The idea that the stupid are out-breeding the intelligent appears to have reached the mainstream a few years ago by way of the movie “Idiocracy” intended as a dark comedy, this movie does has its basis in fact. IQ has long been seen as having a negative correlation with fertility, but a positive correlation with the survival of offspring [1]. This has also been confirmed to be an international phenomenon, and thus is not just relevant for the United States [2].
I’ve also observed this first hand, in that some of the men who struggle with getting laid the most, are the most intelligent. An example in popular culture as of the past 5 years has been the television show “The Big Bang Theory” about a group of highly intelligent physicists, who never the less seem to struggle with the simple concepts of friction and tension.
This lead to an interesting question, if outlier men often struggle with understanding how the sexual market works. Why does evolution still produce a certain percentage of high IQ men?
One possibility would be that the genetics that make outliers live on and reproduce in siblings with lower IQs and more mating success. Another possibility is that the production of outliers on every trait is a common time-risk management technique employed in case conditions have changed. Evolution works on a time scale that is difficult to fathom for the human mind, who thinks of long term as 2 – 5 years in most cases.
The IQ Distribution and Gender
Despite much research and rhetoric in recent times, there is a documented difference in IQ distributions between men and women. Men tend to have more outliers on both sides of the scale, whereas females tend to cluster around the mean (85 – 115).
What this demonstrates is not that one gender is smarter than the other, but that the distributions vary, meaning that women have more people within the range of 85 – 115, whereas men have both more people with an IQ below 85, but also a higher number of people above 115.
On average the genders are equally intelligent, however men have the smartest people and the dumbest people, whereas women as a gender do not have many true outliers in either direction.
This means that men will most likely always outpace women when it comes to both Nobel Prizes and Darwin Awards. From the female perspective, as IQ often correlates with real world success, in the form of status, financial and many other ways [3], it means more eligible men to target when they want to marry up.
This also partially explains why men have been the principal drivers of technological advancement, as those with very high IQs are often those who push human technology and knowledge forward. Where would our species have been without minds like Newton, Tesla, and the many others who have contributed to our technological liberation from our natural state?
The IQ Communications Gap
This gap is based on that when the IQ discrepancies between people gets to around 30 points (2 standard deviations), communication between the two break down [4, 7, 8]. A person with an IQ of 145 will struggle to communicate with anyone who has an IQ of 115 or less, meaning that the group they can comfortably communicate with amounts to about 16% of the population.
From the graph, compared to an average person, a person who is 2 standard deviations below the mean at an IQ of 70, will be between borderline and mildly developmentally challenged, therefore this person will struggle to communicate with anyone who has an IQ over 100.
This is the same gap that a person with an IQ of 130 will face when speaking to a person with an IQ of 100.
At such a different level IQ, communications, leadership and even respect struggles to exist, and therefore one can argue that the ideal IQ for a business leader is 115, as this permits the widest range of communication possible, while still being able to communicate with those who have an IQ over 130.
For the high IQ person, one would assume that they have the ability to learn how communication works at the differing levels of IQ. Meaning that they could adapt their communication and approach to better tailor their approach to the market, and thus expand their market. After all, if a person with an IQ of 145 can learn to communicate well down to an IQ of 100, then they expand their female dating market substantially.
The Ideal IQ for the Sexual Market
Given the issues with communications outlined above, the ideal banging IQ, meaning the IQ where a man is most likely to experience the least amount of communication issues in the market is in the 110 – 120 range, this IQ means that he is capable of communicating with the vast majority of women, while being perceived as being smarter than they are. Thus, this means he can appeal to the largest market, while at the same time being higher value than they are in this respect.
Furthermore, if one looks at average IQ based on profession [6] 110 – 120 would also lead to opportunities within high value professions such as law, banking and medicine. That further improves the opportunities within the mating market as a result of appealing to hypergamy.
However, if one looks at the idea that the fertility-IQ correlation, also appears to speed up below the mean, is this perhaps an indicator that intelligence is not a major variable that women select for in their mates. This is not to say that a high IQ is negative correlated with being attractive to women, but more to say that it may not be a primary and directly selected for variable, in the same way muscle mass or height is selected for. An anecdotal and somewhat flippant comment are all the women who do not date men under 6 feet, but have no similar rule for IQ. Or is this simply a case of those who as a result of lower IQ having a more difficult time to plan engaging in in more reproductively risky encounters?
A high IQ is perhaps in and of itself not a driver, it is the result of what that IQ produces that determines the man’s place in the sexual market. I had a conversation about this recently, that was based off the following premise. If IQ is not primarily selected for, in that women do not go for high IQ men and avoid low IQ men, how is IQ selected for by evolution?
Perhaps it is a result of advantageous social position, tribes generally have advisors to the tribal leadership in the form of a Shaman or something similar. Likewise, this was also the case with kings in the middle ages. Wise men are somewhat of a permanent fixture of historical narratives. From Aristotle and Plato, to Leonardo and Machiavelli, men who through their intelligence carved out a market niche for themselves.
Perhaps, as we in the last 100 – 150 years have moved away from manual labor and steadily towards the knowledge based economy, the pressure for IQs to increase will rise? After all, as labor becomes more complex and requires more training, that should present an evolutionary pressure over time.
Summary and Conclusions
The conclusion drawn from the above 3 premises, there are more high IQ males than females, there is an IQ communications gap and there is an ideal IQ level for reproductive success. Newton and Tesla are examples of men who were the intellectual vanguard of their day, and who made contributions that lasted well beyond their own lives yet they were also men who died virgins.
To some extent the same DNA that made Newton and Tesla will perhaps also reside in relatives of theirs who did not manifest as such massive outliers, and therefore were more successful in terms of reproduction.
From the perspective of relationships and if we apply the data from above, it follows that those men who end up on either side of the scale will struggle for a few different reasons. The men who are outliers on the top of the scale, meaning those men who have an IQ over 135, will face a partner market with very limited choice. This follows from the fact that the amount of men that have an IQ of 135 or above, greatly outnumber the women who do. Those men who have an IQ over 145, are likely to face an even more challenging market.
Within the theoretical population I designed for the statistics portion of this article, consisting of a 1000 women and a 1000, the number of men within the 130+ brackets number 21, the number of women 10. Within the 3 highest brackets, the men number 161 while the women number 90.
If one adds the assumption that the IQ communication gap is on a sliding scale, rather than a binary “on/off” situation, it must also be assumed that a man with an IQ of 130 dating a woman with an IQ of 103 or vice versa, would be right at that edge where communications may break down.
This would indicate that high IQ men face a market where they are an extreme niche product, therefore must act accordingly when designing their marketing strategy as I outline in the upcoming Gendernomics book:
“In the sexual market place, scope translates into aiming for a specific segment of the market where there is less competition; “gamer girls” are an example of women targeting a specific subset of men “gamers” where there are fewer women and where she can thus find a higher quality man than she would be able to outside of that niche. Thus the “gamer girl” identifies a market where not only does she face lesser competition (because of lower supply), but she is also acting within a market where the demand for her specific product will be much higher than in the general market.” Black Label Logic (Gendernomics)
For those men who fall within 1 standard deviation of the mean, they have a large market of women available to them, and are likely to share some common interests and perspectives with these women. This means that their product is in many ways inherently tailored towards the general market. Not so for men who are outliers, here the product must be tailored towards a specific market for both long, and short term success. For short term success the high IQ man can leverage his IQ to trigger the same short-term mating cues that less intelligent men do naturally, in many ways the purpose of the Manosphere is to give out the check list to such men. For long-term success however, the high IQ man is still facing a market where few products are tailored to his specific IQ communications requirement.
As outlined by the research, communication and ability to respect someone breaks down when an IQ gap approaches that of 2 standard deviations. Thus, a man who seeks to be in a long-term relationship with a person of an IQ 2 standard deviations below theirs will face more challenging communications than is the norm within relationships.
A note:
I recently launched a Patreon page where I will be posting additional content every month for those who support me and I will do a Google Hangout for the highest tier Patrons (limited to 10 people).
I’ve also had some requests for consults, which I’ve declined up until now, but due to demand I’ve chosen to open up for doing some consults on request. For details please check out my Consulting and Patreon Page
As always you can buy my book Gendernomics at Amazon.com as both paperback and Kindle
More Reading
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
The Curse of the High IQ by Aaron Clary
Sources
[1] http://www.jstor.org/stable/1972320?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
[2] Shatz, S. (2008). “IQ and fertility: A cross-national study”
[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/facts-you-dont-want-to-know-iq-2011-11
[4] http://www.hollingworth.org/fullincl.html
[6] http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx
[7] Towers, G.M. (1988). The margins of mind. Vidya (The Journal of the Triple Nine Society) 95, 3-7.
[8] Towers, G.M. (1988). IQ and the problem of social adjustment. Vidya 98, 5-9.
