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Sunday 14 December 2008
Sperm Quality Linked to Cleverness
Intelligent men produce better quality sperm, researchers have found. They say the discovery suggests an unexpectedly close relationship between intelligence and general evolutionary fitness.
Intelligent men produce better quality sperm, researchers have found. They say the discovery suggests an unexpectedly close relationship between intelligence and general evolutionary fitness.
The researchers, based at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, set out to test the controversial hypothesis that people with greater intelligence are healthier - not just because of lifestyle factors but because they are fitter in an underlying genetic sense.
“We took two characteristics that seemed, on the surface, unlikely to be associated with each other - intelligence and sperm quality - and tested whether there was a statistical relationship between them,” said Rosalind Arden, lead author of the study, which was published on Friday in the journal Intelligence.
“We found a small positive relationship: brighter men had better sperm,” added Ms. Arden. “This association wasn’t caused by habits like avoiding smoking or drinking - the big hitters of health.”
The study was based on the analysis of 425 former US soldiers who had provided semen samples and undergone intensive testing for intelligence and lifestyle factors. After adjusting for lifestyle, the results show small but statistically significant correlations between intelligence and three measures of sperm quality.
“This does not mean that men who prefer Play-Doh to Plato always have poor sperm: the relationship we found was marginal,” said Ms. Arden. “But our results do support the theoretically important ‘fitness factor’ idea.”
“Fitness factor” is the proposal that there is an underlying relationship across many inherited characteristics, including intelligence, that makes some people more successful than others at reproducing.
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Sperm Quality Linked to Cleverness
By Clive Cookson, Science Editor
6 December 2008
Intelligent men produce better quality sperm, researchers have found. They say the discovery suggests an unexpectedly close relationship between intelligence and general evolutionary fitness.
The researchers, based at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, set out to test the controversial hypothesis that people with greater intelligence are healthier - not just because of lifestyle factors but because they are fitter in an underlying genetic sense.
“We took two characteristics that seemed, on the surface, unlikely to be associated with each other - intelligence and sperm quality - and tested whether there was a statistical relationship between them,” said Rosalind Arden, lead author of the study, which was published on Friday in the journal Intelligence.
“We found a small positive relationship: brighter men had better sperm,” added Ms. Arden. “This association wasn’t caused by habits like avoiding smoking or drinking - the big hitters of health.”
The study was based on the analysis of 425 former US soldiers who had provided semen samples and undergone intensive testing for intelligence and lifestyle factors. After adjusting for lifestyle, the results show small but statistically significant correlations between intelligence and three measures of sperm quality.
“This does not mean that men who prefer Play-Doh to Plato always have poor sperm: the relationship we found was marginal,” said Ms. Arden. “But our results do support the theoretically important ‘fitness factor’ idea.”
“Fitness factor” is the proposal that there is an underlying relationship across many inherited characteristics, including intelligence, that makes some people more successful than others at reproducing.
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