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Who s the Smart Sibling? Ten weeks ago, Bo Cleveland and his wife embarked on a highly unscientific experiment-they gave birth to their first child. For now, Cleveland is too exhausted to even consider having another baby, but eventually, he will. In fact, hes already planned an egalitarian strategy for raising the rest of his family. Little Arthur won t get any extra attention just because he s the firstborn, and, says his father, he probably won t be much smarter than his future .siblings; either.It s the sort of thing many parents would say, but it s a bit surprising coming from Cleveland,who studies birth order and IQ at Pennsylvania State University. As he knows too well, a study published recently in the journal Science suggests that firstborns do turn out sharper than their brothers and sisters, no matter how parents try to compensate. Is Cleveland wrong? Is Arthur destined to be the smart sibling just because he had the good luck to be born first? For decades, scientists have been squabbling over birth order like siblings fighting over a toy. Some of them say being a first-, middle- or lastborn has significant effects on intelligence. Others say that s nonsense, The spat goes back at least as far as Alfred Adler, a Freud-era psychologist who argued that firstborns had an edge. Other psychologists found his theory easy to believemiddle and youngest kids already had a bad rap, thanks to everything from primogeniture laws to the Prodigal Son. When they set out to confirm the birth-order effects Adler had predicted, they found some evidence. Dozens of studies over the next several decades showed small differences in IQ; scholastic-aptitude tests and other measures of achievement So did anecdata suggesting that firstborns were more likely to win Nobel Prizes or become prominent psychologists. | 
