jacob wrote:Since the heredity of intelligence has been studied in detail, there's really no need to speculate.
IQ in children is about 50% hereditary (shows a 0.5 correlation with the parents).
IQ in offspring regresses towards the mean.
The degree of stimulation in the environment (growing up) accounts for the rest.
...
NITPICK TIME!!!
In an R-squared framework a 0.5 correlation coefficient accounts for only 25% of the variation. So how does someone interpret 50% heredity from that?
One cannot combine numbers that way.
So if the parents are 120, then the first 60 IQ points come from the parents?
Naaaaah... Doesn't sound right.
It's not a useful piece of information really.
You can say that IQ in children has a correlation coefficient of 0.5 with that of the parents and leave it at that. How you interpret that number depends on what you'd like to say it seems.
Works great on population control so long as "winging it" is equal opportunity. Where women are allowed to "wing it" by becoming educated, work for pay and have access to birth control, you don't have a population problem -- or at least not the one you thought you had.
BRUTE wrote:crazy idea: what if humans don't usually have well thought-out reasons for their actions and just wing it, including how many kids to have?
crazy idea: Abortion rights not only guaranteed, but REQUIRED for all first time pregnancies.
Dragline wrote:Works great on population control so long as "winging it" is equal opportunity.
turns out the free market is best at figuring out the right population size. who would've thought.
Umm - no, that's not what I said at all and the data is decidedly against that notion. It's about equality of gender, regardless of the market system involved. Where there is no equality of gender, a free market system is likely to produce even more children as fuel for growth and as a substitute for social safety nets. This is why the lowest fertility rates are found in the socialist democracies of Europe and places like Cuba. (The only lower rates are found in small, crowded city-states or islands like Singapore or Macau). In the developed countries, higher fertility rates are found in places with more open markets like the U.K. and U.S., or in France where they essentially pay people to have children. Highest fertility rates are found in countries with lots of poverty and gender inequality.