[Pharmboy]

Geometric constructs are key to understanding a 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional world. This is not surprising.

[Pharmboy]

Math ping...for your personal interests and not meant for you to ping your lists.

[SauronOfMordor]

Geometry is crucial to land navigation. It's not surprising that hunters understand

[Pete'sWife]

They should've done their study in a pool hall... er... billiards parlor.

[muir_redwoods]

"Adults and children alike showed a clear grasp of concepts such as where the center of a circle is and the logical extension of a straight line, the researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Science"

My geometry course was more demanding than this but then, I went to a Catholic High School

[Junior]

"All participants, even those aged 6, performed well above the chance level of 16.6 percent," they found. The average score was nearly 67 percent correct -- identical to the score for U.S. children.

So, primitive hunter-gatherers who have never been inside a classroom score as high on geometry as American children who are being "educated" at $10,000 per head per year.

[ovrtaxt]

"Many of its propositions -- that two points determine a line, or that three orthogonal axes localize a point -- are judged to be self-evident and yet have been questioned on the basis of logical argument, physical theory, or experiment," the researchers wrote.

Oooh, we have grant money to spend! Let's question obvious, self evident minutiae!

yay for science!

[WL-law]

Chimpanzees have been documented in their ability to continually locate and find their own chimp-made tools (special rocks for breaking nuts, etc) that they store in different areas of their territory. Based on the descriptions I read of the process, they must have been using geometric reasoning and a mental map to do this.

Other animals may rely primarily on scent and scent-memory for finding things -- but it would seem that primates evolved with a different set of capabilities to solve the same problem.

[kalee]

ping

[xzins]

AG, you ole salty dog, you.

You called this ahead of time.

"The unreasonable effectiveness of math." (or something like that.)

HA! Designer indeed!

[Ken H]

Geometry may be hard-wired into brain, study shows

Hadn't thought about it from this angle before.

[edcoil]

"points, lines, parallelism, right angles simple pictures, distance, angle, relationships"

All of these exist in the Amazon and tribe. All are used in hunting, farming, cooking and taking care of the tribe.

Look at what has been built over 1,000 years where modern math did not exist - we cannot duplicate today - maybe modern math is incorrect.

[Netheron]

This whole article is based on a completely faulty premise. The whole point of High School Geometry is not to teach people how to compute areas of rectangles or know that two points make a straight line. Students are expected to intuitively know that coming in.

High School Geometry is meant to introduce axiomatic thinking and theorem proving.

All this proves is that the hunters know geometry and the guys who designed the study do not!

[TX Bluebonnet]

Sounds more like plain old spatial relations.

[RobbyS]

I recall that Kant said the same thing more than 200 years ago.

[RightWingAtheist]

Fascinating article. Thanks for posting it.

[Onelifetogive]

Geometry may be hard-wired into brain, study shows

Personally, I have always had a thing for nice curves and shapes. It almost seems programmed into me...

[hispanarepublicana]

I was just horrible at algebra and suffered through it with C's during high school. Meanwhile, I aced geometry and actually tutored some of the A+ algebra students suffered horribly with C's in geometry. I just loved doing proofs.
I wonder what that says about how my mind is wired?

[TADSLOS]

(...ducking)

[VOA]

Amazonian hunter-gatherers who lack written language and who have never
seen a math book score highly on basic tests of geometric concepts,...

Heck, they are aren't suffering the residual brain damage from being
institutionalized in a lower-rung public school for grades 1-12!
Thus, they have an unfair advantage over a lot of Americans!!!

[Smokin' Joe]

"Our results provide evidence for geometrical intuitions in the absence of schooling, experience with graphic symbols or maps, or a rich language of geometrical terms."

"Never let your schooling interfere with your education." Mark Twain