Free Republic

Former Vice President Joe Biden referred to his youngest son, Hunter, as the “smartest guy I know” during a campaign event on Wednesday. The Democrat nominee reportedly made the remarks during a surprise appearance at a virtual voter mobilization event with Oprah Winfrey, according to the UK Daily Mail. During the event, only a portion of which was made available to the traveling press, Biden opened up on how his children convinced him to accept the number two slot on the Democrat ticket in 2008.

There’s no easy way to rate dog intelligence. As psychologist Stanley Coren wrote back in the 90s, there’s adaptive intelligence (i.e., figuring stuff out), working intelligence (i.e., following orders), and instinctive intelligence (i.e., innate talent) — not to mention spatial intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, and more. Indeed, as animal behaviorist Frans de Waal has argued, humans tend to judge animal intelligence in limited and unfair terms and often bungle the experiment. While labs at Yale, Duke, and around the world are studying this question, for now we do at least have data on one metric: working intelligence. Coren, in...

AUDIO LINK (40 MINUTE SEGMENT) “Cruz's roots: Asked by (Anderson) Cooper if he was more a product of the Northeast or Texas, Cruz chose the Lone Star State. "When I went off to Harvard Law School my dad jokingly referred to it as missionary work," Cruz said. Cruz had completed his undergrad studies at Princeton University by then, becoming the first member of his family to attend an Ivy League school. "To be admitted to Princeton was an extraordinary thing," he said. "It was a world, frankly, that I didn't know. When I arrived there it was a scary place....

Famed Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz ranks Sen. Ted Cruz among the school’s smartest students, adding that the Canada-born Texan can run for president in 2016. Cruz was a “terrific student,” Dershowitz told The Daily Caller. “He was always very active in class, presenting a libertarian point of view. He didn’t strike me as a social conservative, more of a libertarian.” “He had brilliant insights and he was clearly among the top students, as revealed by his class responses,” Dershowitz added. Dershowitz also gave a high estimate of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who has decidedly different political...

A new study ranks Minnesota as having the fourth smartest drivers in the country. A GMAC Insurance Study released Thursday states that one in five drivers on the road today cannot meet the basic requirements to get a driver’s license — that’s roughly 18 percent of American drivers. The study says if those drivers were to take the written driver’s test today, they would not pass. Kansas was named the most knowledgeable drivers in the country, while Washington, D.C. bumped out New York to take the last spot on the list.

WASHINGTON, July 28 — They were high school friends from Park Ridge, Ill., both high achievers headed East to college. John Peavoy was a bookish film buff bound for Princeton, Hillary Rodham a driven, civic-minded Republican going off to Wellesley. They were not especially close, but they found each other smart and “interesting” and said they would try to keep in touch. Which they did, prodigiously, exchanging dozens of letters between the late summer of 1965 and the spring of 1969. Ms. Rodham’s 30 dispatches are by turns angst-ridden and prosaic, glib and brooding, anguished and ebullient — a rare...

Birds not so stupid after all By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 1:58am GMT 22/02/2007 Birds have emerged as strong challengers to chimpanzees and dolphins for the title of our smartest rivals in the animal world, biologists at Cambridge University have concluded. Planning and worrying about the future has always been considered an exclusively human activity, but now at least one species of bird has also been found to plan. "This is the first evidence that an animal can plan for the future," said Prof Nicky Clayton, who led the research team. According to her findings, published in the...

The future looks grim for the state and even grimmer for the Inland Empire in education and the economy, according to a Cal State Sacramento study. Called "State of Decline," the study by the university's Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy found the Inland Empire is least likely in California to prepare students for college. And a second, unrelated report issued by Morgan Quitno Press lists the state as one of the nation's dumbest, ranking it in 47th place out of the 50 states. Declining college-going rates and an achievement gap between students from different races and regions of...

World's Smartest Woman Denies She is on the Dole in Bulgaria Lifestyle: 14 November 2004, Sunday. The Bulgarian woman, who made headlines after being pronounced the world's cleverest by the country's Mensa office, denied reports she has spent two years without a job in Bulgaria. Daniela Simidchieva, a qualified industrial engineer with a mind-boggling IQ of 200 and five masters degrees, said she was looking for a job to correspond with her qualification and skills. The reports are not true and could discredit me, Daniela told local Trud Daily, commenting reports that she is struggling to find gainful employment, "even...