Skepticism

Skepchick Quickies, 12.8

Jen

Jen is a writer and web designer/developer in Columbus, Ohio. She spends too much time on Twitter at @antiheroine.

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36 Comments

  1. Somehow, I can’t see this information being helpful in singles bars. “Hey baby, you know what they say about intelligent men? Well I’m a frickin genius.”

  2. re: atheist placard: At my train station in Edinburgh there is a poster advertising some church qouting Psalms 1:1 – “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”

    I REALLY want to add in spray paint, “The wise man shouteth it from the rooftops.”

  3. Higher Intelligence tends to produce better sperm? If that’s true, I think the floor of my bathroom is pregnant.

  4. @Rebecca:
    But if the guy’s smart enough to put together a witty sentence like that, he’s probably lying!
    I might try, “Me not smart. You smell good. Who place, me or you?”

  5. Sadly the lack of good decision making associated with lower intelligence and a lack of impulse control cancels out any qualitative benefit the intelligent male may posses in his loins. I wonder if birth control will have an ultimate negative impact on human intelligence as a whole give the more intelligent and more educated one is the fewer children one is likely to have.

    The whole brouhaha about the atheist sign here in Washington State has been quite amusing. You’d think it was the end of the world as we know it and the godless heathens are going to start a campaign of child kidnapping and forced indoctrination, starting with the baby jebuzz, and put an end to all the Christmas fun!!AARRRGH!!

  6. Stoopids breed mucher mucher! ;-)

    At least, from the population of stoopids, they must. Or do stoopids have littters?

  7. I love how the intelligence-sperm correlation article has such a provocative title, and all the scientists are quoted as saying, “yeah, it’s not what you think at all.”

    But hey, it sure got me to read the article AND care about the science!

  8. @James Fox: Also I think the attitude of my ex-wife might be prevalent among the stoopids. I scheduled my vasectomy after the birth of my daughter and she spent weeks bitching and trying to talk me out of it. When pressed as to why I shouldn’t get a vasectomy she said “What if one of the kids dies? How do we get another one?”

  9. Does that improve the flavor? Do different intelligience taste different? Biologist sperm tastes of strawbery with a faint note of mango and vanilla aftertaste?

  10. The blood type thing drives me up the freakin wall. My wife lived in Japan for a time (so she and I are both experts) and the Japanese tend to do a lot of things better than America. Better efficiency in cars and land use, ect. But one thing that bugged her to all hell is the shear amount of naked prejudice in Japan. The blood type thing is just a small part of a much bigger problem with sexism, racism (especially against Koreans and Chinese), and even family history. “I’m sorry you’re just not qualified for this job. Turns out your great-great grandfather was of an insufficient cast.” And all this from a 1st world nation.

  11. @skepticalhippie: I suspect being the most advanced country with it’s medieval, misogynistic, racists and xenophobic social structures having been fully in place most recently could be one explanation. I’ve always been surprised more educated Japanese women don’t try to find jobs overseas.

  12. @James Fox: @QuestionAuthority:
    If the movie Starship Troopers has taught us anything, and it has, is that the best way to have it so only qualified people can have babies is to have a world government create two casts of people; citizens and civilians. The government then gives licenses out to citizens to have babies. One way gain citizenship is to do government service, like joining the Mobile Infantry. This makes it so only worthy people reproduce and as a side benefit have enough soldiers to fight off the imminent invasion of giant arachnids from outer space.

    Oh who am I kidding, I only want this as a way to bring about a world with coed showers.

  13. Good luck with that (by the way, Heinlein wrote the book long before the film and it still holds up very well) in the US. Everyone seems to think that they have an unlimited birthright to produce kids, no matter what the cost or consequences. The wife and I had a “replace ourselves only” policy with kids, and then I had the surgery.

    I’m not entirely sure that we don’t have those two castes of people in the US already. The problem is how to prevent the “soldier caste” from taking over the society entirely and enslaving the “civilian caste.” Then again, see the beginning of this paragraph….

  14. In response to the Atheist Placard found in a ditch story…

    That’s the most childish story I’ve ever heard. I thought the FFRF had more class than that. The LAST thing that Atheists need to be is more antagonizing of Christians. This will just be one more story for the Bill O’Riellys, Ann Coulters and Rush Limbaugh’s of the world to point out about how Christmas is being attacked. this is going to do is make people resent/fear the mere word Athiest even more.
    I find it hilarious that other Athiests would actually be upset that it was found in a ditch…What the hell did you expect?

  15. We were in MC Sports and the gun expert, who was helping my husband find the correct cleaning solution to clean his antique muzzle loader, started telling us how there was no way Barack Obama would be the next president. He told us that Obama was actually born in Kenya and went on and on about the conspiracy to put a black man in the white house. It may be a fringe movement but if this guy was representative it’s a very angry movement with access to A LOT of guns…….

  16. Lead researcher Dr Rosalind Arden said: “This does not mean that men who prefer Play-Doh to Plato always have poor sperm”

    I nominate Dr. Rosalind Arden for COTW, just in case that kind of thing is allowed.

    I am a Hedge

  17. @w_nightshade: Yeah, they’re all over the Railway network, as if you can insult someone into believing something.

    A little graffiti over the word “No” goes a long way….

  18. Sperm. They said it was a “Marginal” result, which is scientist code for “Probably nothing, but this sort of study makes good copy and brings in the research grants”

    So the difference is small, and its only one study (and a correlation study at that). When you see the words “Significant Difference” repeated in a dozen or so replications of this study, then there’s probably something to it.

    Besides, there are so many varibles involved in Sperm quality/production a “one shot” sample is no where near enough to get a good idea

  19. Well, I for one, am happy to help with repeat results if necessary. Mmmm, scientific rigor never felt so good.

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