Picasso, a firstborn, and Schiller, a kid brother, both quipped that there are no accidents. They were smart as whips so I’m sure they’re right, just as I’m sure it wasn’t an accident that the 1,100-word story on birth order and IQs in the New York Times on June 22 never once used the word “smart” in any of its forms–particularly the comparative phrase “smarter than.”
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The New York Times story, by science reporter Benedict Carey, has a whiplash finale worthy of The Sixth Sense. Its subject is a large Norwegian study that looked at the IQs of 241,310 young men who were tested when they reached draft age. The research found a “slight” but “significant” difference in the scores of firstborn sons and second sons: three points. That “may not sound like much,” Carey reports, “but experts say it can be a tipping point for some people–the difference between a high B average and a low A,” or an education at a public university instead of “an elite private liberal arts college.” A comparison of 63,951 pairs of brothers produced the same results.
Firstborns have won more Nobel Prizes in science than younger siblings, Carey allows, “but often by advancing current understanding, rather than overturning it.” Among the great over-turners, he reports that Darwin was the fifth of six kids, Copernicus the youngest of four, and Descartes the youngest of three.
It was smart of Benedict Carey to leave “smart” out of his stories. I asked him if it was intentional and he said, “I wasn’t aware of that.” But that doesn’t mean his word choice was an accident. Other papers translated the research into the vernacular, but Carey says he stuck to the language of the study, which dealt with birth order and IQ points. He says he made a case for younger siblings because “anyone who’s lived in the world realizes later-born kids often have all sorts of skills that may sweep them past firstborns.”
The good news is that the Sun-Times would never dare boast like that if it couldn’t count on Roger Ebert to do some heavy lifting. Ebert transforms the Sun-Times whenever he’s in it, which due to ill health has been only occasionally in recent weeks and virtually never for months before. I hope Ebert doesn’t try to do too much. If he writes a story or two each week and presides over the section, making the other critics the Sun-Times has rounded up sound smarter by sheer propinquity, he’ll be doing as much as any one writer can to keep the ship afloat.
The front-page story by Rick Popely in the same edition said motorcycle fatalities have more than doubled in the past ten years, and “one obvious reason for the spike is that U.S. motorcycle sales more than tripled in the last 10 years, topping 1.1 million last year. That has brought thousands of new riders into the sport and thousands more Baby Boomers back into the saddle, most with little or no training.”
The photo’s riveting and troubling, but the caption doesn’t acknowledge this. It merely says, “Herdsmen saw the antlers off a maral deer in Siberia’s Altai region, where spas provide treatments using a substance boiled from the antlers–and clients down deer-blood shots.”
