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Who's the Smartest of Them All?

A recent effort to settle the age-old question "Which scientific field has
the most intelligent people?" has obtained some very preliminary results.
Project Smartypants, initiated last December by "mini-AIR," the online
version of the Annals of Improbable Research, asked readers to rank
academic disciplines according to the intelligence of their members and to
comment on the clich� that "physicists are smarter than chemists, and
chemists are smarter than biologists."

Physicists won hands down. The tally of 46 respondents--a dozen of them in
physics-related fields--reveals that 40% rated physicists as the most
intelligent. Mathematicians (11% of the sample) were favored by 15%, while
chemists and biologists each captured 6% of the top votes. There was a
motley assortment of other nominations, including stockbrokers, school
custodians, and postmodern philosophers. At the other end of the spectrum,
political scientists, economists, and sociologists received votes as least
intelligent.

AIR didn't define "smart," leaving room for various interpretations. A
Swedish respondent contended that "smart people avoid complicated
problems"--which would knock most scientists out of the running. A Texas
pharmacology professor defined the smartest people as those who "go where
the most money can be made." He put biologists first and physicists last.
Others felt engineers had the most mental firepower. "Engineers have to be
smarter, because someone has to apply the abstract principles found by
chemists and physicists and do something useful with them," noted a
chemical engineer.

Critics were quick to identify flaws in the study, including the small and
physicist-loaded sample. And as one respondent pointed out, the central
question needed refinement: "Is it 'Which field has the most people with
intelligence?'--i.e., the largest quantity of nonmorons--or 'Which field
has people with the greatest intelligence?'--maybe one or two lights in an
otherwise dark area?"

AIR investigators promise to employ more rigorous polling techniques in the
future. Says AIR Editor Marc Abrahams: "Rocket scientists and brain
surgeons were apparently too smart to respond to our original inquiry."

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Volume 275, Number 5303, Issue of 21 February 1997, p. 1073
� 1997 by The American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Copyright � 1997 by the American Association for the Advancement of
Science.

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