out of sight

beauty begets more babies

The Times has a science story about how evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain “as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.” Just a catchy intro? This paragraph though is interesting, if a little dubious.

“In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during the study, which also collected data on the number of children they had.”

Firstly, I would love too see a scientific definition of beauty. From my own completely unscientific observations I note that in the estate where I grew up there were loads of families with five children, whose mothers, apart from my own, were as plain-looking as the view from my bedroom window.

Cymatics is the study of visible sound and vibration. Well, so says Collin Cunning, the ‘mad scientist’ in this video. Watch as he mixes corn starch with music at different frequencies. Mad results.

interview with a savant

A headline in Scientific American caught my eye this morning: Learn to Think Better:Tips from a Savant. There isn’t enough of headlines using the word savant. The interview is with Daniel Tammet a linguist and European record holder for reciting the first 22,514 digits of pi. Nice. Anyway, Tammet says worry not about your IQ score, because he equates the process of scoring people’s intelligence with astrology.

I know from my own experience that there is much more to intelligence than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person’s mind or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential.

The bell curve distribution for IQ scores tells us that two thirds of the world’s population has an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115. This means that some four and a half billion people around the globe share just 31 numerical values (“he’s a 94,” “you’re a 110,” “I’m a 103”), equivalent to 150 million people worldwide sharing the same IQ score. This sounds a lot to me like astrology, which lumps everyone into one of 12 signs of the zodiac.

Even if we cannot measure and assign precise values to it in any “scientific” way, I do very much think that intelligence exists and that it varies in the actions of each person. The concept is a useful and important one for scientists and educators alike. My objection is to thinking that any “test” of a person’s intelligence is up to the task. Rather we should focus on ensuring that the fundamentals (literacy, etcetera) are well taught and that each child’s diverse talents are encouraged and nourished.

Check the weather with low-tech but charming graphics.