And How The Crocodile Ate The Elephant-Original Oratory
And How the Crocodile Ate the Elephant
Original Oratory by Cindy Choi (Se Yeon)
In the high and far-off times, the elephant had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, which he could wriggle about from side to side. There was one elephant – an elephant child – full of insatiable curiosity and asked ever so many questions. As he went around asking the most insolent questions, all his aunts and uncles punished him by spanking him hard. Then one morning, the elephant asked a fine, new question, one he had never asked before. He asked, “What does the Crocodile have for dinner?” All his aunts and uncles spanked him for a long, long time without stopping, but the elephant child refused to give up. He said, “My father …show more content…
Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology and developmental biology at the Stanford University, the human race, especially the Western population, has lost an average of about 14 IQ points since the Victorian Era. Dr. Nijenhuis, the co-author of Dr. Crabtree’s study, has gathered results from 14 intelligence studies between 1884 and 2004 that calculated the participants’ visual reaction time and discovered that the reaction time increased tremendously from an average of 194 milliseconds in the late 19th century to 275 milliseconds in 2004. As reaction time reflects a person’s mental processing speed, it is widely considered to be a fairly accurate indication of general intelligence. Dr. Crabtree attributes the lowering of human intelligence to environmental factors, commenting: “The reduction in human intelligence would have begun at the time that genetic selection became more relaxed, as our ancestors began to live in more supportive high density societies and had access to a steady supply of food. Both of these might have resulted from the invention of agriculture about 5,000 to 12,000 years ago." As humans moved away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and established agricultural settlements, men came to face less life-or-death situations, causing decrease in the level of mental stimulation and eventually lower …show more content…
We have moved away from our drive to understand and discover the unknowns of our world and are settling ever more comfortably into the reassuring hands of our own creations. When Copernicus hypothesized that the Earth was revolving around the sun, when Einstein presented his theories of relativity, and when Darwin uncovered the secrets of biological evolution, they were driven by a desire to compile a more comprehensive view of the world that we live in. This curiosity and zeal – the insatiable questioning of the elephant child – are what we must return
Original Oratory by Cindy Choi (Se Yeon)
In the high and far-off times, the elephant had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, which he could wriggle about from side to side. There was one elephant – an elephant child – full of insatiable curiosity and asked ever so many questions. As he went around asking the most insolent questions, all his aunts and uncles punished him by spanking him hard. Then one morning, the elephant asked a fine, new question, one he had never asked before. He asked, “What does the Crocodile have for dinner?” All his aunts and uncles spanked him for a long, long time without stopping, but the elephant child refused to give up. He said, “My father …show more content…
Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology and developmental biology at the Stanford University, the human race, especially the Western population, has lost an average of about 14 IQ points since the Victorian Era. Dr. Nijenhuis, the co-author of Dr. Crabtree’s study, has gathered results from 14 intelligence studies between 1884 and 2004 that calculated the participants’ visual reaction time and discovered that the reaction time increased tremendously from an average of 194 milliseconds in the late 19th century to 275 milliseconds in 2004. As reaction time reflects a person’s mental processing speed, it is widely considered to be a fairly accurate indication of general intelligence. Dr. Crabtree attributes the lowering of human intelligence to environmental factors, commenting: “The reduction in human intelligence would have begun at the time that genetic selection became more relaxed, as our ancestors began to live in more supportive high density societies and had access to a steady supply of food. Both of these might have resulted from the invention of agriculture about 5,000 to 12,000 years ago." As humans moved away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and established agricultural settlements, men came to face less life-or-death situations, causing decrease in the level of mental stimulation and eventually lower …show more content…
We have moved away from our drive to understand and discover the unknowns of our world and are settling ever more comfortably into the reassuring hands of our own creations. When Copernicus hypothesized that the Earth was revolving around the sun, when Einstein presented his theories of relativity, and when Darwin uncovered the secrets of biological evolution, they were driven by a desire to compile a more comprehensive view of the world that we live in. This curiosity and zeal – the insatiable questioning of the elephant child – are what we must return