new start

On Thursday, September 18, 2003, at 03:03 PM, victoriatangoman wrote:

>>> OTOH, the average
>>> will probably mate with the average, the gifted with
>>> the gifted, and
>>> so on, with enough cross boundary matings occuring
>>> to keep the gene
>>> and societal pool churning. Over time, 10-20
>>> generations, who knows,
>>> it may become impossible, probabalistically, for a
>>> gifted child to
>>> be born to below average parents.
>>>
>> I hope this never happens, the social implications to
>> this is devastating IMHO.
>
> I think it is slowly starting to happen now. Gated communities.
> Socio-economic stratification. From this starting point, I see all
> around me other instances.

Looking back, it used to be the case that doctors would marry nurses
much more frequently than they do now. Now Doctor-Doctor pairings
are very frequent. So too Lawyer-Lawyer, Professor-Professor, and
all sorts of permutations. You get my point.

Before deciding this is happening I'd look for some good data. It's
really easy to get this sort of thing wrong by casual observation. Of
course, a few decades ago there were very few women doctors, lawyers,
and professors so these marriages were not too common, but that's a bit
different effect.

The International Space Station (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr.
Tito going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was old, smelly, crowded and
probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shinny, much more
roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing accounts of how
great space is. Would his experience have been as good on Mir?

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.