How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (23 page)

However, to add insult to injury, it seems that not only do the beautiful get to be richer, but they are actually more fertile. Some years ago, my Polish colleague Boguslaw Pawlowski from the University of Wroclaw and I used a large Polish medical database to show that tall men were not only more likely to be married, but also had more children. In terms of evolution, they had higher fitness – made a greater contribution to the species gene pool – than shorter ones. Daniel Nettle, of the University
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of Newcastle, later showed much the same effect in a longitudinal British sample that had been studied since birth (and who were, at the time of his study, in their fifties, and so had completed most of their reproduction).

We had thought that this was simply because tall men are more attractive, and so are more likely to find partners and have babies. However, it now seems that the beautiful are also more fertile. Ros Arden and her colleagues from King’s College London have recently shown, using an American military sample, that symmetry correlates with sperm count and sperm motility. Beautiful people are just more fertile. Life just isn’t fair.

It used to be said of a certain Oxford college during the 1960s that its dons assessed prospective undergraduates by throwing rugby balls at them as they came into the interview room. A fumbled ball meant the thumbs down, a drop kick into the wastepaper basket an instant scholarship. Such selection practices were, of course, frowned upon by the sniffier colleges.

Yet I seem to recall that, in terms of performance in the academic league tables, that particular college by no means disgraced itself compared to other colleges that pursued more orthodox methods of selection. In fact, the critics ought to have been completely silenced by the results of a long-term study of educational achievement published back in the 1970s. It revealed that the typical high-flyer was not the conventional bespectacled genius of Billy Bunter’s Greyfriars, but the all-rounder. High-flyers, it seems, tend to fly high in everything from sports to exams
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– and just to add insult to injury, even the social sphere is not excluded.

No doubt this slightly surprising result in part reflects the fact that there is nothing like success to breed success. But I wonder whether there isn’t also something in the old educationalist’s adage that healthy minds are found in healthy bodies –
mens sana in corpore sano
. This is not to say that sporting types can be intellectual geniuses simply by virtue of being sporty. But a heavy involvement in sport might provide one essential ingredient for being able to make the grade intellectually. The reason may simply have to do with one of today’s endocrinological buzz-words – endogenous opiates.

The endogenous opiates, or endorphins, are the body’s own painkillers. They are pumped round the brain in vast quantities whenever the body is subjected to stress, thus buffering us against the pain of tissue damage. This system is presumably designed to allow the body to continue functioning more or less normally when a failure to do so because of injury might result, say, in the animal being caught by the predator. But what have painkillers got to do with intellectual activity? The answer perhaps lies in the fact that we often refer to it as intellectual
effort
.

A curious myth has been perpetuated over the centuries to the effect that geniuses produce works of genius effortlessly. René Descartes was partly to blame for this. He affected the lifestyle of a dilettante and habitually spent most of his day in bed while churning out works of genius in the afternoons. T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia fame) did his bit too, claiming to have attended no more than a dozen lectures during his entire undergraduate career before gaining an effortless first-class degree at one of the
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better Oxford colleges (Jesus).

But my impression is that these kinds of claims are ninety-seven per cent bravado. They invariably conceal a great deal of very hard work behind the scenes – often in the college library. Lawrence’s renowned knowledge of medieval crusader castles (he wrote a seminal report on one excavation in Palestine) was not acquired by divine inspiration. And my guess is that Descartes was doing a great deal more than dozing as he lazed in bed each morning. What he was in fact probably doing was exactly what every good mathematician still does – namely, allowing his subconscious to mull over a problem off-line.

Which brings me back to opioids. What they surely provide is a buffer against the pain and stress caused by the physical and mental exhaustion, the discomfort and eye strain, headaches and frustrations that come from poring over books, other people’s obscure algebraic proofs, and experiments that refuse to turn out right. Those lucky individuals with naturally high endorphin levels sail through all this and emerge at the other end fresh and still raring to go long after other mere mortals have wilted and given up.

Now, one way of raising endogenous opiate levels is to exercise vigorously on a regular basis. Of course, I don’t want to suggest that exercise will turn everyone into a genius. Clearly, a certain amount of native intellectual competence is required – things such as memory and quick logical thought, which usually come under the rubric of general IQ. All I am suggesting is that we may have overlooked an important element in the equation for that mul-tifaceted trait we refer to as IQ, namely endurance. Those who have the cerebral machinery will not succeed unless
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they also have the capacity to stand up to the work effort required to exercise it to the full.

Which raises some interesting questions. Should lectures begin with ten minutes of advanced callisthenics before getting down to the business of working through the proofs of matrix algebra? Do field workers in biology who spend their days tramping the moors have an unfair advantage over their more sedentary colleagues in, say, English literature? Should a high endorphin titre in the brain count as an essential qualification for an intellectually stressful job? Should prospective employers have a keener interest in the kinds of exercise you take – or don’t take?

Perhaps next time someone else gets the job you desperately wanted, you should ignore their paper qualifications: instead, try checking out the way their muscles ripple under the well-cut outfit as they walk into the interview room.

And we might well contemplate the implications of this for how we educate our children. Physical sports have gradually dropped off the list of activities that children are asked to indulge in, partly through some rather odd notions about equality (the ‘everyone should get a prize’ mentality), but also, in these increasingly litigious times, partly because of the abject terror of being sued that turns both schools and local councils into quivering wrecks. But if there really is a relationship between exercise and learning, that might not be too clever, because everyone ends up suffering thanks to the stupidity and greed of a few. The real issue is that we need to learn how to accept risk and be less petulant and blaming when accidents happen. Life is full of risks, and you can’t be grateful for the enormous benefits that invariably accrue from taking them
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and then blame others when it goes wrong – a lesson apparently lost on the world’s bankers. Failure to appreciate that is a form of shortsightedness that doesn’t do our children any good in the long run.

Despite all its inbuilt advantages, just being smart is not enough. Having the IQ of Einstein is a bit like having the biggest computer ever built: that’s all very impressive, but without the software it’s going nowhere. Education remains the key ingredient. Without packing the mind with knowledge and skills for it to mine and exploit, native IQ alone wont get you all that far. Education allows us, in Newton’s famous phrase, to stand on the shoulders of the giants of the past. Knowledge, and especially scientific knowledge, is cumulative.

So, given all the later conflict between science and religion, it is all rather ironic that one of the most successful experiments in education ever done was actually carried out at the behest of religion – in this case, the Calvinist Presbyterians in Scotland. The impetus to ensure that every crofter could read the Good Book for him- (or even her-) self produced, by the early nineteenth century, what was probably the best educational system in the world. Literacy rates in Scotland were on the order of seventy per cent by the end of the eighteenth century, at a time when they were not much more than half that in England and Wales, never mind the rest of Europe.

By the mid-nineteenth century, attendance at university was more than ten times higher per head of population in Scotland than it was in England and Wales. And where
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higher education remained the near-exclusive preserve of the upper classes in England, it was the broad egalitar-ianism of the Scottish educational system that was its great achievement. Crofters’ sons had virtually the same chances of making it to university as the sons of the laird and the minister. Education became a passport to a better life for droves of Scots, even though many of them went abroad to administer, explore, industrialise and generally create a virtual empire around the world.

The downside, of course – and this is not always recognised – is that all this education was probably responsible for almost as great a depopulation of the Highlands and islands as the Clearances themselves. OK, in this case, at least, this was seen as a good thing by the families – a way out of grinding poverty, a gateway to a future that was always going to be better and more sustainable than the harshness of life on the land back home.

That enthusiasm for buying into the educational dream had one important consequence. And that was an intellectual interest and curiosity right at the roots of society. One need only point to Robert Burns’s father who anxiously sought out an education for his children (and how much less rich the world of literature would have been had he not!). It spawned what became known as the Edinburgh Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century when the philosopher David Hume and the economist Adam Smith and their friends rose from humble beginnings to write some of the most lastingly influential works of all time. It generated some seminal contributions to science, engineering and literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – names like Alexander Fleming, Walter Scott and the various Stephensons of railway and
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iron bridge fame.

Somehow we have lost that sense of purpose. Education no longer seems to be valued for itself, something to challenge the mind, to excite and motivate a spirit of enquiry. I do not know what the answer is, but I do know that unless we can find an answer quite quickly we are heading for deep trouble. The problem is summed up for me by the fact that applications for science courses at British universities have been declining at a steady rate for the better part of a decade. When I analysed the figures for chemistry and biology a few years ago, the decline was so precipitate that, if it continued at the same rate, the number of applicants for
both
disciplines would hit zero by 2030.

But my real concern is this. An education is not just a technical training in the arcane knowledge of a discipline (whether that be history, politics or a science). It is a training in how to think and evaluate, how to marshal evidence for and against a position, how to approach a problem critically without falling prey to prejudice and preconception. Those are skills that everyone from bank manager to politician, journalist to local government func-tionary, needs every working day. But to train those skills, it is necessary to excite an interest. And somewhere along the line between primary school and university, we are managing to stamp out that sense of excitement and enquiry. We will rue the day we lost sight of that.
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In a Gallup poll commissioned by the BBC some years ago, eighty per cent of the British people thought that science was important. That’s pretty encouraging, isn’t it? Well, yes, except for the fact that, by implication, twenty per cent of the population took a distinctly more jaun-diced view of our activities. This is a figure that accords well with many other polls: typically, five to twenty-five per cent of the people polled express negative attitudes towards science.

So who are all these Doubting Thomases? And do they really matter? As a matter of fact, I think they do matter – very much. For their position within society often gives them an influence over our future history that far exceeds their numerical share of the vote.

By and large, people who are disdainful of science are well-educated, professional people. Typically, they hold degrees in the humanities: some are teachers, some are academics, others are members of the artistic and literary communities. More worryingly, some are politicians. They share a common antipathy towards science that is generally founded on the view that scientists are acultural and
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insensitive to the finer things in life. The underfunding of the arts relative to the sciences is regarded as symptomatic of this – our cultural heritage being eroded and submerged beneath the harsh adamantine machinery of science.

This is very much the Victorian caricature of scientists: the mad Dr Frankenstein hell-bent upon world domination even at the expense of his own life; the evil duplicity of Dr Jekyll. Whatever happened, I wonder, to Renaissance Man, that intellectual polymath whose interests ranged from music and poetry to astronomy and physics, and whose accomplishments and reputation often rested as much on the ability to turn a fine sonnet as on the construction of some ingenious experiment?

One thing seems clear: Renaissance Man is no longer always to be found among the humanities. A surprising number of scientists turn out to have hidden (and in some cases not so hidden) talents. Take Einstein, surely the archetypal scientist. Like many mathematicians, he was an accomplished musician: he played the violin. He was not, of course, a Yehudi Menuhin, but he did on more than one occasion play with a celebrity orchestra. Still, if you want to be sniffy about Einstein, then try Alexander Borodin, the nineteenth-century Russian commonly credited with having been one of the technically most innovative composers of his day. He taught chemistry for a living throughout his working life.