Theodore P. Hill in Quillette:

In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.

Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.

Darwin had also raised the question of why males in many species might have evolved to be more variable than females, and when I learned that the answer to his question remained elusive, I set out to look for a scientific explanation.

More here.  And here is a rebuttal by the Fields Medalist Sir Tim Gowers writing in his own blog:

I was disturbed recently by reading about an incident in which a paper was accepted by the Mathematical Intelligencer and then rejected, after which it was accepted and published online by the New York Journal of Mathematics, where it lasted for three days before disappearing and being replaced by another paper of the same length. The reason for this bizarre sequence of events? The paper concerned the “variability hypothesis”, the idea, apparently backed up by a lot of evidence, that there is a strong tendency for traits that can be measured on a numerical scale to show more variability amongst males than amongst females. I do not know anything about the quality of this evidence, other than that there are many papers that claim to observe greater variation amongst males of one trait or another, so that if you want to make a claim along the lines of “you typically see more males both at the top and the bottom of the scale” then you can back it up with a long list of citations.

You can see, or probably already know, where this is going: some people like to claim that the reason that women are underrepresented at the top of many fields is simply that the top (and bottom) people, for biological reasons, tend to be male. There is a whole narrative, much loved by many on the political right, that says that this is an uncomfortable truth that liberals find so difficult to accept that they will do anything to suppress it. There is also a counter-narrative that says that people on the far right keep on trying to push discredited claims about the genetic basis for intelligence, differences amongst various groups, and so on, in order to claim that disadvantaged groups are innately disadvantaged rather than disadvantaged by external circumstances.

I myself, as will be obvious, incline towards the liberal side, but I also care about scientific integrity, so I felt I couldn’t just assume that the paper in question had been rightly suppressed.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

For something of such obvious importance, money is kind of mysterious. It can, as Homer Simpson once memorably noted, be exchanged for goods and services. But who decides exactly how many goods/services a given unit of money can buy? And what maintains the social contract that we all agree to go along with it? Technology is changing what money is and how we use it, and Neha Narula is a leader in thinking about where money is going. One much-hyped aspect is the advent of blockchain technology, which has led to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We talk about what the blockchain really is, how it enables new kinds of currency, and from a wider perspective whether it can help restore a more individualistic, decentralized Web.

More here.

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb at the Poetry Foundation:

In halls and moods of violent possession, we speak of languages as things we “have.” This mood comes easy when the books are small and green—a Loeb’s fits in the palm like a secret jewel, a perfect bun. Its loose-woven ribbon reminds us the gift is inside, our reading an unwrapping—happy birthday to our most serious, our highest mind. In the early aughts, I was often high haha.

In those days, when I was still a teenager, I went over and over the lines in the Timaeus that told me what we might be about. Our atoms and waves, our tides and our matter. I didn’t know then how much of this is in Lucretius, too, from the Atomists, and also in a lot of hokey theory that comes out now about mycology and the end times. I worry that if these idiot dialogues are the kind of philosophy that covers up its poetry—lets people forget about, well, people and their errors, language and its habit of always running away and wild, which also means forgetting about justice—then maybe the Timaeus is also bad, since it telegraphs messages about ideal forms and eternal essences, whether it wants to or not. I mostly think philosophy is bad when we forget it’s poetry. Don’t talk to me about Plato on this subject.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

GORONGOSA NATIONAL PARK, Mozambique — We are flying in a Bat Hawk aircraft — which may be named for a raptor that preys on bats but looks more like a giant, lime-green dragonfly — and my hair, thanks to the open cockpit, has gone full Phyllis Diller. Scudding above flood plains the color of worn pool table felt and mud flats split like jigsaw puzzles, we dip toward the treetops and see herds of waterbuck scatter with an impatient flash of their bull’s-eye rumps. We are searching for the elusive tuskless elephants of Gorongosa, elephants that naturally lack the magnificent ivory staffs all too tragically coveted by wealthy collectors worldwide. Tuskless elephants can be found in small numbers throughout Africa, but Gorongosa is known to harbor a sizable population of them, the legacy of a violent 15-year civil war. Tusked elephants were slaughtered for their ivory at a harrowing rate, and the park’s rare tusk-free residents thus gained a sudden Darwinian advantage. Today, about a quarter of the park’s 700 or so elephants are tuskless, all of them female, and I am determined to catch a glimpse of at least one. Yet a week of ground searches has proved fruitless, and now we are circling in a plane and still nothing and, holy mother of Horton, how can such massive creatures go missing?

“There!” Alfredo Matavele, the pilot, cries triumphantly, pointing toward a cluster of trees. “And there!” pointing toward a watering hole. And there and there. “Do you see them?” he demands. Oh yes, I see them. Dozens, scores, cliques and claques of elephants, ears flapping like flags, trunks slowly swinging, and many of their faces decidedly free of ivory eruptions. I have found them at last, my sisters in dental deprivation. Other people may admire elephants for their brains or their complex social lives; I feel a bond with this mutant crew. After all, I’ve learned that we share a basic developmental anomaly, which may well be traceable to the same underlying glitches in our DNA. Elephant tusks happen to be overgrown versions of the upper lateral incisors — the teeth right next to the front teeth, before you get to the canines. Simply put, tuskless elephants lack lateral incisors.

More here.

Eric Boodman in Stat News:

WASHINGTON — As deals struck by health care behemoths go, this was one of the stranger ones. On one side, you had a medical device giant, with a phalanx of PR professionals carefully guarding the company’s image. On the other, you had a consultant who didn’t sound much like a consultant:

“I am synthetic life form ‘Yoko K.,’ assembled in the US with components made in Japan,” one of her websites explained. “I am designed to assume the role of an ‘electronic musician.’ I am one of many secret agents sent to this time to plant magical thinking in people through the use of ‘pre-22nd century nostalgia Mars pop music.’”

In other words, Yoko K. Sen is an ambient electronic musician, born in Japan but transplanted to the United States, where she’s layered her breathy, machine-modulated vocals over ethereal blooms of synth at galleries, in concert halls, and on award-winning albums. In recent years, though, she’s created a new, more corporate niche for herself: revamping the soundscape in hospitals. Medtronic had hired her, late in 2017, for a related project, to help design the beeps patients would hear from their cardiac monitors at home.

We live in an era of constant redesigns, and health care — with its cheerless institutional bent and vomit-like color palette — has proven especially ripe for reimagining. Fashion icons have taken on the hospital gown. Architects have gone after the hospital room, and celebrity chefs have barged into the cafeteria. One bigwig San Francisco designer even tried to rebrand death. You name it, there’s probably someone out there working to give it a makeover. And sometimes, these aesthetic changes might just save lives. As the New York Times reported in 2014, when patients moved into homier hospital rooms as a test, they not only felt more comfortable but also requested less pain medication.

More here.

Violets

Down by the rumbling creek and the tall trees—
…. where I went truant from school three days a week
…….. and therefore broke the record—
there were violets as easy in their lives
….. as anything you have ever seen
……… or leaned down to intake the sweet breath of.
Later, when the necessary houses were built
…… they were gone, and who would give significance
………. to their absence.
Oh, violets, you did signify, and what shall take
…… your place?

by Mary Oliver
from Evidence
Beacon Press, 2009

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

It must be hard for Joseph Stiglitz to remain an optimist in the face of the grim future he fears may be coming. The Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank has thought carefully about how artificial intelligence will affect our lives. On the back of the technology, we could build ourselves a richer society and perhaps enjoy a shorter working week, he says. But there are countless pitfalls to avoid on the way. The ones Stiglitz has in mind are hardly trivial. He worries about hamfisted moves that lead to routine exploitation in our daily lives, that leave society more divided than ever and threaten the fundamentals of democracy.

“Artificial intelligence and robotisation have the potential to increase the productivity of the economy and, in principle, that could make everybody better off,” he says. “But only if they are well managed.”

More here.

Paul Bloom in The New Yorker:

In 1961, Piero Manzoni created his most famous art work—ninety small, sealed tins, titled “Artist’s Shit.” Its creation was said to be prompted by Manzoni’s father, who owned a canning factory, telling his son, “Your work is shit.” Manzoni intended “Artist’s Shit” in part as a commentary on consumerism and the obsession we have with artists. As Manzoni put it, “If collectors really want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there’s the artist’s own shit.”

Manzoni originally priced the tins according to their equivalent weight in gold, but they were purchased by the Tate Gallery and other collectors for much more, and, in 2016, one of the tins was bought in Milan for two hundred and seventy-five thousand euros. Plainly, then, some like this work; they believe that it’s of value. Others see it as ridiculous. In “The Art Instinct,” the philosopher Denis Dutton takes considerable pleasure in telling the story of how Manzoni failed to properly autoclave the tins, and many of them, years later, in private collections and museums, exploded.

You’d think that psychologists would have a lot to say about our differing reactions to such creations, but research in art and aesthetics tends to focus on more conventional forms of art. There are a lot of studies on the perception of tonal music, exploring which aspects of musical pleasure are universal and which vary across culture, what babies and children prefer to listen to, how expertise shapes our perception of music, and so on. There is research into figurative art, usually paintings, much of it exploring how we make the leap from a two-dimensional array of colors and shapes to a three-dimensional world. But there’s little research on our reception of work such as “Artist’s Shit,” or the better-known pieces by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

More here.

Kumi Naidoo and Kenneth Roth in EU Observer:

As the EU struggles to rein in some member states that are backsliding on democratic standards, a critical vote in the European Parliament next week could be a decisive moment.

The threat is real. Radical populist leaders promoting policies to dismantle human rights safeguards have recently joined governing coalitions in Austria and Italy.

The Freedom Party and Lega Nord are using their positions to promote policies based on hate and intolerance. But in both countries, at least for now, complex governing coalitions make it hard for them to undo democratic institutions.

In Hungary and Poland, however, radical populist parties are in power alone. Fidesz and the Law and Justice Party (PiS) have seized the opportunity to undermine the rule of law and other democratic checks on their power.

More here.