USS Clueless Stardate 20010728.1109

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Stardate 20010728.1109 (Crew, this is the Captain): Yesterday I read an article which I can't find now which claimed that researchers had found a correlation between IQ and life expectancy, the idea being that people with higher IQ's also seemed to live longer. I believe that this is probably true, but I think it can be explained easily enough. There is a known strong correlation between IQ and level of education. There is an inverse correlation between education level and the likelihood that someone will be a smoker, and equally an inverse correlation between smoking and life expectancy. In other words, people with higher IQs are less likely to smoke, and smoking kills. If you were to eliminate this factor, I bet there would be no important correlation at all between IQ and life expectancy. (discuss)

Captured by MemoWeb from http://denbeste.nu/entries/00000382.shtml on 9/16/2004