Is Your Father Smarter Than Your Mother?

Steve Sailer, bless his hardening heart, has a post up about a Charles Murray article reminding leftoid paymasters that high achievement on tests like the SAT are more a consequence of genetic heritage than of socioeconomic status.

One of the commenters, Jonah, draws the mostly-unspoken parallel of SAT scores to female hypergamy:

I’d wager a guess that the correlation would be significantly stronger if the father’s IQ could have been assessed as well. I’d assume that there are a significant number of affluent families where the father is the skilled/educated breadwinner.

This is very astute and under-considered by sociologists looking at longitudinal data like these. Given hypergamy – the propensity for women to “marry up”, and the willingness of men to “marry down” in favor of looks or other non IQ traits – I would bet Murray’s point would be amplified by if you looked at father’s IQ instead of mother’s. Wish he had the #s for dads/SAT rather than moms/PIAT. Would be a stronger and more striking piece.

By the way, I doubt I’m the only person here whose father was smarter than my mother. It’s probably true for over 60% of the population but you never hear about it. For people with one parent SIGNIFICANTLY smarter than the other, I bet it’s Dads over Moms 10-1.

And yes, the math checks out. Dumb, low status men, and ugly smart women are more frequently shut out of the marriage game than their gender opposites.

Female hypergamy in the West is, at least in its current configuration, dysgenic. Smart, overcredentialed women are shunting their smart genes into an ever narrower demographic slice, because these women can’t stomach the thought of “marrying down” in intelligence or phonyfuck credentials. And we see exactly that playing out, as the fertility rate of high IQ white mimosaettes is zeroing in on a little over 0.0 kids per woman.

But high IQ fathers, especially conservative fathers who don’t do woman’s work, have higher fertility and thus “male hypergamy” is eugenic. The primary reason has to do with the lifetime SMV slopes of men. High achieving men experience a gradual increase in their SMVs peaking at right about the time same-age women’s SMVs are crashing into the Wall. Many of these men go on to second or third younger wives, and produce second or third families of scions.

A secondary reason for the eugenic effect of male hypergamy — the urge to pair off with ever-younger, hotter, tighter minxes — is the fact Jonah mentioned: High achieving/high IQ men cash in their higher SMVs for prettier women at a wider range of female smarts. Because, you see, to the vast majority of men, even to the SJW manlets in full denial mode, a woman’s youth and beauty are nitroglycerin to a man’s boner. Blows it right up. A woman’s smarts? No effect. Worse for the grad school ladies, boners will sometimes wither under the droning onslaught of SMRT women with something insufferably feminist to prove.

In the final analysis, high IQ women demographically hoard their advantageous genes, just like they romantically hoard their eggs. High IQ men, in contrast, spread their advantageous genes just like they spread their sperm.

Which brings us to the fascinating, if perturbing to fragile minds, question Jonah asks: Is your father smarter than your mother?

I can recall with the crystal clearest clarity only Lucifer’s favored son can summon that it did, and does, seem to me most of my peers’ fathers were/are brighter than their mothers. (NB: I am not a product of a black ghetto. I only play one on TV.) There were a few glaring exceptions, and like all exceptions they are extraordinarily memorable by reason of their rarity. Mostly, these pairings featured a ballbuster proto-feminist tankwife cracking the whip over the back of a stepnfetchit beta hubby. Not all though. A few couples in which the mother of my friend was noticeably smarter than the father had the right sexual polarity — submissive wife and dominant husband — that managed by way of alchemical sexual magic to work despite the father’s relatively gimped brainpower.

That’s the monkey wrench in the patented CH theory of dysgenic female hypergamy: The allure of badboys — who may or may not have upper quintile SAT scores — to all women, maybe especially to SMRT women surrounded in their milieus by supplicating beta males. If the Pill and condom and abortion weren’t acting as procreation thwarting intermediaries, the fertility of high IQ women might be a lot higher, as they opened the un-latexed gates to their eggs to sundry charming jerkboys.

Evolution grinds regardless. Where are we heading? I don’t know, but I do know the late 20th-early 21st century paradigms are not long for this world. More and more it appears the historical pairing of smarter, high achieving men with prettier, low achieving women has been severed and hijacked by powerful anti-human social forces. More and more the romantically healthy arrangements are upended by discordant faux-aristocratic entities. What was once common — a vital middle class distinguished by fathers smarter and higher achieving than mothers — has become a curiosity gawked at by the destroyers of harmony.

We know our trajectory. What we don’t know is our destination. So certain are you that a bright, sunshiney day waits at the end?