As the author of Miller (2000), 'The Mating Mind', I'd just encourage everybody to read the actual chapters in that book where I talk about sexual selection for intelligence, language, and creativity -- rather than relying on second- or third-hand accounts of what I wrote.
I emphasized, repeatedly, that selection for intelligence tends to happen over a period of days, weeks, and months, rather than in the first few minutes of speed-dating or video clips. Often, we're not so much selecting _for_ intelligence, as _against_ boredom and incompetence. Stupidity takes a while to reveal itself.
If you've ever dated someone who seemed beautiful and thrilling at first, but then you found their company tedious, uninspiring, and lame after a few weeks, due to a lack of intelligence, and then you broke up with them, then congratulations, you imposed sexual selection for intelligence on them.
A small percent of humans are consciously 'sapiosexual', and explicitly attracted to intelligence per se. A much larger percent seem to be turned off by lower intelligence over the longer term -- and it's the longer term that really counts in terms of pair bond formation, reproduction, and parenting.
Many thanks for the comment. Have passed this onto the author. Whilst I wait for his response, could I ask: do you think these dynamics have changed much since social media?
You write that 'A much larger percent seem to be turned off by lower intelligence over the longer term'. It wouldn't surprise me if < 105 IQ folk were turned off by the majority of > 130 folk more often than not. Would you agree? Not looked for any decent data. Just "vibez", as they say.
Recent research suggests that there are few sapioxesual humans. For each of these individuals, there may be an anti-sapiosexual human who actively avoids intelligent partners. The evidence that intelligence is selected for over a longer timeframe is lacking. The anecdotes provided do not support this claim. It is possible that a person with a low IQ may find the company of a very intelligent person unenjoyable because they may engage in activities that the less intelligent person finds boring (coding, museums, playing classical music, etc.). I suggest spending more time with individuals of varying intelligence levels and reevaluating your comments on this topic.
Observations of higher fertility among couples with lower intelligence levels do not support the idea that couples with intelligent partners are more successful.
This is true in the present day, but as you note the last century or so has been an aberration by historical standards. I'd suggest the inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility has been primarily caused by a lengthening education & career-entry pipeline eating up the reproductive window of high IQ individuals (especially for women, but to some extent for men as well.) It doesn't necessarily mean that women don't select for smarter partners when they can get them (obviously in addition to other traits, like physique, dependability, being affable, et cetera.)
Sorry, these few paragraphs of your social desirability plaining suggests reading your book be a waste.
>Often, we're not so much selecting _for_ intelligence, as _against_ boredom and incompetence.
What is any evidence this has any relevance to intelligence? You don't need weeks to determine intelligence, you can just ask other person to fill in an IQ test or get any proxies to it, takes half of hour. Just because you can express cause of breakup as low intelligence, doesn't mean it's so.
I'm of the inclination of stabilizing selection over directional selection, particularly those of the aggregate population at large.
Yes, the majority of men and women will be selecting against extreme stupidity and whatnot but it's unlikely they will be selecting for specifically intelligence. Employing intelligence is directed, purposeful action towards long-term goals. The higher the intelligence, the more utilitarian and systematic one tends to be in generality. East Asians may just outright state, sexually attractive or not, income, house, car and job, or not. Europeans might take a more modest approach but it's verifiable in terms of cues (i.e. live with parents or not, own a car or not, able to take out on expensive dates or not) which is more indirect or second-ordered in nature, hence why you have antagonist selection at the bottom rung as no intelligence usually means no wealth accumulated. However, exempting those concerns -- other things such as physical attractiveness predominate.
People interact first on the basis of proximity and shared environment. These are genetic effects that are being showcased. I choose to go to a museum. I choose to go to a private school. I choose to work in a lab. I choose to game over discord. Assortative mating applies to cognitive stratification, economic stratification and class stratification as well. Fat people tend to mate with fat people and vice versa, drug users with drug users, divorcees with divorcees. So it's more likely that it's stabilizing selection for the majority of people at large, someone fairly similar to me but not too similar, but not too distant. This is an empirical fact (fourth-cousin-relatedness most suitable). Maybe less so for incentuous cultures with lower IQ, but at least for advanced countries this has been the predominant fact.
Extreme intelligence comes with many other factors that is not sexy, a disposition of reservedness, restraint, non-spontaneity, predictability, 'more control of displayed emotionality' so there is some counteracting effect to increased intelligence. I'd say up to 120 or so IQ is the most beneficial as one can display dark triad traits + intelligence + occupational success/social mobility. If one looks at pair-bonding statistics like rate of marriage, divorce rate, etc one will see the more differentiated the male is (in the negative sense) relative to the female, the higher the chance of pair-bonding being broken. Thus a female will likely use short-term cues during ovulation (i.e. abs/going to gym/macho-ness) + a combination of self-selection factors (i.e. choice of occupation, choice of environment) with long-term cue evaluation following pair-bonding (i.e. dating) to find the most suitable mate. Since women prefer men in all aspects to be superior (i.e. height, intelligence, funny-ness, etc), the mating pools are asymmetric which can already be seen with OkCupid Data of females rating nearly over 50% the males as undesirable vs a proportional rating by males by beauty standards. Usually only the top 10% of males or so get to mate which has been how history has worked, although nowadays anyone can choose anyone to mate with although single-dom is returning as the hypergamous nature reduces the pool of 'suitable' applicants since women are also working, and educated, etc.
Given the majority of women are of average intelligence, sexual selection for intelligence is unlikely to be the highest level of inclination, hence why we observe an equilinear proportionality of correlations for the mid-section of the curve, and severe drop-off against men for the left and right-hand of the curve. If men are more selective about expending resources on women, instead of following their instinctual simp-brain mode it also reduces their success for mating vs the 90-100 IQ range who just knocks up the woman at the bar or whatever. Not to mention higher IQ men are more likely to enjoy mental stimulations (i.e. video games, pornography -- see Japan with virtual idols) with a higher risk-reward parity ratio skewed towards lower-effort lower-risk rewards or more consistent rewards (as predicated with higher IQ for risk aversion).
Nevertheless since there is an intrinsic nature for women to be hypergamous, by and large you will see families of physicians, engineers, scientists, aristocrats to be mostly preserved overtime as confirmed by a certain economic historian's research on last names in Europe through genetic distance.
Now this is anecdotal, but if the general population is more intelligent, especially like the Ashkenazi Jews or Upper-Castes of India or certain NE-asian populations in urbanville cities both males and females will likely to be equally selective for factors of physical attractiveness vs other things because they will be more likely to be capable of imagining the consequences of their off-spring, also possessing a slower life history, less immediate sexual gratification inneudo, etc.
Breakups happen differently for different genetic groups. For low IQ it can just be domestic abuse. For Europeans it can be due to boredom, non-spontaneity, complacency... for Asians it can be due to lack of financial security -- the reasons for breakup are unlikely to be explicitly for intelligence other than the preliminary 'are you a crazy X' or whatever.
"stabilizing selection over directional selection" is besides the point. You can have low SMV at extreme ranges, but peak SMV might be, at, say, either 80, 100 or 120. We are talking if selection moves average value of trait in population, not about extreme edges
I have some strong - vital - anecdotal evidence that female choice for childbearing is driven by different priorities than big city mating done mostly for stress relief.
In fact, the population of modern women are becoming two distinct groups regarding the importance of sex vs. reproduction. The mom and the wine aunt, once besties, speak a different language by 35.
To mothers, as far as their offspring goes, smartness still seems to be the most precious trait. Everything else can be solved by cosmetics later.
Maybe it's a Hungarian thing: here you can be poor and pretty, and stay poor, but if you're smart, the sky is the limit. So women chose their partners for reproduction differently.
I have an anecdotal case of a would-be choice-mother seeking a biological father through Mensa. But there's a reason why men's wrists bear Rolexes instead of IQ tattoos.
So its basically just genetic similarity theory - women prefer men similar to themselves, and women are about 95IQ on average and cluster close to the mean - so 130IQ boys are too dissimilar. Rushton is right again.
Not really sure where you got that from, and anyway we know women cluster closer towards the middle of IQ and everything. And women are not more likely to be virgins than men.. top men have many sexual encounters, women have 1-2 sexual encounters and bottom men have no sexual encounters
Of course, it could be the case that the high proportion of virgins at the tail end of the IQ spectrum is due to GST itself. The higher IQ one has, the smaller their dating pool becomes due to GST, hence they have a greater likelihood of being virgin.
-I'm pretty confident (without having read the studies) that the speed dating clips from uni students are probably a power failure. The g-loadedness of social skills/humour is low, but probably not zero.
-The thing about intelligent teens/adults not having sex or kissing is almost certainly due to self-selection, given those individuals are less impulsive. This is different from other individuals not wanting to mate with them due to them being too smart.
-Intelligence undoubtedly corresponds to educational/income attainment, but there is dysgenic selection for intelligence which is ~-.1 in men and ~-.2 in women (in NLSY97 I believe). If I had to guess religiosity, educational attainment in women, and impulsivity push the correlation downward, while income/social status pushes the relationship upward. In this sense, intelligence is being selected against, but I doubt that humans actually prefer less intelligent partners.
Oh, the problems of social science survey data. Given that most of us are entirely un_self-aware it's remarkable that careers continue to be made from asking us what drives us to the positions we assert.
I agree with Dr. Miller except I would like to bring focus to the point that women are most certainly attracted to men with WEALTH--this is a replicated finding and a human universal, and wealth of course is correlated with intelligence, with the causal direction going from intelligence to wealth (per Herrnstein & Murray). Yes, it takes intelligence to be interesting, too, and a nice house and nice car are "interesting" to women. It seems to be the most plausible reason why humans became the most intelligent species--runaway sexual selection for male wealth. Dr. Miller seems to think that that the relevant variable is the ability to make interesting conversation--maybe that would follow from the self-report data but not from evolutionary theory.
If intelligent men are more attractive for being wealthier, that doesn't mean male intelligence correlates so well with sexual success or reproductive success. There is an offspring quantity/quality trade-off, and the more capable prospective parents tend to delay reproduction and have fewer children for the sake of greater survival probability per child (Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan, 1999).
The one man you have in mind within that picture probably is not the smartest within that group, but he almost most certainly has intelligence above 100, and for that reason he had high reproductive success. So, that example is perhaps self-defeating. Yes, I agree that women are not attracted to intelligence per se. If a man has a high IQ, then it won't do him much good if he is not a capable provider. If I were to take a guess, then I would expect that every single man within that picture scores better than the average man in the dating market. If one of them wants to compete with some tall chiseled jock at a bar, then he pulls out that picture and says, "This is me, and this is Elon Musk, who fired half my coworkers at Twitter, but not me. Where do you work?"
This definitely cannot be because you can't accumulate wealth in hunter-gatherer societies, and by the point when people started being sedentary, they were already the smartest species.
Ferien, I don't disagree so much. The accumulation of material wealth among hunter gatherers is difficult but not necessary for the hypothesis, because the sexual selection is upon the male ABILITY to gain wealth (mainly hunting ability) and upon "relational wealth" (reputation and status). See for example the study by Eric Alden Smith et al., 2010, "Wealth Transmission and Inequality Among Hunter-Gatherers."
"Intelligence is one of the most attractive qualities that women look for in a partner. They are drawn to men with a good education, men who think critically, and men who can engage in interesting conversation. "
Where can I meet a woman like this? I don't think that the author of this article lives in the same universe as me.
This comment thread is old, but for the benefit of future readers, I'd like to recommend Gregory Clark's book The Son Also Rises, which looks at unique last names to trace familial success over long periods of time, finding absolutely massive effect sizes for what he deems "social competence", aka status / success (of which intelligence is probably a large factor, along with things like conscientiousness, risk appetites, and other things).
It was easily the best book I read last year in terms of being surprising, relatively well researched, and interesting.
As for it's application to the present discussion, I think that the results that it highlights would argue that within elite families, there is indeed reliable selection for intelligence down the generations. But this is likely just standard assortative mating, and high-status people selecting similar talent rather than explicitly going for outsize talent on an intelligence dimension.
Interesting article, but wrong tense. If you asked not “Do women... but "DID women select for intelligence?", then probably, yes. Across human evolutionary history, sexual selection probably did help to drive the rapid encephalisation of our species. But all traits involve fitness trade-offs. At a certain level of braininess, probably about where we are now, diminishing returns set it. Other factors also have to be taken into account in mate selection: resource potential, social status, ambition, reliability, compatibility, kindness etc, as well as physical and intellectual condition. Failure to find current utility in higher intelligence does not contradict an evolutionary dynamic.
I think we could have a much higher IQ population than we have now without reaching that "optimum point",if the average IQ were 110 or 120 we would probably be better off
I one had a boss who told me that "APPLIED knowledge is power".
In my experience, what women find attractive as it relates to intelligence is not high cognitive ability per se, but intelligence when combined with the discipline and self control to push one's cognitive energies in to applying such knowledge to improve one's own (or her) life.
That noted, practical or applied intelligence is hard to qualify. It would be interesting to see results would look if raw intelligence could be differentiated from applied intelligence.
Humans consists of multiple groups ranging from fast to slow-life history strategies.
Intelligence is a purposeful, intentful trait that increases the success rate of actions over long-term generations, which requires more cooperation, more investment, more energy. The improvement of society, the improvement of technology,
the improvement of infrastructure, the augmentation of efficiency of exploitation of energy-dense sources; these all require a large laborious force and precursors that do not pay off immediately unless you were able
to transmit this knowledge. Culturally, socially, politically, epigenetically, economically, ideologically. You invest more in the quality of your offspring, and the future generations of your offspring
and the environment of your progeny -- ultimately it is increasing the insensitivity to the environment, or inversely, it can be said to be increasing the sensitivity to the change in volatility of the environment if one is to look
at the lens of evolutionary changes of the 'innate' code transmitted through time, abstracted at higher levels into cognition, psychology, information, entropy-dynamics.
On the other hand, you could invest in energies elsewhere than the brain, strength, speed, perceptual acuity, fast maturation times -- something very favoured by low intelligence and low investment/fast life history strategies.
The majority of the population in the developed countries fall into two extremes, because reproductive fitness is higher in the middle due to evolutionary mismatches of society with present civilizational capacities. (i.e. Us
deriving pleasure from sugar, and taking an overabundance of it even when we don't need it due to it benefiting us in the past with scarcity of calories; that is we are always delayed by n+1 generations of delayed effects for selection
or even more if the generational times/gestation times/maturation times/time until reproduction are longer in-between generations, especially on alleles within populations).
You produce more offspring today all because it feels good to have sex. You moderately care about your offspring, but kick them out of the house once they reach age 18. (European-Nordic) vs staying in an intergenerational household
to raise offspring and invest (NE-Asian) -- not necessarily due to economic necessity (i.e. overcrowding in India). One can certainly derive a series of notable characteristics that most women prefer from looking at
teen fiction, romantic films/movies, animes/mangas and whatnot media (and yes Machavillian men that are sexually attractive (of high genetic-fitness age) tend to re-occur throughout time in society).
Regardless, humans organize themselves into castes whether they like it or not. There is some violation of the Herdy-Weinburg equilibrum with gene-flow due to the reduction in borders nowadays, but for the most part people remain
distinctive genetic clusters. The reason for this is reasoned as follows. Geographically and demographically, historically humans were separated much more, and the energetic-costs to travel/traverse/start new colonies were pretty high,
so you basically lived your entire life in a village (although not too-different from modern days equivalent in mega-cities). The alleles were more isolated, so outsiders (ethnocentrism) were seen as less favourable as Dawkin said
you are a representation of your genetic interests within that society you reside in. While outbreeding might contribute to social altruism in certain Nordic groups, with the social contract being the norm, this is not an ubiqitous
attitude shared everywhere (i.e. the Chinese, Ashkhenazi Jews, Indians). Other groups are more ethnocentric with more in-breeding, hence stabilizating selection. If you inter-mingled enough, you did form hybridized peoples but you
see these people are usually ostrachized or relegated to less economically successful areas in every country when they are a minority, because they were displaced by the native populations that conquered there, with the exception
of highly traversive populations (i.e. Chinese in Africa or Indonesia).
Sex is a mechanism to interchange genes, and is ubiqitous in nature because there is variation in the environment and responding to variations in the environment is a necessary component of existence, both at the fast-time frame levels
and generational-time frame levels (eons). However, you can pursue chaotic strategies (many mutations) or stable strategies (less mutations, high conservation/conserved sequences, similar genetic architectures). Humans
are mostly of the latter nature, therefore this lower-ordered process is implicated up the chain (i.e. mitochrondria-Krebs cycle, universal emotional-response drives, differentiated sensitivities of neuro-receptors) onto human societies.
Thus conserved cultures, conserved interests tend to fare better in stable environments that are not changing. (i.e. farmers possessing high work-ethic attitudes/tolerance for manual labour) and vice versa. There is a trade-off
for loss of transmissibility of information, loss of fidelity of information that is recouped/balanced with gain of information (i.e. change in industrial organization, change in social hierachies), change in mating strategies.
The core principle is not that SMV is a two-dimensional gaussian distribution of just x,y,z variables and that that sole determinant of observable offspring is that of a sexual dimorphic process that is unilaterally traversing to a coincident value of higher IQ; it is the fact that there is latent processes at work to select for intrinsic inclinations that are conserved overtime by
the environment which may or may not be beneficial to the present-time frame and for which modus operandi (i.e. psychological architecture, emotional processing, sociodemographic tendencies, sociocultural tendencies) are representations
of these lower-level abstracted processes acting in concertion at higher levels of organization of life (i.e. religions abandoning harsher punitions in favour of forgiving --> similar equivalence to AI agents developing 'fitness' functions to Tit-for-tat with contrition/forgiveness as higher value than Tit-for-tat only).
As the author of Miller (2000), 'The Mating Mind', I'd just encourage everybody to read the actual chapters in that book where I talk about sexual selection for intelligence, language, and creativity -- rather than relying on second- or third-hand accounts of what I wrote.
I emphasized, repeatedly, that selection for intelligence tends to happen over a period of days, weeks, and months, rather than in the first few minutes of speed-dating or video clips. Often, we're not so much selecting _for_ intelligence, as _against_ boredom and incompetence. Stupidity takes a while to reveal itself.
If you've ever dated someone who seemed beautiful and thrilling at first, but then you found their company tedious, uninspiring, and lame after a few weeks, due to a lack of intelligence, and then you broke up with them, then congratulations, you imposed sexual selection for intelligence on them.
A small percent of humans are consciously 'sapiosexual', and explicitly attracted to intelligence per se. A much larger percent seem to be turned off by lower intelligence over the longer term -- and it's the longer term that really counts in terms of pair bond formation, reproduction, and parenting.
Many thanks for the comment. Have passed this onto the author. Whilst I wait for his response, could I ask: do you think these dynamics have changed much since social media?
You write that 'A much larger percent seem to be turned off by lower intelligence over the longer term'. It wouldn't surprise me if < 105 IQ folk were turned off by the majority of > 130 folk more often than not. Would you agree? Not looked for any decent data. Just "vibez", as they say.
Recent research suggests that there are few sapioxesual humans. For each of these individuals, there may be an anti-sapiosexual human who actively avoids intelligent partners. The evidence that intelligence is selected for over a longer timeframe is lacking. The anecdotes provided do not support this claim. It is possible that a person with a low IQ may find the company of a very intelligent person unenjoyable because they may engage in activities that the less intelligent person finds boring (coding, museums, playing classical music, etc.). I suggest spending more time with individuals of varying intelligence levels and reevaluating your comments on this topic.
Observations of higher fertility among couples with lower intelligence levels do not support the idea that couples with intelligent partners are more successful.
This is true in the present day, but as you note the last century or so has been an aberration by historical standards. I'd suggest the inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility has been primarily caused by a lengthening education & career-entry pipeline eating up the reproductive window of high IQ individuals (especially for women, but to some extent for men as well.) It doesn't necessarily mean that women don't select for smarter partners when they can get them (obviously in addition to other traits, like physique, dependability, being affable, et cetera.)
You emphasize? Do you have data?
Sorry, these few paragraphs of your social desirability plaining suggests reading your book be a waste.
>Often, we're not so much selecting _for_ intelligence, as _against_ boredom and incompetence.
What is any evidence this has any relevance to intelligence? You don't need weeks to determine intelligence, you can just ask other person to fill in an IQ test or get any proxies to it, takes half of hour. Just because you can express cause of breakup as low intelligence, doesn't mean it's so.
I'm of the inclination of stabilizing selection over directional selection, particularly those of the aggregate population at large.
Yes, the majority of men and women will be selecting against extreme stupidity and whatnot but it's unlikely they will be selecting for specifically intelligence. Employing intelligence is directed, purposeful action towards long-term goals. The higher the intelligence, the more utilitarian and systematic one tends to be in generality. East Asians may just outright state, sexually attractive or not, income, house, car and job, or not. Europeans might take a more modest approach but it's verifiable in terms of cues (i.e. live with parents or not, own a car or not, able to take out on expensive dates or not) which is more indirect or second-ordered in nature, hence why you have antagonist selection at the bottom rung as no intelligence usually means no wealth accumulated. However, exempting those concerns -- other things such as physical attractiveness predominate.
People interact first on the basis of proximity and shared environment. These are genetic effects that are being showcased. I choose to go to a museum. I choose to go to a private school. I choose to work in a lab. I choose to game over discord. Assortative mating applies to cognitive stratification, economic stratification and class stratification as well. Fat people tend to mate with fat people and vice versa, drug users with drug users, divorcees with divorcees. So it's more likely that it's stabilizing selection for the majority of people at large, someone fairly similar to me but not too similar, but not too distant. This is an empirical fact (fourth-cousin-relatedness most suitable). Maybe less so for incentuous cultures with lower IQ, but at least for advanced countries this has been the predominant fact.
Extreme intelligence comes with many other factors that is not sexy, a disposition of reservedness, restraint, non-spontaneity, predictability, 'more control of displayed emotionality' so there is some counteracting effect to increased intelligence. I'd say up to 120 or so IQ is the most beneficial as one can display dark triad traits + intelligence + occupational success/social mobility. If one looks at pair-bonding statistics like rate of marriage, divorce rate, etc one will see the more differentiated the male is (in the negative sense) relative to the female, the higher the chance of pair-bonding being broken. Thus a female will likely use short-term cues during ovulation (i.e. abs/going to gym/macho-ness) + a combination of self-selection factors (i.e. choice of occupation, choice of environment) with long-term cue evaluation following pair-bonding (i.e. dating) to find the most suitable mate. Since women prefer men in all aspects to be superior (i.e. height, intelligence, funny-ness, etc), the mating pools are asymmetric which can already be seen with OkCupid Data of females rating nearly over 50% the males as undesirable vs a proportional rating by males by beauty standards. Usually only the top 10% of males or so get to mate which has been how history has worked, although nowadays anyone can choose anyone to mate with although single-dom is returning as the hypergamous nature reduces the pool of 'suitable' applicants since women are also working, and educated, etc.
Given the majority of women are of average intelligence, sexual selection for intelligence is unlikely to be the highest level of inclination, hence why we observe an equilinear proportionality of correlations for the mid-section of the curve, and severe drop-off against men for the left and right-hand of the curve. If men are more selective about expending resources on women, instead of following their instinctual simp-brain mode it also reduces their success for mating vs the 90-100 IQ range who just knocks up the woman at the bar or whatever. Not to mention higher IQ men are more likely to enjoy mental stimulations (i.e. video games, pornography -- see Japan with virtual idols) with a higher risk-reward parity ratio skewed towards lower-effort lower-risk rewards or more consistent rewards (as predicated with higher IQ for risk aversion).
Nevertheless since there is an intrinsic nature for women to be hypergamous, by and large you will see families of physicians, engineers, scientists, aristocrats to be mostly preserved overtime as confirmed by a certain economic historian's research on last names in Europe through genetic distance.
Now this is anecdotal, but if the general population is more intelligent, especially like the Ashkenazi Jews or Upper-Castes of India or certain NE-asian populations in urbanville cities both males and females will likely to be equally selective for factors of physical attractiveness vs other things because they will be more likely to be capable of imagining the consequences of their off-spring, also possessing a slower life history, less immediate sexual gratification inneudo, etc.
Breakups happen differently for different genetic groups. For low IQ it can just be domestic abuse. For Europeans it can be due to boredom, non-spontaneity, complacency... for Asians it can be due to lack of financial security -- the reasons for breakup are unlikely to be explicitly for intelligence other than the preliminary 'are you a crazy X' or whatever.
Thanks for taking the time to write this.
"stabilizing selection over directional selection" is besides the point. You can have low SMV at extreme ranges, but peak SMV might be, at, say, either 80, 100 or 120. We are talking if selection moves average value of trait in population, not about extreme edges
There's sex and there's reproduction.
I have some strong - vital - anecdotal evidence that female choice for childbearing is driven by different priorities than big city mating done mostly for stress relief.
In fact, the population of modern women are becoming two distinct groups regarding the importance of sex vs. reproduction. The mom and the wine aunt, once besties, speak a different language by 35.
To mothers, as far as their offspring goes, smartness still seems to be the most precious trait. Everything else can be solved by cosmetics later.
Maybe it's a Hungarian thing: here you can be poor and pretty, and stay poor, but if you're smart, the sky is the limit. So women chose their partners for reproduction differently.
I have an anecdotal case of a would-be choice-mother seeking a biological father through Mensa. But there's a reason why men's wrists bear Rolexes instead of IQ tattoos.
Maybe it’s a Hungarian thing.
Thus the Manhattan Project's Hungarian "men from Mars".
So its basically just genetic similarity theory - women prefer men similar to themselves, and women are about 95IQ on average and cluster close to the mean - so 130IQ boys are too dissimilar. Rushton is right again.
If I'm reading the plot correctly, it isn't the case: women are more likely to be virgins at edges of bell curve.
Not really sure where you got that from, and anyway we know women cluster closer towards the middle of IQ and everything. And women are not more likely to be virgins than men.. top men have many sexual encounters, women have 1-2 sexual encounters and bottom men have no sexual encounters
I'm getting this from the plot in the post (there's only one).
The relative odds of [ever had sex] at rightmost IQ range is .22 for women and .32 for men.
If it was simple "a woman prefer men with IQ close to her own" we'd see reverse pattern.
Yes, it's true that we know SD of IQ is women is lower, however it doesn't manifest in this plot
ah okay yes, you are right, but at the same time women are far less likely to be at the edges of the bell curve, so maybe GST does play a role still
Of course, it could be the case that the high proportion of virgins at the tail end of the IQ spectrum is due to GST itself. The higher IQ one has, the smaller their dating pool becomes due to GST, hence they have a greater likelihood of being virgin.
-I'm pretty confident (without having read the studies) that the speed dating clips from uni students are probably a power failure. The g-loadedness of social skills/humour is low, but probably not zero.
-The thing about intelligent teens/adults not having sex or kissing is almost certainly due to self-selection, given those individuals are less impulsive. This is different from other individuals not wanting to mate with them due to them being too smart.
-Intelligence undoubtedly corresponds to educational/income attainment, but there is dysgenic selection for intelligence which is ~-.1 in men and ~-.2 in women (in NLSY97 I believe). If I had to guess religiosity, educational attainment in women, and impulsivity push the correlation downward, while income/social status pushes the relationship upward. In this sense, intelligence is being selected against, but I doubt that humans actually prefer less intelligent partners.
Oh, the problems of social science survey data. Given that most of us are entirely un_self-aware it's remarkable that careers continue to be made from asking us what drives us to the positions we assert.
I agree with Dr. Miller except I would like to bring focus to the point that women are most certainly attracted to men with WEALTH--this is a replicated finding and a human universal, and wealth of course is correlated with intelligence, with the causal direction going from intelligence to wealth (per Herrnstein & Murray). Yes, it takes intelligence to be interesting, too, and a nice house and nice car are "interesting" to women. It seems to be the most plausible reason why humans became the most intelligent species--runaway sexual selection for male wealth. Dr. Miller seems to think that that the relevant variable is the ability to make interesting conversation--maybe that would follow from the self-report data but not from evolutionary theory.
If intelligent men are more attractive for being wealthier, that doesn't mean male intelligence correlates so well with sexual success or reproductive success. There is an offspring quantity/quality trade-off, and the more capable prospective parents tend to delay reproduction and have fewer children for the sake of greater survival probability per child (Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan, 1999).
The one man you have in mind within that picture probably is not the smartest within that group, but he almost most certainly has intelligence above 100, and for that reason he had high reproductive success. So, that example is perhaps self-defeating. Yes, I agree that women are not attracted to intelligence per se. If a man has a high IQ, then it won't do him much good if he is not a capable provider. If I were to take a guess, then I would expect that every single man within that picture scores better than the average man in the dating market. If one of them wants to compete with some tall chiseled jock at a bar, then he pulls out that picture and says, "This is me, and this is Elon Musk, who fired half my coworkers at Twitter, but not me. Where do you work?"
>runaway sexual selection for male wealth.
This definitely cannot be because you can't accumulate wealth in hunter-gatherer societies, and by the point when people started being sedentary, they were already the smartest species.
Ferien, I don't disagree so much. The accumulation of material wealth among hunter gatherers is difficult but not necessary for the hypothesis, because the sexual selection is upon the male ABILITY to gain wealth (mainly hunting ability) and upon "relational wealth" (reputation and status). See for example the study by Eric Alden Smith et al., 2010, "Wealth Transmission and Inequality Among Hunter-Gatherers."
I like your coolness here & have consequently followed that Kierkegaard stack you read. Just saying
Yes, I recommend it.
"Intelligence is one of the most attractive qualities that women look for in a partner. They are drawn to men with a good education, men who think critically, and men who can engage in interesting conversation. "
Where can I meet a woman like this? I don't think that the author of this article lives in the same universe as me.
This comment thread is old, but for the benefit of future readers, I'd like to recommend Gregory Clark's book The Son Also Rises, which looks at unique last names to trace familial success over long periods of time, finding absolutely massive effect sizes for what he deems "social competence", aka status / success (of which intelligence is probably a large factor, along with things like conscientiousness, risk appetites, and other things).
It was easily the best book I read last year in terms of being surprising, relatively well researched, and interesting.
As for it's application to the present discussion, I think that the results that it highlights would argue that within elite families, there is indeed reliable selection for intelligence down the generations. But this is likely just standard assortative mating, and high-status people selecting similar talent rather than explicitly going for outsize talent on an intelligence dimension.
Interesting article, but wrong tense. If you asked not “Do women... but "DID women select for intelligence?", then probably, yes. Across human evolutionary history, sexual selection probably did help to drive the rapid encephalisation of our species. But all traits involve fitness trade-offs. At a certain level of braininess, probably about where we are now, diminishing returns set it. Other factors also have to be taken into account in mate selection: resource potential, social status, ambition, reliability, compatibility, kindness etc, as well as physical and intellectual condition. Failure to find current utility in higher intelligence does not contradict an evolutionary dynamic.
I think we could have a much higher IQ population than we have now without reaching that "optimum point",if the average IQ were 110 or 120 we would probably be better off
Very interesting article, followed
I one had a boss who told me that "APPLIED knowledge is power".
In my experience, what women find attractive as it relates to intelligence is not high cognitive ability per se, but intelligence when combined with the discipline and self control to push one's cognitive energies in to applying such knowledge to improve one's own (or her) life.
That noted, practical or applied intelligence is hard to qualify. It would be interesting to see results would look if raw intelligence could be differentiated from applied intelligence.
It is not besides the point.
Humans consists of multiple groups ranging from fast to slow-life history strategies.
Intelligence is a purposeful, intentful trait that increases the success rate of actions over long-term generations, which requires more cooperation, more investment, more energy. The improvement of society, the improvement of technology,
the improvement of infrastructure, the augmentation of efficiency of exploitation of energy-dense sources; these all require a large laborious force and precursors that do not pay off immediately unless you were able
to transmit this knowledge. Culturally, socially, politically, epigenetically, economically, ideologically. You invest more in the quality of your offspring, and the future generations of your offspring
and the environment of your progeny -- ultimately it is increasing the insensitivity to the environment, or inversely, it can be said to be increasing the sensitivity to the change in volatility of the environment if one is to look
at the lens of evolutionary changes of the 'innate' code transmitted through time, abstracted at higher levels into cognition, psychology, information, entropy-dynamics.
On the other hand, you could invest in energies elsewhere than the brain, strength, speed, perceptual acuity, fast maturation times -- something very favoured by low intelligence and low investment/fast life history strategies.
The majority of the population in the developed countries fall into two extremes, because reproductive fitness is higher in the middle due to evolutionary mismatches of society with present civilizational capacities. (i.e. Us
deriving pleasure from sugar, and taking an overabundance of it even when we don't need it due to it benefiting us in the past with scarcity of calories; that is we are always delayed by n+1 generations of delayed effects for selection
or even more if the generational times/gestation times/maturation times/time until reproduction are longer in-between generations, especially on alleles within populations).
You produce more offspring today all because it feels good to have sex. You moderately care about your offspring, but kick them out of the house once they reach age 18. (European-Nordic) vs staying in an intergenerational household
to raise offspring and invest (NE-Asian) -- not necessarily due to economic necessity (i.e. overcrowding in India). One can certainly derive a series of notable characteristics that most women prefer from looking at
teen fiction, romantic films/movies, animes/mangas and whatnot media (and yes Machavillian men that are sexually attractive (of high genetic-fitness age) tend to re-occur throughout time in society).
Regardless, humans organize themselves into castes whether they like it or not. There is some violation of the Herdy-Weinburg equilibrum with gene-flow due to the reduction in borders nowadays, but for the most part people remain
distinctive genetic clusters. The reason for this is reasoned as follows. Geographically and demographically, historically humans were separated much more, and the energetic-costs to travel/traverse/start new colonies were pretty high,
so you basically lived your entire life in a village (although not too-different from modern days equivalent in mega-cities). The alleles were more isolated, so outsiders (ethnocentrism) were seen as less favourable as Dawkin said
you are a representation of your genetic interests within that society you reside in. While outbreeding might contribute to social altruism in certain Nordic groups, with the social contract being the norm, this is not an ubiqitous
attitude shared everywhere (i.e. the Chinese, Ashkhenazi Jews, Indians). Other groups are more ethnocentric with more in-breeding, hence stabilizating selection. If you inter-mingled enough, you did form hybridized peoples but you
see these people are usually ostrachized or relegated to less economically successful areas in every country when they are a minority, because they were displaced by the native populations that conquered there, with the exception
of highly traversive populations (i.e. Chinese in Africa or Indonesia).
Sex is a mechanism to interchange genes, and is ubiqitous in nature because there is variation in the environment and responding to variations in the environment is a necessary component of existence, both at the fast-time frame levels
and generational-time frame levels (eons). However, you can pursue chaotic strategies (many mutations) or stable strategies (less mutations, high conservation/conserved sequences, similar genetic architectures). Humans
are mostly of the latter nature, therefore this lower-ordered process is implicated up the chain (i.e. mitochrondria-Krebs cycle, universal emotional-response drives, differentiated sensitivities of neuro-receptors) onto human societies.
Thus conserved cultures, conserved interests tend to fare better in stable environments that are not changing. (i.e. farmers possessing high work-ethic attitudes/tolerance for manual labour) and vice versa. There is a trade-off
for loss of transmissibility of information, loss of fidelity of information that is recouped/balanced with gain of information (i.e. change in industrial organization, change in social hierachies), change in mating strategies.
The core principle is not that SMV is a two-dimensional gaussian distribution of just x,y,z variables and that that sole determinant of observable offspring is that of a sexual dimorphic process that is unilaterally traversing to a coincident value of higher IQ; it is the fact that there is latent processes at work to select for intrinsic inclinations that are conserved overtime by
the environment which may or may not be beneficial to the present-time frame and for which modus operandi (i.e. psychological architecture, emotional processing, sociodemographic tendencies, sociocultural tendencies) are representations
of these lower-level abstracted processes acting in concertion at higher levels of organization of life (i.e. religions abandoning harsher punitions in favour of forgiving --> similar equivalence to AI agents developing 'fitness' functions to Tit-for-tat with contrition/forgiveness as higher value than Tit-for-tat only).