It’s been a few years, so I don’t have sources to cite, but I remember looking into this at one point and finding that immune health during developmental years is a common major underlying cause for intelligence, attractiveness, physical fitness, and so forth. This makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint: infectious disease used to be the #1 killer, so immune health would be the thing which everything else traded off against.
One consequence is that things like e.g. attractiveness and intelligence actually do positively correlate, so peoples’ halo-effect estimates actually do work, to some extent.
Are you sure that the correlation between immune health during childhood and all of those positive attributes is causal?
Superficially, it seems more plausible that the causation starts much earlier, via mutational load or specific conditions during the gestation period. Though I suppose that it is also possible that health in the womb and health during early childhood could both effect adult outcomes.
Yeah, sorry, I should have been more clear there. The mechanisms which trade off immune strength against other things are the underlying cause. Testosterone levels in males are a good example—higher testosterone increases attractiveness, physical strength, and spatial-visual reasoning, but it’s an immune suppressor.
It’s been a few years, so I don’t have sources to cite, but I remember looking into this at one point and finding that immune health during developmental years is a common major underlying cause for intelligence, attractiveness, physical fitness, and so forth. This makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint: infectious disease used to be the #1 killer, so immune health would be the thing which everything else traded off against.
One consequence is that things like e.g. attractiveness and intelligence actually do positively correlate, so peoples’ halo-effect estimates actually do work, to some extent.
Are you sure that the correlation between immune health during childhood and all of those positive attributes is causal?
Superficially, it seems more plausible that the causation starts much earlier, via mutational load or specific conditions during the gestation period. Though I suppose that it is also possible that health in the womb and health during early childhood could both effect adult outcomes.
Yeah, sorry, I should have been more clear there. The mechanisms which trade off immune strength against other things are the underlying cause. Testosterone levels in males are a good example—higher testosterone increases attractiveness, physical strength, and spatial-visual reasoning, but it’s an immune suppressor.