Quote of the year for 1999?
"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."

Ok... one too many doobies at this stage... but this, like , blowed me away: without women what would be the point of wealth? I've no response, wow!

rarely do the greatest researchers overlap with the greatest scientific rock stars)

very rarely

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i know there is an irrational male desire for immortality (fame), present or posthumous, Nietzsche and Achilles. what drives it? glorious death & wild immortality vs scoring & genetic expansion in the present?

the hope and the dream is what drives men and women of ostensibly high intellectual aptitude.

why would it drive women?

why would it drive women?

sexual dimorphism takes a long time to evolve. one could hypothesize for example that extremely high male reproductive skew is a feature of the past 10,000 years with the rise of male societies. a high risk/high yield (lots of offspring after fame) morph might have arisen amongst males. but their female offspring might also have it, though it really isn't that beneficial for them because their reproductive output is naturally rate limited. over time one can imagine genetic modifiers making the high risk/high yield behavioral morph express only in males, but it would take a while. and anyhow, the trait can persist if the benefits to a few males are great enough to outweigh the problem this might create for the vast majority of males and all females who carry the genes predisposing themselves to behaviors with a low chance of yield (proximately one can hypothesize that these individuals' psychologies are simply unrealistic calculating their success attaining a high likelihood failure goal. e.g., "i'll beat the odds!").

p.s. and obviously i don't really think that this tendency expresses itself equally in males and females. i don't think that the reproductive skew started just 10,000 years ago, though it has probably gotten more extreme, nor do i think genetic parameters explain the whole expression of this tendency.

The advance of our species was driven by the hunting and drinking men that fathered the most children.

The advance of our species was driven by the hunting and drinking men that fathered the most children.

like isaac newton? ;-)

Money needn't be a prime motivator. Nor sex. Nor power. Nor fame. Intellectual curiosity can suffice. There is also community. Sharing of powerful ideas. Intelligent peers. Being part of something greater than oneself.

Leibniz also didn't have any children and God knows studying calculus never did anything to enhance my sex life.

There is no evidence that the human race has advanced in anything other than numbers since the end of the last ice age. Give a healthy paleolithic man a shave and a haircut and he could pass for anyones cousin Fred. I daresay the distribution of the traits of strength, speed, or cleverness over the population of ancestral hunter-gatherers is any different than it is over the current population.

Some argue that we have adapted to live with crowds and germs but becoming docile mass consumption units is hardly an "advance" in my book.

jrh, there is no objective sense in which we can say evolution "advances" toward any goal. I think we could say there is evidence that the average IQ of humanity has risen, but as Charles Murray said "Who wants to be an elephant": IQ isn't everything or even much of anything to some.

there is no objective sense in which we can say evolution "advances" toward any goal.

Survival and reproduction fill the bill for me.

I think we could say there is evidence that the average IQ of humanity has risen

What evidence? Are you saying that there has been genetic evolution in the human faculty of intelligence in the short span of time that IQ tests have existed?

Charles Murray said "Who wants to be an elephant": IQ isn't everything or even much of anything to some.

Especially if it cuts into ones hunting and drinking! :-)

I daresay the distribution of the traits of strength, speed, or cleverness over the population of ancestral hunter-gatherers is any different than it is over the current population.

over the past 10,000 years there certainly has been quite a bit of evolution. search for 'recent human evolution' in our archives. we know that cranial morphology has changed in britain in the past 1,000 years.

"society was driven by
The hunting drinking men that fathered the most children?"
While i am familiar with the allure of evolution as a beer commercial, nowadays the only thing such men drive up are the welfare roles. well, maybe the hunting part is useful if you're out of work, though only when necessary....
Considering the ubqitiousness of infanticide and abortion in most cultures down through the ages, and the first man to strategically use a bit of fabric on his whatnot took the trophy. Birth control was practiced in ancient times--there was a plant that grew in the mediterranean area that women used for that purpose and it was harvested to extinction by the time of the Christian era.

Anyway, there are not many real "scientists' around. Most research is funded in government thinktanks and universities. It is controlled by people who are invested in orthodoxy, be it of archeaology, astronomy, physics, genetics, biology, medical research. They don't want a drastically different paradigm--they REALLY don't. How could they if their tenure, or their funding, or their sense of reality depends on the already-accepted truths. It has as stiffling effect on discovery as ever religion did. The attitude of most scientists is, "don't bother me with the facts (if they are disturbing, unfamiliar), my mind is made up."
I've been shocked and dismayed at the narrowness of thinking among them, the total lack of wonder at the mystery of the universe. They are technicians, not seekers of truth. Nothing wrong with that i guess. And actually the ones at NASA don't do too badly.

While i am familiar with the allure of evolution as a beer commercial, nowadays the only thing such men drive up are the welfare roles.

Among the contemporaries of Newton and Darwin it was more along the lines of riding to hounds and imbibing port rather than pickup trucks and Budweiser although you seem to be implying that the current hunters in your neck of the woods are continuing to win the evolutionary race.

BTW, does anybody know how physics grads make their cars go faster?

Fun posting and comments. One suspicion, though: I'm just guessing here, but I'll bet that as time passes you'll start respecting the matrix that science takes place in and that supports it (the institutions, the structures, the mid-level workers, the bosses, the popularizers) a little more and the star-geniuses a little less. Just a hunch. Could be wrong, of course!

over the past 10,000 years there certainly has been quite a bit of evolution. search for 'recent human evolution' in our archives. we know that cranial morphology has changed in britain in the past 1,000 years.

Considering the all the different waves of invasion that occurred during the millenium previous to that one, it's not surprising that something as complicated as skull shape continued to boil around for a while especially when you consider that there was a more or less continuous admixture of Celts from beyond the Pale (or even Wales) as they became more integrated into British society. Cultural standards of beauty were changing fashion during that time too. I guess that is "evolution" if you want to call it that but it seems to me a lot of it is merely a lot of sideways movement vis a vis the "advancement" of the species.

It seems a lot of stuff on this site is pure speculation along the lines of Bruce Lahn's hypothesis about microcephalin and ASPM. His critics charge that the gene changes he notes may not even relate to any phenotype changes let alone any change in general intelligence. I guess I'll just have to study your archives more so I get a better handle on the current expert opinion on recent genetic evolution.

It doesn't make any sense to me that there can possibly have been any natural selection since the start of the Industrial Revolution however; given the population explosion that is occurring as a result of the huge increase in human productivity that the revolution unleashed. I guess you could call it "success" when the biomass of homo sapiens exceeds that of the ants but it is hard to call it better.

I don't see that humans are any more intelligent now than they were in the past. Plumbing didn't get back to Roman standards until well into the 18th Century. Newton and Bach lived to ripe old ages without the benefit of MRI machines or penicillin.

I'd also say that the mass success of the human race has been at least as much attributable to the efforts of engineers and businessmen as it has been to the the scientists. Smart people go into science for the intellectual stimulation and creative freedom it provides as they would probaly be too bored in other work. And not withstanding the scandalously low wages by yuppie standards, in the global scope of things doing science is a high status occupation that pays pretty well, is largely indoor work, and doesn't require heavy lifting.

And I thought the take-home message was that it's not women, but religious ecstasy that drives science...

Razib, a few posts back you gave the impression that you read The Black Swan, has that influenced this post?

Considering the all the different waves of invasion that occurred during the millenium previous to that one

the waves of migration haven't been that significant in britain over the past thousand years. if they were in terms of skull size we could track geographical differences within the british isles. no one has suggested that to me.

And I thought the take-home message was that it's not women, but religious ecstasy that drives science...

Razib, a few posts back you gave the impression that you read The Black Swan, has that influenced this post?

on the first, religious ecstasy is too narrow of a term, rather, the high risk taking which religion may make rational or viable because of the alteration of the norms or axioms. second, the black swan might have effected the magnitude, though not the vector (i had this idea before i read that book). though it offer to be the possibility that the distribution of scientific discovery isn't poisson.

great post Razib.

religious ecstasy is too narrow of a term, rather, the high risk taking which religion may make rational or viable because of the alteration of the norms or axioms

We might be in agreement, but I'm not sure. What I mean is that the same psychological phenomenon that makes people devote themselves to seemingly irrational things - that "increases the magnitude of the vector" - is at work both among religious people and among scientists.

The reason why I bring up The Black Swan is that Taleb talks a lot about the psychology of people in "Extremistan" - areas of pursuit in which the payoff is unlikely, but large.

Rather, I suspected that religious beliefs tended to increase the amplitude of fluctuation between being "good" and "bad." Religion tends to motivate humans toward intense and acute enthusiasm.

Interesting idea, but perhaps true for for any system of thought or type of social organization?

The reason why I bring up The Black Swan is that Taleb talks a lot about the psychology of people in "Extremistan" - areas of pursuit in which the payoff is unlikely, but large.

yeah, that reinforced my perception.

Interesting idea, but perhaps true for for any system of thought or type of social organization?

hm. golden mean? moderation? what about the military and the chain of the command and the deman for uniformity? no, i think there are plenty of systems which try to homogenize and remove personal action.