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Intelligent men have better sperm

By Carla Bevan on Monday 8 December 2008

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Intelligent men have better sperm, according to the latest research.

In a UK study, which looked at sperm collected from American soldiers who'd served in conflicts such as Vietnam and Korea, there was a small, but significant link between healthy semen and the individual's IQ.

It was previously believed that the only way intelligence played a part on semen quality was that the more intelligent someone was, the less likely they might be to smoke or make unhealthy decisions about their lifestyle, which is already known to have an impact on sperm quality.

However, the new study, recently published in the journal Intelligence, says that doesn't explain the whole picture.

'This does not mean that men who prefer Play-Doh to Plato always have poor sperm: the relationship we found was marginal,' says lead researcher Dr Rosalind Arden.

'But our results do support the theoretically important 'fitness factor' idea.

'We look forward to seeing if the results can be replicated in other data sets, with other measures of intelligence and other measures of physical health that are also strongly related to evolutionary fitness.'

Fertility expert Dr Allan Pacey disagrees.

'The fact that it's possible to detect a statistical relationship between intelligence and semen quality in adult men probably says more about the co-development of brain and testicles when the man was in his mother's womb, and therefore how well they both function in adult life, rather than suggesting that playing Sudoku can somehow stimulate more sperm to be produced,' Pacey notes.

'The improvement in semen quality with intelligence observed in this paper is small and therefore it is unlikely to have a big impact on the ability of men of different intelligences to conceive.'