Brainy People

Anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution tirelessly measures human skulls both quick and dead.

He looks for the significance of 1) cranial changes in human evolution. 2) cranial differences among men today. The significance is harder to detect than the differences. Eskimos have bigger heads than white men but are little if any brighter. The three largest skulls on record belong to an Aleutian Islander (capacity: 2,005 c.c.), an Algonquin "contemporary" of Pocahontas (2,200 c.c.), Russian Novelist Ivan Turgenev (2,030 c.c.). Recently Dr. Hrdlicka examined the heads of 150 members of the National Academy of Sciences, which the Smithsonian calls "one of the most distinguished intellectual groups in the world." Last week the Smithsonian broadcast Hrdlicka's conclusions:

> "America's greatest intellects have bigger and broader skulls" than do their fellow citizens. Larger skulls indicate larger brains.

> "The popular idea of the association of great intellect and weak physique was found to have no basis."

> Also nonsense is belief in the "high brow." There were plenty of low brows among Hrdlicka's scientists.

> One scientist had a skull strikingly like that of the Aurignacian man--a cave man of the late Ice Age.

> None of these academicians has red hair. Hrdlicka's kindly explanation: "Redheads may tend toward types of ability which, while outstanding, do not lead to . . . Academy membership."

> Academicians in general have unusually low cheekbones. This distinguished sign of higher civilization, however, shows not greater use of the brain but lesser use of the chewing organs.

In the German publication Natur und Kultur, ten authors launched violent attacks on the doctrine of organic evolution, accepted as an ABC fact by all biologists of standing in free countries. Gist of the German argument: Adolf Hitler and other splendid Aryans could not conceivably have evolved from ape men.

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