Elon Musk says it’s “super concerning” that smart young people aren’t having more sex. He was responding to a tweet about high IQ kids not having as much sex as average IQ kids. The content of the tweet goes back to an article published in 2000, titled: “Smart teens don’t have sex”. Something is loading.
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Elon Musk worries about the sex lives of smart teens.
On Monday night, the Twitter CEO responded to a tweet from a user named Bronwyn Williams. Williams referenced research that found young people with an IQ over 130 are “3 to 5 times less likely” to have had sex than those with an average IQ.
“Boys with an IQ that would qualify as intellectually disabled (60) were even more likely to have had sex than those with a very high IQ (130),” Williams tweeted, adding that this “doesn’t bode nothing good for humanity.”
“Super disturbing,” Musk tweeted in response.
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2023
Williams’ tweet references a research article published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2000, titled “Smart Teenagers Don’t Have Sex (Or Kiss Much Either).”
The study followed 12,000 teenagers in the United States between grades 7 and 12 to try to determine the link between intelligence and sexual activity.
The study found that teens at the higher end of the information distribution were less likely to have sex than their peers. But teens at the lower end of the intelligence distribution were also less likely to be sexually active than other people their age, the study found. Meanwhile, those with higher intelligence scores were also found to be more likely to have sex later in life.
Carolyn Halpern, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and study researchers, told WebMD in 2000 that the smartest teens “probably think about their educational and career goals and the possible negative consequences of ‘early sexual activity’.
It should be noted that the research was published 23 years ago. A 2021 study published in the academic journal “Archives of Sexual Behavior” found that from 2009 to 2018, people, whether teens or adults, had less sex everywhere.
Musk is known to frequently tweet about the population crash, saying humans need to boost fertility rates immediately to avoid catastrophic consequences.
Musk did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.