Archive for the ‘intelligence’ tag
Of Football and Intelligence #
Of all the provocative possibilities raised by Ben Fry’s playing with intelligence (Wonderlic) scores and (American) football positions, the most obvious and interesting may be that offensive players — and especially linemen — are usually smarter than defensive players.
Quick Learners Die Sooner #
Of course there are 100 reasons to disregard the meaning of a study that involves fruit flies, but this left me a tad disheartened:
After repeating the experiment for 30 generations, the offspring of the learned flies were compared with normal flies. The researchers report in a forthcoming edition of Evolution that although learning ability could be bred into a population of fruit flies, it shortened their lives by 15%. When the researchers compared their learned flies to colonies selectively bred to live long lives, they found even greater differences. Whereas learned flies had reduced life spans, the long-lived flies learned less well than even average flies.
Reading Faces #
Dolores Labs is quickly becoming the go-to source for entertaining data that I’m not comfortable calling science. Another example: they’ve asked people to judge faces by age, politics, and intelligence. They present the pictures as they were rated along those axes.