The Econ­o­mist presents a short arti­cle on how intel­li­gence predicts—among other health benefits—sperm qual­ity. Some­thing I pointed to a cou­ple of months ago when research results were first com­ing through.

Recently, it has been dis­cov­ered that an individual’s [intel­li­gence] is cor­re­lated with many aspects of his health, up to and includ­ing his lifes­pan. One pos­si­ble expla­na­tion for this is that intel­li­gent peo­ple make bet­ter choices about how to con­duct their lives. They may, for exam­ple, be less likely to smoke, more likely to eat healthy foods or to exer­cise, and so on.

Alter­na­tively (or in addi­tion) it may be that intel­li­gence is one man­i­fes­ta­tion of an under­ly­ing, genet­i­cally based health­i­ness. That is a view held by many evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gists, and was pro­pounded in its mod­ern form by Geof­frey Miller of the Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico […]. These biol­o­gists believe intel­li­gence, as man­i­fested in things like artis­tic and musi­cal abil­ity, is such a reli­able indi­ca­tor of under­ly­ing genetic fit­ness that it has been cho­sen by mem­bers of the oppo­site sex over the mil­len­nia. In the ensu­ing arms race to show off and get a mate it has been exag­ger­ated in the way that a peacock’s tail is. This process of sex­ual selec­tion, Dr Miller and his fol­low­ers believe, is the rea­son peo­ple have become so brainy.

Two com­ple­men­tary arti­cles: The ‘evo­lu­tion’ high of cul­ture, Evo­lu­tion has not come to an end (even if nat­ural selec­tion has).