[extropy-chat] limits of computer feeling

Anders Sandberg asa at nada.kth.se
Wed Mar 21 15:01:27 UTC 2007


Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> On 3/21/07, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Is there any evidence that smarter, richer, better-looking etc. people
>> today
>> are more likely to pass on their genes than most of the rest of the
>> population?

There seems that IQ correlates negatively with fertility in many modern
societies:

Vancourt, M. and F. D. Bean. 1985. Intelligence and Fertility in the
United-States - 1912-1982. Intelligence 9(1): 23-32.

Udry, J. R. 1978. Differential Fertility by Intelligence - Role of Birth
Planning. Social Biology 25(1): 10-14.

Vining, D. R., L. Bygren, K. Hattori, S. Nystrom and S. Tamura. 1988.
IQ/Fertility Relationships in Japan and Sweden. Personality and Individual
Differences 9(5): 931-932.

It is a pretty small effect. This paper argues that at least among
medieval jews smart people had a fitness advantage:

Cochran, G., J. Hardy and H. Harpending. 2006. Natural History of
Ashkenazi Intelligence. Journal of Biosocial Science.

I don't know about being richer, but I think there are some papers showing
that high status males tend to remarry more often and have more children,
at least in fairly recent premodern societies.

Dustin J. Penn and Ken R. Smith showed in the PNAS paper "Differential
fitness costs of reproduction between the sexes" that there were definite
fitness costs of having many children among women in the late 1800s.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University





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