If you live in a competitive family and are a middle child, the news that first-born children are the cleverest is not good. A study conducted at the University of Oslo, and reported in the New Scientist, states that first-borns have an average 2.3 point IQ advantage over their dopey siblings.

I’ve never fancied IQ as a real measure of intelligence. And 2.3 points difference I could probably make up with better nutrition and all this flaxseed oil I’m consuming.

But then that is sort of the point that the Norwegian research is making. That some of the difference in intelligence within families is social, not genetic. It probably results from the fact that parents have more time for the first-born. The older children have been progressively more exposed to the sophisticated vocabulary of the parents. It suggests more powerfully that we should not overstate — as too many people prefer to these days — nature over the complex circumstances of individual nurture, which can produce heavily path-dependent outcomes.

The Knackered parenting experience would bear that out. You think you’re knackered with one child. What you really are is angst-ridden: you try so very hard. By the second, you happily consider that TV is adequate childcare, and react with hostility to any research that says otherwise. We were too knackered to have more children, so cannot speak with any authority on the exponential fatigue factor.

The real trick, as you get older, is to avoid competitions in which any of these differences in intelligence might be made manifest. That includes national IQ games on TV (I hate those because the Knackered Hackette — youngest in a family of five — always beats me), and Trivial Pursuit (is there such a thing as general knowledge any more?).

In arguments, the best advice is to pursue a strategy of “I’m not sure” in any discussion. It will undercut anyone and everyone in a family of experts, and will even gain you an endorsement from our favourite thinker. If you are male, a good trick is to learn to cook. You’re well out of the way when all the bickering takes place around Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Seriously, while 2.3 points does not seem that large, for the optimizers among us it could be a death knell in the hyper-competitive environment of globalization:-

In the US, SAT exams in reading and mathematics have a combined total of 1600 points, and on these two sections a difference in IQ of 2.3 could mean a 30 point difference in scores, says Frank Sulloway, at the University of California, Berkeley, US. This can mean the difference between getting into a premier university or second-tier university in the US, he points out.”

Of course, if you are really competitive, you should not be worrying about how smart your siblings are but how smart the emerging middle classes in India and China are. And, if you live in rich Europe, those arriving with a good education from the former Eastern Bloc countries. And how much brighter their children will be than yours.

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