthesis work? How was energy extracted from food? How did the body fight infection? No one knew.

The truth is psychometric measurement is much in the same boat, they attempting to measure something in reference to culture without understanding how it works. They simply don't know even how to define intelligence other then my standards of the socio-economic system and cultural education system. If I'm a genius and I choose to live the life of a poor artist am I still a genius by societies standards? This is what I mean by "What are we attempting to measure" and what is "smartness", ultimately IQ, science and the subjective collide in nasty ways that 21st century science does not and cannot understand just yet due to the fact that: It's beyond today science.

"In this study, they had 241,310 subjects. If memory serves me right, the population standard deviation is 15 points, so we have a margin or error along the order of 15 divided by the square root of 241,310, or 0.03. That is, two orders of magnitude smaller than 3 IQ points, which to you 'seems almost within the margin of error'."

Now I know your just being anal retentive, while "two orders of magnitude smaller" seems 'big', I am very right to question whether the difference of "3 IQ points" seems 'reasonable' when you consider the nature of the tests themselves what exactly is the difference of 3 points, in terms of the actual design of the test.

SO you're missing the point you can be given a tool and have other issues or not use it in a healthy fashion. Measuring IQ without a necessary biomolecular theory and definition of intelligence and understanding of the brains subsystem components is a very crude measuring tool.

Re:Ugh IQ...

[goombah99]

As a scientist and thus someone dealing with error analysis daily, I would say you have a very naive notion, much like any second born, of what statistical errors really are. Things don't scale that way in real life because one is never dealing with homogeneous samples and there are uncontrolled factors.

First!

[DoofusOfDeath]

Hah!