Do the thick die quick?
WORLD OF SCIENCE - BOB BROCKIE
The Dominion Post | Monday, 01 December 2008Scots psychologist Ian Deary claims that clever people live longer than thickheads.
Sure, some bright people die young and many thickheads live into old age but if you measure a large bunch of people the statistics point that way.
Dr Deary and his team looked at more than 2000 Scottish children given IQ tests in 1932 when they were 11 years old. He traced most of these people again in 1997 and found that those still living at age 76 had average IQs of 102 but those who had died had average IQs of 98.
Dr Deary says more evidence comes from IQ tests on large numbers of young men recruited into the Australian Army at the time of the Vietnam War and nearly a million 19-year-olds inducted into the Swedish Army.
Twenty years after the tests, those who had died in the meantime had lower average IQs than those who remained alive.
Several other surveys point in the same direction.
Some critics find Dr Deary's claims insulting. "So, you're saying that the thick die quick?" "Anyway", they challenge, "haven't IQ tests been discredited"?
"Well, no," says Dr Deary. IQ tests have a predictive value unequalled in psychology. Hundreds of data sets since 1904 show that IQ remains almost unchanged over a lifetime, can predict educational achievement, occupational success, propensity to sickness and age of death with some confidence. It's a better predictor of life expectancy than body mass index, total cholesterol, blood pressure or blood glucose.
But why IQ should be a good predictor of life expectancy remains a mystery.
Some epidemiologists suggest that intelligent people get the easy jobs, leaving the heavier, dangerous, life-threatening work to dumber people.
Or, they suggest, most people with high IQs behave better. In early life people with higher IQs are more likely to have better diets, do more exercise, avoid accidents, give up smoking, do less binge drinking and put on less weight in adulthood.
But Dr Dreary has checked all that stuff, and finds it does not wash.
Rather, he thinks, intelligence causes the association between education, social class and health.
He favours the theory that IQ tests in youth reveal a well-wired body better able to respond effectively to environmental insults.
Some supporting evidence comes from the finding that simple reaction speed – the time taken to press a button when a stimulus appears – can replace IQ test scores as an even better predictor of an earlier death. Reaction-time tasks don't demand complex reasoning, so are unlikely to improve by education.
Dr Deary hopes his findings will explain the connection between childhood IQ, sickness and earlier deaths and help to tackle problems of health inequalities. In Christchurch, David Fergusson leads a team studying the behaviour and fates of 1265 children born there in 1977. He has already shown that those with higher IQs did better at school.
If his study continues long enough, it may throw light on the connection between IQ and life expectancy of Christchurch kids.
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Funny. The doc has it the wrong way round. IQ scores tend to reflect social class, not predict it - kids from affluent households do better in standardised testing, and funnily enough in health stats. Who would have thought?
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#1 Posted by Mark — 11:39 AM | Monday , 01 December 2008
okay, a 98 IQ vs a 102 IQ score, with a sample of 2000????
Comon, that is not a big enough difference to draw any conclusion like this. I think whoever interpreted those results needs to take a statistics 101 course.
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#2 Posted by frank — 12:12 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
In response to #1
Yes Mark, every poor person would have a genius IQ if only the class system wasn't keeping them down.
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#3 Posted by Stuart — 12:13 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
Well, obviously reaction time is going to be a good predictor of life expectancy. Particularly where crossing the road or getting out of the way of falling objects is involved...
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#4 Posted by Stu — 12:13 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
Dr Dreary has obviously not heard of the 'Flynn effect', whereby IQ scores in the west have been rising for decades, which says more about the education system than it does about intelligence. Certain social classes are just getting better at sitting the tests.
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#5 Posted by Peter Wilson — 12:24 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
good call Mark, couldn't agree more
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#6 Posted by Nick — 12:31 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
The averages differ by 4 points. What's the variance?
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#7 Posted by John Fouhy — 12:32 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
In response to #1
Sorry Mark, it's you who have it the wrong way around. Whilst there is some input from nuture, nature has a bigger say. Otherwise genius' would have a strong tendancy to occur more in the "upper classes" - this is not the case. If it was a reflection then movement between social classes would be almost non-existant. In fact IQ has a high corrolation with the rate at which your nervous system fires. If you can find a corrolation between those two - I'd be impressed...
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#8 Posted by PJ — 12:40 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
A lower IQ will naturally lead to a lesser ability to determine which risks in life are more favourable for longevity, and thus they will chose foods, exercise, pasttimes etc that are inclined to shorten their life, while on the other hand those with a higher IQ will be more aware of the foods, exercise, pastimes etc that will prolong life ... QED.
Is this not obvious?
And as for a poverty/affluence aspect determining IQ ... that is completely unrelated, as IQ tests specifically filter out anything that could influence that environmental aspect.
Maybe some more research on what makes up IQ tests would be helpful before coment on the test results.
The outcome is meaningless unless you understand the test.
High IQ leading to a longer life is quite obvious.
The findings would show a wider disparity if it were not for higher IQ persons taking ever increasing 'calculated' risks, where lower IQ persons would either never have been able to place themselves in such situations ... take for example Steve Fosset ... he was killed at a young age, yet a lower IQ couch potato may indeed die 5 years older, but of a heart attack, or from tripping over the vacuum cleaner.
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#9 Posted by Matthew — 13:03 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
Does it really matter, not much you can do to boost your IQ & live longer haha
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#10 Posted by Ralph — 13:04 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
yeah but it also depends on the person personality ae. i know a guy who is really smart but can't be bothered. he is currently failing
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#11 Posted by Aiden — 13:35 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
Social classes, chaps and chapesses, are just part of the environment. And we funky humans react/adapt to that. The beauty about IQ is that, if one follows <a href="http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/tbs/index.html">Pinker</a>, it is in fact mostly inherited. His metaphor is that a child is a photographic image. It can be developed badly or well. But the image cannot be altered. So, IQ, as an imperfect window into that image, really does reflect something innate.
This explains the defensiveness and faux-outrage when such simple measures explain so much. It greatly removes the role of the Social Engineer in life outcomes.
Or, as us conservationists would aver, it restores faith in Gaia's great Schemes, via biological determinism.
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#12 Posted by waymad — 13:59 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
In response to #8
Sorry, PJ - you're still wrong..
An IQ of 102 does not indicate a Genius. I agree with you that a 'genius' is someone with genetic mutations (most of the time). This guy is talking of people with an average IQ of 102. 102 is actually well within the average range of 90 to 110.
Plus, this does relate to class. Think of a more affluent household - children will have more opportunity at a young age to get more brain stimulation by having more toys, books, learning tv and radio shows, etc. It's also completely rational to assume that early childhood education will be a factor in the child's learning capabilities (intelligence) and therefore in the child's knowledge (intellect) which is exactly what the test is designed to test.
Not to mention that affluent households are usually affluent because the parents/grandparents have enough intelligence to become affluent in the first place.. therefore allowing a 'nature' approach to the argument.
Therefore, raising children in a more affluent environment will have an effect on the test results.
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#13 Posted by Chris — 14:53 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
As Frank says, 98 vs 102 is not statistically significant. Nor do IQ tests reliably measure intelligence. About all an IQ test can measure is your ability to do an IQ test.
When I was about 13, I did a whole lot of IQ tests over the period of about two months as part of some University research. The researchers told me that the variance between my lowest and highest scores was over 20. Much of that came from learning how to do IQ tests (ie. there was a general trend upwards), but there was still variance caused by other factors - perhaps tiredness, phase of the moon or some other unquantified variable.
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#14 Posted by cm — 16:02 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
Who wrote this? It seems this is just coming out of his head there is hardly any statistical informational to prove it.
Maybe you should research things before you write about them next time.
Funny article.
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#15 Posted by Steve — 16:12 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
I find this all quite interesting, especially the revelation that people with higher IQs do better at school. Another recent study has discovered that people with higher IQs do better in IQ tests.
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#16 Posted by James — 18:20 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
Well one thing's for sure: the people commenting aren't statistically representative of the general population! I reckon 95% of respondents are males, and 70% of them have done at least seventh form statistics or a first year university course in statistics or psychology.
My 2 cents: (a) I wouldn't question the researcher's ability to make statistical inferences. He's a PhD in statistics, and IQ is purely a statistical output. You could question whether the inferences are material or 'economically' significant (that's what we refer to in econometrics when an estimator is statistically significant but the coefficient is small enough to ignore). (b) IQ measures academic potential, and there's several other types of intelligence too (spatial, social, emotional etc) (yeah I did first year psych too). There are Dr's out there that are otherwise total retards in many common sense ways.
I wouldn't read too much into it, but I wouldn't get upset about it either (as that'd probably be more a reflection of frustration that one's IQ is stubbornly lower than they'd like theirs to be). It will be very interesting to see what all the other research underway suggests.
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#17 Posted by Chris — 20:51 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
If IQ is affected by different socio-economic circles, then its because some sectors of society still choose to drink piss and smoke drugs while they are pregnant and in the early stages of nurturing their offspring. And its not just the mothers.
Now, there is a potential link between class and potential IQ.
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#18 Posted by Richard — 20:54 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
In response to #3
Hey, go read his papers. It's a great study. And he could teach Stats 401 if he was't being an epidemiologist. He's tracked down all the Scots that sat the school test in 1932 (which was *all* Scots 11yr olds still in school - a pretty good sample!). He's retested them with the same test they sat then, to see if they were consistent (they were). He's given them the Stanford-Binet (so the Flynn effect isn't relevant - it's the same cohort). He's given modern kids the Stanford-Binet, and checked how it correlates with the 1932 test (pretty well, is the answer;). He's tracked all those 1932 kids through Scots death records (which are also very comprehensive). He's controlled for lifetime income, for educational attainment, for anything else he could measure in the survivors. And IQ predicts longevity really well...
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#19 Posted by James — 21:42 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
Thankyou Mark and stewart for the laugh and mytery.Is stewart a flaming liberal who feels sorry for mark ? A rich mans son ? A big old positive capitalist who slogged thru to make it and by God we all better !? I love it.
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#20 Posted by Alan — 21:52 PM | Monday , 01 December 2008
IQ tests are heavily inaccurate anyways. Most of them are multi-choice where you still have a 1/4 chance of a correct answer just for a random guess. I still to this day do not consider an IQ test to be an accurate method of measuring intelligence, it is only good for relative purposes and even then for a less biased result, you should average the scores out over several tests.
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#21 Posted by Alex — 00:48 AM | Tuesday , 02 December 2008