17 February 2025
Hatred of intelligence
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The late Professor Hans Eysenck once told me about an experiment in which a population of rats was divided into ‘bright’ and ‘dull’ on some ...
17 December 2024
The basic moral principle
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Modern society has lost sight of the only moral principle of any importance, so that the individual citizen is basically unprotected against...
25 October 2024
The melancholy of genius and its causes
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guest post by Christine Fulcher Havelock Ellis makes some interesting points about the personality features of geniuses in his book A Stud...
11 September 2024
Galton on ‘steady application and moral effort’
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Francis Galton (1822-1911), from his book Hereditary Genius : I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often imp...
13 July 2024
The impoverishment of the English aristocracy
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P.G. Wodehouse was one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His most famous fictional creation was Jeeves, the knowing and...
22 May 2024
The work ethic and its decline
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I have noticed over the last forty years that it has become more and more difficult to find anyone willing to do useful work in a polite and...
27 March 2024
Laughter
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A young graduate who had read English at Oxford, and with whom I was corresponding, once referred to jokes about ageing. Certainly they are ...
26 January 2024
Genes and social class
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It has been estimated that the proportion of a person’s intelligence which is inherited from his or her parents is upward of 50 percent . ...
30 October 2023
Genes, leadership and monarchy
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The idea that ability is partly inherited continues to be controversial, for reasons that seem to have more to do with ideology than scient...
13 October 2023
Two brief essays on education
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Good parents In order to be a socially approved parent it is necessary not to ‘push’ your child. There is a social myth to the effect that ...
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