No signs of sibling rivalry here.

I suppose that we are fortunate in that there, as yet, appear to be no signs of sibling rivalry, among the brothers. In fact, just the opposite seems to be developing.

Yesterday, Fintan, five and Ainan, eight, went to a talk on genetics. Initially, just Ainan was meant to go - but Fintan expressed an interest, so his mother, Syahidah, brought him along too. In the end, he rather enjoyed it and seemed to gain from it.

Anyway, Fintan behaved rather sweetly throughout the talk. Whenever a question was addressed to the audience, he did something very funny: he would grab a hold of Ainan's arm and raise it into the air to make it look like Ainan wanted to answer the question. Then he would urge Ainan on: "Go on, Abang, you can answer that one!". Ainan, once put on the spot, duly answered the questions.

It was endearing to see Fintan do this from several perspectives: the first is that, not knowing the answer himself, he had the confidence in Ainan that Ainan would know. Secondly, it was warming to see how proud he was of his elder brother ("abang") that he should be able to answer such questions.

The most important thing I learnt from this is the strong evidence that the dynamic developing between the brothers is not one of sibling rivalry - but of pride in the other's achievements and abilities. It seems to me that this is a very good development, indeed, for it promises that the relationships between the brothers will be strong and supportive ones - and few things are more valuable in a life than that one's siblings should form a support network.

Fintan, interestingly, had some well-observed questions 0f his own - but that is for another post. In the meantime, I am just happy to see the brothers get on so well.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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Superhuman: Eleazar, giant of the Jews.

I am intrigued by the extremes of Mankind. The limits of the human and what rare humans are capable of, strike me as inherently interesting. Sometimes, the possibilities within the human gene pool are quite staggering. One such possibility - in fact, actuality, for once he lived - was Eleazar (or Elazar, as it is sometimes written), a giant of the Jews.

Before I go on, I would like it made clear that Eleazar is an historical figure. He is not a myth or a legend. He was written of by Josephus, the historian (who wrote specifically of his height) and was in a social position in the latter part of his life, in which there could be no hiding his true nature: too many people would have known who he was.

Now, the Guiness Book of World Records has Robert Pershing Wadlow as the tallest man on "record" at 8' 11 inches or 2 metres 72 centimetres. The question is, whose records? History has many taller examples recorded in one form or another. Some of those historical records look pretty solid. During his lifetime, Robert Pershing Wadlow was hailed as the "tallest man in medical history" - and perhaps that is true. He was probably the tallest man to encounter relatively modern medicine and be recorded, for posterity, by doctors. Yet, there are other types of record - such as historical records.

In the "Antiquities of the Jews", by Josephus, is the story of Eleazar, High Priest. Josephus was a Jew and son of a priest who became a noted historian and Roman Citizen. He went by various names: Yosef Ben Matityahu, as a Jew, Titus Flavius Josephus as a Roman, or simply Josephus, as an historian. His works recorded issues of importance in Jewish history and have given great insight to the period, particularly the Destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 (which he, of course, survived to write about).

So, who does Josephus tell us Eleazar was? Well, he was the son of Aaron, who was brother of Moses (yes, that Moses). Aaron was a Levite and High Priest. Eleazar, rose through the ranks of the religion and, in time, he too was appointed High Priest (the story has it that Moses himself appointed him High Priest by taking the holy vestments off of Aaron and passing them to Eleazar. My question is, then, how tall was Aaron, that his vestments should fit Eleazar?)

So, being High Priest, it is clear that Eleazar would have been well known. His height would have been known to all of the Jews of his time. I would like you now to guess how tall he was stated to have been.

Guess again. He was reputed to have been 10 ft 6 inches tall.

That is a full nineteen inches taller than Robert Pershing Wadlow "tallest man on record".

Eleazar fathered a son, Phinehas, by his wife (a daughter of Putiel) and he, in turn, features in many tales that appear in the historical records. So, this figure of Eleazar has many links to documented lives.

It is said that he was buried at Gibeah, on lands given to his son, Phinehas, in the hill country of Ephraim.

To this day, this true giant is commemorated by the Eastern Orthodox Church, annually, on September 2nd. He is also remembered by the Armenian Apostolic Church, who hold him to be a Holy Forefather in their Calendar of Saints. They celebrate him on July 30.

I have been thinking about his height. At 10 foot 6 inches he is about twice the height of a Singaporean woman. He is a full four and a half feet above the height of what modern people call a tall man. How must life have been for such a giant man, when even tall people came up to the height of his navel?

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and one month, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and six months, and Tiarnan, twenty-three months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

The mysterious genius of Athens

Consider these names: Socrates, Plato, Pericles, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Xenophon, Thucydides, Anaxagoras, Demosthenes, Alcibiades, Phidias and Simonides. Consider also these lesser known names: Aspasia, Aristippus, Polynotos, Lycurgos, Lysias, Protagoras, and Praxiteles.

What do all these people have in common - apart from being known by but a single name?

The answer is more surprising than at first it seems. They are all Athenians, from Ancient Athens. Does that shock you? It did me. It shocked me because I troubled myself to find out a little more about Ancient Athens and its Golden Age. What I learnt is both humbling and terrible news for the modern era.

The first thing that should be noted is that all of these people lived in the period 440 BC to about 380 BC. This is the Golden Age of Athens. As you will have noted the first of the two lists is unequivocally a list of some of the greatest geniuses who ever lived - accounted by not only their impact and reputation in their own times, but by their subsequent effects on the development of Western civilization and rational thought. Without their impetus, most of what we enjoy today, would not have come to being. The underlying way of thinking would not have evolved. So, we owe a debt of great gratitude to these early rational thinkers and scientific philosophers - and playwrights, too, (for inventing the theatre), among other achievements.

The second list are also regarded as geniuses, but are of lesser reputation - but still, they are all Athenian - and that, in itself, is telling.

You see, I tried to find the population of Athens at the time in question. I saw estimates varying from just 90,000 people to a high of 250,000. The highest estimate, according to one historian, implied that were about 60,000 adult males in Athens at the time. This estimate is not just for Athens but for the city plus the entire surrounding territory of Attica, on which Athens stood. So, it is actually an over-estimate for Athens itself. (Quite a few estimates for Athens' population placed it at around 100,000 - so divide all these calculations by 2.5, if that figure is correct for the city of Athens, proper).

So, the largest estimate of the possible pool from which all these geniuses - and some of them were great geniuses indeed - is drawn - is just 60,000 men.

Think long about that. A significant number of the greatest thinkers in Ancient times were drawn from a pool of just 60,000 men! (At the highest estimate).

How many geniuses are there today in a gathering of 60,000 men in a typical developed country? I mean, true geniuses - people of genuine creative power? I would be surprised if there was even one, really surprised.

How many true geniuses are there alive in the world's 6,000,000,000 plus people, today? Very, very few.

How many should there be? Well, let us use Ancient Athens as our template - and just so you don't accuse me of massaging the figures, let us use a worst case scenario. Let us count the number of major geniuses in Athens in the list above - and forget about the ones of lesser reputation, in the first instance. There are 14 major geniuses in the list above - for a population of no more than 250,000 (including children and slaves - who didn't really have much chance of participating - so this actually dilutes the true impression of Athenians, proper).

How many great geniuses would there be in the world today, for a population of six billion?

Well it is 14 divided by 250,000 multiplied by 6,000,000,000. That gives us a total of: 336,000.

There would be a third of a million geniuses on a par with Plato and Socrates alive today, if modern humans were as the Ancient Athenians had been.

I, for one, do not believe that there are a third of a million such individuals alive today. It may even be that such a number of great geniuses have never, in fact, lived, in the whole history of the human race. (Had they lived, one would expect history to be littered with many more great men and women than seems to be the case).

Now, that calculation only looked at those geniuses of greatest reputation in Ancient Athens. Let us consider the whole list - but remember that these lists may have accidentally excluded other great names, too. So, it will be, if anything, an underestimate of the true situation.

Doing the calculation for the second list of seven names gives another 168,000 geniuses who should be alive today - but most probably aren't.

Now, it doesn't make sense that the lesser names should be half as numerous as the greater ones. Clearly, therefore, my list is incomplete. So this is just a rough guide to the situation. There should be several lesser names for every greater one. Remember though that these lesser names are geniuses too - great enough to be remembered by some two and a half millenia later. So they are not insignificant.

Adding the two estimates gives us at total of 504,000 geniuses for the modern world. That is enough to populate a sizable city. Yet, I doubt the actual number is great enough to fill a sizable hotel.

The conclusion we can draw from this is either something is wrong about modern man - or something was great about Athenian man. It is basically the same, relative, conclusion.

Francis Galton (February 16, 1822 to January 17, 1911) once noted concerning the Athenian situation that, for Ancient Athens to have possessed so many geniuses, that the average intelligence of its population would have had to have been "two grades above the mean for a modern European" (That is a 19th century human, who, I propose, would have been genetically superior to people of today for reasons to be discussed elsewhere). For Francis Galton, a grade equated to about 10 IQ points in the current way of looking at it. So, in Francis Galton's estimate, for there to have been so many geniuses, in such a small place as Ancient Athens, the mean IQ of the Athenian population must have been about an IQ of 120.

No nation, city or race on Earth in the modern world comes remotely close to such a figure. By comparison the mean IQ of our "world leader" - the United States is just 98. The highest is Hong Kong at a mean of 107. As for races and IQ, the highest is for the Ashkenazi Jews at just over 107 mean according to the biggest study I could find (and therefore likely to be the most representative), with a sample size of 1,236 Ashkenazi Jews, by Backman in 1972.

So, Athenian man (and woman) stood far above modern people in mean intelligence. Such a huge disparity in mean intelligence, would have led to a situation in which gifted people - by modern reckoning of that term, were super-abundant. A significant proportion of the population would have tested as "gifted or above". If the mean IQ was, in fact, 120 for Ancient Athens, then assuming a standard deviation of 15 about that mean (as it is today in the West), then fully 25 % of the population would have tested at the gifted range of 130 or above. One in four Athenians would have been considered gifted by modern standards, by this reckoning.

Let us look a little deeper. One in four would have been moderately gifted (IQ 130); One in twenty-one would have been highly gifted (IQ 145 and above); one in two hundred and sixty one would have been exceptionally gifted (IQ 160 and above) and one in thirty-one thousand five hundred and sixty would have been profoundly gifted (IQ 180 and above). By the way, this suggests one Athenian had an IQ of 187 (one in a quarter of a million).

Now even these figures will be an underestimate of the true situation because they use a normal curve to derive the probabilities - whereas the true, observed curve is trimodal, with higher than expected upper and lower occurrences of IQ.

By comparison, for the modern world, using the rarity expected in a normal distribution of standard deviation 15, gives 1 in 44, moderately gifted, 1 in 741 highly gifted, 1 in 31,560 exceptionally gifted, 1 in 20,696,000 will be profoundly gifted (or say fifteen people in the United states, today).

These figures can only, therefore, give you a feel for the situation - but an incredible one it is. Were modern men as gifted as Ancient Athenians, genius would be more common than footballers. Such a world would be far different from the one we actually have. Presumably, we would be far more advanced culturally, scientifically and technologically.

Yet, we are not as the Athenians were. Neither are the modern Greeks. Their mean IQ is a saddening 92.

What happened, then, to the great Athens and their superhuman Athenians? Well, plague took a lot of them (including Pericles) - one third in one bite. Then Sparta took a lot more of them, by defeating them. The sterility (and military discipline) of Sparta triumphed over the genius of Athens. In 338 B.C Philip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great's dad) conquered Athens ending its independence. Athens never shone again, as once it had.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and nine months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and two months, and Tiarnan, nineteen months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Natural hairstyle and individuality

As regular readers will know, Fintan, four, has curly hair. Yet, we live in Singapore - a "Land of the Straight-Hairs", as I call it. Basically everyone, apart from foreign visitors, has straight, black, flat hair.

A few days ago, Syahidah took Fintan to the Science Centre, in Singapore. This is a kind of interactive Science Museum - though not as extensive as the Science Museum in Kensington, London, that I remember from my childhood, it is still worth a visit, particularly for children.

While wandering around the exhibits, Syahidah noticed two children who looked rather surprising: they both had curly hair.

"Look Fintan!" she pointed them out to him, "They are like you."

He looked and he saw and then he spoke a little disenchantedly, "Yeh, but who is the father?"

His arm picked out a man far away across the room, amidst the bustle of many people coming and going - a curly headed man. How he spotted the man in such a crowded, busy, poorly lit, room is a marvel - but being sharp of eye is typical for Fintan.

There was too much separation between the children and the "father" so Syahidah watched him for a while. Soon enough she saw him close the gap between them and interact with the kids: sure enough, he was the father.

This was one of the only occasions that Fintan has ever seen another curly headed person. Two things are interesting here: first, he was very quick to scan the environment and link the distant curly headed man as father to the nearby curly headed children. But also, it is telling, perhaps in a sad way, the conclusion he drew from this: that those children had reason enough for their curly hair - but he did not. You see neither his mother nor his father have curly hair - but we both have slightly wavy hair. It seems that two genetic doses of "wavy" is enough to make hair curly.

Why do I write this? Well, Fintan feels set apart by his appearance here, in Singapore. No other child of his acquaintance looks remotely like him. He doesn't look Malay (but is half-Malay), he doesn't look Irish (but is half-Irish), he doesn't look Chinese (but speaks it a little), he doesn't look Indian (but occasionally eats their food!). He has no real visual affiliation with any of the basic groupings of Singapore. Being of two different racial lineages, he looks only like his brothers. Allied to this disparity of race, is his hairstyle - abundant, never straight, curls, with plenty of natural body - and this makes him feel marked out from his fellow children. That feeling is unlikely to ever leave him, unless we live somewhere else.

Even Syahidah's attempt to make him feel that there were others, by pointing out the curly-headed children fell flat - because the father's appearance made it clear where their appearance comes from: Fintan has no such understanding of his origin. He cannot say to himself: "My hair looks like Daddy's" or "My hair looks like Mummy's". The fact is, it looks like neither's. Perhaps, then, he feels a little unanchored, a little set adrift. He needs to be moored to the facts of his origin - in a comprehensible visual way - but, owing to his mixed genetic lineage, he cannot really have that. The admixture has obscured his origins - and made something new.

Yet, I am happy for him that he is different. He is different in many ways - and not just hair. He is very much himself and unlike any other. In time, I think he will come to appreciate that and learn to be content with the way things are. It is just that, at four years old, finding common ground with one's fellow youngsters is a big social issue.

I look forward to the day when he is happy to be a stocky, curly headed, half-Irish, half-Malay, handsome man!

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and nine months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and two months, and Tiarnan, nineteen months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

IQ and the Politics of Science

IQ has been a contentious issue since it was developed in the early part of the twentieth century. The most common reason for contention has been the connection between IQ and genetics.

One of the early pioneers on the matter of IQ and genetics was Cyril Burt. You may have heard of him - and what you may have heard may not be entirely flattering - yet...have you been misinformed?

Cyril Burt was born in 1883 and his heyday was in the 1920s and 1930s. His work pioneered not only the question of genetics in IQ but also the sociological factors involved in poor school achievement and his work called attention to such matters, which seem obvious now, of poverty, overcrowding and the like. At the time, however, it was fresh work.

This is not why he is most famous, however - or infamous, for that matter. His work on the heritability of IQ is what led him into trouble. He published some studies of twins raised apart - and therefore growing up in different environments. If IQ was environmentally determined, one would expect that there would be little correlation, therefore, between their IQs. What his results showed, however, was that the correlation was very high indeed: a correlation of 0.77, in which a correlation of 1.0 would indicate identity of IQs.

This result caused an outcry among his environmental (nurture type) opponents. They were just not willing to accept his results. In due course, in 1973, Leon Kamin, then at Princeton University, cried "fraud" and stated that the fact that his correlation remained unchanged despite moving from 15 pairs of twins in 1943 to 53 pairs of twins in 1966, remaining at 0.77, once rounded off, indicated that the results were fraudulent.

The whole world joined in the ambush with even newspapers as eminent as The Sunday Times in England calling him a fraud and pounding his reputation into the ground. Cyril Burt was destroyed by this.

One curious accusation levelled against Cyril Burt was that his two assistants, referred to in his work, never existed. The charge was that he made up his assistants to lend corroboration to his work - which they also said he made up.

However, in 1989, a re-examination of the case against Burt by Robert B. Johnson, showed that the "evidence" was ill-founded and that it was most certainly not proven.

Tellingly, there have since been five other studies of monozygotic twins raised apart. The average IQ correlation shown in these studies is 0.75. This is remarkably similar to Burt's "fraudulent" results of 0.77. For a "fraud" his work is spot-on: how strange.

The worst part of this case though was what happened immediately after Cyril Burt's death in 1971. Liam Hudson, one of Cyril Burt's greatest enemies and most outspoken opponents rushed around to his house. Now, do you think he went there to express his sorrow? No. I am afraid not. He went there to instruct Burt's secretary-housekeeper to burn Burt's data and papers - which she duly did. Liam Hudson, Burt's opponent, personally oversaw the destruction of as much of Burt's lifework as he could.

This act appals me as much as the burning of the Library of Alexandria by the ignorant Romans.
The question is: why wasn't Liam Hudson sentenced to life in prison? He should have been for destroying the scientific work of a lifetime - but, as far as I am aware, nothing happened to him at all. He should still be in prison - but he never set foot in the place.

The other question is: why would Liam Hudson destroy Burt's work? If he genuinely believed Burt to be wrong about the hereditability of IQ, as he said, publicly, what would he have to fear from Burt's data? Clearly, though he spoke against it, he believed that Burt's data was correct and that IQ was highly heritable - otherwise he would have no motive to destroy the data set laboriously collected over a lifetime. The whole matter is absolutely shameful.

As for those mysterious "non-existent" assistants, both were later located. However, no newspaper, that I know of, published an apology for their accusations that these two people had been nothing but fiction.

This whole case tells us much of the danger of politics infecting science. Science should be pursued for the truth - whatever that is. No-one should try to impose the answer they want onto the world - or the data. Burt's opponents strongly believed that environment was all. Yet, Burt's studies showed IQ to be almost entirely hereditary. Instead of performing experiments of their own to investigate the matter - they set about with ad hominem attacks - to destroy his reputation and then, upon his death, one of them destroyed his lifework and data.

Politics should have no part in science. That which is not purely scientific should not be considered - for when it is, the truth is murdered.

Ultimately, Burt's conclusions have been verified by five other independent studies which all came to the exact same conclusion he had. There seems to be little mileage, therefore, in the idea that he was nothing but a fraud. He had, after all, stated the right answer.

So, the next time you see a scientist - or other seeker of the truth - being publicly vilified, look at who is doing the accusing - and ask why? Is it science or politics that drives them? If it is the latter, then you should have a pretty good idea of where the truth actually lies.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and nine months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and two months, and Tiarnan, nineteen months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Genetic determination of all giftedness

Genes are the foundation of all our attributes. This may seem like an obvious statement for many - but for some, it is controversial. This is the core of the nature-nurture debate: are we born or made?

From everything I have read, seen and understood in life, I am firmly on the side of nature. I have seen so many instances of people with abilities and attributes that show familial inheritance, that it could not be otherwise. The gene is all: at least, it is most of the story.

I have posted elsewhere about the remarkably strong relationship between the IQ of the parents and the IQ of the children, once they become adults (a correlation of 0.8). Intelligence is not the only strongly inherited characteristic - our height, our health, our immune systems...everything is there, in the genome. Though many may dislike it, we are very much a product of our genes (though these genes interact with their environment).

I am moved to write about this, today, because of my recent encounter with a supercentenarian. Many react to such a person by asking: "What is their secret?" They believe that there is some environmental quirk which led to such a long life. Well, I have to disappoint you. Teresa Hsu, is presently reputed to be 110 years old. That is interesting and amazing in itself - but what do you think about its cause when I tell you that her mother lived to 104? It begins to look rather like another case of genetic inheritance, doesn't it? Well, how about this: her mother's grandmother lived to 103. Thus Teresa Hsu, far from being possessed of some behavioural secret, is the product of a long-line of female centenarians, in her family. It is an attribute of her family, as much as blue eyes are the attribute of other families. It is a genetic inheritance.

All human giftedness, in my opinion, backed by both observation, and reading of much scientific literature, is founded in the genome. This applies to all ways in which one person may be special compared to another. If you look at them closely enough, you will almost always be able to pinpoint a familial cause: they are the product of their inherited genes.

We should not be concerned that so much of what we are is genetically based. That actually is a cause for celebration - for everyone of us is unique (barring twins etc) - and possess a set of attributes and dispositions, given to us by our genes, that no other person in history has ever possessed or will ever possess. We are all, by genetic definition, completely unique. I find that refreshing.

(If you would like to read of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and eight months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and one month, and Tiarnan, eighteen months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, genetics, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, the creatively gifted, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Genetic discrimination against the gifted

Racism is discrimination based on genetics. It is almost universally decried and fought against. Discrimination against the disabled is also, often, based on genetics - and universally fought against. Giftedness is genetically determined, and often the subject of discrimination - but who fights against that? Virtually no-one. "Giftism", as I have coined it, is both common and not thought of as a real issue. It is OK in many societies to be hostile towards the gifted; to deny them appropriate educational opportunity and generally deny them receiving what they need to receive - by simply ignoring them.

The gifted child is often resented by other children - and socially isolated as a result. That is a form of discrimination. Most schools who saw a child of minority race being shunned would get the school together and give them a talk about it - and try to persuade them to be more inclusive. No such talk will ever occur to protect gifted children from ill-treatment. Their situation is simply not recognized - or if it is, no-one, who has the power to do something about it, cares enough to act.

Discrimination of all kinds must be opposed in a civilized world. If your nation does not oppose discrimination against the gifted - then it is not yet fully civilized: there is at least one more step to take.

It is not just the intellectually gifted who receive this directed envy of their fellows. Children - and adults - gifted in other ways also receive it.

Brad Pitt, of all people, made a relevant comment on the issue, by being quoted as saying:

"I am one of those people you hate because of genetics."

So, even, the famous among us, feel it: the hate of others, simply because of who we are.

Really, everyone, everywhere, who understands this issue should do what they can to oppose it and make this world a more civilized, inclusive, place.

(If you would like to read about Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and six months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, three, and Tiarnan, sixteen months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, the creatively gifted, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Valentine Cawley Celebrity Look-a-likes part two

It is difficult to be impartial in the matter of appearance. Now, however, one can let a computer make the judgements. In the previous post, I ran one photograph through a site that correlates one's features with famous people. (Its purpose is to find lost relatives, actually, through finding genetic resemblances between people reflected in their features.)

Below is the result of trying another photograph. There is variation between them because a different photo will catch one in somewhat different way. It is interesting to note that Jacqueline Bisset comes up again, despite the change of angle. Albert Einstein also correlates to me, at 52%. I hope it is not my hair that did it.

I am not displeased to correlate with Vince Vaughn and Tom Hanks: amiable souls both.

Have fun all.

Celebrity look-a-likes: famous faces

It is said that everyone has a double, somewhere, somewhen: but is that true? In my life, I have met several people who look somewhat like me, some male, some female - but who, of all the world's famous people do I look like?

There is a website called www.myheritage.com that purports to match genealogy using face recognition. One side effect of this is that it can match any face to its databases of celebrities. Clearly this database is not complete since there are a number of celebrities that I have been said to remind people of at various stages of my life, that did not come up as results - such as Ewan MacGregor (who I was more than once mistaken for, when I was younger) - and Ricky Martin (except one of us is plumper...wonder who?!!). However, given the limitations of the database I thought it a very fun exercise to see who, in the world, one looks like: according to the impartial judge of a computer program that measures faces.

The results are served up here. Apparently, I am a sixty per cent match for Donald Trump (I could do with 60 per cent of his wealth, then...) and a 73 % match for David Bowie. Interestingly, I also resemble Jacqueline Bisset - a woman - and Coolio - who is of a different race. I find this refreshing. In going beyond our ways of categorizing people by race and gender and looking at the actual proportions of the face, this software should give a truer reflection of who we actually look like. The results can be very revealing.

The results depend very much on which photo you upload: different photos may give slightly different results if you are caught differently - or were a different age at the time, I suppose (or weight, I would guess: though it managed to see through my poundage and match the features of ultra-slim David Bowie - so I think the software is pretty good at overcoming such impediments).

I will see if I can check other photos for my family members and post the results for you.

So, who do you look like?