Ladies, as a matter of fact, I *am* your perfect mate...

Balls and brains

Dec 4th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The quality of a man’s sperm depends on how intelligent he is, and vice versa

Link here.


I won't bother to summarize. It's self-explanatory. The Money Line is this:

Ms Arden sought to test this idea in a way that excluded intelligent choice and got directly at any correlations between intelligence and health that operate at the physiological level. She chose sperm quality because it is both easily measured and about as far from intelligent choice as it is possible to imagine...

samples had been collected and analysed from unvasectomised men who had... answered all the necessary questions for her to test her hypothesis, namely that their g values would correlate with all three measures of their sperm quality.

They did. Moreover, neither age nor any obvious confounding variable that might have been a consequence of intelligent decisions about health (obesity, smoking, drinking and drug use) had any effect on the result. Brainy men, it seems, do have better sperm.

I think if I make photocopies of this article and distribute it to women I might randomly meet, my odds for successful procreation will increase. Let the experiment begin...