foudn this article in bbc here and found it funny. The base line that they found correlation between IQ and sperm quality, the correlation was strong, but the quality improvement not enough to make it difficult for dumb people to reproduce. here is the full article:
Men of higher intelligence tend to produce better quality sperm, UK research suggests.
A team from the Institute of Psychiatry analysed data from former US soldiers who served during the Vietnam war era.
They found that those who performed better on intelligence tests tended to have more – and more mobile – sperm.
The study, which appears in the journal Intelligence, appears to support the idea that genes underlying intelligence may have other biological effects too.
This does not mean that men who prefer Play-Doh to Plato always have poor sperm
Dr Rosalind Arden
Institute of Psychiatry
Therefore, if tiny mutations impair intelligence, they might also harm other characteristics, such as sperm quality.
Conversely, people with robust genes might be blessed with a biological “fitness factor” making them fit, healthy and smart.
Previously, scientists tended to assume that lifestyle factors were more likely to underlie any relationship between intelligence and health.
For instance, brighter people may be less likely to smoke, and more likely to take exercise, both of which are known to impact on mental performance.
Different characteristics
The latest study tested the gene theory by taking two characteristics that seemed unlikely to be associated with each other – intelligence and sperm quality.
They found a small, but statistically significant link, and were able to show that this could not be explained by unhealthy habits, such as smoking or drinking alcohol.
The study was based on 425 men who undertook several intelligence tests and provided semen samples.
The researchers found that independently of age and lifestyle, intelligence was correlated with all three measures of sperm quality – numbers, concentration, and ability to move.
Lead researcher Dr Rosalind Arden said: “This does not mean that men who prefer Play-Doh to Plato always have poor sperm: the relationship we found was marginal.
“But our results do support the theoretically important ‘fitness factor’ idea.
“We look forward to seeing if the results can be replicated in other data sets, with other measures of intelligence and other measures of physical health that are also strongly related to evolutionary fitness.”
Dr Allan Pacey is an expert in fertility at the University of Sheffield.
He said: “The fact that it’s possible to detect a statistical relationship between intelligence and semen quality in adult men probably says more about the co-development of brain and testicles when the man was in his mother’s womb, and therefore how well they both function in adult life, rather than suggesting that playing Sudoku can somehow stimulate more sperm to be produced.
“The improvement in semen quality with intelligence observed in this paper is small and therefore it is unlikely to have a big impact on the ability of men of different intelligences to conceive.”
The semen samples were collected in 1985 by the US Centers for Disease Control as part of a large-scale study into the health of US soldiers who served during the Vietnam Era. Some of the men in our sample had served in Vietnam, some had served in Germany, Korea and the USA.
hehehe! Kind of funny! This article made me remember a discussion we had long time ago about the special relativity theory, where for some reason you was totally denying it, even some of its evidences, you thought they might be caused by something else, such as the half life of some materials, when they rotate in relativistic speeds, their half lives become visibly longer than what they suppose to be, but yet you did not believe in it, and thought it had something to do with the rotation.
Still you do not believe in that theory man?
Actually what made me remember this, is the fact that I do not care about these studies, most of them are so random and have no real basis, but they try to be popular, and so you might see two articles one talking about the benefits of orange in curing cancer, and the other talking about the fact that orange is a cancerous agent at the same time?!
I mean, there still a huge conflict when it come to defining intelligence its self, so how come they use it here? Something else that pushes me to say so is an article I read like 1 month ago, it says that short-sightedness gene, and intelligence genes are connected to each others in form of packages, just like the blue eyes and blond hair!
If we took Jubilee school (am not saying this method is true, but am trying to simulate the same way the study was done) and to be more precise our class only few had short-sightedness. I can name them, Malik, Severus, Hunaity and Hala (am talking about people who can not take their glasses away, and not people who can not read without glasses, because the later is not quit short-sightedness.
One thing, I believe in the special relativity theory, it is based on real evidences, and it appliactions are already there!
i remember the relativity discussion. i do remember that argument as well. The evidence you used then that when a radioactive material is rotated really fast, t degenerate slowerd, THUS THE TIME SLOWED DOWN. my problem was (and still) the last sentence, why we say this because the time slowed down rather than the half life increased itself? afterall halflife is a weird concept in the first place.
and i do agree with you that this is probably not accurate study, and i TOTALLY agree with the oranges example.
another thing i am not convince about yet is the change from matter to energy. u know e=mc^2 I know we studied the application of this equation at atomic level. but i think the science has yet to make a breakthrough someday about the atoms and discover that there is another thing that causing the increase of energy and the perceived decrease of mass. maybe the way they measure the mass is not accurate or doesn’t account for a factor they don’t know yet.
but since this is not my field of study, i can’t really argue effectively.
At least it is good that you thought about it =)
BUT the energy produced in nuclear fission or fusion is equal to the mass lost multiplied by the square of light speed! And it is taken as a fact now man!
It can help if you tell what makes you doubt it? Any scientific bases? Or just that you do not like the idea?
Another thing, it is important for you to know, there is something called inertial frames, these frames moves in constant speed all the time, and it is evident that there is no reference frame, this means speed does not affect any property of a given system, so the half life should be the same in all the frames. If you believe that your speed should be zero to conduct experiments then this is kind of strange from you, you know that zero is not different from any other value, all are just mere numbers.
And besides, what we live in now is from the fact that Einstein and his friends (though they had many conflicts about the quantum mechanics) corrected the way we see life (of course Allah is to be thanked ultimately for that). Are we going to dump Quantum mechanics, I can tell not a single chance, it is true in all of its parts.
May be you are not a big fan of this topic, but man you should have a base for you ideas, rather than just refusing ideas =) that would be so unprofessional from you.
Did you tried to read about it?
I do admit, my argument is almost, in fact it is totally free of any hard evidence, that’s why i can’t truely convince someone.
i haven’t read about it, and i doubt i will do any time soon. i understand ur point of view and it is valid. but i THINK, not based on hard evidence rather than educated guess, this is like the thompson model for atom. he gives a reasonable theory and it worked for a while, but then some weird behaviours were not explained by it till a new theory came along. i think this is what happening, this theory explains a lot of things, but when we can see more closesly inside the atom i think more weird behaviours will emerge orcing the scintist to make up a new theory or at least modfiy the existing ones.
i can’t really argue correclty with this, so i mainly leave it to myself. When i was young i would argue, but i know now it will be useless without hard evidence, and i don’t care enough to read in detail about it to see where things might not add up.
about speed affecting things, it was just a possiblity i throw, many possiblities can be thrown, i don’t know details to valid or invalid any.
S3d I have to tell this little thing! Back at Thomson time, science was at the end of its linear growth region, why linear? Because they used to know very little about atoms, for instance at Thomson the atom was still an abstract concept with no real effective experiments then came the experiment that used X-ray and found that huge part of the matter is vacuum, space, nothing!
At that time they did not even know about the neutron, till that time there was no real methods to come up with experiments to check the validity of such theories. What happened next was a leap in the world and the industrial revolution came with new methods to test these theories and to find new phenomena we never knew about before.
Talking about testing the theories at that time, most of them failed and it was indeed when relativity and quantum theories came along to save us, and because they are true they helped in understanding the new phenomena and even to predict some of them. Another thing that support the fact we are going on the right lane is that science entered its logarithmic growth region. Can you imagine the irony? We lived on earth for thousands of years, and it was not until the last 100 years that we really started science in the right way.
Now, you are talking about and educated guess, but it is not at all educated man, am sorry. What you are talking about is already there, they are taking about particles physics, and in this branch of science, atom is like a galaxy, so they have seen what is inside the atom and are sure of the quantum and relativity, indeed they are the frame that judges if they are to accept and new theory or reject it.
S3d what I am trying to tell you is that there is a huge difference between what happened like 100 years ago! 100 years ago, there were no real applications for those theories, but these new theories had affected every single thing on earth that it became reality! Just so simple and I care to tell you this, because I find it gay that you are sooo stubborn about it, this is not good! =)
So read or do not talk about it =) I know that this is what you want to do, but do not tell others about these ideas you have!
dude, that’s UNFAIR, u brought the subject up. i am not trying to convince you, nor i am trying to spread my opinion. i still believe i am allowed to think that this theory will be omitted someday, till that day i will use it as a fact.
and when i said educated guess, i knew it was a wrong expression, but what i meant is a somehow lossely, very lossly based on logical guess. what i am saying, NOT A TOTAL RANDOM GUESS. but yeah, an educated guess has to be much better
and dude, i doubt we started to know things in the right way, evolution theory is under test still. anyway, this is pointless, unless u can explain to me the whole theory and how he ended up with this equation, then we won’t get anywhere at all.
Cool down =) Man I am not trying to convince u, but still I can not see why u believe this theory is not part of the truth! I love to think of it as a puzzle game; we have combined many parts of it, but there still more parts to combine! But this does not mean we will dumb what we have found first!
And about the evolution theory, I never believed in it in the first place, when I said we are on the right lane, I meant for Physics and Chemistry! And man, you know that very well, many of our sciences where practically established, rather than starting with the theory itself. And about how to understand this theory, consult books man! I have read it, and it convinced me, so you should read it too. But be warned, you have to do lots of readings.
See, I won’t be sad if u have read it and denied it, but you did not read it at the first place. And if it was not you, then I would have stopped long time ago, but u r a smart guy who should know what to do.
Man keep it coming up, this is healthy and am enjoying this discussion. That would make jordanmafia a good place for things other than vampires =)
suggest good books to read, and who knows, maybe i will give it a try.
S3d u got access to many sources as a Masters student at virgina! Go search for the orginial thesis of Einstein about the general relativity!