Sensitivity to the laws of human nature.

Tiarnan is only six years old. Yet, in his few years, he has come to certain assessments of the nature of people which are interesting to hear, at times.

He was watching “Once upon a time”, recently. This is a TV series in which a fairy tale world and the real world collide, with fairy tale characters living in our world. Tiarnan quite likes this. The other day we got a peek into the kinds of things he is thinking as he watches it.

Having observed the characters for a few episodes, he suddenly piped up, whilst watching it:

“Good guys can become bad but bad guys cannot become good.”, he said to his mummy. He said this because he clearly did not believe that one of the bad characters was being genuinely good, as he appeared to be. Tiarnan was "seeing through" his behaviour. It was surprising, given his extreme youth, that he had not been fooled, by the character's actions and words - because, superficially, they did seem like "good" acts.

We were both quite taken by this, because it seemed he had used the evidence of the personalities at play in the TV show, to draw a general rule about human behaviour - and to come to his own view about a particular person's moral nature. This is a very rational thought process, akin to what scientists do: gather evidence, and spot patterns, to draw up laws. That is what Tiarnan is doing, about people. It is interesting to witness his developing understanding of people – and to see just how he thinks about them.

I see in Tiarnan’s human rule making, a cross between Syahidah’s thinking and my own. Syahidah is socially skilled and I have a tendency to invent laws, in the scientific manner: Tiarnan is crossing both thinking styles to deduce his own laws of human nature. Of course, this is just the beginning of his thinking about people. It will be interesting to see how far he takes this approach to understanding people, in future. Perhaps, not all TV watching is useless!

Posted by Valentine Cawley

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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.)

Is Singapore an uncaring society?

A society reveals itself by the way it communicates to its people. So, it is with Singapore.

Yesterday, I stepped into a lift and I saw a notice on the wall. It was from the Housing Development Board and it had been widely distributed to communicate a safety message. The message was a simple one and explained in detail: windows, on high rise flats, have inherent dangers and must be protected against. A set of detailed precautions were given, advising on the maintenance and upkeep of windows to prevent a mishap.

This was "all well and good". However, there was something else which I noticed about the poster, which really perturbed me. You see, at the bottom of the notice, in large letters there was the slogan: "Your loved ones could be hurt". It was the only message on the poster that said, directly, that windows could hurt people. Think about it for a minute. What does it imply about the society to which it is addressed? For me it says something really, really, dark about Singapore. It says that, in the Government's opinion - for it is a notice from a branch of Government - that the people of Singapore will ONLY care about personal injury to their immediate relatives and loved ones. Stated, most clearly, by that slogan was the fact that an appeal to a Singaporean's general concern for their fellow man, would be ineffective. They had to make the poster personal. By saying: "Your loved ones could be hurt", they were saying that you, personally, could be affected by failing to maintain your windows. Clearly, it was thought that something more general like: "Someone could be killed", would have no effect on people's behaviour. Seeing those words, therefore, appalled me - for it told me most clearly, what the Government must know and think about its own people. It says that they JUST DON'T CARE.

Is there any evidence of this lack of care in daily life, here? Well, there is: plenty of it. Most relevantly, is that one not infrequently hears of things falling from windows, and sometimes people are hurt. Occasionally, such things are even reported - so it is not something which does not happen - it is a danger of life in a high-rise city. Yet, should such things happen? It should be a simple matter to ensure that there is nothing able to fall from a window - just don't put anything there. It is also a simple matter to ensure that the windows are safe: get them repaired if they start to look precarious. Yet, the Government here, knows that people don't take such precautions - that people don't think of the strangers down below who might be hurt or killed, by their negligence regarding windows. Hence, the notice that brings the danger closer to home - it is not strangers that might be hurt, but your own family.

It is true of course. One's own family could be hurt by ill-fitting, badly secured windows. Yet, in most countries, I feel it would have been sufficient to say: "Someone could be killed - take care of your windows." Something like that would work in any society in which people value all life, in which people care whether or not others come to harm by their actions or inactions. Clearly, Singapore is not such a place. If it was, the communication would have been different. It would have felt no need to bring it down to the level of the individual's loved ones.

In all, I found the poster rather chilling therefore. Do people really care so little for their fellow human beings, here?

(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.)

Chimpanzee Brain vs Human Brain

It is customary for humans to think of themselves as mentally superior to all other known forms of life - but is this true? Do we truly have the best minds on Earth?

In one way, it is evident that we do: we are, after all, the dominant life-form. But perhaps all is not as it seems.

Two days ago, an article published in the US Journal Current Biology challenges some of our most basic assumptions about ourselves. Researchers from the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute, led by Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa wanted to compare the memories of chimpanzees with the memories of humans.

The researchers pitted three pairs of chimpanzees versus nine University students. Note that this is not a fair match. The chosen humans were of a superior type: University students will have superior intelligence compared to the average person in the street. Thus randomly chosen chimpanzees were being compared to superior humans. This is not, one might suppose, a fair match - and you would be right, for reasons soon to be clear.

This was a multi-year study. The chimpanzees were trained to recognize the numbers 1 to 9 when written down. In the tests, they were rewarded with food (a peanut) when they got the right answer. These numbers were distributed at random about the screen and the chimps had to tap each number in the right order to get a reward. (So the chimps were essentially counting through a sequence).

The next step in the experiments was to cover the randomly distributed numbers with a white box and to ask the chimps - and humans - to again tap through the numbers in sequence, without being able to see them again. Thus, of course, the memory of the test subjects was called upon.

Shockingly, the chimpanzees did FAR better on this task than the University students did. The chimpanzees showed inherently much superior memories for the position of numbers, than smart human subjects.

There was another stage in the testing. Some of the numbers - and covers - were removed, leaving some behind. The test subjects - both chimp and human - had to again tap through them in ascending order, taking account of the fact that a number of them were missing.

Again, the chimpanzees far outperformed the smart, young human students.

So much better at this task were chimpanzees than humans, that the chimps could correctly remember the position of the numbers, once hidden, from a single glance at the array. The human subjects were unable to do this.

The researchers suggested that this demonstrated that, perhaps, humans had lost a similar ability, perhaps giving it up for the new skill of language.

I am not convinced, myself, for Koko, the gorilla, has managed to acquire human sign language (as posted elsewhere), showing that other primates can learn a language, too.

The chimpanzees beat the human students on both speed and accuracy. They even managed to do this, when interrupted in their tapping, by loud distracting noise.

So, this experiment establishes that, in terms of this mental function, anyway, that of memory, chimpanzees are superior to relatively smart, young humans.

All of this makes me wonder just why some people persist in treating our primate relatives so poorly. We may be the dominant life-form, but our primate cousins are certainly not without their gifts. They should be better looked after, all over the world. Perhaps experiments like this can inspire better efforts to care for them.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and no months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and five months, and Tiarnan, twenty-two 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, 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.)

Child prodigy - allowed to develop or not?

The saddest question, in some ways, in a long time, has been asked by a google searcher from Spain.

They asked: "Do you think a child prodigy should be given a chance to develop his or her skills or not?"

I must admit, I was a bit shocked by this and it makes me wonder who is asking. Is it a parent, wondering whether they should furnish a child with opportunities for growth in their chosen area (like a book, or a piano, maths tutor, etc...)? Is it a teacher/school administrator wondering whether they should make special arrangements for a child of gift in a particular area?

In either case, the answer is the same: of course, you should. To ask whether a child prodigy should be allowed to grow, is a bit like looking at the child of two giants and saying: "I think he is going to be tall...should we let him grow?" It is an inhumane question. What it proposes is that the child giant, should be impeded in their growth, that they should be starved into stuntedness. A person proposing such a question appears to resent the future height of the child and seeks, somehow, to diminish them. Such a person would be happy to turn a child destined to be a giant, into one of just average height, by dint of starvation, or other stresses. So, too, is it with the child prodigy. A prodigy, as a child, is destined to be a mental giant, if given the right opportunities to grow. Is it better for them to be stunted into ordinariness, by being unchallenged, by being denied access to books or an appropriate educational environment - or being bored to death in an education system designed for mediocrity? I don't think so - and no-one who was of humane outlook would think so, too. A child prodigy could grow up to be an adult genius, if well-handled. It would be a kind of crime not to assist that progress, not to do everything one can to ensure that the outcome would be good - for the child, in terms of self-realization - and for the world, in terms of nurturing a gifted child, who may, in turn shower gifts on the world.

So, whoever you are in Spain, if you have it in your influence or power, to help that prodigious child, you MUST. There is no moral alternative: to do otherwise is to commit a crime against the future of Man - it is to deprive the world of whatever gifts that child could bestow on the world, later, but also to deprive the child of the happiness of becoming what they may.

Remember: Giotto started in the world as a child prodigy - and would the world be better without his art, if he were deprived of the opportunity to grow? The same can be said of Mozart and his music: his prodigious childhood led to adult genius. Would Mozart's stunting have been a boon to the world? Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, was a child prodigy who became an adult genius: would it have been better had his father denied him opportunities to learn and grow? Had that been so, the world would be without much of the mathematical foundation of the Information Age - and where would we be without that?

Don't snuff out genius that might be, in any prodigy: give it, at least, a chance to grow. To do otherwise is a crime against, not only the child, but us all.

(If you would like to read of a scientific child prodigy, Ainan Celeste Cawley, aged seven years and three months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, three, and Tiarnan, thirteen 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, adult genius, baby genius, savant, the creatively gifted, gifted children and gifted adults in general. Thanks.)