Showing posts with label Verbal Ability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Verbal Ability. Show all posts

Thursday, February 14, 2019

Data: Do brains get you more sex?

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey posted the claim on Twitter recently that human cognitive abilities evolved to attract sexual partners.  Greg Cochran responded that there is no evidence that sexual selection has been a significant driver of mental abilities.

Do intelligent people get more sex?  And bottom line: do they end up with more children?  The General Social Survey measures IQ with a vocabulary quiz, so we're measuring verbal ability, a form of intelligence Miller would think is more important for courting than, say, math ability.  I'll focus on ages 18-35 since this is a critical time for sexual competition, and frequency varies with age. Here's a graph of the frequency of sex over the past year (GSS, whites, N = 12,757):
















Sexual frequency peaks for men at a mean IQ of 98.  The mean is 3.8 -- 3 means two or three times per month, and 4 means weekly.

Sexual frequency drops off for higher IQ mean, but then it reverses for men in the highest IQ category.  Their average is 3.7.

(Notice how the lowest IQ women have the most sex by far.)

What about kids?  We've already documented that high IQ women have fewer kids, but let's focus on men. This graph is for whites ages 45-60:
















For men, peak family size is for those with IQs of 77.  Men at the highest IQ level average fewer children than almost any other group.

There's little evidence here for a verbal IQ payoff.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Homosexuals and verbal ability

A reader wanted to know in the last post if I had a measure of verbal ability. The Add Health Study gave respondents a vocabulary test. Here are the means by sexual orientation:

Mean vocabulary score (sample size = 6,150, whites only)

Straight males 105.8*
Gay males 104.0
Straight females 104.2
Lesbians 107.7

*significantly higher than straight females

It's unexpected, but straight guys score significantly higher than straight girls. While the mean is low for gay guys and high for lesbians, they do not differ significantly from other groups.

Are gun owners mentally ill?

  Some anti-gun people think owning a gun is a sign of some kind of mental abnormality. According to General Social Survey data, gun owners ...