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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.'"
...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
Well, I have some very reliable evidence that the seventh son is the most powerful, but only if it's a seventh son of a seventh son.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Yea, but Peter took over the world while Ender only saved it.
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?
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
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
So you can probably tell that I'm a firstborn, otherwise I'd be 'doing' something interesting instead of posting on /.
They used the records of around 250 000 people, mmmmkay?
The standard error pretty much disappears at that sort of number of participants.
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.
Hmm, my wife has a science PhD and her sister is a mor... um, is more talented in non-academic areas.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
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
Hmm, my wife has a science PhD and her sister is a mor... um, is more talented in non-academic areas. ....tell me more!
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.
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.
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.
I knew I shouldn't have started this.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
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...
If you try to apply the results of the study to a specific situation, standard error certainly does come into play. For instance, if the error in an IQ test is 5 points, and my older brother gets 3 more points than I do on that test, you can't claim that the study predicted that particular spread.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
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.
Only on Discworld. On Discworld, cubes are the powerful numbers. On Earth it's the primes.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
What you're talking about is standard deviation, not standard error. SE = SD/sqrt(n), and given that in this case SD = 15 (by definition of IQ) and n = 241310, we have a standard error approaching 0.
It's a little more complicated than that, of course, since the "n" here has to be applied to each group separately; for the sake of argument, let's assume the sample was equally divided between first-, second-, and third-borns, that means about 80000 in each group, which means the SE is about 0.053. This is plenty to detect the kind of differences they're talking about.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
For a large majority of the people and jobs out there, the name of your college will cease to really matter after you get your first real job. Education is great and all, but if you've got a couple years of decent work experience under your belt, where you went to school is only a minor footnote.
It might make a bit more of a difference right out of school, where they employers don't have much else to go on. But in that case, your best bet is get a job through personal connections, relying on your school's name probably isn't your best bet.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I'm a firstborn zombie.
Braaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiinnnnnssss....
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Neither of my two older brothers are as smart as I am.
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
A member of Mensa & I were standing near the edge of the Grand Canyon admiring the view. Both of us were thirsty, he reasoned that since he was the smart one, I should be the one to go get some drinks so he could continue pondering over the view.
So I pushed him over the edge.
I still had to fetch a drink, but I felt better about doing it.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
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.
> 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.
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