The Genius Famine


Book Description

Geniuses are rare and exceptional people.




The Genius Famine


Book Description

Geniuses are rare and exceptional people. The majority of the great ideas, discoveries and inventions of human history, which have allowed the development of civilization itself, were the products of geniuses. A genius combines extremely high intelligence with a unworldly, intuitive personality. Geniuses will seldom fit-into normal society, they will seldom want to. And we shouldn't want them to, because it is their unusual and socially-difficult nature which drives geniuses to come up with original ideas, and solutions to otherwise unsolvable problems. But modern society has been hit by a genius famine. There are ever-fewer geniuses and, to make matters worse, modern society has become actively hostile to those few geniuses we still have. The Genius Famine explores the nature of genius, why the genius famine has happened, how the famine will lead to the decline of civilization, and what we can and should do to overcome it.







At Our Wits' End


Book Description

We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it's currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer. With At Our Wits' End, they present the first ever popular scientific book on this crucially important issue. They prove that intelligence — which is strongly genetic — was increasing up until the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, because we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest. But since then, they show, intelligence has gone into rapid decline, because large families are increasingly the preserve of the least intelligent. The book explores how this change has occurred and, crucially, what its consequences will be for the future. Can we find a way of reversing the decline of our IQ? Or will we witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of a new Dark Age?







Hunger: Theory, Perspectives and Reality


Book Description

Hunger is an issue which has been subject to much rigorous intellectual examination by economists, philosophers, sociologists, NGOs and governments. This volume provides a critical overview of current academic and political perspectives and then compares these views from thenon-hungry people with those of thehungry particularly from a broad range of poor communities in India. Their views are gathered using participatory rural appraisal techniques and the scale of the material presented is unprecedented. Not surprisingly, the comparisons show that the perceptions of the hungry are fundamentally different from those of the non-hungry. It makes compelling suggestions about how best policy makers can attempt to eliminate hunger based on what the hungry themselves suggest. The book also draws attention to the critical role of Common Property Resources and women in the fight against under-nutrition, which have so far been largely ignored.




Brave Genius


Book Description

The never-before-told account of the intersection of some of the most insightful minds of the 20th century, and a fascinating look at how war, resistance, and friendship can catalyze genius. In the spring of 1940, the aspiring but unknown writer Albert Camus and budding scientist Jacques Monod were quietly pursuing ordinary, separate lives in Paris. After the German invasion and occupation of France, each joined the Resistance to help liberate the country from the Nazis and ascended to prominent, dangerous roles. After the war and through twists of circumstance, they became friends, and through their passionate determination and rare talent they emerged as leading voices of modern literature and biology, each receiving the Nobel Prize in their respective fields. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unpublished and unknown material gathered over several years of research, Brave Genius tells the story of how each man endured the most terrible episode of the twentieth century and then blossomed into extraordinarily creative and engaged individuals. It is a story of the transformation of ordinary lives into exceptional lives by extraordinary events--of courage in the face of overwhelming adversity, the flowering of creative genius, deep friendship, and of profound concern for and insight into the human condition.







The Past is a Future Country


Book Description

Since the 1960s, the West has moved ever-leftwards. 'Equality' and ‘feelings' are central to the New Religion that rejects all traditional values. Yet beneath the institutionally dominant ‘Left' stews a growing and restless ‘Right’. How has this fractured situation come about? What will the future hold? In The Past is a Future Country, the authors trace it back to the Industrial Revolution. Darwinian selection massively weakened, meaning that, for the first time in history, the selfish, sick and stupid could survive and reproduce, undermining our religious, group-oriented culture. Now the West is scourged by an epidemic of narcissists, competing to signal their individuality and moral superiority. But their ‘fight for equality’ is really a fight for self-promotion. Reflecting this runaway individualism, Westerners increasingly don’t have children, save for those who are genetically resistant to this onslaught — the staunchly conservative and religious: the eventual inheritors of the earth. But there is a dark storm brewing in the demographic data that the authors have analysed. There is a burgeoning growth in the population of exceptionally unintelligent and antisocial people that social welfare systems cannot sustain for much longer. The developed world will pass away, and the global population that depends on it will crash, in the greatest Malthusian Collapse of all time. Yet all is not lost. The authors show how a resistant class of intelligent, religious conservatives will band together to preserve enclaves of civilization that may survive most of the coming apocalypse, and from its ashes rebuild a new world: A Neo-Byzantium.




Fram


Book Description

Reliance on devices like the photograph and slidewill lead, I rather fear, to linguistic suicide.We must keep on challenging language to engagewith all we suffer from in this new modern age.This epic sweep of a play takes us from a contemporary Westminster Abbey to the Arctic ship Fram - or Forward - specially built by the famous Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen who, with his suicidal companion, Johansen, makes a bid on foot for the North Pole in the 1890s. Though incompatible, they share a bear fur sleeping-bag through the long winter. Nansen, still haunted by Johansen's ghost is appointed to the League of Nations. As a figurehead of Russian famine relief in 1922, he conducts the first celebrity campaign, searching for means, however shocking, to make people care. Tony Harrison's major new work for the theatre, Fram, premiered at the National Theatre in April 2007.