{"id":490471,"date":"2010-03-30T10:05:12","date_gmt":"2010-03-30T14:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"tag:www.economist.com,21005694"},"modified":"2010-03-30T10:05:12","modified_gmt":"2010-03-30T14:05:12","slug":"selection-pressures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/490471","title":{"rendered":"Selection pressures"},"content":{"rendered":"

WILLIAM SALETAN discusses<\/a> the market for human eggs; it turns out people are willing to pay for potential smartness:<\/p>\n

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[T]he big story is SAT scores. \u201cHolding all else equal, an increase of one hundred SAT points in the score of a typical incoming student increased the compensation offered to oocyte donors at that college or university by $2,350,\u201d Levine reports. When the ad was placed for a specific couple, the premium was higher: $3,130 per 100 SAT points. And when an egg donor agency placed the ad on behalf of the couple, the bonus per 100 points rose to $5,780.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Matt Yglesias discusses<\/a> the implications:<\/p>\n

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Saletan, meanwhile, comments that \u201cscience and narcissism are limiting eugenic stratification\u201d but I think he\u2019s overestimating what narcissism is doing. Saletan notes that \u201c[m]ost couples want their own offspring, not donor eggs or sperm\u201d which is true. But given the way society functions, I bet most children with high-SAT mothers also have high-SAT fathers. If it were the case that SAT scores were purely a product of heritable genetic characteristics, we\u2019d already be just as eugenically stratified as egg donations could make us.<\/strong> But the incorporation of crass things like money and precise SAT scores, doesn\u2019t change the fact that in non-donor contexts you typically have people who went to fancy colleges marrying each other and thus, in practice, selecting for high SAT score.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Emphasis mine. Now, it’s certainly the case that well educated people tend to marry each other these days, but that hasn’t been the case for all that long\u2014a few generations at most. Women haven’t actually been attending university for all that long, and the rise of a large class of professional women is quite a recent development. Men may have been selecting for intelligence to some extent before it became common for women to be primary breadwinners, but they were likely as focused or more focused on other characteristics. I don’t think there has been nearly enough time, in other words, for selection pressures to have done much in the way of genetic<\/em> stratification, though there has been plenty of time for class effects to impact generational mobility. I still boggle over the statistic<\/a> that a child from the highest income quintile without a college degree is more likely to end up in the top income quintile than a child from the bottom income quintile with a college degree.<\/p>\n

There’s also the possbility that an increasingly bimodal intelligence distribution is unlikely thanks to the phenomenon of regression toward the mean\u2014smart parents will tend to have children not quite as smart as them (they pass on intelligence incompletely) while parents of lower intelligence will tend to have smarter children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WILLIAM SALETAN discusses the market for human eggs; it turns out people are willing to pay for potential smartness: [T]he big story is SAT scores. \u201cHolding all else equal, an increase of one hundred SAT points in the score of a typical incoming student increased the compensation offered to oocyte donors at that college or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-490471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}