Gould has admitted that there is no real reason why populations couldn't differ in intelligence etc. (he is in fact a group selectionist), he simply says that it is a "contingent fact of nature" that all races are equal. So, it's not really a Gouldite argument.

Intelligence past a certain point doesn't necessarily afford a reproductive advantage, especially in pre-agricultural societies. (hell, it doesn't really provide any advantages now)

Say what?

g by itself doesn't confer reproductive success, witness the history of genius marriage, or just look at Mensa.

But genius combined with other attributes can achieve successes the other attributes by themselves could not. There were many Mongol chiefs in Genghiz' time. He maybe differed from them in several ways, but I'll bet that one of the ways was, he was smarter than the average chief. And his smarts, along with his leadership, brought him incredible reproductive success.

Exactly Jason--Is it reasonable to say that groups 'could' differ, but then say, without evidence, that it is a 'fact of nature' that they don't.

Silly.

And yes, intelligence coupled with other attributes can certainly contribute to reproductive success. But there are plenty of single nerds out there as we all know.

Not to mention the seething unwashed masses;). They seem to reproduce just fine.

I was mainly thrown off by the statement that intelligence "doesn't provide any advantages now". Obviously, it provides a lot of advantages, including the ability for choice mate selection and to have the best resources for your children. American Ashkenazis, for instance, have especially high standards of living.

High IQ doesn't have _evolutionry_ advantages in modern societies. It lowers your reproductive fitness, on average.

High IQ doesn't have _evolutionry_ advantages in modern societies. It lowers your reproductive fitness, on average.

I think this is highly debatable. Obviously Newton was a genius and he died a virgin. But high IQ is a very important factor in ones survival and the survival of ones offspring. I think most of the biological trade-offs that come with high IQ (myopia, asthma, etc.)are less costly in the modern world of eyeglasses, inhalers, and prozac. Remember "survival of the fittest" doesn't mean exactly what most people think it does:

'Fitness' to Darwin meant not those that survive, but those that could be expected to survive because of their adaptations and functional efficiency, when compared to others in the population.

I think high IQ is more "functionally efficient" in the modern era than low IQ is. (Though I admit that there were times and environments in the past when the costs of higher intelligence could plausibly be a liability.) Cultural trends here in the West have no bearing on this issue.

*Unless, of course, you are_the_Gregory Cochran, in which case I'll just shut up*

we disagree jason.

I expect people with IQ's of 100 and SATs of 900 to survive in the USA just as well as those with SATs of 1500 and IQs of 150. There are no effects on reproductive fitness. In fact, the less educated tend to have more healthy children at younger ages.

Anything above "normal" for IQ is pretty much gravy in the modern world.

Analyzing human reproduction rates in Western countries, lower IQ seems to be more advantageous in a modern society. If you would compare the reproductive success of Group A (low IQ cons and ex-cons) and Group B (High IQ, high achieving) you may find that the low IQ group is more successful in reproducing.

I was under the impression that Darwinian fitness referred to reproductive success, known as inclusive fitness (both direct and indirect).

"...Fitness, in an evolutionary sense, is the average reproductive output of a class of genetic variants in a gene pool. Fit does not necessarily mean biggest, fastest or strongest." (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.html)

Well when a PhD, an alpha male, and, perhaps, Gregory Cochran (!?) find what you say objectionable perhaps it's time to back down. :)

Looking back I can see my lapses in good judgment regarding IQ and reproductive success. Sorry for the annoyance David.

"High IQ doesn't have _evolutionry_ advantages in modern societies. It lowers your reproductive fitness, on average."

While I would not disagree with this, I think it is vastly more true for women than men. Some women really go for a man with high IQ and/ or the things high IQ can potentially bring, like money or a glamorous job.

Men, on the other hand, generally care a lot less about how smart a woman is- often going for a chick with hotter looks and/ or a more affectionate personality than some high IQ corporate type; often thinking that the careeris woman is more rigid and cold. Right or wrong, this is often the case.

I think male preferences are not the reason that women with high IQs have fewer-than-average children.

Here we have a basic distinction between "social" advantage and "evolutionary" advantage. No question but that a high IQ confers many advantages in a technological society. (As I recall, there was an obscure book called "The Bell Curve" about just that subject a few years back...) But evolution doesn't care what your standard of living is - it only cares how many kids you have. And it's a fact that higher-IQ people tend to have fewer kids, at a later age, than lower-IQ people. I tried to make a similar point in reference to feminism in an earlier post, but there were some people who seemed intent on misunderstanding me...

(P.S. - I wonder if the high-IQ/lower fertility correlation is cross-cultural? And if it is, maybe that's the reason the mass of humanity is so surprisingly stupid, considering the potential of the basic form...

The negative IQ-fertility correlation is very widespread nowadays, but it wasn't in the past. I would guess that higher IQ, all else equal, was a plus in almost every society, but the balance of advantages and costs was not the same everywhere.
I think that transition to more complex money economies created a niche with higher reproductive rewards for IQ in a number of societies during premodern times, and in some cases, this niche persisted long enough to have measurable effects. But that trend certainly ended by the beginning of the 20th century.

D: Gouldites are logically inconsistent.

JS: And you Dawkinsites are incapable of holding mutually contradictory positions. So there.

The evidence that IQ is being selected against in modern industrial societies is pretty overwhelming:

The researchers found many of the variations in the three traits were controlled by social factors such as religion and education. For example, Roman Catholic women had 20 per cent higher reproductive fitness than other religions. University educated women had 35 per cent lower fitness than those who left school as early as possible.

“I was staggered by the results we got,” said Dr Owens. “When we decided to control for these factors, I wasn’t expecting anything to come out of it. I thought, ‘let’s just run with the analysis’. But there was a massive difference in the number of children born to families with a religious affiliation. Many of the Catholic twins we studied had an average family of five children, where other families were having only one or two children.

“We also found that mothers with more education were typically having just one child at an older age. Their reproductive fitness was much lower than their peers who left school as early as possible. Again, and again, our analyses for these two factors came back with the same results.”

Excerpt:">Genes are being selected for:

This is the URL for the original paper.

One example of high IQ people being less fit is WWI where high IQ pilots were more likely to be killed. Also, after reading these posts I think it is best to marry a smart woman who recently dropped out of high school.

make sure her cousins are smart-that way you won't have to worry about regression toward the mean....

....and marry someone who is as genetically distant from you as possible - Heterosis (hybrid vigour) - to counteract any regression.

The thing to remember is that before about 1900, the poor (whether this was due to low intelligence, poor impulse control, bad health, or simple lack of inherited wealth sufficient to give them a fair chance) could have lots of children, but only a few that survived. Many more of the better fed and better protected children of the wealthy survived. Young men also had a quite high death rate, which varied with socieconomic status since the rich would either keep their children out of the dangerous jobs, or see that they went off to war wearing enough armor to be nearly invulnerable. (Even royalty had quite high death rates by modern standards - for example, two of William the Conqueror's four sons died in accidents - but the death rate among Saxon peasants was much, much higher.)

By contrast, in modern societies, the successful are taxed to provide food, medicine, and shelter for the children of the unsuccessful, and very few children die even among the poorest Americans. Since a large part of being successful is not burdening oneself with a flock of children before one has finished college and gotten a good start on a career, the successful are having fewer children, and later in life, while the least successful are getting paid by the child! I suspect that this is selection for inability to control one's impulses far more than for unintelligence, but it's a bad trend nevertheless.