All Articles

David Shenk: I think the really dangerous and oppressive myth of IQ is that IQ tests are identifying some kind of quantity of intelligence that we are born with and that we have this static amount of intelligence that we’re going to carry with us throughout life.

Kids might be immensely great at something, but they’re never performing at a great adult level.  

There is a large group of child prodigies who go on to a life of relative mediocrity.

The difference in personalities between people who get good at stuff or get great at stuff is the people who get great at stuff really find satisfaction in the constant pushing process. 

A parent who wants their child to be great at something, absolutely cannot put love out there as a reward. 

The old notion of giftedness, the notion that we are born with a certain quantity of intelligence or a quantity of talent really isn’t there. 

You just absolutely cannot separate the affects of genes from the affects of the environment, so all we can do is identify the resources that we have in our environments and maximize them as best we can.  

David Shenk: I don’t think it’s really important to make a dividing line to try to figure out when you’ve crossed over into genius.  

Peter Ward: I’ve got a 12-year old son.  The only way to get to him is a video game.  That’s what he wants to do all the time.

There is only one place in our solar system with stable liquid lakes and seas on its surface, besides planet Earth. Saturn’s moon Titan is this place. 

What is it about the Earth that has allowed life to continue for such long periods of time? The most important factor is plate tectonics. 

If you really look at the history of life on this planet, you see a lot of biologically-produced catastrophes. Where do they come from? From life itself. 

Peter Ward: Not going extinct doesn’t mean you’re not going to be miserable, and by misery I mean, wholesale, enormous human mortality.

We now think the big mass extinctions were caused by hydrogen sulfide bacteria. Two hundred hydrogen sulfide molecules among a million air molecules is enough to kill a human.

Peter Ward: We will get hit again.  It is only a matter of time until we get hit by an asteroid the same size of what killed off the dinosaurs, should humanity last long enough, that is. 

A large asteroid hit us in the Yucatan Peninsula causing the mass extinction. Was the impact just the coup de grace coming on an already affected world?

We are now at levels that the world has not seen for the last 40 million years and we will soon be at carbon dioxide levels that existed 100 million years ago when we had a true hot house world.  

The problem with speculative fiction is what might be called “the tour of the garbage disposal plant,” in which somone says to the visiting character, “Well in your day, you did this terribly inefficient thing, but now we have this wonderful garbage disposal plant.”  

“Love, Actually” exemplifies a remarkable transformation from a society that understood female empowerment as a systemic concern to one that interprets all feminist concerns about empowerment through the ideological lens of market-based morality.

“He never is alone that is accompanied with noble thoughts.”- John Fletcher (born on this date in 1579)

Vivian Maier took about 150,000 pictures during her lifetime, but never showed a single one to another living soul. When she died in April 2009, Vivian was remembered as a […]

A few weeks ago I found myself engaged in an all-too-familiar debate. She was frustrated that I was not subscribing to her idea that ‘everything happens for a reason,’ and […]

If people cooked 50 percent of their meals, as opposed to what’s probably 20 percent of their meals, it would have a huge impact on both their health and on the environment, and it would be almost entirely positive. 

A horrendous disease called Sleeping Sickness was close to being eradicated but war in Sudan gave it a new lease on life. 

Other primates don’t seem to share their own desires and intentions with others, which leads to a lack of cooperation in a lot of domains. 

The mechanism for changing your mindset through messaging is the same as for changing a physical behavior: a targeted and limited resolution practiced relentlessly until it becomes automatic. 

A Republican congressman from Georgia, Jack Kingston, thinks the national school lunch program sends a terrible message to our youngsters. “We need to get the myth out of their head,” […]

A million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab.

“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.” – Jean Genet

I want to think about garbage today. Driving home from the store, I made an informal census of the garbage by the side of the road and in the green […]