Why do stupid people have more kids

I t seems that women these days are too clever for their own good, at least when it comes to making babies. Research emerging from the London School of Economics examining the links between intelligence and maternal urges in women claims that more of the former means less of the latter. In an ideal world, such findings might be interpreted as smart women making smart choices, but instead it seems that this research is just adding fuel to the argument that women who don't have children, regardless of the reason, are not just selfish losers but dumb ones as well.

In the opening paragraph of the chapter titled "Why intelligent people are the ultimate losers in life", he makes his feelings about voluntary childlessness very clear:.

If any value is deeply evolutionarily familiar, it is reproductive success. If any value is truly unnatural, if there is one thing that humans and all other species in nature are decisively not designed for, it is voluntary childlessness. All living organisms in nature, including humans, are evolutionarily designed to reproduce.

Reproductive success is the ultimate end of all biological existence. That said then, Kanazawa finds it paradoxical that intelligent women apparently don't possess the desire to pursue what should be the ultimate goal of their biological existence, hence the loser reference.

He says that it's not yet known why intelligent women are having less babies but says it's not the reason most people assume, that women with higher IQs are more likely to go to college and have demanding careers. A baby giraffe can stand within an hour of birth, and can even potentially flee predators on its first day of life.

A monkey can grasp its mother and hang on for protection and nourishment. A developmental cognitive scientist who currently works at the University of Rochester, her work had focussed mostly on learning and decision-making in children.

But when she looked at the infants she encountered, she saw a baffling degree of helplessness: How could they be so incompetent one second and so bright so soon thereafter? One day, she posed the question to her colleague Steven Piantadosi. Humans become so intelligent because human infants are so incredibly helpless, they argue; the one necessitates the other. Researchers have been pondering the peculiarities of our birth and its evolutionary significance for quite some time.

Humans belong to the subset of mammals, called viviparous mammals, that give live birth to their young. This leads to a trade-off: the more intelligent an animal is, the larger its head generally is, but the birth canal imposes an upper limit on just how large that head can be before it gets stuck. The brain, therefore, must keep maturing, and the head must continue growing, long after birth.

The more intelligent an animal will eventually be, the more relatively immature its brain is at birth. Researchers have long known about this trade-off, and about the connection between brain size and neural density and intelligence. H M S In the news. Joe Weisenthal. Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know.

Loading Something is loading. Email address. Deal icon An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. This would be incredibly tricky—studies like these need large amounts of nice, clean data, a better grasp of how genes affect traits, and a good grasp on the role of culture. PNAS , DOI: You must login or create an account to comment. Skip to main content Universal Pictures.