: Just to disprove your theory; the most smart people seem
: to be very short. Not too many dumb short people (not
: kidding; I really think the bigger you are, since you
: have a lower brain:body ratio, you are not as
: intelligent as a short person with a very high
: brain:body ratio!). And the opposite goes with tall
: people (there are exeptions to that rule in my school
: though).
: Basically, based on the theory of brain:body ratio
: deciding how intelligent one is shows that he could
: not be human, since more of his brain may be taken up
: by motor skills, processing his senses and remembering
: how to use the damn thing without falling on your face
: take up more space.
: But im no biologist so Im probabally wrong. The only real
: good evidence of that is hte 2 smartest kids in my
: school are under 5 ft, the 2 dumbest are over 6 feet
: (not counting special ed kids)
Well now...
In the first place, there's no empirical evidence that shorter people are smarter. If anything, taller people tend to do slightly better on IQ tests. This could be because height is to some degree associated with good nutrition, which is in turn associated with "intelligence"...or it could simply be that taller people are better socialized and more confident in their abilities. But of course IQ tests are absurd, so there's no real evidence of an "intelligence"-to-height correlation at all. Outside of the fact that the extremes of height in either direction are usually due to medical conditions that may impact intelligence as well.
If the short people at your school seem smarter, then as Archer said, it's probably due to their being influenced toward intellectual roles because taller folks are usually preferred in sports and in highly social pursuits like school politics.
(Also, it's clear that inside the very extremes, brain size means jack about intellect. Stephen J. Gould's written quite a lot on this subject. Anatomists used to catalogue brain sizes of famous intellectuals, back when they thought size did matter...and they discovered that some had brains almost twice as big as others. With no apparent correlation to intelligence at all.)
But for the sake of argument, let's accept the brain size-body size argument. Suppose there's a chunk of brain responsible for thinking, and a chunk of brain responsible for telling the body what to do and receiving signals from it. The body-controlling part of the brain has to have a size proportionate to that of the body, while the size of the thinking part of the brain is independent of the body size.
Then if person A's twice as big as person B, his "body-controlling chunk" must also be twice as big, while his "thinking chunk" doesn't have to be any bigger. But in general large people are shaped the same as small people...they don't have proportionately smaller heads. So person A's "thinking chunk" WILL be bigger...which means he'll be smarter! Big people are smarter than little people! :-)
I think the whole issue of brain size is irrelevant, btw...just wanted to point out how easily it can be skewed to any viewpoint. :-)
: Also, how do we know he did not use magic to make him
: more humanoid? I think a 8-9 ft tall Calliach would
: more than get the notice of the Trow!
Maybe he did. But maybe Alric's actually a Ghôl passing for human; maybe Rurik's actually a Trow passing for human; maybe all the Heron Guards are actually herons passing for human. When you start having characters magically changing species, there's not really any room for discussion. :-)
--SiliconDream
