Slashdot Mirror
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.
[
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 /.
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
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 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...
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.
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.
Neither of my two older brothers is as smart as I am.
Thank you, please drive through.