Tuesday, September 07, 2004


SCIENTISTS AGAIN ATTEMPT TO STUFF LIFE INTO A BOX OF MEASURABLE DIMENSIONS

"A five-year study run by Indiana University's Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction proves what many in the scientific community have always suspected: having children significantly lowers the IQ of both male and female parents."

What the researchers are necessarily overlooking, of course, because it can't be quantified, so isn't scientific, is the fact that in a very intuitive way, having a child COMPLETELY transforms your view of the world: it's no longer me versus all those possibilities, it's parent-with-child, a much diluted self, a psyche vastly transformed by this life stage evolution.

The new parent's mental metabolism is altered in its very nature; in such a state, who really gives a damn about acing some IQ test? Before you had a child, and were supremely interested in your OWN self, your OWN prospects, your OWN parameters, your SELF-value and its assessment by the world at large, you focused like a laser on that IQ test, as you had on all the other tests you took in your FORMER life.

Now in your NEW life, with a child in the background waiting for you, utterly dependent on you, scientifically 'quantifiable' ephemera fade to minor significance, a phenomenon that these researchers, in the umbra that science casts on all spiritual things, perceive as "lost intelligence." Perhaps it's because the researchers themselves have no children, a state that delimits their perceptions of the world. I'd call parenthood the acquisition of transcendant intelligence, an acute sense of the greater time (rather than the mere now that formerly pertained), a state likely assessable only by intuition, a concept that drives scientists crazy.

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