Better education can lead to better ejaculation, according to research done in part by UNM psychology professor Geoffrey Miller.
Miller and his research group found that more-intelligent men have a higher sperm count and more-mobile sperm than their less-educated counterparts.
Other contributors to the study include Rosalind Arden of King's College in London, Allen Pacey of the University of Sheffield and Arden Pierce of the Pathology Department at UNMH.
"Basically, it all stems from an idea that there is a general mutational load that people carry with them," Pierce said. "And the idea is that you can sort how well a person's mutational load affects their evolutionary fitness, i.e., their ability to procreate and survive."
Pierce said most of the "mutational load" is accessible in genomes in the brain, making it possible to correlate intelligence and sperm quality.
"We figured the brain would best express whatever sort of mutational load an individual had in terms of how intact their intelligence was," he said. "(The study) looks at several different functions of sperm quality, so we were talking about sperm motility and concentration . and there were positive correlations with all of them."
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Miller is on sabbatical in Australia and was unavailable for comment.
Pierce said this research project is a continuation of Miller's pioneering work.
"A lot of our ideas come from his work describing how the brain evolved to be the way it is not to merely survive but to mate," Pierce said. "In this sense, our mysteriously complex ability to think is really just an extensively evolved and exaggerated trait, much like the functionally useless peacock tail."
The sperm study was done last summer using pre-existing data from 425 of about 4,500 Vietnam veterans who, among other things, provided sperm samples and took psychological and neurological examinations as part of the Vietnam Experience Study in 1985, Pierce said.
"There was a fairly representative proportion of all races in the study," he said in an e-mail to the Daily Lobo. "We controlled for behavioral factors such as smoking, drug and alcohol use, and even Agent Orange exposure, so that our genetic (versus environmental) hypothesis could be tested."
Pierce said age, days of abstinence and body mass index were taken into account, as these can affect sperm quality. Sperm concentration, motility and count were all robustly statistically correlated with overall intelligence, he said.
Pierce said the research team used that data to argue for the "mutational load" theory.
"We kind of used those correlations to argue for this greater idea . this idea of a mutational load having an effect on evolutionary fitness," he said.
Ezra Meier, graduate adviser for the English Department, said more-efficient semen doesn't necessarily mean the improvement of the gene pool.
"It just seems to me that smart people might intelligently decide not to reproduce," he said. "I think that it is confounded by the fact that smart people, although they have more effective semen, may not be as likely to spread it out. They may choose not to reproduce or to reproduce in smaller families, because it's easier to raise smaller families with a higher standard of living."
Chad McCoy is listed as a senior majoring in physics and mathematics, even though he's only spent two years in college.
"I would say it's just for the benefit of the gene pool," McCoy said of the positive correlation found in the study. "By the concept of social Darwinism - the survival of the fittest - those who are best suited to succeed in life, do."
Should the gene pool be improved as a result of intelligent men's semen, McCoy said there will likely be more innovative research in the future.
"Hopefully it's going to allow for greater scientific advancements in the future . to have more of the bright minds who have the brightest future for scientific and technological advancement in the country," he said.
