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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.'"
I think Ender's Game is more compelling evidence that the 3rds are where it's at!
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
And what is the standard error on the particular IQ test they used?
...the senior boy in a family... has an average IQ two or three points higher than younger brothers... Experts say it can be a tipping point for some people Well, that explains why I'm a network admin instead of the CIO.I also wonder if being a middle child has any effect on IQ...
I wonder if I will get those extra IQ points if I eat his brains...
Help test the
It wouldn't surprise me, as the act of teaching while learning tends to reinforce the learning. The oldest kid, whether consciously or not, ends up demonstrating any new knowledge and capabilities to the younger kids in the family or neighborhood.
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Firstborn Get the Brains would be an awesome name for a zombie movie!
(Pardon my stupid ramblings - I'm not an eldest son, you see)
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
As the second of five brothers, I can say that the second of five is always the smartest, not the first.
Its troo. Just ask meh.
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
In spite of what some would like to tell you, IQ is not a measurement of intelligence. It could be considered a measurement of knowledge and training. Admittedly those who are "More intelligent" in theory could learn better, but these things are so screwy that this is essentially meaningless.
Maybe first born are just home bodies, and thus spend more time studying.
Ok, I give up, why you?
I can say that my older brother's high IQ is severely hampered by severe lack of common sense :P
I'd be more interested in seeing a study that not only includes girls, but breaks down as such:
Family of only boys
Family of both with boy as eldest
Family of both with girl as eldest
Family of only girls
For my experience, I am the first born (girl) with one younger sister; I'm a graphics/web designer/computer geek and she's a scientist who works in a lab with dangerous chemicals. If there is a difference between us it's slight. I'd wager that would hold true for most girl siblings regardless of pecking order.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Due to the earth being warmer, people may be getting smaller brains over time.
God spoke to me.
Could it be the first born receives more attention, and thus brain development?
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TheLink, women can't go to college
(Just kidding. Until last fall my wife had a higher level of education than I did)
but... that can't be true, I'm not the first born in my family, and my older sister... frist post!!! GNAA!!! In Soviet Russia...
Oh wait, ok, I guess I can kind of see their point...
Interesting study and the stats seem to back up their theory. However, the IQ difference is so subtle that I wonder how much difference it really makes. Does an IQ of 102 really provide that much of an advantage over someone with an IQ of 100?
:) Your first child gets all your energy, and you try out interesting things, go to interesting places. The arrival of the second child means you now divide your time and energy and so the second child will tend to lose out. When the first child leaves the house the second child is nearly full grown anyway.
Based on personal experience raising two daughters, I'm sure that part of the reason the second child lose two points of IQ is that the parents just start getting tired.
I wonder if they looked at homes where the children were very far apart in age? Suppose one child was 10 when the second child was born. By that time the parents are comfortable with the progress of child #1 and might devote more time to child #2 than they would have if the children were only a year or two apart.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
... on their parents for at least nine months, and receive all the attention during that time. And for an infant, play/attention equals learning. All following kids will have to deal with parents who are already stressed out by their firstborn. ;)
I wuz born sevunteenth you insensuhtive Claud!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I wonder, though, if there isn't a broader organizational behavior principle at work here.
Keep an eye on the phrase How often at work is there a tautology, whereby the senior headz are the only ones equipped to perform certain tasks/make decisions, simply by virtue of longevity. Once they retire, get flattened by a bus, or move on to a position at the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, then the next person in line steps up.
Thus, I dispute the title "Firstborn Get the Brains", and offer instead that, in families as in other organizations, we do a sub-optimal job of affording the juniors the opportunity to negotiate the learning curve.
"Firstborn Get the Brains" somehow implies that the womb retains some state in between children, and knows to shortchange the later arrivals.
My younger brother and sister have also floated some really irritating cop-outs based on this birth order talk. Raises my hackles. I had been going to troll this article using Exodus 13:12 calling it subliminal Christian propaganda, but then I thought the better of it.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The idealized likelihood of any one particular person is one in 64 trillion different genetic combinations of mother and father chromosomes. And with 100 billion neurons being stimulated throughout childhood, how are we to say that birth order influences one particular variable that we measure with various psychology tests? There is an immense amount of complexity that we cannot yet isolate (ask the neuroscientists), even in estimating the likelihood of specific combinations of genes because of diffusion gradients, energy interaction dynamics of DNA, and all sorts of other phenomena that keep us guessing only in 'Idealized' cases-- birth order is nowhere near such an idealization, however.
* Wikipedia linked me to this re: birth order and intelligence.
* Judith Harris on birth order and related psychology.
So isn't this theory anti-evolution? The younger children are less smarter than the oldest one.
A whole 2 or 3 points on a test that completely accurately gauges a person's intelligent and future success. Amazing! Take that kid brother, with your 131 IQ compared to my 133. Fucking retard! Have fun working a McDonalds while I complete my Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics!
Well I guess now that study is complete they can move on to less important things like curing cancer.
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
So you can probably tell that I'm a firstborn, otherwise I'd be 'doing' something interesting instead of posting on /.
They compared males only to make things clearer, since comparig males and females would also bring up a sex-derived difference in IQ scores (women are much better at algebra while males do a lot better at geometry, and so on).
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
So you're the youngest, eh? Sorry dude, better luck next reincarnation.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
It depends on how hot the daugter is.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
... to those us who are firstborn males. We knew it all along, but out of pity for our poor dumb siblings agreed to keep it between ourselves.
Then again how do you explain this first-born male?
Three Squirrels
Just to commit a plural of anecdotes error:
Einstein was the older sibling, as I think is Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler and Robert Oppenheimer - doing fine so far. On the other hand (and merely AFAIK), Blaise Pascal was the second son, Dirac was the second son, Niels Bohr was the second of three, Faraday appears to have been well into the plurals and Ernest Rutherford was the fourth-born child. Van de Graaff had three older brothers, all of whom were into football rather than physics.
All of which may go to suggest only that seventh sons don't necessarily need to sell their scientific calculator and resign themselves to brainless toil quite yet.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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'.
Of course, the actual margin of error depends on other things, such as how many children were firstborn in the sample, how many were secondborn, etc. Still, with such a large sample, the final standard deviation should be much smaller than a single IQ point, making their conclusions statistically interesting. And, in fact, if the results were not statistically significant, they wouldn't get published very easily, and certainly not in Science.
George W Bush, eldest son of George H W Bush.
What if first born = daughter and next born is son?
Interesting question. The study was confined strictly to men, but they didn't just study families having only sons. Their methodology was to data mine old military records (mid-60's to mid-70's) and look at the IQ scores of people based upon whether they are the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd born. So I suspect there are plenty of cases where they looked at the IQ scores for 2nd-borns who had older sisters. However, the looked only at men, so they have no data about the IQ of the sisters.
The study authors do seem to think there would be the same effect across both sexes. From TFA: "Because sex has little effect on I.Q. scores, the results almost certainly apply to females as well, said Dr. Petter Kristensen, an epidemiologist at the University of Oslo and the lead author of the Science study."
To see how far on average the slashdot titles for stories are away from the actual content.
I wouldn't normally be bothered by the differnce between "First Born Gets All the Brains" and "Eldest Son Gets All the Brains" but come on, the story clearly states its not the first born, and by saying it is, you almost imply this a genetic study and it isn't, the whole point is if they were raised as the oldest, even if they aren't (ie, dead sibling) so the story is about nurture of the child and not genetics.
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.
But did they take into consideration where the second born came along in a later marriage and raised alone? I was my mom's second-born and my dad's first-born. Out of my immediate family, I'm the only one who graduated from community college twice (General Ed in 1994 and Computer Programming in 2007), and working in the technology field. Everyone else is still working in the blue-collar field.
I wonder if the time between the boys is significant more so than the fact they are 1st and 2nd in birthing order. For instance what about twins who can be born less than a minute apart? The study was very wide in scope and should include much more information.
Ah, yes...another case of "how to distort the truth with statistics".
Statistically, when you have a large number of individuals in your study (e.g., 250,000 is a huge number) you have a large amount of statistical power to detect minor differences.
In this case, while they detected a significant difference in IQ scores (whether or not IQ scores measure actual intelligence is subject of a different post), the difference may not have any practical meaning - "2 or 3 points" on a scale that has a standard deviation of 15 points is a very small effect (and thus has little practical meaning).
Yes, I know, personnal examples are very weak proof...
In my father's family (5 boys and two girls), only two kids went to high school: my oldest uncle and my dad, who is the youngest of the family but also the only one who went to an university. The thing is that he is 15 years younger than his youngest brother, so he was technically raised as an only child.
I also see my two nephews (8 and 6), and it is clear that the youngest one is smart, but also lazy so he always try to have his brother help him (or, to me more precise, do the whole work) whenever his homework gets a little too difficult.
I am in the wrong line of work.
I envy "researchers" who can come up with this sort of neo-darwinistic crap, rummage through some I.Q. scores and tell the world "If you aren't a first born son, forget about it."
I can here the session at the bar now:
RESEARCHER ONE: I never thought it would get published. Honest, it was just a joke.
RESEARCHER TWO: You fool! We'll just have to play along with it or our careers are over.
RESEARCHER ONE: I'll never underestimate the public's stupidity again. (sob)
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
LIke most Zonk articles, the title is misleading. The study specifically notes that you don't actually have to be the first-born, just the oldest-living.
Though saying the the family "does a sub-optimal job of...junior's learning" is a bit of an oversimplification -- like most organizations the family has responsibilities outside of the education of children, and a 2-3 point IQ difference may not be a bad trade for the other gains the family sees.
Or you could look at it from another point of view, saying something like the oldest child has to teach themselves more things, having no peers to learn from. This self-educational skill is unecessary for younger siblings and, while that skill may be advantagous, the siblines receive a direct benefit in peer-based education that the oldest sibbling did not.
Does this mean that China's one child policy is creating a race of Han superchildren? Unless, of course, you fail to have a son the first time, then you can try again.
I'm an identical twin, you insensitive clod!
Well, I am the older, but only by 7 minutes...
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
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
As the second born, I'm obviously doomed. I guess I'd better hand back my PhD.
Also, in the UK, a "Public School" is a very posh private school. State schools
are where scum like me end up.
return 0; }
I've got the brains, my brother Sean's got the looks, let's make lots of money.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
I'm an eldest child, but some things are still beyond me... for instance, if my dad's a youngest child, and my mom's a youngest child, how come I'm not a youngest child?
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Sheesh. College? That's the "Worst case scenario" you came up with?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Being the youngest in my family - this makes total sense. having the higer IQ, not EQ, explains why my sister is a total bitch. More brains, less personality.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
that means us only children don't have to share and of the brains.... we're like selfish zombies....
(some would say that about us before the study though.... oh.. now I'm sad and I have no younger siblings to punch... sigh... )
I should really RTFA, but I'm lazy and working, besides. Anyway, I recall hearing almost this exact claim when I was a college freshman, taking an intro psychology course. Is this news, then, or are we just confirming the already known?
Canthros
I can confirm this story. I am firstborn and have two younger sisters. They are both idiots.
So many injustices..so little time..
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...
When I took the test I was a barefoot rural South Indian. The only pieces of clothing I was aware of were shorts, shirts, sarees and saree's male version the dhothi. Had never seen a glove nor did I know that there is no left and right version for the socks. The real problem is that some clueless educator bought some IQ tests designed for US or Britain and administered it to us. Or may be some lazy Indian teacher copied a western test and changed the names from Victor and Barbara to Vijay and Bhanu.
Still my point is these test dont measure anything more than knowledge and training and may be level of motivation of the parents. Let us take a all American boy from the exurbs of Chicago and give him a Kalahari IQ test.
You suddenly come face to face with a hyena. You should:
A: Throw rocks at it
B: Turn around and run
C: Curl up and play dead
D: Find a stick or a bark and hold it over your head to make you appear taller than the hyena. And wait for a Kalahari who was on a missing to throw away a coke bottle over the end of earth to appear and save you.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The bit that said if an older brother dies, the 'new' oldest brother will have a higher IQ. Apart from feeling somewhat threatened if I were an older brother with an overly keen to succeed sibling, what's the mechanism at play here and can it be harnessed without being oldest brother?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
...I recall reading a study back in the '90s that said that the most successful combat generals historically were SECOND sons, or at least almost never eldest sons. The speculation was that their upbringing made them particularly inured to stress from an early age.
Dunno if that's true or not, haven't checked for myself. But it sounds credible.
TiA: I'm a firstborn, myself.
-Styopa
IQ means you're good at:
It doesn't measure:
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
As an elder brother who, anecdotally speaking, can confirm this, I'm curious if younger siblings are superior in other traits. While I am marginally smarter book-wise than my younger sister, she far excels in athletic ability and willpower/drive. To be honest, I think she got the better end of the bargain -- Thomas Edison said that genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Of course, my personal experience isn't enough to base any theories on but I wouldn't be surprised to find that the youngest sibling generally tends to work harder then the eldest brother.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
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.
Ok, ok, now that you've calmed down a bit...
Is 3 IQ points really the difference between l33t colleges and waste-of-paper diplomas like the summary implies?
Is it even noticeable outside of the strict confines an IQ test?
I think these are the issues us non-article-reading, statistical standards ignoring people want to discuss. Not that I wasn't happy to have you parse the article and extract those tidbits for us, bless your angry little heart, but it does seem like an awfully small difference.
You can't take the sky from me...
It would be interesting to see what sort of effect (if any) would be evident if this same analysis were applied only to very high IQ families (eg where the parents both have IQs > 125), or very low IQ families. Would one see a greater difference between the first boy and his younger brothers due to the extra effort put into nurturing his gifts? Or would the children's natural intelligence overshadow this small effect from birth order, with the more intelligent children being better capable of independent learning? That said, less than 3 points is not much, especially with children. For all we know, the first kids may be spanked more than the others, or feel like they have more to prove, so would simply put more effort into responding to questions which an adult is asking them for the test.
From personal experience, I don't think it matters so much. I just finished a BA and I'm starting a Masters course next year. My older sister dropped out of college just a couple of weeks into her A-levels. She's also a bit of a dumbass when it comes to other things, such as how she's been engaged 8 times so far (she's 22). More interesting would be to see how my half-siblings turn out, as that's a group of 4 boys and a girl, with the girl being the youngest (though a twin with the youngest boy).
Ubuntu Music Project: OSS for music tech geeks
if the oldest is 19 when he takes the test and the youngest is 18 if you where to wait a year for the youngest to be 19 would their be a difference in score then? it could be that the oldest son brain is more developed because of age.
Indeed, scientific knowledge is prone to error. But, you cannot publish in the particular journal 'Science' if your results are not statistically significant - in the technical meaning of the term. Which is all I said, and all I meant. I did not say that the results were correct, just that they were statistically significant, which was doubted in the comment I was replying to. (You can certainly doubt if statistical significance leads to 'truth'; many scientists do.)
It's how someone learns and the learning habits one develops. In a situation where a child is the first, he pretty much has to figure things out for himself with very little if any assistance before the ages where verbal communication come into play. At those tender ages, babies have to develop for themselves, by themselves.
On the other hand, when there are other kids around, they tend to pick up useful tricks faster since they have examples to follow... examples like how to use a toilet. (It's pretty well known that first-borns potty train a lot slower than second and later-born children.)
The advantage of the first born is in that he develops his own methods and his own will to learn things and depends on others a lot less to provide answers. This is a large part of where IQ is developed.
I have realized this long before I had any children and have since developed the habit of 'challenging' the children from the earliest ages with little puzzles and funny little games... games that teach reality and how to interact with the world. Simply showing a child how to do something is a disservice... showing them how to learn is how to build a smarter child.
From TFA:
[the study provided] evidence that the relation between birth order and IQ score is dependent on the social rank in the family and not birth order as such
They specifically concluded that being the firstborn is not the deciding factor, but that being the eldest is.
"Choosing to refrain from producing another person demonstrates a profound love for all life" [vhemt.org]
I think a big factor in this is the pressure that firstborns receive from the parents to succeed. Parents tend to pile their hopes onto the first child but are more relaxed the second time around.
Uh dude... He was talking about the publication Science. Nice rant though. *slow clap*
Peter actually did turn out pretty decently for himself once he got older and Ender ended up off planet. Ender saved the planet from the 'Buggers'. Peter ends up saving the world from its self.
END COMMUNICATION
I presume there are a lot of first-borns on Slashdot...
I'm the firstborn son of two sons in my family.
So, since this article kinda gives me the authority to speak on smart topics (see, I'm SMART, right, I'm firstborn). And my opinion is this is all a bunch of crap.
So now we have two options here:
A) I'm totally wrong, which means I don't have the brains, which means the study is wrong, which means I'm actually totally right. I'm right and wrong at the same time.
B) I'm actually right, which means the study is wrong, which however means I'm dumb and I can't be right, so the study should be right. Which means the study is right and wrong at the same time.
The mind boggles...
Now seriously: biology 101, genes of both parents get combined randomly to produce an offspring. Where is this "magical" intelligence coming from? The genetical mental faculties from a kid come either come from the father, mother or (almost always) a mix of both. There aren't any phantom "brain" genes that get depleted when the second kid comes around.
So if this study has anything real going on, it means the link isn't genetical at all. It's probably cultural, it's the way firstborn kids are treated. But then it's not about "getting the brains", it's about "obtaining the brains" during your life. So the study is bull again.
But wait, the study uses IQ, the infamously wrong factor about predicting real life intelligence. You'll find people wijth high IQ that drove trucks their entire life and can't put 2+2 together. But they just like crosswords, and hence like solving IQ puzzles. Great (no offense to the truck drivers, just needed an example).
And even then, it's about 2 points. Yea. Like the diff between 80 and 82. Or 100 and 102. Or whatever. Could be a statistical error for what I know.
Is there anything correct going on in this study at all? Nothing I can see.
I am the middle child, but my older sister is 12 years older than me, and my older brother 17 years older.
It is interesting here: my younger sis is only a year behind me, followed by similar spacing for my younger bro and then youngest sis (large fam).
I think this would make me a hybrid. I am the oldest of a cluster of 4 closely-spaced siblings, with two older siblings more than a decade ahead of me.
Perhaps this would explain my immense IQ.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
That's interesting. But let's not forget that in most walks of life, it's not raw IQ that is most important. Emotional stability, discipline, dedication, passion, and communication skills are at least as important to success. I wonder if the other siblings get an advantage in those areas?
I'm not a basketball fan, but don't a vast majority of the players have college degrees? Even meeting the minimum requirements for a degree while under the time pressure athletes face is a significant academic accomplishment.
There are two types of people who get good grades: people for whom learning new things comes easily, and people that don't learn new things easily but are extremely persistent. Both of those attributes translate into success in the workplace.
There are smart people who are unmotivated by the inaneness of public school. For example, I nearly flunked spelling class the year I won the school spelling bee. There are also people who change their work habits to become more persistent when their livelihood depends on it.
However, in both of those cases, they are capable of getting good grades, even if they decided it wasn't worth trying. I believe there are very few people who are successful in the workplace who would not be capable of transferring that success to schoolwork if they so chose.
There's a biblical saying: "By their fruits ye shall know them." Unless someone with poor grades has some extraordinary extracurricular accomplishments, they're going to have a hard time convincing a potential employer that they have the intelligence or persistence to succeed at a job. "I can do it, I just never have" is a hard sell. They may eventually get to the same point as someone with good grades, but it will take a lot longer.
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No, IQ is more about the measurement of being able to figure things out or solve problems, not a measurement of training.
I was tested in 2nd grade and ended up with a very high IQ, but my school performance wasn't great. I often rushed through my work so quickly that I would make silly mistakes.. then I would get bored and start causing trouble.
I have never studied, I never took notes, and very rarely did I ever do assigned homework.. I was a lifetime 'B' student because of it. I tested well, just didn't do any of the "filler" work needed to get my grades up. My IQ is 145.
This was an interesting article. I am the oldest of 3 in my family. My siblings are both intelligent, but they don't have the problem solving ability I have.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Well. You've just convinced me my life is a failure. Suicide booth here I come!
This is flipped flopped in my family. Both my Father and I were the LAST BORN sons in the family and yet, we both have noticeably higher IQ's then our siblings.
:)
This isn't saying all that much, since my "older" brother started out decent in the Navy, stalled there, then took countless dead-end jobs and now is working at a Security Company, you should seriously fear if he's in charge of your cargo
Sorry bro, just telling the truth!
Two decades ago when a friend and I looked, MIT was overwhelmingly admitting first borns and only children.... (And, yes, I'm the first of four....)
MIT as of that time had also found out empirically that class rank (which of course entirely depends on grades) was a very good predictor of success at MIT. They didn't know exactly why, and of course were careful in applying it, but it fell out of the retrospective studies they do on who succeeded and who didn't. (MIT believes that everyone they admit can succeed, but of course statistically in the real world this doesn't happen.)
There's been research on the ratio of your index to ring finger, called the 2D:4D ratio, which is a marker of fetal exposure to androgens, or estrogens from the mother.
One thing these studies have shown is that a longer index finger in males is associated with a higher IQ (ie, slight feminization of the brain), whereas in females, the opposite is true (ie, slight masculinization of the brain), and this also correlates with academic success. Sort of a "hybrid-is-better" thing.
Another finding is that subsequent male children, for whatever reason, start having lower 2D:4D ratios and become more masculinized, which is also a predictor for homosexuality and autism.
So, one possible explanation for this is that the fetal hormonal environment starts changing after the first child, producing more masculinized children at the cost of IQ (in males). I don't know if this holds true for females or not though; if so, it would mean later-born female children have the potential for a higher IQ.
What about the severe beatings handed out by older brothers? A few good shots to the head could easily account for those missing IQ points.
Because you certainly sound smart. . .
But I got the good looks
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I, for one, welcome our firstborn overlords.
What high schools graduate people in the fall? :)
...
Funny, funny... Grad school. She had her masters for a year and a half before I got mine. In my defense, I'm 2 years younger than her
As a first born in a divorced family, I had to look out for my younger brothers, there was alway pressure to do well, be a good example, watch the kids, be the man of the house...
I am the only brother who completed University, was only one on the honor roll etc, I am the only one who financially supports my aging parent...
But my younger siblings are better people persons, are more relaxed, and enjoy life more.
I think this has more to do with the role first born males assume and the pressures that go with that role. Necessity being the driver here, not biology.
An IQ test gives a general appraisal of one's mental abilities, but is a limited test. An integer between 0 and 200 cannot describe the human brain. Moreover, as far as grades are concerned, one's effort and training plays a much greater role than 2 points of IQ. I would also like to point out that Richard Feynman's sister had a higher IQ than Feynman, yet no one knows HER name!
Parents will generally spend more time with the first child than the later ones (because amount of time available is devided by the children) and so the first child will get a bit more attention and one-on-one learning from the parents when they are very young. Later, if they have siblings, they will usually be the natural leader and teacher and you really start to learn things well when you have to teach them to someone else. This would easily account for such a small difference. However, I remember a study that said that the most successful people financially are more likely to come from 80th to 95th percentile - so sometimes it doesn't pay to be too intelligent.
I'm a firstborn zombie.
Braaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiinnnnnssss....
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
As far as I can tell, with an average difference of about 1% to 2%, that means that about 49% of younger brothers are actually smarter than their older brothers. So this study means *what* exactly? Even a 2% difference over thousands of people is hardly conclusive evidence of anything at all.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Grades aren't meaningless if you have any plans to attend University.
I had fairly poor grades all through school up until I attended University. From which, I graduated with multiple degrees with high honors.
Grades mean nothing. In elementary school, grades mean kissing ass and "plays well with others". In highschool, grades mean kissing ass and "doesn't cause trouble". In college, grades mean kissing ass and regurgitating memorized facts. Care to guess which of those four criteria I satisfy?
For many people, grades are a major factor in determining acceptance or rejection to paths of life that guarantee some amount of financial success.
Grades mean absolutely nothing six months after you start your first professional job. From that point on, your pay and career path depends only on your employment history (and of course a bit of luck). Whether you graduated with straight-Cs or straight-As, no one cares anymore.
Of course, you are perfectly reasonable in considering 3 points to not be much, objectively speaking.
That is a completely separate issue from statistical significance, which is the topic I was referring to.
Just because we don't understand everything about the world doesn't mean we can't compare measurements and come to conclusions.
This study has produced an interesting result: firstborn children are slightly better at IQ tests than their siblings. And, statistically, we can be *very sure* that this result is correct. We can argue all day about what IQ means, but that won't change this result. On the other hand, this result and others like it *could* change our understanding of what IQ means and what influences it - which would be pretty useful.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
On the other hand, the seventh sons (of seventh sons) are the ones who inherit all the cool wizardy powers. The seventh daughters too, as demonstrated by Eskarina Smith.
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
My older brother isn't what you call the brightest bulb on the tree. I would honestly have to say that my younger sister got the brains in my family (I'm adopted so I got my own brains :D)
I was sixth born! :-(
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Honestly, in western civilization we always look for excuses. I've got ADD, I've got no leg, I've got a drinking disorder. Then we get people who tell them "well it's ok that you arn't excelling then" I say screw that.
I've had numerous problems in my life, and the day I started being happy for myself and creating my own life is the day I said shut up to the people who say it's ok I have set backs, and started actually solving or working on my problems than just accepting them.
Maybe the first child is pushed harder to succeed, maybe the first child is actually a little smarter, but if anything 3 IQ points isn't going to change a grade on a paper. Einstein, who is considered one of the brightest geniuses on earth got bad grades. I'm sure the best scorer in his classes was far below him in any mark of intelligence.
My point is this doesn't mean anything. Acting like a second child is a predisposed to be less intellegent means nothing. Intelligence doesn't mark who you are or even how smart you are. What matters is what you do with your mind and how far you take it yourself. You might have a very slightly harder time in school (it might take you 31 minutes instead of 30 to solve that problem) but you still have the tools to do it.
His analysis of all these things led him to believe that academic underachievers of a certain vein learn creative ways to get around things, or are out to prove people wrong regarding others saying they'll never amount to anything due to poor grades.
I'm waiting to see how the racists respond to this. By their usual logic, it will now be appropriate for employers and others to discriminate against people of low birth order. At least the first-born among them will be happy with that, anyway.
The bigger issue is that such a significant difference in IQ was found where (a) there is no systematic genetic difference between the populations being compared and (b) the environmental difference between them is so subtle. I say "subtle" because even though the first-born and their younger siblings have somewhat different relationships with their parents and each other, they still live under the same roof, have the same parents, go to the same schools, etc. It certainly shines new light on what kind of effect to expect when the differences are night-and-day, like wealth vs. poverty or responsible, educated parents vs. "not so much"...
More importantly, the excuse that some extremely successful people didn't finish university is used as a "so what if I'm not bothering to learn anything?" or "it's good to be an underachiever" excuse. What such people miss is the fact that those guys worked hard and learned on their own anyway.
E.g., while it's true that, say, Steve Jobs decided to drop out, then he hung around and took the courses that interested him. He learned a lot in that time.
Or I do personally know some people who are well paid software architects, consultants and the like, and who did drop out of college and went on to just do what they liked the most. (And in retrospect, I should have probably done the same thing.) But the thing is: we're not talking people who spent their time getting drunk off their ass. We're talking people who had a passion for computers, and spent most of their waking hours learning and getting some practical experience. That's a freakin' huge difference.
Or since the GP post was about the NBA, I'd wager that there too we're talking about people who spent a lot of their own time training, or just playing the game. It may not be the most intellectual or school-grade-driven job, but it involved some talent, dedication and plain-old hard work anyway.
Basically, yes, it's possible to be successful and well paid without a school, but the rub is: it takes a lot of effort anyway. Those who were just underachievers, are those you see behind the counter at McDonalds.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...people who were born in more tropical climates...
To
Well in my case I think it was different. At least it would seem that way, as
my younger brother might be a few points above me. It could also be that
he simply applied himself more in school. We both ended up as engineers, but
he got into MIT, while I took a slightly less glamorous education route.
... that would mean that jeb is dumber than george.. ROFLOL...
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
The IQ test is not designed to measure intelligence - it is intended to measure potential academic aptitude. Just so, the ASVAB (Armed Forces Vocational Assessment Battery) is not designed to see how "smart" military recruits are; rather, it is designed to test how well a recruit can be trained for a particular job. I took it and did reasonably well on the math and communications portions, but the mechanical parts, such as automotive, were not my best moments.
The IQ test is the same way. Your IQ does not determine how well you will do in life, how smart you are, what job you'll have, or how successful you'll be. It simply measures your aptitude in certain areas of learning and academic knowledge.
Additionally, it would follow that a difference of two or three points can be chalked up to prior knowledge. There is a significant amount of questions on most standard IQ tests that are only hard due to lack of knowledge. For example, a question designed to test for a person's pattern-recognition aptitude might say "Suzy likes 1600 but not 1700, 400 but not 500, and 100 but not 200. Which of the following numbers does Suzy like? A) 49 B) 23 C) 890 D) 274." The answer would be A) because 49 is a perfect square, as are 1600, 400, and 100 (perfect squares of 40, 20, and 10, respectively). This question cannot be answered, however, if you don't have a good working knowledge of multiplication or square roots. Additionally, if two people, one with good pattern-recognition skills and the other with prior knowledge of the type of question both take the test and the one is unable to answer it while the other, being familiar with it, gets it right, the question is invalid. It becomes, then, a test of preparation - not aptitude.
That said, the IQ test is also outdated with our (relatively) recent discovery of the different intelligences. I know some artists who paint, sculpt, or play music beautifully, but they were usually less academically adept. Does this make them less intelligent? No. It simply gives them a different set of skills.
That said, I am a second-born child, and I think my elder brother is extremely intelligent, but he is not terribly academically savvy. He is, however, a very successful martial arts instructor who is very well respected by both his superiors, peers, and students. Would I score higher on an IQ test? Maybe. Did I get better grades in school? Yes. Am I more technologically competent than my brother? Certainly. Am I smarter than him? Doubtful. The IQ test is a poor standard by which to measure someone's so-called "intelligence." It is no better at telling you how smart you are than a book of brain teasers.
Ask any parent who's had more than one child and they'll all tell you the same thing: "with the first one, you so very careful. You measure this, protect against that...but, the second one...at that point it's all pretty much old hat and pretty much throw all caution to the wind." If this "ease" that comes during the second child's rearing includes lower quality foods (because you don't NEED to purchase the most expensive, you learn), different parenting techniques, etc wouldn't that result in a change? It seems more common that a woman who breastfed her first child isn't as likely to do the same with subsequent children and there's some evidence to suggest higher intelligence through breastfeeding. Dunno, just throwing some things out there. Correlation not being causation and all.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
Older kids get a higher test result than younger kids? ...
The younger kids spend more time in our "happy places" due to the elder brothers being such dicks.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Neither of my two older brothers are as smart as I am.
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
I personally see no link between intelligence and school admissions or grades. Why do so many people assume that someone who was accepted to college X must be smart? In fact, I personally have noticed that many smart people fail college because they have much more interesting things to do.
I am the oldest of three boys. My youngest brother is pretty smart, and more importantly he has his thoughts better organized than me. I can be a bit all over the map, but I think I have been inductive reasoning than him.
;)
I have noticed that oldest siblings, tend to have better leadership skills and desires. This sort of makes sense, when you think about it. However, my brothers and I are all pretty close in age - I would guess that the differences in leadership would be more pronounced with a greater difference in age, whereas I expect that the IQ difference noticed would increase with difference in age to a certain point (as the eldest gets exclusive attention until #2 comes along), and then decrease (as eldest becomes less of a care burden to parents, and also contributes to the intellectual development of the younger child). But the leadership skills would increase through age difference to a much higher point before decreasing. What I mean by this, is that as a sixteen year old I could feel comfortable leading my twelve year old brother, but I don't think I'd have much effect on an infant, and by the time the infant was twelve, I'd be out of my parents' house and therefore not as effected or effective.
BUT, these are just statistics. I believe that life events, genetics, and family personality has a far greater effect than birth order.
Now, some notes on IQ. IQ means intelligence quotient. Beyond that, there is no universally agreed upon meaning. The original IQ tests by Binet were developed to measure intellect of children. The later tests, Stanford-Binet, were extended to test young adults, with the goal of predicting academic success. These were adapted for testing of recruits in the US military, to determine officer potential. Stanford-Binet is very accurate in useful in this regard. However, there are many other attributes of intelligence which are not tested by Stanford-Binet and this has caused it to be criticized.
I believe the test has value. Is this because I did well on the test? My score was in the 'gifted' range, just a few points short of 'genius', so it's obviously not totally accurate, as I am in fact a genius mad scientist!
Brother is that you? What are you doing on Slashdot? Get back to cnet.com, where you low IQ morons belong!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I had fairly poor grades all through school up until I attended University. From which, I graduated with multiple degrees with high honors.
:)
Most universities where I come from have an admittance threshold of 75% average. With a lower average, you were either dismissed or had to jump through certain hoops to be accepted. The fact that you had poor grades and you were easily accepted to University doesn't speak for the majority of institutions, but it does for those willing to accept the "below-average" students (and I don't mean that in a offensive way).
Grades mean absolutely nothing six months after you start your first professional job.
True, but I'm not disputing that. The issue is how do you get your first professional job with poor grades? You either work your ass off outside of school, get lucky, or both. But if you work hard to get good grades, your efforts will usually be rewarded with a good job. I don't know if this is true for philosophy majors, but it seems so for the rest
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
there are no other children.
I'm the smartest child my mother ever had.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
I think you're reading way too much into this (and seemingly taking it personally -- not a first-born, I'm guessing). Furthermore, you seem to be displaying a strong confirmation bias against unpleasant news that's leading you to discard a paper that's essentially nothing more than statistical analysis of a large population group -- hardly a thing subject to bias or number-fudging.
All this says is that on average a firstborn son will be 2-3 IQ points higher. The natural variance within a family is more than sufficient for later-born sons to be significantly smarter than the first-born. Actually, what this study says is that previous studies (which focused only on birth order) missed out on the effects of losing the first-born children on the later-born children. Essentially, they show that the difference is not biological but instead social.
If you don't get that much, and are willing to cast aspersions on the character of the researchers involved because you don't like what their research suggests, something tells me that their line of work wouldn't be a very good fit for you either.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Very interesting. But one thing seems off, with such low GPA's how did half of them get advanced degrees? I'm really wondering about the physician who had a 3.12. Will a med school accept someone with such low grades? My grades were a little higher than that with excellend GRE, published research, etc. and I still got turned down by a couple of grad schools that I applied to.
Now I know why my brothers are boneheads! Now I'll have to buy some body armor before they can...[NO CARRIER]
Everything you said was correct, but you didn't address the most common misuse of margin of error by the media: even if two numbers are within a margin of error of each other, that doesn't make the statistic meaningless.
When comparing two numbers, being outside the margin of error only means that you are at least 95% certain that one number is bigger than the other. Being inside the margin of error doesn't instantly drop that confidence down to 0, or even 50-50. Two numbers with slightly overlapping margins of error might have a confidence of 94.9%, but people who don't understand statistics will automatically discredit the study they would have accepted at 95.1% confidence.
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I think grades are less important that you make them out to be. I have no grades - zero educational history* before I was 20 - and I got into Law School solely on the basis of three CLEP tests.
Oh, and I'm second-born male.
(* I was home schooled - the state didn't require records)
Yes, IQ is _one_ measure of _one_ kind of intelligence. So far, so good.
(And a very flawed one, since it seems to reflect education and past reflexes a lot more than what it claims to measure. But let's ignore that for now.)
The problem becomes when people start acting like it's the one single measure of intelligence, and obviously the one number by which you can measure that human on the whole. That is what some of us are railing about.
It's like proclaiming that everyone's fitness and physical prowess can be squeezed in one single number. Let's say, how fast they run the 100m sprint. Obviously, the shorter the time, in better physical condition someone is, and the better they'll perform in sports. Right?
Well, wrong. Some people have instead very high endurance: a sprinter won't typically win the marathon, and viceversa. Some people have great eye-to-hand coordination: a sprinter won't necessarily be a good tennis player. Some people have great raw strength and can lift impressive weights. Some people can make split-second assessments of a chaotic situation, and take the right decision in that split second: see, most team sports. Etc.
It would be pure stupidity to claim that all those unrelated skills and talents can be squeezed into a single number, and that you can neatly assess and order every single human by that one criterion.
And that's just the mistake that is done with IQ: everyone acts as if there's only one kind of intelligence, and IQ measures it objectively. If you even look at the title of this thread, it doesn't say "first born have higher IQ", it says outright, "first born gets the brains". _That_ is the problem. In the mind of whoever wrote that, there was no room for other kinds of intelligence or other ways to measure it. For him, IQ = Brains, it's that simple.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Consider the sample source. Millionaire mind studied successful multi-millionaires right now. Majority of whom are middle-age. Ie they went to College quite a long time ago. I strongly suspect that competition for college admission is much greater today than it was then. I based this simply on that fact that the population is simply so much larger today and hence almost automatically increased competition. Thus I suspect that in 10 maybe 20 years when a new version of the book comes out the scores will be significantly higher. Makes sense to me.
As a parent of two young girls (and I would be that the same could be found in female offspring) aged 4 and 2, I know for a fact that we had more time to read books and play with our firstborn.
When our second daughter was born, time got much tighter (two young kids requires more than twice the effort of one - here's a classic case of the whole being more than the sum of the parts). We don't read her books one-on-one (we read to both of them at the same time), we don't play with her as much by herself, because her older sister needed attention.
Our eldest had two years of two parents teaching her to count, to speak, to recite the alphabet, and whatever else you impart to your kids during those highly formative years.
The youngest gets no such benefit, sharing her parents time with the eldest.
That said, our youngest is more logical, and our oldest more artistic. I am not sure who would come out on top in an IQ test.
My impression is that this is one of those, "The ice is cold because it's frozen water" studies.
It can be.
In india, admission to the top schools is based on a hard numerical rating.
Not top 10%.
I.e. if they have 735 or 813 or 5,234 students- the top 75 students (#1 to #75) as measured by the test get in to the school, have a good life while the rest are relegated to trade school or less prestigious institutions (and many commit suicide just like in japan).
If the 3 points is genuine, then it means it will be slightly easier for them to study for the test. Sure there are other factors- broken relationships, lack of sleep the night before, test anxiety, etc. But being smarter is a factor.
And clearly some people are smarter than other people. It was a shock to me in my senior college year when it became clear I was smarter than average- but not nearly as smart as the top 10% people in my harder classes. I wasn't even in the same league as them.
And likewise- while 1st born may be smarter on average- that does not say that some 2nd born or even 15th born won't be smarter than some 1st born.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
For all we know the moon may be as conscious as a poet or a realtor, and extremely weary of its monotonous round. - HLM
Or 99%. Or 90%. Or any other number; the margin of error doesn't tell you anything if you don't know at what confidence interval it is stated at.
I must agree, wholeheartedly, with this study.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
It can't always be true, I had a higher IQ than my older sibling when we were tested.
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.
I am the youngest male of 6 kids 5 of which are boys , and I have all of my male siblings by at least 10-20 IQ points. That being said *spppppplllll* Na na na na na na!
WTF?
Such evidence does exist, but for different reasons. In the case of sexual orientation, the effect is because successive births change the hormonal environment of the womb. But for IQ it was social rank, not biological birth order. If someone had an elder brother who died young (making them biologically a secondborn but socially a firstborn), they looked like a firstborn.
This leads to an important point. All of the discussion has been about birth order, but the scientific importance of this study is broader than that. What's really exciting about this study (IMHO) is that it provides compelling evidence that family social environment affects intelligence. This flies in the face of recent arguments by Judith Rich Harris (who has been enthusiastically received by Steven Pinker, the Freakonomics guys, and others), claiming that parents don't matter.
There is a lot more ways to interpret the data than just first vs latter born.
It could be the age of the parents. Older parents might have dumber kids (age has been shown to be linked to birth defects)
It could be that first children are raised differently from latter borns. First born get to find their path more (usually due to inexperienced parents). Later children tends to follow patterns, so less inquisitiveness and possibly lower IQ.
Dumb people have more kids sounds like at least as plausible of an interpretation of this study as any other.
> 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.
/ _Lawyer/Salary
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Attorney_
More like, "almost a 6-figure income after 20 years". You, like many non-lawyers, grossly overestimate how much lawyers are paid.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Wouldn't this (no matter how you choose to measure intelligence) have to do with the fact that the oldest child is carried by a younger mother... most likely more healthy for child bearing?
Yes, they did look at those persons who where a lot younger than their older siblings, and found that after 8 years, the difference in IQ wasn't detectable.
I.e. since my youngest brother is 7 years younger than his sister who is the next-youngest, the expected "cost" of having older siblings should be very close to zero.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
The whole point is the article is that the first born does not get the brains, but that the child raised as first born ends up with a higher IQ. It's not a genetic thing. The title of the topic is totally misleading.
While the margin of error can give us some idea of how accurate the measurement is, it does NOT tell us whether or not there is any practical significance to the result. For that, we need to know the effect size.
Assuming the standard deviation is 15, and the difference in means is 3, this gives us an effect size (Cohen's d) = 0.2, or a "small effect".
I tend to place studies on birth order or gender in the same category and generally ignore them because they focus on small differences in variables that cannot be controlled (like your gender or the order of your birth) while avoiding important variables (like your home environment) that can make a big difference.
Sarcasm is hard enough to detect on the internet, but it's completely impossible when someone's pretending to be a reactionary, anti-science redneck. There are WAY too many people who genuinely espouse such beliefs. There is literally NO amount of clownishness you could put into such a post and not sound believably like someone innately skeptical of any science news.
In my defense, though, I live in the South; I have to deal with people like this all the time, so it pricks a sore spot for me.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Seriously 3 points of difference in IQ is not much. - You can raise your IQ by 5 to 15 points trough study and hard work. Although since I am first born its nice that I have to work less than my sister :)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
While my situation isn't exactly comparable (I only have one younger sister) I have often wondered about this exact thing. I almost feel like as an infant that maybe I was given more attention, or read to more often, or maybe I just got more toys. As we grew up I accelled quickly through school while my younger sister had a bit more difficulty pulling a GPA that was lower.
I always wondered if there were teeth to my theory that older siblings are on average smarter than the younger ones. I've always attributed it to geting more attention as a first child, the second time around parents may be less responsive to a crying baby or less willing to read for hours on end.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I am the youngest of three boys. Eldest went to Williams College, middle went to Cornell University, and I went to the lowly public College of William and Mary. Damn I feel dumb.
Now I understand China's one child policy... and to think we thought it was about reducing population growth.
As a younger brother, I strongly disagree. I don't doubt that I would be able to build my own house (might not be pretty, might not be big, but it'd work, and it'd have one hell of a computer system). My brother would hire someone to replace a doorknob. He's better than me at math, and perhaps programming, but he's completely incompetent in anything else. As a result, I have several iPods and other gadgets of his that 'broke'. On average it takes me about 10 minutes to get them running again. And he gets some free tech support for his laptop when I'm in a good mood. Net benefit for both of us I guess. Except my mom always makes me help with the remodeling, because him anywhere near tools of any sort won't end well.
Where's a mod point when I need it? At least +2 insightful!!
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Wouldn't you first have to show that parents whose first born is a dumb dumb are equally as likely to have more children as those whose firstborn is a baby einstein?
If only children are shown to have lower average IQ's than first borns with younger siblings then you could argue that the mild effect described in the study is related to parents of above average first borns being more likely to roll the dice again.
(and a quick google does in fact show some studies that indicate that only children have lower IQ's on average)
Families like this one are a bit short on brain mass to begin with...
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
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.
I'm late to the discussion and may be redundant, but here's my explanation from observing my own siblings and children:
The oldest spends more time with adults. He comes into a family of all adults, and typically continues to orient his thoughts and conversations toward them more than younger siblings do. Later-born children look to the oldest child for guidance and are less oriented toward adults.
The oldest child isn't different from the younger ones. He just spends more time in a family that is all adults besides him. It's the family composition that makes the difference.
I would expect only-children to get the same intellectual benefits as oldest children from increased exposure to parents, though only-children might lack some of the social experience that comes from interacting with siblings.
True, but 95% is generally accepted as the default when it is unstated.
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Quite surprised at the small but concerted amount of people mentioning how flawed the IQ principle test is. Take Gauguin for instance - a genius artist if you ask a lot of persons; and to most he is at least decent...his intelligence was average and he doesn't look particularly enlightened either. However this guy made some brilliant works all from his own "average" mind. So was he just a dude off the street with some talent and enough independence - or was he this plus possessive of a special kind of cleverness?
Also - a funny constant you get when you watch televised IQ programs at least here in the UK is that those who score best overall with 160 or whichever for one thing sound ordinary and boring, like any normal person in the office; plus some of them mention doing these tests as a habit. So how much of the IQ tests mechanisms and questioning can be learnt? Say I sat down and practiced, in a few months I may have raised my IQ ten points and be able to get into whatever high IQ organization likes this stuff, pay a fee for the sake of pride, and go to boring meetings.
In the end its good, old fashioned wisdom that counts over a high IQ or cleverness etc - sooner be a wise man of average intelligence than a brainy guy who is a fool; being wise enough to switch off the TV, read the best books, avoid most films, avoid crappy conflicts, stand up for yourself and not be coerced etc. How about monks in Tibet? They couldn't give jack for their own alleged "intelligence" as a method for ego-stroking; and according to surveys they're amongst the most fulfilled people on Earth.
If you want to know the pretensions of academia, which is partly responsible for the rise of the IQ test from its anti-immigrant origins, read Politics and the English Language by George Orwell; this sort of language goes on to this day in academic papers the world over. Orwell.ru is a great site - not that this is a straw man; but we in the West are amongst the most ego-inflated, pretentious, anxious to seem bright on the globe. Whether it be the pecking order, pandering to people above or below, or just a trained and ingrained crappy nature - people love to seem bright. Recall the Tao te Ching: "Who exalts himself is humbled, he who humbles himself is exalted." - people should quit this crap and show themselves through acheivement and character, AND not boast about it; not some shitty number and how they're a member of this or that.
As the only member of my family that is earning more than $25,000/year (Actually i make $70,000/year+ as a software developer) and the only one to go to college and get my drivers license out of 3 siblings (and no they aren't mentally handicapped) i can assure you that this is NOT true.
... this isn't true for my younger brother & myself. His IQ was a good 9 points higher than mine when we were tested.
There is a war going on for your mind.
The first born, or surviving first born, has two people to interact with -- both adults.
The next child has three to interact with, two adults and a child.
Third child, two adults and two children.
Throigh non-nuclear family in, and they're a constant, just as are parents.
This conclusion here is well know and proven,. and has been for many years. Chances are the study found something worthwhile, but when science gets rewritten for popular media, the important points get left off so there's room for supposedly surprising results. Sadly fopr the researchers, the people who do this rewriting rarely know anything about prior work.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
It's not nurture making the first-born smarter, it's the first born bullying and dominating the younger syblings to make them stupider and less sure of their intelligence.
Averages. Phht. My IQ is a full standard deviation above my older brother (I'm second). And no, I don't think 2 or 3 points is significant in any case.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
tell that to this kid; shes the youngest member of MENSA yet, at only two years of age, and the youngest kid in her family to boot! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/new s/news.html?in_article_id=463539&in_page_id=1770
Or maybe millionaires are too busy making money to waste time learning shit?
I think andrewd18 was actually referring to "a man" in that joke.
This only works if you do it while you're young.
If he's a network admin, he's gotta be at least 10.... It's probably too late....
The 2nd list seems definitely second rate :-)
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's easy to find the fatal statistical flaw in this.
It would (mistakenly) seem to indicate that the best way to raise the total population's IQ would be to divorce as soon as the first child is born, and to go have another "first-born" with another mate.
I doubt it would work.
+++OK ATH