Talk:Our Fragile Intellect

Citation templates
Per WP:CITEVAR, this article does not use citation templates. I'm placing this note here because in at least two recent instances, editors added citation templates to articles thinking that the original editor neglected to use them. Viriditas (talk) 22:04, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: GrrlScientist and Bob O'Hara
I would very much like to add The Guardian piece, "Fragile intellect or fragile arguments?", but it comes across as a semi-anonymous attack piece full of erroneous, half-baked arguments rather than as a serious, authoritative criticism of Crabtree's hypothesis. For only one of many examples, Crabtree writes "A hunter–gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his/her progeny, whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate. Clearly, extreme selection is a thing of the past."

I think most people would see this statement as a fairly noncontroversial illustration of the financial-crisis era of the 2000s, a time when executives received enormous bonuses, pay raises, and golden parachutes and handshakes as their companies failed. Crabtree's point is supported by hundreds of sources (for example, "Rewarding C.E.O.’s Who Fail"). And to quote Matt Taibi, "Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted."

Strangely, "GrrlScientist" responds to Crabtree's point with, "Actually, a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would have joined the ranks of the homeless." Actually, no. You don't join the ranks of the homeless with $13 million in severance pay. Professor John J. Donohue at Stanford law school observes what "GrrlScientist" fails to see: "It's a great irony that spectacular failure is rewarded lavishly...It is a terrible mistake to set up a structure where the top person walks away with millions even if the company is laid waste by their poor decision-making, yet this is what's happening. It's a shocking departure from capitalist incentives if you lavish riches on the losers."

It is difficult to take this article by "GrrlScientist" and Bob O'Hara seriously when their opinion isn't supported by relevant experts in their respective fields, and when it contains such glaring errors of fact, I don't see any benefit of including it. It's one thing to have a difference of opinion, but quite another to say that the color white is black. Viriditas (talk) 06:53, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

New sources for this article
Inasmuch as this article is about a particular paper published in a scientific journal, I thought it was important for WP:NPOV and WP:RS to add to this article two sources that were published in the same journal as reply articles. Those are

and

I think a variety of editors who watch this page will be able to obtain full text of those articles, as I have, from one or another source listed in the citations. Best wishes to all of you for a happy new year. After a while I may update the article text here based on these and other sources. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 02:14, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

POV check
Recent edits may have introduced problematic material, including original research. Viriditas (talk) 00:30, 25 August 2014 (UTC)


 * The sourcing looks dodgy, although in part that is an outcome of a Wikipedia article itself being about a primary research publication than about a reliable secondary source. Is this article about the underlying factual issue that Crabtree was neither the first nor the last author to write about, or is it about his one-time article and the small role it has played in the literature on the topic? -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 01:11, 25 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I think the topic is notable and MEDRS has nothing to do with this discussion. I've reverted to the last good version. I may decide to add some of the content back in if I find it is supported by the sources in an appropriate manner. Viriditas (talk) 01:27, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Konrad Lorenz

 * The Nobel Prize-winning zoologist Konrad Z. Lorenz once suggested that humans were subject to the same dynamics of domestication. Our brain and body sizes peaked during the end of the last ice age, and declined with the spread of agriculture...

This article seems to portray the critics in this article as adherents of "human exceptionalism". Viriditas (talk) 22:47, 1 December 2014 (UTC)


 * That's just an opinion piece (as it is clearly labeled), so why does it matter? -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 22:56, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Article restored
I've restored the article due to 1) no consensus for deletion, and 2) the content being dishonestly deleted from the merge target in 2018. I'm frankly mystified by the repeated attempts to delete or hide this subject. Since publication, the article has been cited in 48 papers, several books, and dozens of popular news articles. Viriditas (talk) 23:26, 17 August 2020 (UTC)