Are symmetrical people smarter?

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From Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters:

Some asymmetries in the body are consistent: the heart is on the left side of the chest, for example, in most people.  But other, smaller asymmetries can go randomly in either direction.  In some people the left ear is larger than the right; in others, vice versa.  The magnitude of this so-called fluctuating asymmetry is a sensitive measure of how much stress the body was under when developing, stress from infections, toxins or poor nutrition.  The fact that people with high IQs have more symmetrical bodies suggests that they were subject to fewer developmental stresses in the womb or in childhood.  Or rather, that they were more resistant to such stresses.  And the resistance may well be heritable.  So the heritability of IQ might not be caused by direct ‘genes for intelligence’ at all, but your ability to develop a high IQ under certain environmental circumstances.  How does one parcel that one into nature and nurture?

What I’ve Noticed

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A Phoenix nun was demoted for saving a woman’s life. Religious hospitals are kind of frightening.

Already environmentally devastated areas, like mine tailings, might be a good place to install solar projects.

A tragedy of “security:” “military personnel were so worried about getting their trucks into the proper place that they crushed a 68-year-old woman on a bicycle five blocks from the nearest point you could have spit on the Convention Center.”

Arizona’s nasty new immigration law is having serious financial consequences, including concert cancellations by Pitbull and Cypress Hill.

Chinese is really hard, but learning to speak it is far easier (and more fun!) than the writing.

Maybe sunshine will cure my migraines.

Even more unexpected and incredibly damaging effects of GM crops.  I am not at all opposed to GM crops in principle, but I do think Monsanto has used the technology in incredibly damaging ways.

Urnula craterium

Urnula craterium from BPotD

You thought the recent financial crisis was bad – just wait until we start to feel the economic effects of the biodiversity crisis.

How not to get people to buy your products.

“Relaxing”

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I thought I’d spend the week after finals relaxing a bit.  Instead, I’ve had class every day from 8:30 to 4:30.  Not that I’m complaining, of course.  The fantastic ecological modeler giving the workshop that’s been eating my days is well worth a few more days of sleep deprivation and an exploded closet (if that doesn’t happen to you during finals week, would you like to be my PA?).

I attended this workshop last summer, too.  The material is essentially the same, but it’s not easy material and it’s not material that I always think about in depth.  Learning some things is a very long process for me – I cover the same points over and over, but at a higher level each time, like walking up a spiral staircase (ok, sometimes it’s more like a maze, or a Temple Grandin design).  While I’ve definitely made a few turns this year working on my own, there’s still so much I don’t fully understand that this workshop has been useful.

Plus, fantastic ecological modeler is a funny and laid back lecturer, which is a good combination when you spend all day covering the board with equations and trying to keep students’ attention.

An evolutionary history of very close things

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From Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters:

[T]he remarkable truth is that we come from a long line of failures.  We are apes, a group that almost went extinct fifteen million years ago in competition with the better-designed [note: I take serious issue with this phrasing] monkeys.  We are primates, a group of mammals that almost went extinct forty-five million years ago in competition with the better-designed rodents.  We are synapsid tetrapods, a group of reptiles that almost went extinct 200 million years ago in competition with the better-designed dinosaurs.  We are descended from limbed fishes, which almost went extinct 360 million years ago in competition with the better-designed ray-finned fishes.  We are chordates, a phylum that survived the Cambrian era 500 million years ago by the skin of its teeth in competition with the brilliantly successful arthropods.  Our ecological success came against humbling odds.

Graduation in my Grandmother’s shoes

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graduation

I graduated yesterday.

It’s been a long time coming – as I mentioned, I technically started my undergraduate degree in 2003.  But migraines and travel and money slowed things down a bit.  There were definite benefits to a slow path through school – I know what I want to do, I’ve learned a great deal about my strengths and weaknesses as a person and a researcher, I’ve had time to explore other interests, like swing dancing and playing the piano, and I know that school isn’t as important as I was led to believe.  So I don’t regret the seven years and two schools it took to get my degree, but it was a tense wait for some people, including my grandmother.

My gramma was born into a not very well to do family just as the Great Depression got very, very bad.  She’s very sharp and wanted to go to college  – she was fascinated by “those new computing machines.” But she was a woman in a poor family with three other children, so she went to nursing school and supported her own family while my grandfather went to college on the GI bill.

My gramma never pressured me, but I could tell she worried I would never graduate.  She was thrilled when she realized that I really would.  So, even though she hates cooking, she baked and express mailed me a cake this week.  I’d include a picture here, but her distaste for cooking doesn’t keep her from making the world’s best pound cake.  We’re not going to discuss how quickly I ate it.

My gramma and I have a lot in common – a love of sci-fi, gardening, and shoes, too.  A few years ago, she gave me many of the shoes she’d worn when she was younger.  She has excellent taste, even if most of them require a date (for a crutch, and a foot massage later).  At graduation, I wore a lovely pair of those shoes in her honor.  A fitting tribute to one of the most extraordinary people I know.

for my gramma