(no subject)

Quoth one of those list things at cracked.com, "5 Unexpected Downsides of High Intelligence":

#4. You're Less Likely to Pass On Your Genes... A 2008 national census reported that women who had dropped out of high school had the most children on average. And the more education women achieved, the fewer children they were likely to have, with the fewest children being born to women who had finished graduate school.

The explanation, according to the Census Bureau, is simple: Women wanted to finish school before they were saddled with nine months of fetus-carrying. Then, for smart people of both sexes, there's the career to think about, and promotions, and who has time for a needy mini-human during all that? And of course, IQ plays a direct role here, since it has also been found that women with lower IQs are less likely to know how to use birth control properly, leading to more unplanned pregnancies."

As someone who happens to possess a filthy huge IQ, this argument disturbs me for several reasons, the chief one being the conflation of intelligence with education. The unstated assumption is that kids drop out of school because they're stupid. However, according to a presentation online at the National High School Centre site, the reasons for dropping out are: "bright but bored", "life event", and "academic failure". Even the latter isn't automatically the result of thickness: the same presentation notes that poor schools may lack the resources to give additional help and attention to all the students who'd benefit from it - mentors, tutors, homework support, attendance monitoring, etc. So not finishing high school might be the result of being dim, but it could also be the result of being poor, having a disability, being mentally ill - or even being smart.

I also wonder how many of those "life events" were unplanned pregnancies. Countless American girls and women (and boys, and men) have been denied sex education and access to abortion, regardless of their IQs. Which comes first, the baby or the drop-out?

There are lots more objections that could be raised, but I haven't had to think hard or dig deep to find several reasons other than low IQs to explain higher childbirth rates for some American teens. idk how seriously anyone takes Cracked's articles, but the links to studies gives it a veneer of respectability it probably doesn't deserve (one of those studies is from 1978!). It veers dangerously towards the Marching Morons fallacy. If human intelligence is genetic, and dumb humans breed more than smart humans, and human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years... then how come we're still smart enough to invent stuff like the Internet? On second thoughts, don't answer that.