Genetic Fitness May Explain Why Intelligent People Are Often Healthier

Sweet. So let's just test everyone at birth, then discard those that don't make the cut. That way, we'll be able to keep health costs sufficiently low.<p>Should be easy once we liberalize the laws on abortion. Hmm... but people might object to their less fit children being eliminated....<p>Better not tell them. We'll just let the Doctors make the decisions. They always know best anyway. After all, why else would we give them white coats?<p>"Genetic fitness" was at the heart of every terrible ideology of the past century. Watch out for this type of thinking. Its the first step to a place you don't want to be....

Oh, yeesh, a Gottfredson publication in the journal Intelligence. The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like that is the article by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.<p><a href="http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html" rel="nofollow">http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html</a><p>Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.

This strikes me as a really weird hypothesis. The idea of some over-arching "fitness factor" existing outside of the huge variety of genetic traits that apply to aspects of physical and mental ability sounds like comic-book science.