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You can probably guess it from context, but I had to look this up to be sure, so for the benefit of others: assortative mating is when you have kids with other
by gliese1337 12y ago
You can probably guess it from context, but I had to look this up to be sure, so for the benefit of others: assortative mating is when you have kids with other people similar to you, rather than selecting mates randomly. In other words, in this case, people with high intelligence tend to marry other people with high intelligence, and people with low intelligence marry other people with low intelligence. This causes the variance in the distribution of intelligence to steadily increase, rather than everybody evening out over a few generations.
- phkahler 12y agoAnd if a society values intelligence, they should encourage smarter people to reproduce and offer as much birth control as possible to less smart people. Following this line of reasoning and policy is sure to ignite all kinds of flame wars ;-)
- fizixer 12y agoAnd it sure did ignite flame wars and the topic is not openly pursued anymore in scientific circles, regardless of how objective it might be. Luckily we don't have to go there. Technology is going to be the great equalizer, and might end up offering you off-the-shelf intelligence upgrade (I'm talking about a time-frame of next 30-80 years).
- ArkyBeagle 12y agoSo long as people have to compete in the workplace, then the resulting equilibrium from everybody having an artificially extended intelligence will probably be ( according to Arnold Kling ) like the Vickies and Thetes in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age".
- nesyt 12y agoI've never read that, what is the resulting equilibrium?
- JetSpiegel 12y agoLet's just say endings are not Stephenson's strong point.
- ArkyBeagle 12y agoI have yet to read it myself :) Dr. Kling is using the book as a template/metaphor more than as a specific proscriptive. But I've seen this myself in the wind as various crises have held forth since 1973 ( when I was first old enough to ask questions about what was going on ). http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/vickies-and-thetes/ http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/vickies-and-thetes/ http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/experts-surveyed-on-the-future-of-work/ http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/experts-surveyed-on-the-futu...
- defen 12y ago> the topic is not openly pursued anymore in scientific circles http://edge.org/response-detail/23838 http://edge.org/response-detail/23838
- Ygg2 12y agoI'm not sure IQ is really that great in the grand scheme of things. Don't get me wrong it's good, but IQ wouldn't help us much if managed to screw the environment beyond our ability to repair it. Also that article reeks of alarmism.
- ArkyBeagle 12y agoIt's called eugenics and it's very bad. At the very least it suffers from this self-referential craziness that nearly guarantees bad results. People are economically unproductive because the economy slowly gets more and more hostile to more and more people. Tyler Cowan and others call this problem "Zero Marginal Product Workers".
- jiggy2011 12y agoThe problem is that smart people tend to earn more, thus the children tend to cost them more both in terms of opportunity cost (hours away from work) and actual cost (more likely to consider things like private school as essential). To incentive them you would need to start giving already wealthy people quite significant tax breaks etc.
- rcoder 12y agoThis is the silliest argument for why intelligence would be negatively correlated with number of children. FWIW, the original article very much did not assert that assertion; reproductive success (meaning having any children at all survive the parents) in fact may be positively correlated because the social status of richer/more intelligent parents translates to higher survival rates for their offspring. Regardless, while the absolute cost of raising children may be higher for high-income families, the share of their total income that represents is much lower. Someone earning minimum wage will struggle to support even one child's basic food, clothing, and shelter; their counterpart making $1M a year could easily afford private school, childcare, and the best possible opportunities for a family of 3-4 children.
- jiggy2011 12y agoMy comment doesn't argue that intelligence is negatively correlated with having children, it argues that it is difficult to incentivise intelligent people to have children. Although looking at figures for 2010 it does seem that there is a negative correlation between income and number of births (at least in the US). http://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fami... Survival rate is unlikely to be highly correlated with income in a first world country because even the poor have relatively good healthcare. The group most likely to have children are those earning $10,000 per year or less, probably because at that income level the state will pay most of the costs associated with child rearing. In fact in some cases having children might make a person better off financially due to higher priority for welfare or public housing etc.
- tjradcliffe 12y agoThere is an interesting and much-neglected corollary to the heritability of intelligence, which is that we are part of the least intelligent generation of humanity that has ever lived. This follows from the two conditions: 1) intelligence is at least somewhat heritable (empirically true, according to the article) and 2) intelligence is positively correlated with reproductive success (plausible give humans seem to have been selected for it) The conclusion follows from the way world population has exploded in the past 250 years, increasing roughly ten-fold in twenty or twenty-five generations. That increase equates to "zero selective pressure": basically anybody could breed successfully, and they did (including my ancestors, some of whom occupied the more stagnant and brackish depths of the gene pool...) So up until 1750 or so intelligence was being selected for, generation after generation. After that time, there was no pressure and the many small effects that this article documents as underlying the heritability of intelligence (with no single gene showing as much as a 1% effect on the overall outcome) would happily carry us all on a random walk across the landscape, creating engineers in some parts and political partisans in others. This realization makes particularly funny the various organizations that have at times promoted Nobelists etc as pinnacles of intelligence (William Shockly, inventor of the transistor, was heavily involved in this kind of thing). Nobelists are certainly bright, but it seems more likely you'd find the most intelligent people amongst still-extant stone age tribes, whose pre-industrial life-style would still subject them to selective pressures long released in the more-developed world.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> Nobelists are certainly bright, but it seems more likely you'd find the most intelligent people amongst still-extant stone age tribes, whose pre-industrial life-style would still subject them to selective pressures long released in the more-developed world. This conclusion is only justifiable if (1) the population of "stone age tribes" and the part of the world where those selective pressures have been released (because people are indivisible units beyond a certain point), and (2) if intelligence was fully determined by genetics rather than merely having some heritable component. If there are important environmental factors in intelligence to which modern technology can positively contributed, and there are a lot more people living with modern technology, then its quite possible that the mean, median, and max realized intelligence would be higher in the modern part of the world than in "stone age tribes", even if the latter have more genetic benefit from pro-intelligence selective pressure and thus a higher mean/median genetic intelligence capacity.
- eastbayjake 12y agoAssortative mating -- among other things -- was one of the "problems" identified by Charles Murray in his book Coming Apart as a cause of greater inequality in American society[1]. As people "stick to their own kind", there are fewer opportunities for both economic and cognitive mobility: in the past, when marriage was determined by other factors, it was more likely that a highly intelligent person might have children with a much less intelligent person. That's increasingly no longer the case. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murray-examines-the-white-working-class-in-coming-apart.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murra...
- matoffk 12y agoInteresting, but assortative mating is not a new phenomenon in the history of mankind. If anything, its impact has probably decreased significantly over the past centuries and decades. This makes it more difficult to take such explanations for growing income inequality at face value.
- eastbayjake 12y agoLet's put it this way: a "meritocratic" society has made intelligence inextricable from wealth and power in a way that was not true 100 years ago or earlier. If you were very smart in 1900, whether you worked in a factory or ran the factory was determined by your family's wealth and influence, and that also determined your pool of available mates. So instead of having a society where people practice assortative mating based on non-hereditary factors (wealth and power) people are mating based on intelligence and passing it onto their children. (I suppose familiar wealth and power is "hereditary" to a degree, but not with the durability of intelligence.)
- hackuser 12y ago> a "meritocratic" society has made intelligence inextricable from wealth and power in a way that was not true 100 years ago or earlier An interesting hypothesis. 1) Are the U.S. economy and society more meritocratic than they were 100 years ago? I've seen research saying social mobility has decreased recently (it didn't say about over 100 years) and is lower than in Europe, for example. Also, at least some research says that access to higher education depends significantly on the wealth of your parents; elite universities (and others) have problems attracting and graduating poor, smart students. 2) The value of specific cognitive skills varies over time. If 100 years ago, you had great ability to translate problems into efficient data structures and logic, I'm not sure how much economic value you would have. 50 years from now, I'm not sure how many humans will be writing code. 3) There is far more to capability than intelligence. For example, there are very smart people who, due to lack of emotional or interpersonal skills, don't produce much.
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- sfbsfbsfb 12y agoI first saw this concept in the context of intelligence in "The Bell Curve" by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1996). They suggested the process is accelerating dramatically with development of situations that make it easier for intelligent people to find each other: the movement of the population from the farm to cities, higher education, improved communications and less restricted travel. I would not be surprised if online dating sites are also playing a role. Once you start thinking about this in the context of genetics, matings and the potential for a survival advantage and increased quality of life leading to further segregation you wonder if this does not have the potential to eventually result in the development of a new species?! I would be interesting to know if the IQ "density" is significantly altered in certain communities in northern California, Boston, NY, etc. associated with industries selecting for high IQ workers. [Edit]Just amused myself thinking of the Silicon Valley crew as participants in a breeding experiment.
- gliese1337 12y agoHaving now learned the terminology, assortative mating could indeed lead to speciation in the general case; it's just a special case of sexual selection. I find it highly unlikely that that will happen with human intelligence, though (despite the fact that it's been used in fiction more than once). The reason is that there's a limit to how big the variance can get- it doesn't grow forever, it grows until limited by other factors (i.e., there are only so many intelligence-promoting alleles that you can possibly have). It would take intentional segregation to cut off all gene flow between the upper and lower halves of the intelligence Bell curve, thus allowing other differences to pile up between the populations, to cause speciation. And as noted elsethread, that's called eugenics and generally frowned upon in polite society.
- sfbsfbsfb 12y agoInterestingly, the current mating and segregation trends, to the extent they exist, appear to be completely "natural" and lacking in premeditation. Can't help but wonder if modern humans are not the result of a process that left the Neanderthals ( pre-modern humans, whoever they were) behind. I'm no expert, but I don't think a complete lack of gene flow between groups is thought to be required for the process of speciation.
- fossuser 12y agoI would suspect that physical looks/features would throw a wrench into this - or at least correct things a bit.
- trhway 12y agoyep, until gap becomes too big so the species divergence begins as physical looks/features play role for both processes - help keep a species together as well as to help distinguish between subspecies once the divergence has started thus speeding up the divergence.
- peripitea 12y agoI don't follow. How would that affect this phenomenon? Given that the cited correlation refers strictly to intelligence, looks (and for that matter, all other factors) are presumably already accounted for.
- fossuser 12y agoIt was more a response to the parent comment. I was suggesting that an intelligent person may choose a mate that's less intelligent because they're prettier which would help resist some of the divergence. They mention assortative mating is greater for intelligence compared to physical aspects like height and weight, but 'prettiness' is a more subjective harder to quantify measure that I would guess plays a larger role in mate selection than just height and weight. This is ignoring the fact that height and weight are probably opposite anyway (women wanting taller men, men wanting shorter women) - so there are some issues there too.
- cle 12y agoFrom a cursory glance at this post, I don't see how your conclusion follows. I'd believe it if I saw the model and some data that supports it. It depends on how populations along the intelligence distribution reproduce, and what the variance of intelligence is of offspring along the continuum. If everyone reproduces at the same rate, and the intelligence variance of offspring is constant across the population, then I would expect the intelligence distribution of the overall population to remain the same. It seems like, given those constraints (which may or may not be true), the variance would remain the same--neither evening out nor diverging. Let me know if I'm mistaken...honestly I've only read part of the article and I only have a lay understanding of this stuff.