An clever method?
Suggestions’s ears at all times prick up after we see a publication with a self-aggrandising title. So we latched with curiosity onto a social media submit by Rebecca Sear, a demographer at Brunel College London, who famous that writer Elsevier has “chosen new editors for Intelligence“.
Intelligence, you see, is a scientific journal that publishes research that make “a substantial contribution to an understanding of the nature and function of intelligence”. Suggestions can not confirm that the editors have been modified, as a result of the journal’s “About” web page hasn’t been up to date, but it surely did promote for a brand new editor-in-chief in January 2024. There was a report that a lot of the editorial board has resigned in protest on the appointment of the brand new editor(s), however since that report appeared on a far-right web site, Suggestions is disinclined to consider it with out additional proof.
Cling on, readers could also be considering. How did we get from a scientific journal changing its editors to a far-right web site? The factor is, intelligence analysis has typically been misused to justify claims of racial superiority, particularly throughout the eugenics motion of the early twentieth century. And Intelligence has printed analysis that your racist uncle may quote approvingly.
Somebody at Elsevier seems to have observed. The Guardian has reported the writer was reviewing papers by the late Richard Lynn, who claimed to have discovered variations in IQ between nations – together with in papers in Intelligence.
That is all getting a bit darkish, so let’s transfer swiftly ahead to the opposite challenge with Intelligence: its obvious lack of its supposed defining trait. Sear highlighted a paper with the innocuous-seeming title “Temperature and evolutionary novelty as forces behind the evolution of basic intelligence“.
Its thrust is that, when some Homo sapiens populations first migrated outdoors Africa, they encountered all types of novel circumstances, like totally different climates. This prompted them to evolve a better degree of intelligence. What this implies for African populations is left to the reader to deduce.
If this all feels like one thing from the unhealthy previous days of Victorian science, Suggestions regrets to tell you that this paper was really first printed on-line in 2007. Nevertheless, should you swallow your nausea and look nearer, a real delight emerges.
The primary challenge is that the creator calculates the distances populations travelled “as the crow flies”. You’ll be able to’t use straight-line distances as even a primary approximation for the historical past of human migration, which concerned individuals journeying to the far north-east of Asia, crossing into North America and onwards to the southern tip of South America.
Nevertheless it will get higher. In the identical sentence, the paper’s creator says he calculated the gap “using the Pythagoras’ theorem”. Readers will recall that Pythagoras’ theorem solely applies to flat planes and doesn’t work for curved surfaces. Sure, this research concerning the racial origins of intelligence is constructed on the belief that Earth is flat.
With immense tutorial restraint, a 2009 rebuttal instructed this research is likely to be “questionable”. Different psychologists introduced the issue to the journal’s consideration, solely to be instructed that their critiques have been “wholly unfavorable and nitpicking“. The paper stays stay.
Accordingly, Suggestions want to nominate the journal Intelligence for the 2025 Reverse Nominative Determinism Award.
Forty lashes
New Scientist reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan highlights a paper about why eyelashes are curly, which they describe as “silly enough to be Feedback material”. Impolite: it is a deeply severe column about severe issues.
The analysis is usually concerning the physics of eyelashes, explaining how they switch water away from our eyes so we are able to nonetheless see when it’s raining. This course of relies on “a hydrophobic curved flexible fiber array with surface micro-ratchet and macro-curvature”. There may be lots of stuff about adhesion forces and the significance of the curvature of the lashes for water drainage.
After which we get to the dialogue part the place, as Karmela drily notes, “the authors go into aesthetic advice”. You see, “modern beauty standards” encourage ladies to make use of mascara “to extend and fix eyelashes”, which “compromises the protective functions”. However concern not, the answer is at hand: “as a tip, for people with sparse eyelashes, hydrophobic curved false eyelashes could offer a practical solution for enhancing appearance while preserving eye protection.” Might a patent probably be pending?
Suggestions wonders whether or not the authors have any recommendation for middle-aged writers whose eyebrows develop too lengthy, inflicting them to seem like a macaroni penguin except frequently trimmed. For a pal.
Worst to-be-read pile ever
Suggestions has someway bought onto the mailing listing for Spines, a tech firm aiming to disrupt the publishing trade via the facility of synthetic intelligence.
By utilizing AI to do the modifying and different jobs beforehand finished by expert and salaried people, Spines goals to publish 8000 books in 2025. To which Suggestions says, sure please. When one seems to be on the structural issues within the publishing trade, such because the dire fact-checking requirements in non-fiction output, one can solely conclude that what we actually want is a deluge of much more books of a fair decrease high quality.
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