5 ms·

Genetic Fitness May Explain Why Intelligent People Are Often Healthier

5 points by newsit 17y ago

Allocator2008 17y ago
This most likely has to do with social status in sexual selection. That is, the more "up the ladder" one is in a social group, the more attractive one is to potential mates. In early society, a female who mated with someone high up the social food chain would have her children more likely to be protected, to survive. But to be high up the social food chain, it takes smarts. So the children would inherit smarts and get the protections social status affords, and be more likely to survive. Also, from the male perspective, he would choose the healthier females he could (which translate to the "hot" females). So, between the females going for the apes with the high social status (the beginning of today's "sugar daddy" concept) for the sake of increasing the selective advantage of their children and the males wanting to choose the healthiest females (or in current parlance, "hottest" females) for the sake of having the best survival chance for the carriers of their DNA, their children, the result is that the offspring are more likely to survive as a result of healthy genes from Mom and social status protections from Dad, inheriting Dad's smarts as well because Dad had to be smart to get the social status he got. Consequently, today, we have evidently a gene set that is both healthy and smart so that more intelligent people may be generally more healthy. (The downside is that more intelligent people are more likely to self-destruct into drugs, alcohol, and generally unstable behavior, but that is another story, ha!)
tokenadult 17y ago
Oh, yeesh, a Gottfredson publication in the journal Intelligence. The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like that is the article by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.
- trapper 17y ago
  Can you expand on what in particular is wrong with this research? I want to hear a critique of the argument not the source.
  - jcl 17y ago
    One point that strikes me is that they seem to be implying that the genetics are directly responsible for worse health, whereas all they have shown is a correlation between a few random factors and some numbers on an intelligence test. They are relying on other studies that show a correlation between health and intelligence to conclude that people with genetic factors have worse intelligence and hence worse health. But we don't know if poor health leads to poor intelligence or vice versa (or neither), so their chain of causation may not even exist. Likewise, those studies presumably applied to the general population; maybe people with club feet are an exception? Also note that the researchers gave the subjects a number of physical tests in addition to asking about the genetic factors, but they only chose to report on the correlation in mental tests; if you are trying to show a correlation between genetic factors and general health, why not use the health tests directly and not need to argue via intelligence? If it turns out that the mental tests were correlated to the factors, but the physical tests weren't, then they have actually found a group of people for which intelligence and health is not correlated, which actually disproves their theory. Arden explained that while she and her team agreed that factors such as poverty and looking after one's health also make a difference to health, this study, which the authors describe as a "proof of concept", shows there could also be a genetic factor which warrants further investigation. For the sake of argument, let's assume that poor intelligence causes poor health. It's entirely possible that the subjects' genetic factors had zero direct influence on their intelligence, but the fact that they grew up "funny-looking" caused them to have less income or to perform poorly in school, which indirectly caused the lack of intelligence. This means the problem could be corrected entirely by devoting more resources to learning or by having the subjects undergo cosmetic surgery -- a big hole in the researchers' theory of a "genetic fitness factor" that is somehow causing both externally visible defects as well as internal health problems. Edit: And this: The researchers then compiled an index of physical health by aggregating "abnormality counts" in 8 categories and by using a statistical tool called regression analysis they were able to show that intelligence was a signficant positive predictor of 6 of the 8 categories. Why would they aggregate counts into categories? Perhaps because none of the individual abnormalities correlated strongly enough with the intelligence tests? (Everyone knows you can redistrict an evenly divided state to favor a particular party...) Never mind that some of these abnormalities are conditional on lifestyle, which is already correlated with intelligence. (Who is more likely to discover they are slightly predisposed to a hernia -- a college professor or a dock worker? A kid who got beat up a lot is more likely to have a malformed nose -- is he more or less likely to have a quality education?) And it would be pretty funny if those other two categories were significant negative predictors -- e.g. people with club feet turned out to be more intelligent than the general population and hence healthier. And, of course, the sample population is heavily biased: They're all Vietnam-era vets. The study leaves out everyone whose malformities were too great for them to serve as well as everyone who was smart or well-placed enough to get out of the draft. (This may all be addressed in the paper, but I'm not paying $30 to find out.)
sdurkin 17y ago
Sweet. So let's just test everyone at birth, then discard those that don't make the cut. That way, we'll be able to keep health costs sufficiently low. Should be easy once we liberalize the laws on abortion. Hmm... but people might object to their less fit children being eliminated.... Better not tell them. We'll just let the Doctors make the decisions. They always know best anyway. After all, why else would we give them white coats? "Genetic fitness" was at the heart of every terrible ideology of the past century. Watch out for this type of thinking. Its the first step to a place you don't want to be....
- tokenadult 17y ago
  "Genetic fitness" was at the heart of every terrible ideology of the past century. Yes. And "genetic fitness" is very ill-defined here.
- mynameishere 17y ago
  "Genetic fitness" was at the heart of every terrible ideology of the past century. Except for the worst.
- KirinDave 17y ago
  > "Genetic fitness" was at the heart of every terrible ideology of the past century. Watch out for this type of thinking. Its the first step to a place you don't want to be.... Uhh, what? I can't believe no one here has challenged you on this. There are lots of terrible ideologies that have nothing to do with genetics or genetic fitness. And then there are ideologies that carry out racist agendas in the name of something vaguely genetic, but in reality are just one group of people scapegoating and killing a group that looks different. It's hard to imagine Genetic Fitness seldom plays a part in the day to day thinking of people executing pogrom. And westerners by the stadiumload have given their doctors permission to engage in genetic fitness decisions with human lives, attempting to select the most viable embryos (and increasingly as the technology matures, the embryos with the greatest chance of expressing desired traits). Heck, these doctors abort fetuses by the half-dozen at a time by a selection process that's half-chance, a bit of science and the parent's biases and preferences. It's called In Vitro Fertilization, and society hasn't come crashing around our ears just yet. What's truly dangerous and most likely to result in immediate violence is reactionary genetics = eugenics statements and people who equate any kind of genetic fitness propositions with Hitler.
Semiapies 17y ago
This strikes me as a really weird hypothesis. The idea of some over-arching "fitness factor" existing outside of the huge variety of genetic traits that apply to aspects of physical and mental ability sounds like comic-book science.

5 points by newsit 17y ago

Allocator2008 17y ago

This most likely has to do with social status in sexual selection. That is, the more "up the ladder" one is in a social group, the more attractive one is to potential mates. In early society, a female who mated with someone high up the social food chain would have her children more likely to be protected, to survive. But to be high up the social food chain, it takes smarts. So the children would inherit smarts and get the protections social status affords, and be more likely to survive. Also, from the male perspective, he would choose the healthier females he could (which translate to the "hot" females). So, between the females going for the apes with the high social status (the beginning of today's "sugar daddy" concept) for the sake of increasing the selective advantage of their children and the males wanting to choose the healthiest females (or in current parlance, "hottest" females) for the sake of having the best survival chance for the carriers of their DNA, their children, the result is that the offspring are more likely to survive as a result of healthy genes from Mom and social status protections from Dad, inheriting Dad's smarts as well because Dad had to be smart to get the social status he got. Consequently, today, we have evidently a gene set that is both healthy and smart so that more intelligent people may be generally more healthy. (The downside is that more intelligent people are more likely to self-destruct into drugs, alcohol, and generally unstable behavior, but that is another story, ha!)

tokenadult 17y ago

Oh, yeesh, a Gottfredson publication in the journal Intelligence. The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like that is the article by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.

trapper 17y ago
Can you expand on what in particular is wrong with this research? I want to hear a critique of the argument not the source.
- jcl 17y ago
  One point that strikes me is that they seem to be implying that the genetics are directly responsible for worse health, whereas all they have shown is a correlation between a few random factors and some numbers on an intelligence test. They are relying on other studies that show a correlation between health and intelligence to conclude that people with genetic factors have worse intelligence and hence worse health. But we don't know if poor health leads to poor intelligence or vice versa (or neither), so their chain of causation may not even exist. Likewise, those studies presumably applied to the general population; maybe people with club feet are an exception? Also note that the researchers gave the subjects a number of physical tests in addition to asking about the genetic factors, but they only chose to report on the correlation in mental tests; if you are trying to show a correlation between genetic factors and general health, why not use the health tests directly and not need to argue via intelligence? If it turns out that the mental tests were correlated to the factors, but the physical tests weren't, then they have actually found a group of people for which intelligence and health is not correlated, which actually disproves their theory. Arden explained that while she and her team agreed that factors such as poverty and looking after one's health also make a difference to health, this study, which the authors describe as a "proof of concept", shows there could also be a genetic factor which warrants further investigation. For the sake of argument, let's assume that poor intelligence causes poor health. It's entirely possible that the subjects' genetic factors had zero direct influence on their intelligence, but the fact that they grew up "funny-looking" caused them to have less income or to perform poorly in school, which indirectly caused the lack of intelligence. This means the problem could be corrected entirely by devoting more resources to learning or by having the subjects undergo cosmetic surgery -- a big hole in the researchers' theory of a "genetic fitness factor" that is somehow causing both externally visible defects as well as internal health problems. Edit: And this: The researchers then compiled an index of physical health by aggregating "abnormality counts" in 8 categories and by using a statistical tool called regression analysis they were able to show that intelligence was a signficant positive predictor of 6 of the 8 categories. Why would they aggregate counts into categories? Perhaps because none of the individual abnormalities correlated strongly enough with the intelligence tests? (Everyone knows you can redistrict an evenly divided state to favor a particular party...) Never mind that some of these abnormalities are conditional on lifestyle, which is already correlated with intelligence. (Who is more likely to discover they are slightly predisposed to a hernia -- a college professor or a dock worker? A kid who got beat up a lot is more likely to have a malformed nose -- is he more or less likely to have a quality education?) And it would be pretty funny if those other two categories were significant negative predictors -- e.g. people with club feet turned out to be more intelligent than the general population and hence healthier. And, of course, the sample population is heavily biased: They're all Vietnam-era vets. The study leaves out everyone whose malformities were too great for them to serve as well as everyone who was smart or well-placed enough to get out of the draft. (This may all be addressed in the paper, but I'm not paying $30 to find out.)

sdurkin 17y ago

Sweet. So let's just test everyone at birth, then discard those that don't make the cut. That way, we'll be able to keep health costs sufficiently low. Should be easy once we liberalize the laws on abortion. Hmm... but people might object to their less fit children being eliminated.... Better not tell them. We'll just let the Doctors make the decisions. They always know best anyway. After all, why else would we give them white coats? "Genetic fitness" was at the heart of every terrible ideology of the past century. Watch out for this type of thinking. Its the first step to a place you don't want to be....

tokenadult 17y ago
"Genetic fitness" was at the heart of every terrible ideology of the past century. Yes. And "genetic fitness" is very ill-defined here.
mynameishere 17y ago
"Genetic fitness" was at the heart of every terrible ideology of the past century. Except for the worst.
KirinDave 17y ago
> "Genetic fitness" was at the heart of every terrible ideology of the past century. Watch out for this type of thinking. Its the first step to a place you don't want to be.... Uhh, what? I can't believe no one here has challenged you on this. There are lots of terrible ideologies that have nothing to do with genetics or genetic fitness. And then there are ideologies that carry out racist agendas in the name of something vaguely genetic, but in reality are just one group of people scapegoating and killing a group that looks different. It's hard to imagine Genetic Fitness seldom plays a part in the day to day thinking of people executing pogrom. And westerners by the stadiumload have given their doctors permission to engage in genetic fitness decisions with human lives, attempting to select the most viable embryos (and increasingly as the technology matures, the embryos with the greatest chance of expressing desired traits). Heck, these doctors abort fetuses by the half-dozen at a time by a selection process that's half-chance, a bit of science and the parent's biases and preferences. It's called In Vitro Fertilization, and society hasn't come crashing around our ears just yet. What's truly dangerous and most likely to result in immediate violence is reactionary genetics = eugenics statements and people who equate any kind of genetic fitness propositions with Hitler.

Semiapies 17y ago

This strikes me as a really weird hypothesis. The idea of some over-arching "fitness factor" existing outside of the huge variety of genetic traits that apply to aspects of physical and mental ability sounds like comic-book science.