The relationship between fertility and intelligence has been investigated in many demographic studies. There is evidence that, on a population level, measures of intelligence such as educational attainment and literacy are negatively correlated with fertility rate in some contexts. [1]
The negative correlation between fertility and intelligence (as measured by IQ) has been argued to be persistent and systematic in many parts of the modern West in particular. Early studies, however, are sometimes claimed to have been "superficial and illusory" and not clearly supported by the limited data they collected. [1]
Some of the first studies into the subject were carried out on individuals living before the advent of IQ testing, in the late 19th century, by looking at the fertility of men listed in Who's Who, these individuals being presumably of high intelligence. These men, taken as a whole, had few children, implying a correlation. [2] [3] This common objection, however, does not clearly apply to all studies of the time period. This can be shown for the case of educational psychologist and peace researcher Theodore Lentz, who had stated in the same year that "[t]he correlation between I.Q. and number of children in a family varies from -.095 in one community to -.41 in another", taking this to verify a clear dysgenic trend. [4]
More rigorous studies carried out on Americans alive after the Second World War returned different results suggesting a slight positive correlation with respect to intelligence. The findings from these investigations were consistent enough for Osborn and Bajema, [a] writing as late as 1972, to conclude that fertility patterns were eugenic, and that "the reproductive trend toward an increase in the frequency of genes associated with higher IQ [...] will probably continue in the foreseeable future in the United States and will be found also in other industrial welfare-state democracies." [6] [b]
Several reviewers considered the findings premature, arguing that the samples were nationally unrepresentative, generally being confined to white people born between 1910 and 1940 in the Great Lakes States. [8] [9] Other researchers began to report a negative correlation in the 1960s after two decades of neutral or positive fertility. [10]
In 1982, Daniel R. Vining, Jr. sought to address these issues in a large study on the fertility of over 10,000 individuals throughout the United States, who were then aged 25 to 34. The average fertility in his study was correlated at −0.031 with IQ for white women and −0.086 for black women. Vining argued that this indicated a drop in the genotypic average IQ of 1.6 points per generation for the white population, and 2.4 points per generation for the black population. [11] Critics note Vining's involvement with the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly and his acceptance of grants from the Pioneer Fund. [12] [13] [14]
In a 1988 study, Retherford and Sewell examined the association between the measured intelligence and fertility of over 9,000 high school graduates in Wisconsin in 1957, and confirmed the inverse relationship between IQ and fertility for both sexes, but much more so for females. If children had, on average, the same IQ as their parents, IQ would decline by .81 points per generation. Taking .71 for the additive heritability of IQ as given by behavioural geneticists John L. Jinks and David Fulker, [15] they calculated a dysgenic decline of .57 IQ points per generation. [16] In a subsequent attempt of theirs to more definitively identify the exact causal grounds of these observations, they argued, that "[p]ath analysis shows that the effects of IQ on subsequent family size are almost entirely indirect through education". [17]
Accordingly, it often proved useful to rely on educational attainment alone in such correlation studies insofar as it is known to be a relatively good proxy for IQ, correlating with it at circa .55. [18] Conducting a study along such lines and therefore retrieving a correspondingly larger national sample, David C. Rowe and colleagues (1999) found not only that achieved education had a high heritability (.68) and that half of the variance in education was explained by an underlying genetic component shared by IQ, education, and SES. [19] One study investigating fertility and education carried out in 1991 found that high school dropouts in the United States had the most children (2.5 on average), with high school graduates having fewer children, and college graduates having the fewest children (1.56 on average). [20]
Herrnstein and Murray, in their best-selling 1994 book The Bell Curve , argued that the average genotypic IQ of the United States was declining due to both dysgenetic fertility and large scale immigration of groups with ex hypothesi lower average IQ than the previous population mean. [21] [c]
Controversial psychologist Richard Lynn has been a well-known advocate for the validity of dysgenic hypotheses under modern conditions. In a 1999 study, he examined the relationship between the intelligence of adults aged 40 and above with their respective numbers of children such as siblings, positing that "correlations were found to be significantly negative at -0.05 and -0.09 respectively, indicating the presence of dysgenic fertility." [d] Furthermore, reporting that there was virtually no correlation between women's intelligence and the number of children they considered ideal, he surprisingly observed that this negative correlation held true only for women. [23] In 2004, Lynn and Marian Van Court attempted a straightforward replication of Vining's work. Their study returned similar results, with the genotypic decline measuring at 0.9 IQ points per generation for the total sample and 0.75 IQ points for whites only. [24] [e]
However, a 2014 paper by similarly controversial evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, using data from the National Child Development Study, found that more intelligent women and men were, in fact, both more likely to want to be childless, but that only more intelligent women – not men – were more likely to actually be childless. [28]
It is helpful to exclude some confounding variables from adjacent research regarding the correlation of fertility and income. In a 2006 statistical analysis of the US General Social Survey, it was found that higher relative income indeed led to both a greater frequency of sex and greater fecundity in men. [f] Nonetheless, intelligence and fertility were shown to remain negatively correlated throughout. [30] This exact asymmetry was again replicated based on data from National Longitudinal Surveys. [31] Population economist Vegard Skirbekk on the other hand had already argued on the grounds of another large multi-national dataset that this characteristic "status-fertility relation" had long since stalled or even reversed for males just as well. [32]
Criminologist Brian Boutwell et al. (2013) reported a strong negative association between county-level IQ and county-level fertility rates in the United States. [33] [g]
A theory to explain the fertility-intelligence relationship is that while income and IQ are positively correlated, [35] income is also in itself a fertility factor that correlates inversely with fertility, that is, the higher the incomes, the lower the fertility rates and vice versa. [36] [37] There is thus an inverse correlation between income and fertility within and between nations. The higher the level of education and GDP per capita of a human population, sub-population or social stratum, the fewer children are born. In a 1974 UN population conference in Bucharest, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, encapsulated this relationship by stating "Development is the best contraceptive". [38]
In most countries, education is inversely correlated to childbearing. People often delay childbearing in order to spend more time getting education, and thus have fewer children. Conversely, early childbearing can interfere with education, so people with early or frequent childbearing are likely to be less educated. While education and childbearing place competing demands on a person's resources, education is positively correlated with IQ. [39]
While there is less research into men's fertility and education, in developed countries evidence suggests that highly-educated men display higher levels of childbearing compared to less-educated men. [40] [41]
As a country becomes more developed, education rates increase and fertility rates decrease for both men and women. Fertility has fallen faster for both less-educated men and women than it has for highly-educated men and women. In the Nordic countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, fertility for less-educated women has now fallen enough that childlessness is now highest among the least educated women just as it is for men. [42]
Among a sample of women using birth control methods of comparable theoretical effectiveness, success rates were related to IQ, with the percentages of high, medium and low IQ women having unwanted births during a three-year interval being 3%, 8% and 11%, respectively. [43] Since the effectiveness of many methods of birth control is directly correlated with proper usage, an alternative interpretation of the data would indicate lower IQ women were less likely to use birth control consistently and correctly. Another study found that after an unwanted pregnancy has occurred, higher IQ couples are more likely to obtain abortions; [44] and unmarried teenage girls who become pregnant are found to be more likely to carry their babies to term if they are doing poorly in school. [45]
Conversely, while desired family size in the United States is apparently the same for women of all IQ levels, [11] [ dubious – discuss ] highly educated women are found to be more likely to say that they desire more children than they have, indicating a "deficit fertility" in the highly intelligent. [46] In her review of reproductive trends in the United States, Van Court argues that "each factor – from initially employing some form of contraception, to successful implementation of the method, to termination of an accidental pregnancy when it occurs – involves selection against intelligence." [47]
Regardless of whether correlations exist between fertility and intelligence, genetic studies have shown no evidence for dysgenic effects in human populations. [48] [49] [50] [51] Additionally, theories about dysgenic and eugenic effects in human populations are associated with scientific racism. [52] [53] [54] [55]
Preston and Campbell (1993) argued that it is a mathematical fallacy that such differences in fertility would result in a progressive change of IQ, and applies only when looking at closed subpopulations. In their mathematical model, with constant differences in fertility, since children's IQ can be more or less than that of their parents, a steady-state equilibrium is argued to be established between different subpopulations with different IQ. The mean IQ will not change in the absence of a change of the fertility differences. The steady-state IQ distribution will be lower for negative differential fertility than for positive, but these differences are small. For the extreme and unrealistic assumption of endogamous mating in IQ subgroups, a differential fertility change of 2.5/1.5 to 1.5/2.5 (high IQ/low IQ) causes a maximum shift of four IQ points. For random mating, the shift is less than one IQ point. [56] However, James Samuel Coleman, formerly president of the ASA such as economist David Lam both independently argued that this model depends on various assumptions which are unlikely to be true. [57] [58]
Recent research has shown that education and socioeconomic status are better indicators of fertility and suggests that the relationship between intelligence and number of children may be spurious. When controlling for education and socioeconomic status, the relationship between intelligence and number of children, intelligence and number of siblings, and intelligence and ideal number of children reduces to statistical insignificance. Among women, a post-hoc analysis revealed that the lowest and highest intelligence scores did not differ significantly by number of children. [59] [ better source needed ]
An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardized tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. Originally, IQ was a score obtained by dividing a person's mental age score, obtained by administering an intelligence test, by the person's chronological age, both expressed in terms of years and months. The resulting fraction (quotient) was multiplied by 100 to obtain the IQ score. For modern IQ tests, the raw score is transformed to a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. This results in approximately two-thirds of the population scoring between IQ 85 and IQ 115 and about 2 percent each above 130 and below 70.
Discussions of race and intelligence – specifically regarding claims of differences in intelligence along racial lines – have appeared in both popular science and academic research since the modern concept of race was first introduced. With the inception of IQ testing in the early 20th century, differences in average test performance between racial groups have been observed, though these differences have fluctuated and in many cases steadily decreased over time. Complicating the issue, modern science has concluded that race is a socially constructed phenomenon rather than a biological reality, and there exist various conflicting definitions of intelligence. In particular, the validity of IQ testing as a metric for human intelligence is disputed. Today, the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain differences in IQ test performance between groups, and that observed differences are environmental in origin.
Fertility in colloquial terms refers the ability to have offspring. In demographic contexts, fertility refers to the actual production of offspring, rather than the physical capability to reproduce, which is termed fecundity. The fertility rate is the average number of children born during an individual's lifetime. In medicine, fertility refers to the ability to have children, and infertility refers to difficulty in reproducing naturally. In general, infertility or subfertility in humans is defined as not being able to conceive a child after one year of unprotected sex. The antithesis of fertility is infertility, while the antithesis of fecundity is sterility.
The g factor is a construct developed in psychometric investigations of cognitive abilities and human intelligence. It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the assertion that an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks. The g factor typically accounts for 40 to 50 percent of the between-individual performance differences on a given cognitive test, and composite scores based on many tests are frequently regarded as estimates of individuals' standing on the g factor. The terms IQ, general intelligence, general cognitive ability, general mental ability, and simply intelligence are often used interchangeably to refer to this common core shared by cognitive tests. However, the g factor itself is a mathematical construct indicating the level of observed correlation between cognitive tasks. The measured value of this construct depends on the cognitive tasks that are used, and little is known about the underlying causes of the observed correlations.
Birth rate, also known as natality, is the total number of live human births per 1,000 population for a given period divided by the length of the period in years. The number of live births is normally taken from a universal registration system for births; population counts from a census, and estimation through specialized demographic techniques. The birth rate is used to calculate population growth. The estimated average population may be taken as the mid-year population.
IQ and the Wealth of Nations is a 2002 book by psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen. The authors argue that differences in national income are correlated with differences in the average national intelligence quotient (IQ). They further argue that differences in average national IQs constitute one important factor, but not the only one, contributing to differences in national wealth and rates of economic growth.
Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal. He was lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. Lynn was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018.
Neuroscience and intelligence refers to the various neurological factors that are partly responsible for the variation of intelligence within species or between different species. A large amount of research in this area has been focused on the neural basis of human intelligence. Historic approaches to studying the neuroscience of intelligence consisted of correlating external head parameters, for example head circumference, to intelligence. Post-mortem measures of brain weight and brain volume have also been used. More recent methodologies focus on examining correlates of intelligence within the living brain using techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), positron emission tomography and other non-invasive measures of brain structure and activity.
Dysgenics refers to any decrease in the prevalence of traits deemed to be either socially desirable or generally adaptive to their environment due to selective pressure disfavouring their reproduction.
The study of religiosity and intelligence explores the link between religiosity and intelligence or educational level. Religiosity and intelligence are both complex topics that include diverse variables, and the interactions among those variables are not always well understood. For instance, intelligence is often defined differently by different researchers; also, all scores from intelligence tests are only estimates of intelligence, because one cannot achieve concrete measurements of intelligence due to the concept’s abstract nature. Religiosity is also complex, in that it involves wide variations of interactions of religious beliefs, practices, behaviors, and affiliations, across a diverse array of cultures.
Research on the heritability of IQ inquires into the degree of variation in IQ within a population that is due to genetic variation between individuals in that population. There has been significant controversy in the academic community about the heritability of IQ since research on the issue began in the late nineteenth century. Intelligence in the normal range is a polygenic trait, meaning that it is influenced by more than one gene, and in the case of intelligence at least 500 genes. Further, explaining the similarity in IQ of closely related persons requires careful study because environmental factors may be correlated with genetic factors.
The study of height and intelligence examines correlations between human height and human intelligence. Some epidemiological research on the subject has shown that there is a small but statistically significant positive correlation between height and intelligence after controlling for socioeconomic class and parental education. The cited study, however, does not draw any conclusions about height and intelligence, but rather suggests "a continuing effect of post-natal growth on childhood cognition beyond the age of 9 years." This correlation arises in both the developed and developing world and persists across age groups. An individual's taller stature has been attributed to higher economic status, which often translates to a higher quality of nutrition. This correlation, however, can be inverted to characterize one's socioeconomic status as a consequence of stature, where shorter stature can attract discrimination that affects many factors, among them employment, and treatment by educators. One such theory argues that since height strongly correlates with white and gray matter volume, it may act as a biomarker for cerebral development which itself mediates intelligence. Competing explanations include that certain genetic factors may influence both height and intelligence, or that both height and intelligence may be affected in similar ways by adverse environmental exposures during development. Measurements of the total surface area and mean thickness of the cortical grey matter using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed that the height of individuals had a positive correlation with the total cortical surface area. This supports the idea that genes that influence height also influence total surface area of the brain, which in turn influences intelligence, resulting in the correlation. Other explanations further qualify the positive correlation between height and intelligence, suggesting that because the correlation becomes weaker with higher socioeconomic class and education level, environmental factors could partially override any genetic factors affecting both characteristics.
Income and fertility is the association between monetary gain on one hand, and the tendency to produce offspring on the other. There is generally an inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations. The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country. In a 1974 United Nations population conference in Bucharest, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, illustrated this trend by stating "Development is the best contraceptive." In 2015, this thesis was supported by Vogl, T.S., who concluded that increasing the cumulative educational attainment of a generation of parents was by far the most important predictor of the inverse correlation between income and fertility based on a sample of 48 developing countries.
Health can affect intelligence in various ways. Conversely, intelligence can affect health. Health effects on intelligence have been described as being among the most important factors in the origins of human group differences in IQ test scores and other measures of cognitive ability. Several factors can lead to significant cognitive impairment, particularly if they occur during pregnancy and childhood when the brain is growing and the blood–brain barrier of the child is less effective. Such impairment may sometimes be permanent, sometimes be partially or wholly compensated for by later growth.
IQ and Global Inequality is a 2006 book by psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen. IQ and Global Inequality is follow-up to their 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, an expansion of the argument that international differences in current economic development are due in part to differences in average national intelligence as indicated by national IQ estimates, and a response to critics. The book was published by Washington Summit Publishers, a white nationalist and eugenicist publishing group.
Cognitive epidemiology is a field of research that examines the associations between intelligence test scores and health, more specifically morbidity and mortality. Typically, test scores are obtained at an early age, and compared to later morbidity and mortality. In addition to exploring and establishing these associations, cognitive epidemiology seeks to understand causal relationships between intelligence and health outcomes. Researchers in the field argue that intelligence measured at an early age is an important predictor of later health and mortality differences.
The relationship between nations and IQ is a controversial area of study concerning differences between nations in average intelligence test scores, their possible causes, and their correlation with measures of social well-being and economic prosperity.
The correlates of crime explore the associations of specific non-criminal factors with specific crimes.
Fertility factors are determinants of the number of children that an individual is likely to have. Fertility factors are mostly positive or negative correlations without certain causations.
Sex differences in human intelligence have long been a topic of debate among researchers and scholars. It is now recognized that there are no significant sex differences in average IQ, though particular subtypes of intelligence vary somewhat between sexes.
This paper addresses two questions not answered in the earlier study: (1) Why is the effect of IQ on subsequent family size negative? And (2) why is it considerably more negative for women than for men? Path analysis shows that the effects of IQ on subsequent family size are almost entirely indirect through education; thus education provides most of the sought-for explanation. This finding suggests the further hypothesis that, in modern societies, the direction of effect of education on family size may predict the direction of evolution of genotypic IQ.
Throughout the West, modernization has brought falling birth rates. The rates fall faster for educated women than the uneducated. Because education is so closely linked with cognitive ability, this tends to produce a dysgenic effect, or a downward shift in the ability distribution. Furthermore, education leads women to have their babies later—which alone also produces additional dysgenic pressures. [...] The rules that currently govern immigration provide the other major source of dysgenic pressure. It appears that the mean IQ of immigrants in the 1980s works out to about 95. The low IQ may not be a problem; in the past, immigrants have sometimes shown large increases on such measures. But other evidence indicates that the self-selection process that used to attract the clas- sic American immigrant—brave, hard working, imaginative, self-starting, and often of high IQ—has been changing, and with it the nature of some of the immigrant population.
"[A]s fertility declines, there is a general shift from a positive to a negative or neutral status-fertility relation. Those with high income/wealth or high occupation/social class switch from having relatively many to fewer or the same number of children as others. Education, however, depresses fertility for as long as this relation is observed.
Since the nineteenth century, a 'race deterioration' has been repeatedly predicted as a result of the excessive multiplication of less gifted people (Galton 1869; see also Fig. 9.1). Nevertheless, the educational and qualification level of people in the industrialized countries has risen strongly. The fact that the 'test intelligence' has also significantly increased (Flynn 2013), is difficult to explain for supporters of the dysgenic thesis: they suspect that the 'phenotypic intelligence' has increased for environmental reasons, while the 'genotypic quality' secretly decreases (Lynn 1996, p. 111). There is neither evidence nor proof for this theory.
There is no convincing evidence that any dysgenic trend exists. . . . It turns out, counterintuitively, that differential birth rates (for groups scoring high and low on a trait) do not necessarily produce changes in the population mean.