Triumph of reason
Michael Bond’s article discusses the disparity between high IQ scores and the ability to avoid cognitive bias in decision-making: the rationality quotient (RQ) (31 October, p 36). My research of scientific literacy among tertiary science students revealed similar results.
There are two aspects of scientific literacy: content knowledge and process knowledge. They can be considered analogous to IQ and RQ respectively. The students in my study displayed a high level of content knowledge in knowing scientific facts, but had a low level of process knowledge, which is the understanding of how science works.
It has been argued that without understanding the processes of science, content knowledge is useless. Following this reasoning, and given that there is a growing concern regarding the way science is taught at school, there is a case for the school curriculum to put more emphasis on process knowledge and less on content knowledge. Unfortunately, just as is the case with RQ, it is difficult to test for process knowledge.
The underlying aim in the endeavour to create scientifically literate citizens should be to instil critical-thinking skills. This will help foster a society in which people are able to make rational decisions when faced with conflicting advice about the application of science, be that in reference to climate change or the latest diet.
From Howard Zimmerman
There was a rather ironic suspension of critical thinking in the middle of Bond’s otherwise intelligent appraisal of IQ testing.
He quotes results from a mid-1980s survey of Mensa members in Canada as proof that high IQ doesn’t equate with rational thinking. Bond implies that the fact that 56 respondents expressed a belief in aliens means the respondents were not applying rational thought, but he fails to report the actual question posed.
Given the number of extrasolar planets already discovered, and the number of stars in the universe, would it not be logical and rational to assume that some form of life other than ours inhabits the universe?
Without knowing the exact phrasing of the survey question, the answers given by the respondents cannot be analysed rationally.
New York City, US
John Campion
IQ tests were designed mainly as a practical device for guiding children through the education system, the aim being to separate educational potential from actual attainment. They are now used mainly to help underachieving children, in combination with more subtle profiling tests that identify particular weaknesses. Their application outside this sphere is often misleading.
Cognitive psychologist Gary Klein has been demonstrating for over 20 years that experts making decisions in demanding situations rely on rich repertoires of situation templates derived from many thousands of hours’ practice, rather than explicit analytical techniques. This is an extension of work done in the 1970s by Peter Wason, Philip Johnson-Laird and others, which showed that people’s decisions rely on mental models of specific situations and not on logic or the sort of rationality measured by IQ, or even RQ, tests.
In the light of such findings, efforts to train children in problem-solving skills are likely to be a waste of time.
Liphook, Hampshire, UK
From Hilarie Bowman
Bond’s article on decision-making includes three questions to test your rational thinking. One question postulates a lake with a patch of lily pads that doubles in size each day, entirely covering the surface after 48 days.
If we assume one lily pad is roughly 10 centimetres square then it would have an area of 100 square cm.
By my calculations, after 48 doublings, starting with just one lily pad, the lake in question would need to be 7.5 times as large as the Caspian Sea, the largest lake on Earth, just to accommodate these prolific plants. Bond seems to have neglected this in focusing on one part of a rational problem.
Milton Keynes, UK
Fabulous fossil
As a plesiosaur palaeontologist, I was pleased to see marine reptiles featured in your editorial (31 October, p 5). But having been closely involved in the announcement to the media of the discovery of the Dorset “Jurassic Coast” pliosaur you refer to, I was slightly miffed to find it described as “not quite as large as some reports suggested”.
Unlike the Svalbard pliosaurs, which are in thousands of frost-shattered fragments, and the mandible unearthed in the UK at Cumnor, Oxfordshire, which has been extensively reconstructed, the Dorset pliosaur is a substantially complete skull and mandible 鈥� not just a jawbone as your editorial states.
Although the rearmost portions of the skull and the tip of the lower jaw are missing, comparison with other pliosaur specimens means that there is little doubt that the skull was 2.4 metres long.
The overall length of a pliosaur is typically estimated as being between 5 and 7 times the length of the skull; Leslie No猫, who is mentioned in an article in the same issue about “Predator X” (p 32), uses a figure of 6 times skull length. On this basis the Dorset pliosaur may have been over 14 metres long; using a factor of 7 times skull length gives an overall length of nearly 17 metres.
We were careful not to exaggerate the beast’s size in our press release, and although some media outlets have used a figure at the upper end of the range, none has fallen outside a range justified by reference to the scientific literature on large pliosaurs.
There is no need to indulge in hyperbole about this specimen. It is enormous, and truly awesome.
Myopia in focus
In her article on short-sightedness (7 November, p 48), Nora Schultz suggests that a diet high in refined carbohydrates may be implicated in its development, because insulin can stimulate eyeball growth, causing myopia.
As excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates is also implicated in the aetiology of dental caries it would be expected that high levels of tooth decay would be more likely in short-sighted people.
I have been involved in dentistry for over 40 years and have never noticed this, but perhaps other dentists have.
From Robert Youngson
The lens system in a myopic eye is too strong for the focal length of the eyeball. This is why myopes wear minifying, or minus, lenses. Hypermetropes, long-sighted people, wear magnifying lenses.
If the statistics for myopia are derived from the numbers wearing glasses they will always be wrong, because eye tests are subjective. Our eyes respond to over-strong minus lenses by making distant objects look sharper, whereas over-strong magnifying lenses will blur the images of distant objects. Thus, thousands of people have been prescribed minus lenses they don’t need, and the figures for myopia are erroneously high. Good ophthalmic opticians are aware of this anomaly and are careful not to prescribe unnecessary minus lenses.
Blandford Forum, Dorset, UK
Susy's six
Anil Ananthaswamy’s article on supersymmetry discusses in some detail the thoughts of Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg concerning possible results from the Large Hadron Collider (14 November, p 36). The article cites the work of Robert Brout, Fran莽ois Englert and Peter Higgs as the source of the theory behind the Higgs mechanism, but ignores our independent work.
Weinberg is uniquely qualified to evaluate the relevant contributions to supersymmetry, and he has on many occasions 鈥� including in his Nobel address 鈥� stressed the contributions of all six researchers. This has most recently been recognised by the joint award of the American Physical Society’s J.J. Sakurai prize for theoretical physics to all six of us. It was disappointing to see our names omitted on this occasion.
Missing bees
In their article “The truth about the disappearing honeybees” Marcelo Aizen and Lawrence Harder make withering mention of the film Vanishing of the Bees, and go on to assert that there is no pollination crisis (24 October, p 26). Yet no one has so far been able to demonstrate with any confidence what is behind the decline in honeybee numbers in Europe and North America.
One crucial reason for this is that there seems to be an aversion in certain quarters to asking uncomfortable questions. The US and UK governments have yet to commit to a review of the impact of neonicotinoid pesticides on honeybees, let alone fund one, despite studies from Italy and France that show these chemicals have a damaging effect.
These are among the factors that have led the Co-operative to back the distribution of the film and to step up research in this area. We feel the situation is so serious that we are funding our own research in the UK and are temporarily prohibiting use of the chemicals by food suppliers.
The Co-operative, Manchester, UK
In 2006 I had a unique opportunity to observe the effects of the disappearance of honeybees. New Zealand had been invaded by the varroa mite, and to combat it beekeepers in our area sent all their hives away to an already infected area. They later installed clean hives once the mite had been eliminated.
Though we observed no honeybees in our garden over the flowering season of our crops, the only adverse effects we noticed were a slight increase in the number of infertile kiwi fruit, a poor set of strawberries at the beginning of the season and an increase in the number of misshapen strawberries for much of the season. All other crops were unaffected.
On our plot we normally have other suitable insects 鈥� principally bumblebees 鈥� and birds. In the absence of honeybees there seemed to be a huge increase in the numbers of bumblebees and nectar-feeding birds.
Utterly random
I was delighted to see that my ground-breaking research into the effects of inebriation on the ability of a group of students to generate random numbers has reached Feedback’s desk (14 November). I urge your readers to check and extend my research in as wide a variety of pubs as they can. But please remember: enjoy statistics responsibly.
For the record
鈥� It’s one mongoose, many mongooses 鈥� not mongeese (21 November, p 55).