Pregunta #4

Ja! Nunca había durado tanto tiempo con una pregunta [y la nueva que salió y que será la número 5 es una mierda; quizá eso me motive a cambiarla pronto].

Thursday, February 28, 2008 - Tuesday, September 15, 2009:
Q4: Your bow is not broken but you've run out of arrows. How can you fake being a bard?
Ugh! What do you need arrows for? You play the lire while singing a song about perverted medieval monks raping unfortunate virgins...

Keeping track of the questions: Pregunta #3

Blogger sucks!

Si metes una palabra al buscador "search blog", no encontrará palabras que aparezcan en itálicas! Me pregunto si encontrará palabras que aparezcan de algún color que no sea el defautl, o en negritas, o subrayadas, etc...

For myself

Me estaba acordando de la vez que un shina me "supervisó" mientras llenaba (por segunda vez en mi vida) ciertos tanquecillos con nitrógeno líquido proveniente de tanques mucho más grandes. Éstos últimos tenían una manguera metálica por la cual pasaba el nitrógeno (cosa que no fue cierta la primera vez, durante la cual sólo tenían un tubo rigido, a manera de grifo) y, como no me puse cryo-gloves (porque son completamente innecesarios cuando colectas nitrógeno de un tanque con grifo!) un rato después de que abrí la llave la manguera empezaba a llenarse de escarcha y en cosa de segundos sentí que me quemaba la mano.
Instintivamente dejé caer la manguera y el nitrógeno vaciábase sobre los pies de la oriental, quien brincoteaba escandalosamente mientras yo cerraba la manguera.
No sé de donde saqué fuerzas para no reírme en su cara mientras se frotaba los pies por encima de sus tenis de lona.

Descubrí que guardé una nota brevísima al respecto ("China pendeja nitrógeno") en mi celular, y ahorita que limpiábalo no pude resistir la tentación de postear para preservar una memoria tan agradable.
Desde luego, la nota en mi celular es totalmente misleading porque el pendejo fui yo :p.
Bah, minucias gramaticales: yo, tú, él/ella... qué importa.

Tall people are more intelligent and more beautiful, HA!

En promedio, al menos, y no cualquier individuo casualmente elongado (según un tipo cuyo nombre aparece al final del post). Hm. Interesante... (BS?).

Why are taller people more intelligent than shorter people?

 In our paper, Reyniers and I propose a second possible explanation.  It consists of three separate mechanisms.

 In my previous post, I explain that men on average are slightly but significantly more intelligent than women, not because they are men, but because they are taller.  But why are taller people more intelligent than shorter people?

The real answer is we don’t know for sure, but there are two possible explanations.  First, both height and intelligence may be indicators of underlying health.  According to this view, people who are genetically and developmentally healthier simultaneously grow taller and become more intelligent than those who are less healthy, producing the positive correlation between height and intelligence.

... ... ...

1.  Assortative mating of tall men and beautiful women.  Because height is desirable in men and physical attractiveness is desirable in women, there should be assortative mating between tall men and beautiful women (and short men and less beautiful women).  Because both height and physical attractiveness are heritable, this will create an extrinsic (non-causal) correlation among their children between height and physical attractiveness, where tall people (both men and women) are more beautiful than short people.

 2.  Assortative mating of intelligent men and beautiful women.  Because intelligent men tend to attain higher status, at least in the evolutionarily novel environment in recent history, and high status is desirable in men, and because physical attractiveness is desirable in women, there should be assortative mating between intelligent (and thus high-status) men and beautiful women.  Because both intelligence and physical attractiveness are heritable, this will create an extrinsic (non-causal) correlation among their children between intelligence and physical attractiveness, where more attractive people are more intelligent than less attractive people.

 3.  Extrinsic correlation between height and physical attractiveness (produced by Mechanism 1 above) and extrinsic correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness (produced by Mechanism 2 above) will create a second-order extrinsic correlation between height and intelligence.

We believe that this may be why taller people are more intelligent than shorter people.  Another factor contributing to the seeming male advantage in intelligence is that taller parents are more likely to have sons than shorter parents.  So, over many generations, more sons will inherit their parents’ genes inclining them to be taller and more intelligent, and more daughters will inherit their parents’ genes inclining them to be shorter and less intelligent.  But, once again, the crucial factor is height, not sex.

In our paper, we present evidence for all of the crucial mechanisms:  Taller people are on average physically more attractive than shorter people; physically more attractive people are on average more intelligent than physically less attractive people; taller people are on average more intelligent than shorter people; and taller parents are more likely to have sons than shorter parents.  But the issue is far from resolved.  While there is no doubt that taller people are indeed more intelligent than shorter people, the question of why this is so is one of the remaining puzzles in evolutionary psychology.

The Scientific Fundamentalist: A Look at the Hard Truths About Human Nature, by Satoshi Kanazawa

Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist at LSE...

Jaja