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by somenameforme 1008 days ago
Contrary to Hollywood stereotypes, attractiveness and IQ are extremely strongly correlated. You can find a million studies affirming this with a search - it's not controversial, though the reason for it is. For the lazy here's a random study. [1] The typical effort to dismiss it is to claim it's a bias or halo effect.

But as that paper lays out there's a really simple and logical explanation for it as well. Intelligence is highly heritable, attractiveness is highly heritable. Intelligent people are more likely to succeed making them more able to seek out other attractive/intelligent individuals, thus resulting in more attractive/intelligent offspring.

[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

2 comments

Unfortunately this is going backwards now.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25131282/

> One-standard-deviation increase in childhood general intelligence (15 IQ points) decreases women's odds of parenthood by 21-25%. Because women have a greater impact on the average intelligence of future generations, the dysgenic fertility among women is predicted to lead to a decline in the average intelligence of the population in advanced industrial nations.

It's not exactly scientific evidence that intelligence is highly heritable.
There's a ton of well controlled studies that show the degree to which intelligence is heritable. This is not really controversial.