Posted on 02/10/2010 9:05:05 AM PST by AngelesCrestHighway
LONDON (Reuters) - Intelligence comes second only to smoking as a predictor of heart disease, scientists said on Wednesday, suggesting public health campaigns may need to be designed for people with lower IQs if they are to work. Research by Britain's Medical Research Council (MRC) found that lower intelligence quotient (IQ) scores were associated with higher rates of heart disease and death, and were more important indicators than any other risk factors except smoking.
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.reuters.com ...
Natural Selection at work
that’s because smart people do not let others hold their beers while they do stuff.
Seriously, this could have 2 different reasons (and maybe more I haven’t thought of). First, if you are not that bright, you are less likely to know how to stay healthy (or to even care to try). OR perhaps there are things going on in your body that make you less healthy AND give you a lower IQ. Of course, I don’t expect the second choice to be pursued by government back scientists since it would be a very unPC thing to even consider.
If true, why do we have any dim-bulb-crats over the age of 50?
Danger, Danger, White House in Danger, Danger.
Where’s that Nazi Heath Care Poster?
Quick, Michelle and Barrack buy massive amounts of life insurance for your mates!
Liberals hardest hit.
“Natural Selection at work”
I can’t tell whether you’re being serious or sarcastic, but I don’t think we should rule out the possibility that this reflects Mother Nature (or God) at work. It certainly would be very counterintuitive if the relationship ran in the opposite direction.
Not natural selection; you get heart disease after your reproduce and get your children to a reasonable age for the most part. Have babies and die is a workable evolutionary strategy.
And the relationship does run in the other way - intelligence, as measured by education, correlates with later age at birth of first child for men and women, and fewer children for women (and maybe men.)
Natural selection is mother nature at work.
What's your point? If intelligence means later age at birth then who makes that decision? It would b the more intelligent people, correct?
...fewer children for women (and maybe men.)
&&&
Yeah, we’re so smart we’re not reporducing at replacement rate.
The nanny state is doing its best to rid the world of smoking, in the name of health, mind you.
So their next plan would be?
“And the relationship does run in the other way - intelligence, as measured by education, correlates with later age at birth of first child for men and women, and fewer children for women (and maybe men.)”
I’m not sure this establishes that the relationship runs the other way. Surely you are not claiming that mere fecundity is species-preserving? The reality is that birth rates are highest in the most impoverished (and least educated) parts of the planet because statistically, you need many more children to ensure enough survive to take care of YOU in your old age. But parents with high education don’t need children for retirement security and moreover, in advanced more educated societies, life expectancy is much higher, so the fertility rate required for a stable population is much lower.
The original article implied that life expectancy was proportional to intelligence. The evidence you cite certainly does not indicate the opposite: quite the contrary, it is consistent with it. Those with intelligence (measured by education) may have fewer babies, but such babies are much more likely to survive, grow old etc. Moreover, affluent societies are so productive that workers can save for their own retirement without relying on their children to feed and care for them once their “productive” years have ended.
“Yeah, we’re so smart we’re not reporducing at replacement rate.”
You may want to check your premise on that one:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-19-fertility_N.htm
“Natural selection is mother nature at work.”
Understood IF your comment was serious. I thought it might have been a more snarky observation along the line of “Darwin Award”—which is usually tossed out when an individual engages in transparently risky behavior with consequences that are tragic for that individual but perhaps beneficial for mankind as a whole.
Darwin’s conception of natural selection didn’t entail volitional behavior, i.e., the bright plumage that might confer a survival advantage in a particular species of bird wasn’t knowingly selected by any individual bird, but occurred instead through more of an “invisible hand” process that culminated in a particular outcome favoring one class of birds over another.
Thus, the humor associated with Darwin Awards extends to applying a process that appears “hard-wired” into nature to human behavior that is freely chosen and hence far from automatic. If we truly believed that people who did idiotic things leading to their own demise were “forced” by nature to take those actions—i.e., they truly were beyond their own control—then laughing about such incidents would appear to be gratuitously cruel.
Anyway, I infer from your response that you meant your comment seriously, not ironically, so the foregoing is simply an explanation of why I raised the question, NOT an attempt to create a mountain from a molehill etc.
It was serious and it’s still only a mole hill
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