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For the second straight summer Friday, two of the network anchors took a long weekend. NBC had Lester Holt substitute for Brian Williams. ABC had George Stephanopoulos take Charles Gibson's chair. CBS and NBC each led with heightened counterterrorism alerts--NBC fearing infiltration from Pakistan, CBS from Iraq. ABC led with the Story of the Day, the mass funeral for the nine Charleston firefighters killed on Tuesday. But the ideal flippant story to kick off a family weekend was the research published in the journal Science that firstborn sons tend to score better in IQ tests than their kid brothers.

None of the three networks could resist the sibling study. It was conducted in Norway among 240,000 late-teenage military men--so when ABC's Bill Weir (subscription required) called it "one more reason to resent your big sister" he was off the mark, since it measured only men. "Not due to nature but nurture," Weir explained in his A Closer Look, since firstborns are more likely to be lavished with undivided adult attention as infants and then have to act as tutors when younger siblings arrive.

Weir and CBS' Kelly Wallace and NBC's Mike Taibbi all characterized the three point advantage in average IQ score between firstborn sons and their secondborn brothers as the difference between an A student and a B student. What a coincidence that they all chose that grade level! No one called it the difference between a D student and an F. There were other strange similarities in the three reports: all cited Albert Einstein as an example of a genius firstborn. As for younger siblings that succeeded in the face of their elder's statistical edge, Weir and Wallace both proposed Thomas Edison. Taibbi, believe it or not, cited the "charm and inventiveness" of Beaver Cleaver, the fictional secondborn in the classic TV sitcom.

Andrew Tyndall 6/23/07 9:24:01 pm

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