The reproduction of intelligence

Meisenberg, Gerhard

doi:10.1016/j.intell.2010.01.003

Cited by 60 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…The results presented here replicate prior findings showing that in the U.S., higher intelligence and higher education are associated with fewer offspring for both men and women (Hopcroft, 2006;Kanazawa, 2012;Lynn & Van Court, 2004;Meisenberg, 2010;Reeve, Lyerly, & Peach, 2013). Further, the results replicate earlier findings showing a sex difference in this trend such that the negative associations of intelligence and education on predicted number of offspring are somewhat reduced for men.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Sex differences in the relationship between status and number of offspring in the contemporary U.S.

Hopcroft

2015

Evolution and Human Behavior

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Sex differences in the relationship between status and number of offspring in the contemporary U.S.

Hopcroft

2015

Evolution and Human Behavior

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“…2A that the PGSs for height and education predict number of children ever born in the overall sample, these associations are consistent across all birth cohorts in this study. Thus, although there may be positive selection on height and slight negative selection on additive measures of the genetic architecture of education, these are not accelerating (32).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…One disconcerting possibility is that recent trends in health and illness may be partially driven by negative selection on the genotypic level. This "dysgenic" theory has been framed primarily with respect to cognitive ability (32). To address this question, we test for associations between the same PGSs and number of children ever born and whether such associations are changing over the same time period as our marriage analysis.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Assortative mating and differential fertility by phenotype and genotype across the 20th century

Conley

Laidley

Belsky

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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This study asks two related questions about the shifting landscape of marriage and reproduction in US society over the course of the last century with respect to a range of health and behavioral phenotypes and their associated genetic architecture: (i) Has assortment on measured genetic factors influencing reproductive and social fitness traits changed over the course of the 20th century? (ii) Has the genetic covariance between fitness (as measured by total fertility) and other traits changed over time? The answers to these questions inform our understanding of how the genetic landscape of American society has changed over the past century and have implications for population trends. We show that husbands and wives carry similar loadings for genetic factors related to education and height. However, the magnitude of this similarity is modest and has been fairly consistent over the course of the 20th century. This consistency is particularly notable in the case of education, for which phenotypic similarity among spouses has increased in recent years. Likewise, changing patterns of the number of children ever born by phenotype are not matched by shifts in genotype-fertility relationships over time. Taken together, these trends provide no evidence that social sorting is becoming increasingly genetic in nature or that dysgenic dynamics have accelerated.assortative mating | fertility | polygenic scores | cohort trends T he traditional view of evolutionary dynamics in humans was that the history of modern humans was too short for the species to have experienced substantive change in its genetic makeup (1, 2). However, findings from recent population genetics studies suggest the possibility that selective fertility, nonrandom mating, drift, and other violations of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium accelerated genetic divergence between modern human populations, particularly since humans began farming and civilization developed (3-6). Extending this logic, rapid economic development and the corresponding demographic transition over the past two centuries may have led to a further shift in the dynamics of reproduction and selection. The present paper uses genetic and phenotypic data from a nationally representative sample of US older adults to test whether the societal changes in the United States during the 20th century were reflected in (i) changes in patterns of genetic assortment in marriage, and (ii) changes in genetic influences on fertility.Understanding trends with respect to specific deviations from random mating and differential fertility is critical to both social and evolutionary scientists. For example, recent research in sociology has suggested that taking a prospective view on social stratification that incorporates differential fertility yields disparate results for estimands such as levels of intergenerational educational mobility (7). Likewise, genetic research on human populations often assumes that mating in a population is random with respect to genotypes (8, 9). Recent empirical evidence suggests otherw...

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“…Genetic g is operationalized as scores on g-loaded test items and the dysgenic trend occurs primarily on g and so g loadings and heritabilities are likely strongly associated (MEISENBERG 2010;MEISENBERG and KAUL 2010;WOODLEY and MEISENBERG 2013). Moreover, the case for genetic g is made all the stronger due to recent evidence suggesting that modern-day populations are slowing down on simple reaction time, a measure which is itself highly correlated to genetic g (also referred here to as chronometric g, ARMSTRONG and WOODLEY 2014) and not as observable on non-g-loaded test items (WOODLEY, TE NIJENHUIS and MURPHY 2013a, b, c, d;.…”

Section: Has There Been Recent Evolution?mentioning

confidence: 99%