Smarter Teens Have Less Sex

Tech.Luver writes "Gene Expression reports, "Tyler Cowen quotes from a new study testing the relationship between grades and delayed sexual activity. Last December I passed a paper along to Razib showing that high-school age adolescents with higher IQs and extremely low IQs were less likely to have had first intercourse than those with average to below average intelligence. (i.e. for males with IQs under 70, 63.3% were still virgins, for those with IQs between 70-90 only 50.2% were virgin, 58.6% were virgins with IQs between 90-110, and 70.3% with IQs over 110 were virgins) In fact, a more detailed study from 2000 is devoted strictly to this topic, and finds the same thing: Smart Teens Don't Have Sex (or Kiss Much Either). ""

Re:Bad news for slashdotters

[Hoi Polloi]

And in another study, highly intelligent teens were found to be constantly frustrated and horny.

Option missing

[f64]

CowboyNeal never puts out, darn it!

Re:Worse than it used to be

[smooth wombat]

We can only hope that at some point in the future, it will once again be cool to be smart.

Ask and you shall receive [cnn.com].

Intro

[Staale Nordlie]

YouTube linky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ5IaIxWNzI [youtube.com] .

Converse is statistically true

[f97tosc]

If groups with different IQs have different sex habits, and I learn about your sex habits, then by using Bayes' theorem I can also make inferences about your IQ. Obviously just statistical inferences ("he has less sex, therefore, he is more likely to be smart"), but still.

Re:heh

[plague3106]

Then they'll be off at college, screw everyone in sight, catch some disease, and if its a woman, get pregnant. Or drink themselvse to death. Great way to raise your kids there..

Re:That explains...

[nido]

That explains the mouth-breathing 14 year olds...

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM, 5000 year history), mouth breathing is considered indicative of the central & governing meridians being 'unhooked'. The Central Meridian runs from the pubic bone up the front of the body, while the Governing Meridian runs from the tailbone up the spine and over the top of the head. They meet where the tip of the tongue touches the roof of the mouth.

Mouth breathing is something that needs to be fixed. Donna Eden [innersource.net] (who can 'see' the body's subtle energies, as the ancient TCM practitioners could) gives several routines: hooking up the belly button & forehead, sucking on the thumb (children do many of her exercises instinctively), etc.

Re:I Believe...

[jandrese]

That's true. It wasn't until I was talking with the job placement office that they let slip that really, 70% of the positions filled at most companies are the result of networking. If you don't know anybody it's quite a bit harder to get in. Once you're in there, you gotta make friends with your boss and his bosses if you really want to get anywhere past middle management. Even in companies that try their hardest to promote based on merit (IE, actual work done), trying to measure that is often too difficult and it comes down to a judgment call on the part of the manager anyway.

On the other hand, you really can't teach charisma. You either got it or you don't. About the best you can do is give some pointers, but what works for some people won't work for others.

you don't enjoy it, but I do (Re: Probably a c

[Laebshade]

If you're someone for whom sex is the most important element of your existence, I'd strongly advocate getting a life.

It's not the imost important element of my existence, but I certainly do enjoy it. You don't. Ah well, we all have things we enjoy and things we don't, right? I consider myself intelligent (I must be since I read slashdot!), but I don't consider myself above 'animal' behavior like so many of these posts imply or directly state. Besides, animals don't talk to each other during sex, so there's at least one thing that sets us apart from the ordinary reproductive animal.

And by the way, having sex once really doesn't show you how enjoyable it can be. You were probably nervous your first time, right? That takes a lot of fun out of it.

The point of this post is: don't just dismiss after having sex once or twice. There's fun to be had by all when it comes to sex.

Re:Idiocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiocracy [imdb.com], here we come!

Hmmm. I didn't see that movie, but I read the short story [wikipedia.org] on which it's apparently based.

Re:Queue Slashdot Reader Love Life Jokes

[mbeans]

Sounds like someone's been thoroughly frightened by what passes for "sex education" in this country.

The odds of a condom breaking are minuscule. If you're living in the United States and you're a heterosexual man, the odds of your partner being infected with HIV are low. The rate of female-to-male HIV transmission for vaginal sex is actually relatively low as well. Put all three of those together, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that sex with a condom is a lot safer than things you probably do every day, such as driving a car.

Re:Bad news for slashdotters

[Goog500]

Your post really annoys me. I don't mean to flame you, but its just wildly inaccurate and strikes me as incredibly pretentious. There is no way slashdot IQ's are typically 160-220. Please read about IQ scores (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ). Look at the distribution - 100 average with a standard deviation of 15. Even 160 would be 4 SD's above the average! That would mean that the AVERAGE reader on slashdot is in the smartest .001% of the population!! Bobby Fischer has an IQ of 184, which, according to your statement would make him only as smart as the average slashdot reader. Sure, slashdot readers are geeks, above average intelligence, but shit, the average reader is as smart as someone in contention for world's greatest chess player.

Re:To Quote...

[vertigoCiel]

Alduos Huxley [wikiquote.org]. (The quote in question is near the bottom of the "Sourced" section).

Re:Queue Slashdot Reader Love Life Jokes

[Marxist Hacker 42]

60% of the "free condoms" split at 3 PSI in a Consumer Reports test. 2% of Trojans did. The moral of this story- buy your condoms, don't take the free ones the college hands out, but you still are running a 2% chance of pregnancy regardless.

Re:Queue Slashdot Reader Love Life Jokes

[Marxist Hacker 42]

And actually- that 2% is reduced by the human female fertile cycle to something more like .5%...but STDs happen regardless of the female fertile cycle.

Re:That explains...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM, 5000 year history)

Bah. Chinese astrology has a history just as old. That's a meaningless appeal to age. Now if you could explain what meridians being "unhooked" means and what effect it's supposed to have, your post might be informative.

Also, "mouth breathing" is just a generic insult for really stupid people who do have a tendency to keep their mouths open. On the other hand, I did once work with a guy who looked mentally retarded (down to too narrow eyes and constant mouth breathing) who was actually really brilliant and had a Ph.D. in some obscure branch of math. Dang good coder too, if a bit careless about making sure his changes didn't have bad effects on cross-platform development.

Re:The question

[Shajenko42]

I know a guy who got blackout drunk and had sex with an ex-FB of his. She got pregnant, and refused to have an abortion.

Turns out the baby wasn't his. It also turns out, she KNEW this, lied to him about it, and had intentionally been having sex with guys with no protection in order to get pregnant. She saw this guy as the most financially viable (long term), so she told him the baby was pretty much definitely his.

Re:Queue Slashdot Reader Love Life Jokes

[king-manic]

60% of the "free condoms" split at 3 PSI in a Consumer Reports test. 2% of Trojans did. The moral of this story- buy your condoms, don't take the free ones the college hands out, but you still are running a 2% chance of pregnancy regardless.

Ahh someone with no knowledge of biology.

Human fertility isn't 100% during all phased of the cycle. It's not 100%. You must have sex within a week of ovulation till 1-2 days after. So if you have sex, and you did so within a week of ovulation or up to 2 days after (sperm survives for 3 days on average with outliers of 8 days reported, the ova has 1 day to be fertilized afterovulation or it's flushed) and the condom must fail then the ova must implant as well which isn't 100% then you may get pregnant. So under ideal conditions for fertility using a condom means less then 1% of getting pregnant even with the condom breaking.

The averaged out odds for a single encounter is generous 3-5% with unprotected sex fatcoring in the window, the 1/3-1/2 odds then even with a the right conditions the sperm may not meet egg or the fertilized egg may nto implant. So you have 2%*3% in general. = 0.06% if you use a condom factoring the fail rate you gave for trojans and the averaged natural conception rate per encounter.

Add the pill into theequation or even morning after if it's legal where you are and it's pretty unlikely.

Re:I think a more interesting study...

[Anonymous Coward]

The article asks those questions (and several related ones) and makes some guesses. My own guess is that by and large it is not intentional, several papers are referenced that suggest a trade off between intelligence and testosterone and point to those with a higher IQ being less sexually attractive.

We can all think of people who were attractive, athletic, and popular who are also intelligent, creative, and introspective, but such geniuses are much rarer than the stereotypical nerd who is a social misfit and physically unattractive.

Condom Split?

[Slashdot Parent]

In all my years of having sex, I have never had a condom split. Somebody must be doing something wrong.

Now let's analyze this attitude. A full 1 million Americans are HIV+ out of a population of 302 million. So there is a 1 in 300 chance that that hot chick you picked up at the bar is HIV+, give or take.

The chance of an HIV+ woman infecting a man through one act of unprotected sex is between 0.1% and 1%. The 1% figure is for men with genital lacerations. Let's take a rate of 0.5%.

Condoms are known to block HIV transmission. The average breakage/slippage rate for condoms is a whopping 4.6% (hello, people! Learn to use the tools!).

Ok. So let's say you pick up a chick at the bar and go home and have protected sex. You are two orders of magnitude more likely to get killed by a car while walking to her house than you are to contract HIV from her.

Hope that helps put things into perspective.

It's called a bell curve

[photomonkey]

The act of sexual intercourse is a very natural human instinct. I would bet that a majority of people out there have sex, or at least have had sex at some point.

In theory, 50% of the people out there, teens or otherwise, are in the middle of the intelligence spectrum. The remainder of the population naturally gravitate to one of the other extremes.

Now, by definition, people approaching either extreme of the curve are increasingly further away from the 'average middle'.

I don't have handy any information about what the personal habits of 'non-normal' people are (when plotted across a curve of intelligence), but since the mind is perhaps our singular most defining feature as a species, I would hypothesize that people of average intelligence behave in very average ways.

Since sexual intercourse is a 'normal' or 'average' behavior, I bet that most of the people with 'normal' or 'average' intelligence participate in the act according to the average frequency of their peers.

I would also hypothesize that deviations from 'average' intelligence on either side of the curve change a great many behavioral characteristics. Since sexual behavior is (in my opinion) a baser, hard-wired bit of evolutionary programming, no doubt intelligence has some relationship with sexual behavior.

A lot of the relationship here, though is probably due to basic statistics and very difficult-to-quantify variables. A majority of people behave as the majority of people do.