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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
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 /.
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.
I have a bone to pick with that statement.
IQ may not be the *only* thing that corresponds to intelligence, but it definitely is an objective measure of some factors that we consider to be the hallmarks of an intelligent person.
Now, there may be other measures and metrics (objective and subjective) that may correspond to intelligence - good language skills, good social skills, good game playing skills and so on. However, that does not necessarily mean that good quantitative and problem solving skills is also not a good measure.
A quarterback who can gauge how the field looks at a given moment and decide upon a particular action is just as intelligent (in a different way) as someone who is excellent at arithmetic. Similarly, someone who has excellent social skills (i.e. read emotions) is just as intelligent as someone who has a prodigious memory. A marketing person is just as intelligent as a computer programmer in a different way, and a tennis player is just as intelligent as a musician, in a different way.
But none of that means that IQ is *not* a measure of intelligence - it is. It just is not the *only* measure of intelligence.
I think there is a difference. A subtle difference, that's for sure, but a difference nevertheless.
Neither of my two older brothers is as smart as I am.
Thank you, please drive through.