An intelligent approach?
Feedback鈥檚 ears always prick up when we see a publication with a self-aggrandising title. So we latched with interest onto a social media post by , a demographer at Brunel University London, who noted that publisher Elsevier has 鈥�.
Intelligence, you see, is a scientific journal that publishes studies that make 鈥� to an understanding of the nature and function of intelligence鈥�. Feedback cannot verify that the editors have been changed, because the journal鈥檚 鈥溾�� page hasn鈥檛 been updated, but it did for a new editor-in-chief in January 2024. There has been a report that most of the editorial board has resigned in protest at the appointment of the new editor(s), but since that report appeared on a far-right website, Feedback is disinclined to believe it without further evidence.
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Hang on, readers may be thinking. How did we get from a scientific journal replacing its editors to a far-right website? The thing is, intelligence research has sometimes been misused to justify claims of racial superiority, especially during the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. And Intelligence has published research that your racist uncle might quote approvingly.
Someone at Elsevier appears to have noticed. The Guardian has reported was reviewing papers by the late Richard Lynn, who claimed to have found variations in IQ between countries 鈥� .
This is all getting a bit dark, so let鈥檚 move swiftly forward to the other issue with Intelligence: its apparent lack of its supposed defining trait. Sear highlighted a paper with the innocuous-seeming title 鈥溾��.
Its thrust is that, when some Homo sapiens populations first migrated outside Africa, they encountered all sorts of novel conditions, like different climates. This prompted them to evolve a greater level of intelligence. What this means for African populations is left to the reader to infer.
If this all sounds like something from the bad old days of Victorian science, Feedback regrets to inform you that this paper was actually first published online in 2007. However, if you swallow your nausea and look closer, a true delight emerges.
The first issue is that the author calculates the distances populations travelled 鈥渁s the crow flies鈥�. You can鈥檛 use straight-line distances as even a first approximation for the history of human migration, which involved people journeying to the far north-east of Asia, crossing into North America and onwards to the southern tip of South America.
But it gets better. In the same sentence, the paper鈥檚 author says he calculated the distance 鈥渦sing the Pythagoras鈥� theorem鈥�. Readers will recall that Pythagoras鈥� theorem only applies to flat planes and doesn鈥檛 work for curved surfaces. Yes, this study about the racial origins of intelligence is built on the assumption that Earth is flat.
With immense academic restraint, a suggested this study might be 鈥渜uestionable鈥�. Other psychologists brought the problem to the journal鈥檚 attention, only to be told that their critiques were 鈥溾��. The paper remains live.
Accordingly, Feedback would like to nominate the journal Intelligence for the 2025 Reverse Nominative Determinism Award.
Forty lashes
New 杏吧原创 reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan highlights a about why eyelashes are curly, which they describe as 鈥渟illy enough to be Feedback material鈥�. Rude: this is a deeply serious column about serious things.
The research is mostly about the physics of eyelashes, explaining how they transfer water away from our eyes so we can still see when it is raining. This process depends on 鈥渁 hydrophobic curved flexible fiber array with surface micro-ratchet and macro-curvature鈥�. There is a lot of stuff about adhesion forces and the importance of the curvature of the lashes for water drainage.
And then we get to the discussion section where, as Karmela drily notes, 鈥渢he authors go into aesthetic advice鈥�. You see, 鈥渕odern beauty standards鈥� encourage women to use mascara 鈥渢o extend and fix eyelashes鈥�, which 鈥渃ompromises the protective functions鈥�. But fear not, the solution is at hand: 鈥渁s a tip, for people with sparse eyelashes, hydrophobic curved false eyelashes could offer a practical solution for enhancing appearance while preserving eye protection.鈥� Could a patent possibly be pending?
Feedback wonders whether the authors have any advice for middle-aged writers whose eyebrows grow too long, causing them to look like a macaroni penguin unless regularly trimmed. For a friend.
Worst to-be-read pile ever
Feedback has somehow got onto the mailing list for Spines, a tech company aiming to disrupt the publishing industry through the power of artificial intelligence.
By to do the editing and other jobs by skilled and salaried humans, aims to publish 8000 books in 2025. To which Feedback says, yes please. When one looks at the structural problems in the publishing industry, such as the dire fact-checking standards in non-fiction output, one can only conclude that what we really need is a deluge of even more books of an even lower quality.
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