Do Good Sperm Predict a Good Brain?

摘要

Could high-quality brains and high-quality sperm travel together? Some scientists wonder if there is a "latent fitness factor" that would cause evolutionarily desirable traits, both physical and mental, to be correlated with one another. Rosalind Arden, a psychology grad student at University College London, with evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and sociologist Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware, Newark, decided to test the question by looking for a correlation between IQ and sperm quality, a direct measure of reproductive fitness. They obtained data on sperm quantity, motility, and density from a health study of 425 Vietnam war veterans aged 31 to 44 and compared them with results of the vets' intelligence tests. After correcting for factors such as drug use, they found a low but still significant (.13) correlation, roughly the same as that for height and IQ (.15).