The ID Report
Archives for: March 2011, 23
03/23/11
Coffee!! Genius is just a birth accident, prof reveals
by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent
"Will the real Baby Einstein please stand up?" is the hedder on a university media release aimed at pop science central:
When it comes to what causes genius, nature may be ready to pull a stunning upset over nurture. University of Alberta researcher Martin Mrazik has put forward the argument that an increased presence of a naturally-occuring hormone could mean that genius is determined before birth.I was invited to e-mail or call for details.In a recent article in Roeper Review, Mrazik and a colleague posit that genius may be caused by prenatal exposure to an excessive level of testosterone. Mrazik notes that there is evidence that this high exposure facilitates increased brain connection. This hormonal "glitch" in-utero, Mraizk notes, would explain why children are born with an affinity for certain areas such as math, science or arts.
Now, the nice thing about Roeper's thesis is that it is undemonstrable. Roeper is unlikely to suggest that we overdose a thousand male babies on testosterone and then give them IQ tests ten years later.
Notice the exquisite political correctness with which the PR department avoids the obvious issue: This, if plausible, would account for why so many more men than women are geniuses, a fact about which I have written here:
One way of looking at it: If you picture human achievement as a sort of bell curve, you will find that, absent serious social oppression of women, the women's achievement curve is of equal height to that of men, but fits inside it. Thus there are more male supergeniuses out there, and there are also more men in prison for essentially stupid offenses.Which is the central weakness of Roeper's theory: It is hardly likely that low or negative achievement in men can be accounted for by low testosterone.In the middle of the curve, women hold down normal jobs just as well as men - deliver the mail, doctor your dog, fix your teeth, et cetera. But at the outer edges on BOTH sides, it's mostly, though not entirely, a guy's world.
Accounting for a truly rare phenomenon is difficult by nature, and its origin can hardly be a simple one.
Note: As a matter of a policy, I, being a blogger, do not respond to invitations that don’t include a link, and I don’t have the time to hunt and peck for more information about a proposition in which I have no confidence anyway. Hence no link and no follow-up.
Further note: Obviously no marketing genius was involved in designing that PR approach. Imagine! In the world of the Internet!
Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.
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We are a group of individuals, coming from diverse backgrounds and not speaking for any organization, who have found common ground around teleological concepts, including intelligent design. We think these concepts have real potential to generate insights about our reality that are being drowned out by political advocacy from both sides. We hope this blog will provide a small voice that helps rectify this situation.
- The Design Inference - The Writings of William A. Dembski
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Website dedicated to comparing scenes from the "Inherit the Wind" movie with factual information from actual Scopes Trial. View 37 clips from the movie and decide for yourself if this movie is more fact or fiction.
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Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones maintains one of the best origins "quote" databases around. He is meticulous about accuracy and working from original sources.
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Most guys going through midlife crisis buy a convertible. Austrialian Stephen E. Jones went back to college to get a biology degree and is now a proponent of ID and common ancestry.
- Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove
Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"
- ID The Future
Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.
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A Philosopher's Journey: Political and cultural reflections of John Mark N. Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at
Biola University.
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