A Philosophical Thread about Good & Evil - Catastrophes, Coincidences & Theodicy

[Silent_Water]

Check out this, it is a truly fascinating study and is still ongoing:

Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study​

The Dunedin Study - Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health & Development Research Unit

dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz

Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It is not the first but it is the longest, started as a long-running cohort study of 1037 people born between 1 April 1972 and 31 March 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand. Great emphasis is placed on retention of study members. At the most recent (age 38) assessments, 96% of all living eligible study members, or 961 people, participated. This is unprecedented for a longitudinal study, with many others worldwide experiencing 20–40% drop-out rates.

Interesting indeed. But I was famous in my time at the university for finding "problems" in the publications of others. In other words, I am and I always was the negative "advocatus diaboli" or "the heretic" alias "der Ketzer".

I found immediately a link to a publication derived from this study with results I partly doubt right from the first abstract:

Polygenic Score for Higher Educational Attainment is Associated with Larger Brains

Abstract. People who score higher on intelligence tests tend to have larger brains. Twin studies suggest the same genetic factors influence both brain size and

academic.oup.com

Quotation from there: "People who score higher on intelligence tests tend to have larger brains. Twin studies suggest the same genetic factors influence both brain size and intelligence. This has led to the hypothesis that genetics influence intelligence partly by contributing to the development of larger brains."

For most scientists and brain researchers in Europe, these few sentences could already lead to "hellish dangerous conclusions" without immediate further explanations because in a larger brain, there certainly could be more connections and links between so-called "synapses" etc., etc.

So far, so good, but you cannot draw a conclusion by saying that larger brains automatically are a reason for higher scores in intelligence tests.

You also need to explain immediately the relations of these larger brains! You might ask: In relation to what?

For example to the average body size of human beings because men's bodies are usually bigger than women's ones and the brain is always a part of the body in relation to the body size. By saying, a larger brain tends to more intelligence, you could easily exclude women from the assumption of the same intelligence as men or of higher intelligence at all.
Because this really has been done by so-called "scientists" for a long time - and we all know some parts of the world, where this is still done - we should be very careful with such sentences and conclusions.

Therefore and especially in brain research, there has always to be used the expression of "in relation to the body size" or something similar, because there are also a lot of animals with bigger or larger brains than human beings but they are not really more intelligent than we are - although their brains are really obviously bigger than ours, they are usually smaller in relation to their body size than ours (e.g. horses, hippos, elephants!) - with only one exception as far as I know:
Dolphins are even having in relation to their body size a brain which is bigger and larger than the brain of human beings and they probably use the additional brain parts for hunting by sending and receiving ultrasonic waves.

Moreover, in my own feelings which sometimes tend to a kind of "mysticism" which I certainly doubt in myself because I am also a heretic for my own beliefs,
I tend to believe that there are "spheres of intelligence" which are outside of our bodies and possibly a kind of "natural instincts" we human beings might have lost in exchange for our analytical "human" capabilities.
For example and on the one hand, I doubt very much that we ever could talk with a dolphin about arithmetics or quantum physics.
On the other hand, I once read that tiny termites are building in their "skyscrapers" perfect "domes" for the room of their queen. Their workers start at the same time at different ground levels and they are meeting at the same time for perfectioning the cupola of their dome. They are too small to have something you could really call "a brain" and unable to see the opposite side of the dome, not to speak about the perfect curves they are building far beyond their bodies in the height of this dome. So, where do they get their architectural abilities from? When this is "swarm intelligence", how is the information about building a perfect cupola transferred to all the other termite workers?

There is so much about intelligence which we still do not know and we believe we are "the most intelligent" beings on this planet! Are we really?

 

[Gibbs505]

Interesting indeed. But I was famous in my time at the university for finding "problems" in the publications of others. In other words, I am and I always was the negative "advocatus diaboli" or "the heretic" alias "der Ketzer".

I found immediately a link to a publication derived from this study with results I partly doubt right from the first abstract:

Polygenic Score for Higher Educational Attainment is Associated with Larger Brains

Abstract. People who score higher on intelligence tests tend to have larger brains. Twin studies suggest the same genetic factors influence both brain size and

academic.oup.com

Quotation from there: "People who score higher on intelligence tests tend to have larger brains. Twin studies suggest the same genetic factors influence both brain size and intelligence. This has led to the hypothesis that genetics influence intelligence partly by contributing to the development of larger brains."

For most scientists and brain researchers in Europe, these few sentences could already lead to "hellish dangerous conclusions" without immediate further explanations because in a larger brain, there certainly could be more connections and links between so-called "synapses" etc., etc.

So far, so good, but you cannot draw a conclusion by saying that larger brains automatically are a reason for higher scores in intelligence tests.

You also need to explain immediately the relations of these larger brains! You might ask: In relation to what?

For example to the average body size of human beings because men's bodies are usually bigger than women and the brain is always a part of the body in relation to the body size. By saying, a larger brain tends to more intelligence, you could easily exclude women from the assumption of the same intelligence as men or of higher intelligence at all.
Because this really has been done by so-called "scientists" for a long time - and we all know some parts of the world, where this is still done - we should be very careful with such sentences and conclusions.

Therefore and especially in brain research, there has always to be used the expression of "in relation to the body size" or something similar, because there are also a lot of animals with bigger or larger brains than human beings but they are not really more intelligent than we are - although their brains are really obviously bigger than ours, they are usually smaller in relation to their body size than ours (e.g. horses, hippos, elephants!) - with only one exception as far as I know:
Dolphins are even having in relation to their body size a brain which is bigger and larger than the brain of human beings and they probably use the additional brain parts for hunting by sending and receiving ultrasonic waves.

Moreover, in my own feelings which sometimes tend to a kind of "mysticism" which I certainly doubt in myself because I am also a heretic for my own beliefs,
I tend to believe that there are "spheres of intelligence" which are outside of our bodies and possibly a kind of "natural instincts" we human beings might have lost in exchange for our analytical "human" capabilities.
For example and on the one hand, I doubt very much that we ever could talk with a dolphin about arithmetics or quantum physics.
On the other hand, I once read that tiny termites are building in their "skyscrapers" perfect "domes" for the room of their queen. Their workers start at the same time at different ground levels and they are meeting at the same time for perfectioning the cupola of their dome. They are too small to have something you could really call "a brain" and unable to see the opposite side of the dome, not to speak about the perfect curves they are building far beyond their bodies in the height of this dome. So, where do they get their architectural abilities from? When this is "swarm intelligence", how is the information about building a perfect cupola transferred to all the other termite workers?

There is so much about intelligence which we still do not know and we believe we are "the most intelligent" beings on this planet! Are we really?

Just a couple of things, the New Zealand study was only one of a number of studies examined,

We analyzed data from European-descent participants in the United Kingdom-based UK Biobank (Sudlow et al. 2015; Miller et al. 2016), a population-based volunteer sample (N = 5691), the New Zealand-based Dunedin Study, a population-representative birth cohort (N = 596) (Poulton et al. 2015), and two studies in the United States consisting primarily of university students, the GSP (Holmes et al. 2015) (N = 1163), and the DNS (Elliott et al. 2018) (N = 515). Sample sizes reflect participants with available structural MRI, cognitive testing, and genetic data (Table 1). Samples are described in detail in the Supplementary Material and Table 1.

And also there was a significant caution in the paper you quoted

Brain Size was a Weak Mediator of the Polygenic Score Associations with Cognitive Test Scores in Two Study Samples​

To test the hypothesis that larger brains mediated the polygenic score association with intelligence, we used the system of equations described by Baron and Kenny (1986) and the methods described by Preacher and Hayes (2008). Meta-analysis estimated the cross-study indirect effect to be b = 0.01, 95% CI [0.00, 0.02], P = 0.045, with evidence of heterogeneity in effect sizes across studies (I2 = 79.5%, P = 0.003; τ2 = 0.000) (Fig. 4). The mediation effect was statistically significant in the UK Biobank (b = 0.02, 95% CI [0.01, 0.02], P < 0.001) and the Dunedin Study (b = 0.02, 95% CI [0.00, 0.05], P = 0.028). We did not find evidence of a mediation effect in the GSP (b = 0.00, 95% CI [0.00, 0.00], P = 0.36) or DNS (b = 0.01, 95% CI [−0.00, 0.02], P = 0.24) (for details see Supplementary Table S2).

And you are correct, all studies have to be strongly examined to determine its weakness or indeed, if it is useful at all!

 

[Silent_Water]

I always thought to be a very tenacious and friendly guy but I came to the conclusion that you have to quit a job when there are too much things happening in it which you do not like or you cannot accept any more. I shocked everyone in this hotel by my own termination of this job: the girl I loved but who not really could love me and who was too young anyway, all the colleagues and the hotel management. The main reason is that every hotel is making losses during this pandemic but this hotel management is trying to reduce costs by cancelling contracts with external workers who were for example cleaning the public toilets in the basement and the ground floor behind the bar room.
These workers - usually poor women from other countries - are certainly the weakest parts in the chains of workers for this hotel, easy to be thrown out because they had no German contracts and now guess, who should do their work after they were dismissed: The "Night Auditors" who are said to work less in the nights than most others in the daylight.
Now there is a saying in Germany that you often would not like to be guest in a restaurant if you really knew how the kitchen is run. The "Night Auditors" here are usually not only checking in the last arriving guests and checking-out the earliest departuring guests, they are also preparing in the meantime the breakfast by baking the buns and the bread rolls for the morning breakfast and this could sometimes be up to 600 parts! Everything else was usually done by the kitchen staff, but also not in times when the breakfast room was closed for reasons of the pandemic. Then, the "night auditors" had to prepare complete lunch packages for each guest who wanted them. And now: If I were my own guest in this hotel, I would not like to know that the person who checked me in in the evening by speaking three different languages is suddenly also the same person who is cleaning the public toilets and preparing my breakfast or lunch package in the same night. This also was never part of my contract and this is why I am leaving relatively angry this hotel, which is - unbelievable but true - a hotel with 3 1/2 stars and part of an international hotel chain!
It is sad but sometimes it is necessary to make a cut - and to my own surprise, I am suddenly the hero of the poorer employees in this hotel because after my "dwarf uprising", the hotel management again hired cleaning personnel for the rest-rooms.
After the end of this month, you can hire me and now, after having worked in this hotel for more than one year in which I was meeting more "Covidiots" than I ever expected and finishing with a successful miniature-revolution, I am almost as prepared for civil warfare as "Hannibal" alias George Peppard in the "A-Team" was.

This (non-)relationship of mine with the much younger colleague at the hotel and all these coincidences around, which I mentioned here - all of this simply cannot be true.
This all is becoming more and more madness and one day, I will lose my mind. Is this destiny, fate or a punishment?

Now, imagine this: This hotel was about 7 km away from my apartment. I left the hotel because of the above mentioned reasons. Now, this girl I loved also quit her job at this hotel and we both did not know all the time about each other where we are living. Today, I have heard from a male colleague, she has quit her job, too, because she was not confident there any more and wants to intensify the relationship with her boy-friend and she looked for a job with normal working times and free week-ends like I did.

I have heard, she is working now in a company only 500 meters away from my apartment and I was dreaming of her almost every night again for one week.

Something like this cannot be true, can it? What have I - or we? - done to deserve this? I am really thinking about travelling to the other end of this planet in order to escape from her, but probably, she will be there on holidays next year, too, without knowing where I was going.

My life starts to look a bit similar like in this old Mesopotamian story "An Appointment in Samara", retold by William Somerset Maugham:

A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Soon afterwards, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace, he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, who made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant’s horse, he flees at great speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles (125 km), where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture to his servant. She replies, “That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

 

[Silent_Water]

As you may have already noticed, I like and I collect stories of incredible coincidences and "miracles", which are "inexplicable", because "it gives hope".
One of my collected stories happened almost exactly 50 years ago in the Peruvian jungle to this young German girl, Juliane Koepcke:

She was then 17 years old and the only survivor of "LANSA Flight 508", which was struck by at least one or possibly several lightnings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LANSA_Flight_508

Even more incredible, she later told in several interviews that the plane broke apart in the air and she did not leave the plane, "the plane left her"!
She stayed conscious for some time, falling with her whole seat bank and head first to the ground from a height of probably 3.000 meters. She saw the green jungle turning and rushing towards her in high speed until she almost approached the trees and only then, she lost consciousness.
When she woke up about 20 hours later, she was injured but not in danger for her life. She was completely alone and her seat bank was now lying next to her.
Everything else of her plane had disappeared in the jungle. She did not see any other passengers and no other parts of the plane. For her, it seemed that the plane had thrown her out like in an ejection seat.
She was the daughter of a German couple of zoologists working in the South-American jungles and her father had told her, how she could survive in the jungle in an accident and that she should always follow the little flowing rivers because they would always lead to some settlements of indigenous people.
In fact, after 11 days alone in the jungle, she came into a hut near a settlement of Indians who were shocked by her appearance and because of her blonde hair, they thought to see the mythical water-goddess "Yacumama", or another hybrid being of a dolphin and a beautiful woman with yellow hair.
Certainly, they helped her when they saw that she had injuries and today, Juliane Koepcke is a scientist, zoologist and mammalogist herself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliane_Koepcke

An interesting additional coincidence is the fact, that the famous German movie director Werner Herzog ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog

... was also booked for this flight because he made at that time a movie there, but he decided in the last minute that this airline was "too unlucky" for him. They had already lost two of three planes within only 7 years!
And Werner Herzog later met Juliane Koepcke and made one of his great documentary movies with and about her with the title:

" WINGS OF HOPE "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Hope_(film)

Flug LANSA 508: Die Frau, die aus 3000 Metern stürzte

Vor 50 Jahren stürzte Juliane Koepcke aus einem brennenden Flugzeug und überlebte elf Tage allein im Urwald

www.spektrum.de