The Bible and homosexuality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_homosexuality

There are a number of passages in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that have been interpreted as involving same-sex sexual activity and relationships. The passages about homosexual individuals and sexual relations in the Hebrew Bible are found primarily in the Torah (the first five books traditionally attributed to Moses). The book of Leviticus chapter 20 is more comprehensive on matters of detestable sexual acts. Some texts included in the New Testament also reference homosexual individuals and sexual relations, such as the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Luke, and Pauline epistles originally directed to the early Christian churches in Asia Minor. Both references in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament have been interpreted as referring primarily to male homosexual individuals and sexual practices.

Hebrew Bible

Main article: Homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and its traditional interpretations in Judaism and Christianity have historically affirmed and endorsed a patriarchal and heteronormative approach towards human sexuality, favouring exclusively penetrative vaginal intercourse between men and women within the boundaries of marriage over all other forms of human sexual activity, including autoeroticism, masturbation, oral sex, non-penetrative and non-heterosexual sexual intercourse (of which the penetrative forms have been labelled as "sodomy"), believing and teaching that such behaviors are forbidden because they are considered to be sinful, and further compared to or derived from the behaviour of the alleged residents of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Leviticus 18 and 20

Main article: Leviticus 18

See also: Abomination (Bible)

Chapters 18 and 20 of Leviticus form part of the Holiness code and list prohibited forms of intercourse, including the following verses:

• "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." Chapter 18 verse 22
• "If a man lies with a man as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them." Chapter 20 verse 13

More recent interpretations focus on the passage's context as part of the Holiness Code, a code of purity meant to distinguish the behavior of the Israelites from the polytheistic Canaanites.

Analyses by Saul Olyan, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at Brown University, K. Renato Lings, and others focus on ambiguities embedded in the original Hebrew, arguing these ambiguities may not prohibit all erotic expression between men but rather proscribe incest between male family members. They argue English translators of Leviticus added to the original text to compensate for perceived lacunae in the biblical text; but thereby altered the verse's meaning. Leviticus 18:22 reads:

w'eth-zäkhār lö' tiškav miškevē 'iššâ

and with a male you shall not lie the lying downs of a woman.

The New Revised Standard Version renders Leviticus 18:22 as "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman".

Lings argues the inclusion of prepositions not in the original text and the translation of Leviticus' otherwise unattested miškevē within the context of Genesis (i.e., miškevē is found only within Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, and Genesis 49:4) is crucial to illuminate the incestuous connotation of the passage, and the translation of miškevē in light of Genesis results in the text of Leviticus 18 and 20 becoming more cohesive.

Some authors alternatively suggest that the prohibitions in Leviticus 18 and 20 specifically condemn males penetrating other males, thus "emasculating" the latter (anal sex). This makes the prohibitions more akin to a sodomy law.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Main article: Sodom and Gomorrah

Lot prevents Sodomites from raping the angels, by Heinrich Aldegrever, 1555

The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, John Martin, 1852

The story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis does not explicitly identify homosexuality as the sin for which they were destroyed. Some interpreters find the story of Sodom and a similar one in Judges 19 to condemn the rape of guests more than homosexuality, but the passage has historically been interpreted within Judaism and Christianity as a punishment for homosexuality due to the interpretation that the men of Sodom wished to rape, or have sex with, the angels who retrieved Lot.

While the Jewish prophets spoke only of lack of charity as the sin of Sodom, the exclusively sexual interpretation became so prevalent among Christian communities that the name "Sodom" became the basis of the word "sodomy", still a legal synonym for homosexual and non-procreative sexual acts, particularly anal or oral sex.

While the Jewish prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Zephaniah refer vaguely to the sin of Sodom, Ezekiel specifies that the city was destroyed because of its commission of social injustice as well as its commission of "abomination:"

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.

The Talmudic tradition as written between c. 370–500 also interprets the sin of Sodom as lack of charity, with the attempted rape of the angels being a manifestation of the city's violation of the social order of hospitality.

Later traditions on Sodom's sin, such as Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, considered it to be an illicit form of heterosexual intercourse. In Jude 1:7–8 the Bible says of Sodom and Gomorrah:

Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh..."

This has been interpreted as a reference to homosexuality by some and to the sexual lust of mortals after angels by others. Jewish writers Philo (d. AD 50) and Josephus (37 –c. 100) were the first reported individuals to assert unambiguously that homosexuality was among the sins of Sodom. By the end of the 1st century AD, Jews commonly identified the sin of Sodom with homosexual practices.

David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi

Main article: David and Jonathan § Homoeroticism

The account of David and Jonathan in the Books of Samuel has been interpreted by traditional and mainstream writers as a relationship of affectionate regard. It has also been interpreted by some authors as of a sexual nature. Theologian Theodore Jennings identifies the story as one of desire for David by both Saul and Jonathan, stating, "Saul's jealousy has driven [David] into Jonathan's arms." Michael Coogan, lecturer on the Old Testament at Harvard Divinity School, addresses the claim of the alleged homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan and explicitly rejects it.

The story of Ruth and Naomi is also occasionally interpreted by contemporary scholars as the story of a lesbian couple. Coogan states that the Hebrew Bible does not even mention lesbianism.

New Testament

Main article: Homosexuality in the New Testament

Romans 1:26–27

Romans 1:26–27 is commonly cited as one instance of New Testament teaching against homosexuality:

That is why God abandoned them to their shameful desires. Even the women turned against the natural way to have sex and instead indulged in sex with each other. And the men, instead of having normal sexual relations with women, burned with lust for each other. Men did shameful things with other men, and as a result of this sin, they suffered within themselves the penalty they deserved.

This passage, part of a larger discourse in 1:18–32, has been debated by contemporary Bible scholars as to its relevance today, what it actually prohibits and whether it represents Paul's view or rhetoric that Paul is actively arguing against. Clement of Alexandria and John Chrysostom regarded it as concerning female and male homosexual intercourse, while Augustine of Hippo viewed it as referring to heterosexual and homosexual anal sex. Although Christians of several denominations have historically maintained that this verse is a complete prohibition of all forms of homosexual activity, some 20th- and 21st-century authors contend the passage is not a blanket condemnation of homosexual acts, suggesting, among other interpretations, that the passage condemned heterosexuals who experimented with homosexual activity or that Paul's condemnation was relative to his own culture, in which homosexuality was not understood as an orientation and in which being penetrated was seen as shameful. These interpretations are, however, in a minority.

Scholars, noting that Romans 1:18–32 represents an exception in the book of Romans as a whole and uses vocabulary elsewhere not seen in Paul's letters, have for decades puzzled over the passage. Some scholars believe these verses are part of a much larger non-Pauline interpolation, a later addition to the letter. Others argue that the grammar of the Greek original demands that Romans 1:18–32 be read as a rhetorical set-up, a summary of Hellenistic Jewish legalist rhetoric that Paul actively forbids followers of Christ from using in Romans 2.

1 Corinthians 6:9–11; 1 Timothy 1:8–11

In the context of the broader immorality of his audience, Paul the Apostle wrote in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 6 verses 9-11:

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor men who practice homosexuality,, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.

1 Timothy 1:8–11 states:

But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers; For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind (arsenokoitai), for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust.

In the letter to the Corinthians, within the list of people who will not inherit the kingdom of God, Paul uses two Greek words: malakia (μαλακοὶ) and arsenokoitai (ἀρσενοκοῖται).

Arsenokoitai is a compound word. Compound words are formed when two or more words are put together to form a new word with a new meaning. In this case, arsenokoitai is from the Greek words arrhēn/arsēn (ἄῤῥην/ἄρσην) meaning "male", and koitēn (κοίτην) meaning "bed", with a sexual connotation. A direct translation would be "male-bed". Its first recorded use was by Paul in 1 Corinthians and later in 1 Timothy 1 (attributed to Paul), and remains unattested in contemporaneous sources. Some scholars consider Paul to have adapted this word by translating, to Greek, the verse from Leviticus 20:13, with additional adaption from the wording of the Septuagint translations of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:23 Due to its unclear definition, English translators struggled with representing the concept of arsenokoitai. It has been variously rendered as "sexual perverts" (RSV), "sodomites" (NRSV), "abusers of themselves with mankind" (KJV), "men who have sex with men" (NIV) or "practicing homosexuals" (NET).

Malakia (μαλακία, "softness", "weakliness") is an ancient Greek word that, in relation to men, has sometimes been translated as "effeminacy". Also translates to "of things subject to touch, "soft" (used in Matthew 11:8 and Luke 7:25 to describe a garment); of things not subject to touch, "gentle"; and, of persons or modes of life, a number of meanings that include "pathic". However, in modern Greek it has come to mean "masturbation", and its derivative μαλάκας – malakas means "one who masturbates".

Interpretation

Bishop Gene Robinson says the early church seemed to have understood it as a person with a "soft" or weak morality; later, it would come to denote (and be translated as) those who engage in masturbation, or "those who abuse themselves"; all that is factually known about the word is that it means "soft".

Most scholars hold that Paul had two passages of the Book of Leviticus – Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 – in mind when he used the word ἀρσενοκοῖται (which may be of his coinage), with most commentators and translators interpreting it as a reference to male same-sex intercourse. However, John Boswell states that it "did not connote homosexuality to Paul or his early readers", and that in later Christian literature the word is used, for instance, by Aristides of Athens (c. 138) clearly not for homosexuality and possibly for prostitution, Eusebius (d. c. 340) who evidently used it in reference to women, and in the writings of 6th-century Patriarch John IV of Constantinople, known as John the Faster. In a passage dealing with sexual misconduct, John speaks of arsenokoitia as active or passive and says that "many men even commit the sin of arsenokoitia with their wives". Although the constituent elements of the compound word refer to sleeping with men, he obviously does not use it to mean homosexual intercourse and appears to employ it for anal intercourse, not generic homosexual activity. Particulars of Boswell's arguments are rejected by several scholars in a way qualified as persuasive by David F. Greenberg, who declares usage of the term arsenokoites by writers such as Aristides of Athens and Eusebius, and in the Sibylline Oracles, to be "consistent with a homosexual meaning". A discussion document issued by the House of Bishops of the Church of England states that most scholars still hold that the word arsenokoites relates to homosexuality. Another work attributed to John the Faster, a series of canons that for various sins provided shorter though stricter penances in place of the previous longer penances, applies a penance of 80 days for "intercourse of men with one another" (canon 9), explained in the Pedalion as mutual masturbation – double the penalty for solitary masturbation (canon 8) – and three years with xerophagy or, in accordance with the older canon of Basil the Great, 15 without (canon 18) for being "so mad as to copulate with another man" – ἀρρενομανήσαντα in the original – explained in the Pedalion as "guilty of arsenocoetia (i.e., sexual intercourse between males)" – ἀρσενοκοίτην in the original. According to the same work, ordination is not to be conferred on someone who as a boy has been the victim of anal intercourse, but this is not the case if the semen was ejaculated between his thighs (canon 19). These canons are included, with commentary, in the Pedalion, the most widely used collection of canons of the Greek Orthodox Church, an English translation of which was produced by Denver Cummings and published by the Orthodox Christian Educational Society in 1957 under the title The Rudder.

Some scholars consider that the term was not used to refer to a homosexual orientation, but argue that it referred instead to sexual activity.

Other scholars have interpreted arsenokoitai and malakoi (another word that appears in 1 Corinthians 6:9 as referring to weakness and effeminacy or to the practice of exploitative pederasty.

Jesus's discussion of marriage

In Matthew 19 and parallel in Mark 10, Jesus is asked if a man can divorce his wife. In that context, Jesus replies:

He answered, "Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female', and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."

— Matthew 19:4–6 (NRSV)

Theologian Robert A. J. Gagnon argues that Jesus's back-to-back references to Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 show that he "presupposed a two-sex requirement for marriage". On the other hand, Bart Ehrman, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, states of Jesus's references to Genesis 1 and 2, "[Jesus is] not actually defining marriage. He's answering a specific question." Ehrman notes further "And here the conversation is quite easy. In our surviving records Jesus says nothing about same-sex acts or sexual orientation. Nothing. Nada."

Matthew 8; Luke 7

Further information: Homosexuality in the New Testament § Pais, and Healing the centurion's servant

In Matthew 8:5–13 and Luke 7:1–10, Jesus heals a centurion's servant who is dying. Daniel A. Helminiak writes that the Greek word pais, used in this account to refer to the servant, was sometimes given a sexual meaning. Donald Wold states that its normal meaning is "boy", "child" or "slave" and its application to a boy lover escapes notice in the standard lexica of Liddell and Scott and Bauer. The Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott registers three meanings of the word παῖς (pais): a child in relation to descent (son or daughter); a child in relation to age (boy or girl); a slave or servant (male or female). In her detailed study of the episode in Matthew and Luke, Wendy Cotter dismisses as very unlikely the idea that the use of the Greek word pais indicated a sexual relationship between the centurion and the young slave.

Matthew's account has parallels in Luke 7:1–10 and John 4:46–53. There are major differences between John's account and those of the two synoptic writers, but such differences exist also between the two synoptic accounts, with next to nothing of the details in Luke 7:2–6 being present also in Matthew. The Commentary of Craig A. Evans states that the word pais used by Matthew may be that used in the hypothetical source known as Q used by both Matthew and Luke and, since it can mean either son or slave, it became doulos (slave) in Luke and huios (son) in John. Writers who admit John 4:46–53 as a parallel passage generally interpret Matthew's pais as "child" or "boy", while those who exclude it see it as meaning "servant" or "slave".

Theodore W. Jennings Jr. and Tat-Siong Benny Liew write that Roman historical data about patron-client relationships and about same-sex relations among soldiers support the view that the pais in Matthew's account is the centurion's "boy-love", and that the centurion did not want Jesus to enter his house for fear the boy would be enamoured of Jesus instead. D.B. Saddington writes that, while he does not exclude the possibility, the evidence the two put forward supports "neither of these interpretations", with Wendy Cotter saying that they fail to take account of Jewish condemnation of pederasty.

Matthew 19:12

In Matthew 19:12, Jesus speaks of eunuchs who were born as such, eunuchs who were made so by others, and eunuchs who choose to live as such for the kingdom of heaven. Jesus's reference to eunuchs who were born as such has been interpreted by some commentators as having to do with homosexual orientation; Clement of Alexandria, for instance, cites in his book "Stromata" (chapter III,1,1) an earlier interpretation from Basilides that some men, from birth, are naturally averse to women and should not marry. Catholic priest John J. McNeill writes, "The first category – those eunuchs who have been so from birth – is the closest description we have in the Bible of what we understand today as homosexual."

Acts 8

Main article: Ethiopian eunuch

The Ethiopian eunuch, an early Gentile convert described in Acts 8, has been interpreted by some commentators as an early gay Christian, based on the fact that the word "eunuch" in the Bible was not always used literally, as in Matthew 19:12. Some religious commentators suggest that the combination of "eunuch" together with the title "court official" indicates a literal eunuch who would have been excluded from the Temple by the restriction in Deuteronomy 23:1.

Contact hypothesis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_hypothesis 

In psychology and other social sciences, the contact hypothesis suggests that intergroup contact under appropriate conditions can effectively reduce prejudice between majority and minority group members. Following WWII and the desegregation of the military and other public institutions, policymakers and social scientists had turned an eye towards the policy implications of interracial contact. Of them, social psychologist Gordon Allport united early research in this vein under intergroup contact theory.

In 1954, Allport published The Nature of Prejudice, in which he outlined the most widely cited form of the hypothesis. The premise of Allport's hypothesis states that under appropriate conditions interpersonal contact could be one of the most effective ways to reduce prejudice between majority and minority group members. According to Allport, properly managed contact should reduce issues of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination that commonly occur between rival groups and lead to better intergroup interactions.

In the decades following Allport's book, social scientists expanded and applied the contact hypothesis towards the reduction of prejudice beyond racism, including prejudice towards physically and mentally disabled people, women, and LGBTQ+ people, in hundreds of different studies. some subfields of criminology, psychology, and sociology, intergroup contact has been described as one of the best ways to improve relations among groups in conflict. Nonetheless, the effects of intergroup contact vary widely from context to context, and empirical inquiry continues to this day.

History

While Gordon W. Allport is often credited with the development of the contact hypothesis, the idea that interpersonal contact could improve intergroup relations was not a novel one. In the 1930s and 1940s, writers had already begun speculating about the outcomes of interracial contact. In 1947, sociologist R. M. Williams described interpersonal collaboration with goal interdependence as a worthwhile strategy to reduce intergroup hostility.

Following WWII, social scientists examined the effects of desegregation on racial attitudes in the U.S. Merchant Marine, and in desegregated New York City housing projects. In 1951, as national attention turned to issues of desegregation in schools, ultimately leading up to Brown v. Board of Education, Robert Carter and Thurgood Marshall, from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, solicited expert opinions from social science. A range of social scientists, from Kenneth Clark to Floyd and Gordon Allport, weighed in on the psychological effects of desegregation, and conditions under which interracial contact might attenuate racial prejudice, including an amicus curiae brief filed in the Brown v. Board case.

Other studies have claimed that contact hypothesis is a very simple and optimistic and that contact would most likely gravitate toward hostility rather than friendship if two competitive parties were involved. If groups with a negative outlook were brought together, it would lead to increases of negative attitudes rather than positive.

Allport situated his formulation of the contact hypothesis in broader discussion of racial diversity—a precursor to interracial proximity and contact. While diversity more generally might foment conflict and prejudice, Allport suggested that contact, under four particular conditions, would facilitate intergroup understanding and consequently reduce prejudice.

Conditions of intergroup contact

In the years prior to Allport’s framing of intergroup contact theory, social scientists had already begun discussing the conditions of intergroup contact that would produce intergroup anxiety, prejudice, or other “detrimental psychological effects”. Wilner, Walkley, & Cook, two years prior to The Nature of Prejudice, studied segregation and integration in housing projects, and also suggested four conditions under which intergroup attitudes would change for the better. Under the assumption that prejudice arises from racial segregation, they suggested that it would diminish when members occupy “the same or equivalent roles in the situation,” share background characteristics like education, age, gender or socioeconomic status, perceive common interests or goals, and when the “social climate […] is not unfavorable to interracial association.”

Concurrently, Carolyn Sherif and Muzafer Sherif developed their Robbers Cave experiment, an illustration of realistic conflict theory. The Sherifs highlighted the importance of superordinate goals and equal status between groups, but notably, did not weigh in alongside other social scientists in their amicus brief for Brown v. Board of Education.

In Allport's own words,

"[Prejudice] may be reduced by equal status contact between majority and minority groups in the pursuit of common goals. The effect is greatly enhanced if this contact is sanctioned by institutional supports (i.e., by law, custom, or local atmosphere), and provided it is of a sort that leads to the perception of common interests and common humanity between members of the two groups."

— Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (1954)

In other words, four conditions under which intergroup contact will reduce prejudice are:

• Equal status. Both groups must engage equally in the relationship. Members of the group should have similar backgrounds, qualities, and characteristics. Differences in academic backgrounds, wealth, skill, or experiences should be minimized if these qualities will influence perceptions of prestige and rank in the group.
• Common goals. Both groups must work on a problem/task and share this as a common goal, sometimes called a superordinate goal, a goal that can only be attained if the members of two or more groups work together by pooling their efforts and resources.
• Intergroup cooperation. Both groups must work together for their common goals without competition. Groups need to work together in the pursuit of common goals.
• Support of authorities, law or customs. Both groups must acknowledge some authority that supports the contact and interactions between the groups. The contact should encourage friendly, helpful, egalitarian attitudes and condemn ingroup-outgroup comparisons.

Additionally, Allport specified that within intergroup cooperation, personal interaction, involving informal, personal interaction between group members would scaffold learning about each other and the formation of cross-group friendships. Yet, without these conditions, casual, or superficial, contact would cause people to resort to stereotypes.

The largest meta-analysis of the contact literature suggested that the conditions are facilitating but not essential. However, more recent meta-analysis highlights that many configurations of the conditions have not yet been experimentally tested.

Psychological processes involved in intergroup contact

A number of psychological processes have been hypothesised to explain how and why intergroup contact is able to reduce prejudice and improve intergroup relations. Firstly, Allport (1954) argued that intergroup contact facilitates learning about the outgroup, and this new outgroup knowledge leads to prejudice reduction. Secondly, intergroup contact is believed to reduce the fear and anxiety people have when interacting with the outgroup, which in turn reduces their negative evaluations of the outgroup. Thirdly, intergroup contact is hypothesised to increase people's ability to take the perspective of the outgroup and empathize with their concerns. Empirical research has only found weak support for role of outgroup knowledge in prejudice reduction; however, the affective mechanisms of intergroup anxiety and outgroup empathy have accumulated extensive empirical support.

The reduction of prejudice through intergroup contact can be described as the reconceptualization of group categories. Allport (1954) claimed that prejudice is a direct result of generalizations and oversimplifications made about an entire group of people based on incomplete or mistaken information. The basic rationale is that prejudice may be reduced as one learns more about a category of people. Rothbart and John (1985) describe belief change through contact as "an example of the general cognitive process by which attributes of category members modify category attributes" (p. 82). An individual's beliefs can be modified by that person coming into contact with a culturally distinct category member and subsequently modifying or elaborating the beliefs about the category as a whole.

However, contact fails to cure conflict when contact situations create anxiety for those who take part. Contact situations need to be long enough to allow this anxiety to decrease and for the members of the conflicting groups to feel comfortable with one another. Additionally if the members of the two groups use this contact situation to trade insults, argue with each other, resort to physical violence, and discriminate against each other, then contact should not be expected to reduce conflict between groups. To obtain beneficial effects, the situation must include positive contact.

Effects of intergroup contact

Social scientists have documented positive effects of intergroup contact across field, experimental, and correlational studies, across a variety of contact situations, and between various social groups. Pettigrew and Tropp's canonical 2006 meta-analysis of 515 separate studies found general support for the contact hypothesis. Furthermore, their analysis found that face-to-face contact between group members significantly reduced prejudice; the more contact groups had, the less prejudice group members reported. Moreover, the beneficial effects of intergroup contact were significantly greater when the contact situation was structured to include Allport's facilitating conditions for optimal contact.

Examples

Intergroup contact and prejudice towards African Americans

The majority of intergroup contact research has focused on reducing prejudice towards African Americans. For example, in one study, Brown, Brown, Jackson, Sellers, and Manuel (2003) investigated the amount of contact white athletes had with black teammates and whether the athletes played an individual or team sport. Team sports (e.g., football or basketball), as opposed to individual sports (e.g., track or swimming), require teamwork and cooperative interactions to win. Results showed that White athletes who played team sports reported less prejudice than athletes who played individual sports.

Intergroup contact and prejudice towards homosexuality

The contact hypothesis has proven to be highly effective in alleviating prejudice directed toward homosexuals. Applying the contact hypothesis to heterosexuals and homosexuals, Herek (1987) found that college students who had pleasant interactions with a homosexual tend to generalize from that experience and accept homosexuals as a group. Herek and Glunt's (1993) national study of interpersonal contact and heterosexuals' attitudes toward gay men found that increased contact "predicted attitudes toward gay men better than did any other demographic or social psychological variable" (p. 239); such variables included gender, race, age, education, geographic residence, marital status, number of children, religion and political ideology. Herek and Capitanio (1996) found that contact experiences with two or three homosexuals are associated with more favorable attitudes than are contact experiences with only one individual.

Intergroup contact and prejudice towards Muslims in Europe

Savelkoul et al. (2011) in their study from the Netherlands found people living in regions with high numbers of Muslims (i.e. those more exposed to unavoidable intergroup contacts) get used to and are more experienced with their integration and express lesser perceived threats. In addition, they also found that higher contacts with Muslim colleagues directly reduce anti-Muslim attitudes. Similarly, Novotny and Polonsky (2011) in their survey among Czech and Slovak university students documented that personal contacts with Muslims and experience with visiting an Islamic country associate with more positive attitudes towards Muslims. However Agirdag et al. (2012) report that Belgian teachers working in schools that enroll a larger share of Muslim students have more negative attitudes toward Muslim students than other teachers.

Intergroup contact with immigrant groups within the United States

Daniel J. Hopkins presented the idea that local conditions within a community or in other words changes in local immigrant demographics can affect the attitudes of people on immigrants. This can include the stereotyping of immigrants and/or a development of pro or anti-immigrant ideas. These attitudes may be shaped by experiences the non-immigrant population has with the immigrant population. He believes that this idea is not necessarily universal but that certain conditions play a role on the development of attitudes.

Intergroup contact and social robots

Evidence suggests that intergroup contact theory may be applicable to social robots. Exposure to a social robot under predictable, controlled conditions can lead people to feel more positive toward that specific robot than they previously felt toward robots in general. Additionally, research has shown that even imagining interacting with a robot can reduce negative feelings.

Indirect intergroup contact

One of the most important advances in research on intergroup contact is the growing evidence for a number of indirect, non-face-to-face intergroup contact strategies as a means to improve relations between social groups. While the benefits of direct intergroup contact have been empirically established, its implementation is often not practical. For example, in many countries, racial and religious groups are often residentially, educationally or occupationally segregated, which limits the opportunity for direct contact. However, even when the opportunity for direct intergroup contact is high, anxiety and fear can produce a negative or hostile contact experience or lead to the avoidance of the contact situation altogether.

Indirect forms of intergroup contact include:

Extended contact

The extended contact hypothesis, established by Wright and colleagues in 1997, posits that knowing that a member of one's own group has a close relationship with a member of an outgroup can lead to more positive attitudes towards that outgroup. Correlational research has demonstrated that individuals who report knowledge that an ingroup member has an outgroup friend typically report more positive outgroup attitudes, while experimental research has shown that providing ingroup members with this information creates the same positive effect.

In the 20 years since its proposal, the extended contact hypothesis has guided over 100 studies, that generally find support for the positive effect of extended contact on prejudice reduction, independent of direct friendship with outgroup members.

In a similar vein, vicarious contact involves simply observing an ingroup member interact with an outgroup member. For example, positive media portrayals of intergroup interactions on television and radio (also known as the parasocial contact hypothesis) have the potential to reduce the prejudice of millions of viewers and listeners.

Imagined contact

Main article: Imagined contact hypothesis

The 'imagined contact hypothesis' was put forward by Richard J. Crisp and Rhiannon Turner (2009) and proposes that simply imagining a positive encounter with a member or members of an outgroup category can promote more positive intergroup attitudes. It also proposed that imagined contact can lead to a greater desire to have social contact between groups and can help improve explicit or implicit biases toward marginalized or minority groups, such as those who are mentally or physically disabled, religious minorities, ethnic minorities, and sexual minorities.

Electronic- or E-contact

Fiona White and her colleagues (2012; 2014) recently developed Electronic- or E-contact. E-contact involves an ingroup member interacting with an outgroup member over the Internet and includes text-based, video-based or a mixture of both text- and video-based online interactions. Electronic contact has been empirically shown to reduce inter-religious prejudice between Christian and Muslim students in Australia in both the short and long term, as well between Catholic and Protestant students in Northern Ireland. In the context of sexual prejudice, research also has shown that interacting online with a member of the outgroup is a particularly useful particularly useful as a prejudice-reduction strategy among individuals who typically report ideologically intolerant beliefs. Additionally, in the context of mental health stigma, participants who experienced a brief interaction with a person diagnosed with schizophrenia reported reduced fear, anger, and stereotyping toward people with schizophrenia in general compared to a control condition.

In the Latin American context, recently Rodriguez-Rivas et al. (2021) demonstrated a positive impact on the reduction of stigma towards people with mental illness in Chilean university students, following participation in a multi-component online program that incorporated electronic contact (E-contact) via videoconferencing with a person diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Criticisms

While large bodies of research have been devoted to examining intergroup contact, social scientific reviews of the literature frequently voice skepticism about the likelihood of contact's optimal conditions occurring in concert, and by extension, about the generalizability of correlational research and lab studies on contact.

Null findings and gaps in research

Though the general findings of intergroup contact research have inspired promise, Bertrand and Duflo (2017) find that observational correlations between intergroup contact and non-prejudiced behavior can be explained by self-selection: less prejudiced people seek out contact. Comparatively, fewer controlled experimental studies of intergroup contact exist; of those that do, few measure prejudice outcomes longer than one day after treatment, leaving a gap in the literature that investigates the long-term effects of contact. Furthermore, of these experiments, none measure the reduction of racial prejudice in people over the age of 25. Similarly, in a report to the United Kingdom Equality and Human Rights Commission, Dominic Abrams highlights "a dearth of good-quality longitudinal research on prejudice or prejudice reduction”.

Gordon Allport himself suggested that in light of increasing racial contact in the United States, "the more contact the more trouble", unless scaffolded by the four facilitating conditions he proposed, distinguishing casual contact and "true acquaintance" or "knowledge-giving contact". In political science, Allport's work is often juxtaposed with V.O. Key's examination of Southern politics, which found that racism grew in areas where the local concentrations of black Americans were higher. In that context, absent the specific conditions of Allport, contact comes to produce more negative effects, namely increasing prejudice. Some social psychologists have converged with political scientists on this position. Daniel J. Hopkins presented the idea that local conditions within a community (specifically changes in local immigrant demographics) can affect the attitudes of people on immigrants. This can include the stereotyping of immigrants and/or a development of pro or anti-immigrant ideas. These attitudes may be shaped by experiences the non-immigrant population has with the immigrant population. He believes that this idea is not necessarily universal but that certain conditions play a role on the development of attitudes. Agirdag et al. (2012) report that Belgian teachers working in schools that enroll a larger share of Muslim students have more negative attitudes toward Muslim students than other teachers. Other studies have claimed that contact hypothesis is a very simple and optimistic and that contact would most likely gravitate toward hostility rather than friendship if two competitive parties were involved. If groups with a negative outlook were brought together, it would lead to increases of negative attitudes rather than positive. Furthermore, ideologies when not motivated by prejudices or negative contacts and attitudes, such as ethnic nationalism, the professed religion or the political standings, do not simply change with greater contact. For example, ecumenism or political collaboration virtually does not operate any religious dogmatic or political ideal or principle change in any of the two rival sides.

Negative contact

Stefania Paolini, Jake Harwood, and Mark Rubin (2010) proposed that intergroup contact may have more negative than positive effects on prejudice, because it makes outgroup members' social group more salient during encounters, the negative contact hypothesis. Recent evidence suggests that although negative intergroup contact is more influential than positive intergroup contact, it is also less common than positive contact in real world intergroup encounters, in five central European countries. Recent research also suggests that people's past experiences with out-group members moderates contact: people who have had positive experiences with out-group members in the past show a smaller discrepancy between the effects of positive and negative contact.

Nucleic acid sequence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleic_acid_sequence

A nucleic acid sequence is a succession of bases within the nucleotides forming alleles within a DNA (using GACT) or RNA (GACU) molecule. This succession is denoted by a series of a set of five different letters that indicate the order of the nucleotides. By convention, sequences are usually presented from the 5' end to the 3' end. For DNA, with its double helix, there are two possible directions for the notated sequence; of these two, the sense strand is used. Because nucleic acids are normally linear (unbranched) polymers, specifying the sequence is equivalent to defining the covalent structure of the entire molecule. For this reason, the nucleic acid sequence is also termed the primary structure.

The sequence represents biological information. Biological deoxyribonucleic acid represents the information which directs the functions of an organism.

Nucleic acids also have a secondary structure and tertiary structure. Primary structure is sometimes mistakenly referred to as "primary sequence". However there is no parallel concept of secondary or tertiary sequence.

Nucleotides

Chemical structure of RNA

A series of codons in part of a mRNA molecule. Each codon consists of three nucleotides, usually representing a single amino acid.

Main article: Nucleotide

Nucleic acids consist of a chain of linked units called nucleotides. Each nucleotide consists of three subunits: a phosphate group and a sugar (ribose in the case of RNA, deoxyribose in DNA) make up the backbone of the nucleic acid strand, and attached to the sugar is one of a set of nucleobases. The nucleobases are important in base pairing of strands to form higher-level secondary and tertiary structures such as the famed double helix.

The possible letters are A, C, G, and T, representing the four nucleotide bases of a DNA strand – adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine – covalently linked to a phosphodiester backbone. In the typical case, the sequences are printed abutting one another without gaps, as in the sequence AAAGTCTGAC, read left to right in the 5' to 3' direction. With regards to transcription, a sequence is on the coding strand if it has the same order as the transcribed RNA.

One sequence can be complementary to another sequence, meaning that they have the base on each position in the complementary (i.e., A to T, C to G) and in the reverse order. For example, the complementary sequence to TTAC is GTAA. If one strand of the double-stranded DNA is considered the sense strand, then the other strand, considered the antisense strand, will have the complementary sequence to the sense strand.

Notation

Main article: Nucleic acid notation

While A, T, C, and G represent a particular nucleotide at a position, there are also letters that represent ambiguity which are used when more than one kind of nucleotide could occur at that position. The rules of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) are as follows:

For example, W means that either an adenine or a thymine could occur in that position without impairing the sequence's functionality.

List of symbols

Symbol	Meaning/derivation	Possible bases					Complement
A	Adenine	A				1	T (or U)
C	Cytosine		C				G
G	Guanine			G			C
T	Thymine				T		A
U	Uracil				U		A
W	Weak	A			T	2	W
S	Strong		C	G			S
M	aMino	A	C				K
K	Keto			G	T		M
R	puRine	A		G			Y
Y	pYrimidine		C		T		R
B	not A (B comes after A)		C	G	T	3	V
D	not C (D comes after C)	A		G	T		H
H	not G (H comes after G)	A	C		T		D
V	not T (V comes after T and U)	A	C	G			B
N	any Nucleotide (not a gap)	A	C	G	T	4	N
Z	Zero					0	Z

These symbols are also valid for RNA, except with U (uracil) replacing T (thymine).

Apart from adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), thymine (T) and uracil (U), DNA and RNA also contain bases that have been modified after the nucleic acid chain has been formed. In DNA, the most common modified base is 5-methylcytidine (m5C). In RNA, there are many modified bases, including pseudouridine (Ψ), dihydrouridine (D), inosine (I), ribothymidine (rT) and 7-methylguanosine (m7G). Hypoxanthine and xanthine are two of the many bases created through mutagen presence, both of them through deamination (replacement of the amine-group with a carbonyl-group). Hypoxanthine is produced from adenine, and xanthine is produced from guanine. Similarly, deamination of cytosine results in uracil.

Example of comparing and determining the % difference between two nucleotide sequences

• AATCCGCTAG
• AAACCCTTAG

Given the two 10-nucleotide sequences, line them up and compare the differences between them. Calculate the percent difference by taking the number of differences between the DNA bases divided by the total number of nucleotides. In this case there are three differences in the 10 nucleotide sequence. Thus there is a 30% difference.

Biological significance

A depiction of the genetic code, by which the information contained in nucleic acids are translated into amino acid sequences in proteins.

Further information: Genetic code and Central dogma of molecular biology

In biological systems, nucleic acids contain information which is used by a living cell to construct specific proteins. The sequence of nucleobases on a nucleic acid strand is translated by cell machinery into a sequence of amino acids making up a protein strand. Each group of three bases, called a codon, corresponds to a single amino acid, and there is a specific genetic code by which each possible combination of three bases corresponds to a specific amino acid.

The central dogma of molecular biology outlines the mechanism by which proteins are constructed using information contained in nucleic acids. DNA is transcribed into mRNA molecules, which travel to the ribosome where the mRNA is used as a template for the construction of the protein strand. Since nucleic acids can bind to molecules with complementary sequences, there is a distinction between "sense" sequences which code for proteins, and the complementary "antisense" sequence, which is by itself nonfunctional, but can bind to the sense strand.

Sequence determination

Electropherogram printout from automated sequencer for determining part of a DNA sequence

Main article: DNA sequencing

DNA sequencing is the process of determining the nucleotide sequence of a given DNA fragment. The sequence of the DNA of a living thing encodes the necessary information for that living thing to survive and reproduce. Therefore, determining the sequence is useful in fundamental research into why and how organisms live, as well as in applied subjects. Because of the importance of DNA to living things, knowledge of a DNA sequence may be useful in practically any biological research. For example, in medicine it can be used to identify, diagnose and potentially develop treatments for genetic diseases. Similarly, research into pathogens may lead to treatments for contagious diseases. Biotechnology is a burgeoning discipline, with the potential for many useful products and services.

RNA is not sequenced directly. Instead, it is copied to a DNA by reverse transcriptase, and this DNA is then sequenced.

Current sequencing methods rely on the discriminatory ability of DNA polymerases, and therefore can only distinguish four bases. An inosine (created from adenosine during RNA editing) is read as a G, and 5-methyl-cytosine (created from cytosine by DNA methylation) is read as a C. With current technology, it is difficult to sequence small amounts of DNA, as the signal is too weak to measure. This is overcome by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification.

Digital representation

Genetic sequence in digital format.

Once a nucleic acid sequence has been obtained from an organism, it is stored in silico in digital format. Digital genetic sequences may be stored in sequence databases, be analyzed (see Sequence analysis below), be digitally altered and be used as templates for creating new actual DNA using artificial gene synthesis.

Sequence analysis

Main article: Sequence analysis

Digital genetic sequences may be analyzed using the tools of bioinformatics to attempt to determine its function.

Genetic testing

Main article: Genetic testing

The DNA in an organism's genome can be analyzed to diagnose vulnerabilities to inherited diseases, and can also be used to determine a child's paternity (genetic father) or a person's ancestry. Normally, every person carries two variations of every gene, one inherited from their mother, the other inherited from their father. The human genome is believed to contain around 20,000–25,000 genes. In addition to studying chromosomes to the level of individual genes, genetic testing in a broader sense includes biochemical tests for the possible presence of genetic diseases, or mutant forms of genes associated with increased risk of developing genetic disorders.

Genetic testing identifies changes in chromosomes, genes, or proteins. Usually, testing is used to find changes that are associated with inherited disorders. The results of a genetic test can confirm or rule out a suspected genetic condition or help determine a person's chance of developing or passing on a genetic disorder. Several hundred genetic tests are currently in use, and more are being developed.

Sequence alignment

Main article: Sequence alignment

In bioinformatics, a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be due to functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. If two sequences in an alignment share a common ancestor, mismatches can be interpreted as point mutations and gaps as insertion or deletion mutations (indels) introduced in one or both lineages in the time since they diverged from one another. In sequence alignments of proteins, the degree of similarity between amino acids occupying a particular position in the sequence can be interpreted as a rough measure of how conserved a particular region or sequence motif is among lineages. The absence of substitutions, or the presence of only very conservative substitutions (that is, the substitution of amino acids whose side chains have similar biochemical properties) in a particular region of the sequence, suggest that this region has structural or functional importance. Although DNA and RNA nucleotide bases are more similar to each other than are amino acids, the conservation of base pairs can indicate a similar functional or structural role.

Computational phylogenetics makes extensive use of sequence alignments in the construction and interpretation of phylogenetic trees, which are used to classify the evolutionary relationships between homologous genes represented in the genomes of divergent species. The degree to which sequences in a query set differ is qualitatively related to the sequences' evolutionary distance from one another. Roughly speaking, high sequence identity suggests that the sequences in question have a comparatively young most recent common ancestor, while low identity suggests that the divergence is more ancient. This approximation, which reflects the "molecular clock" hypothesis that a roughly constant rate of evolutionary change can be used to extrapolate the elapsed time since two genes first diverged (that is, the coalescence time), assumes that the effects of mutation and selection are constant across sequence lineages. Therefore, it does not account for possible differences among organisms or species in the rates of DNA repair or the possible functional conservation of specific regions in a sequence. (In the case of nucleotide sequences, the molecular clock hypothesis in its most basic form also discounts the difference in acceptance rates between silent mutations that do not alter the meaning of a given codon and other mutations that result in a different amino acid being incorporated into the protein.) More statistically accurate methods allow the evolutionary rate on each branch of the phylogenetic tree to vary, thus producing better estimates of coalescence times for genes.

Sequence motifs

Main article: Sequence motif

Frequently the primary structure encodes motifs that are of functional importance. Some examples of sequence motifs are: the C/D and H/ACA boxes of snoRNAs, Sm binding site found in spliceosomal RNAs such as U1, U2, U4, U5, U6, U12 and U3, the Shine-Dalgarno sequence, the Kozak consensus sequence and the RNA polymerase III terminator.

Sequence entropy

In bioinformatics, a sequence entropy, also known as sequence complexity or information profile, is a numerical sequence providing a quantitative measure of the local complexity of a DNA sequence, independently of the direction of processing. The manipulations of the information profiles enable the analysis of the sequences using alignment-free techniques, such as for example in motif and rearrangements detection.

Intelligence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Intelligence is the capacity or ability to acquire, apprehend and apply knowledge in a behavioral context. The term rose to prominence during the early 1900's, coinciding the emergence of behaviorism. Intelligence differs from intellect, with the latter being measured in cognitive performance rather than behavior as a whole. In the case of human intelligence, one can be intelligent in more than a single domain, take for example abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. According to American psychologist Howard Gardner, intelligence can be divided into multiple intelligences or intelligent performances. Similarly, intellect can be interpreted as an aggregate of intellects or intellectual performances.

More generally, intelligence can be described as the capacity or ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context. Intelligence is most often studied in humans but has also been observed in both non-human animals and in plants despite controversy as to whether some of these forms of life exhibit intelligence. Intelligence in computers or other machines is called artificial intelligence.

Etymology

Main article: Nous

The word intelligence derives from the Latin nouns intelligentia or intellēctus, which in turn stem from the verb intelligere, to comprehend or perceive. In the Middle Ages, the word intellectus became the scholarly technical term for understanding, and a translation for the Greek philosophical term nous. This term, however, was strongly linked to the metaphysical and cosmological theories of teleological scholasticism, including theories of the immortality of the soul, and the concept of the active intellect (also known as the active intelligence). This approach to the study of nature was strongly rejected by the early modern philosophers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume, all of whom preferred "understanding" (in place of "intellectus" or "intelligence") in their English philosophical works. Hobbes for example, in his Latin De Corpore, used "intellectus intelligit", translated in the English version as "the understanding understandeth", as a typical example of a logical absurdity. "Intelligence" has therefore become less common in English language philosophy, but it has later been taken up (with the scholastic theories which it now implies) in more contemporary psychology.

Definitions

Unsolved problem in philosophy:

What exactly is intelligence? How could an external observer prove that an agent is intelligent?

The definition of intelligence is controversial, varying in what its abilities are and whether or not it is quantifiable.

In 1994 the "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" was published, as an op-ed statement in the Wall Street Journal, as a response to controversy over the book The Bell Curve which proposed policy changes based on purported connections between race and intelligence. It was signed by fifty-two researchers, out of 131 total invited to sign, with 48 explicitly refusing to sign. The op-ed described intelligence thus:

A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do.

From Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns (1995), a report published by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association, also in response to controversy over The Bell Curve:

Individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought. Although these individual differences can be substantial, they are never entirely consistent: a given person's intellectual performance will vary on different occasions, in different domains, as judged by different criteria. Concepts of "intelligence" are attempts to clarify and organize this complex set of phenomena. Although considerable clarity has been achieved in some areas, no such conceptualization has yet answered all the important questions, and none commands universal assent. Indeed, when two dozen prominent theorists were recently asked to define intelligence, they gave two dozen, somewhat different, definitions.

Besides those definitions, psychology and learning researchers also have suggested definitions of intelligence such as the following:

Researcher	Quotation
Alfred Binet	Judgment, otherwise called "good sense", "practical sense", "initiative", the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances ... auto-critique.
David Wechsler	The aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment.
Lloyd Humphreys	"...the resultant of the process of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing, and using in new contexts information and conceptual skills".
Howard Gardner	To my mind, a human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving—enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that he or she encounters and, when appropriate, to create an effective product—and must also entail the potential for finding or creating problems—and thereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge.
Robert Sternberg & William Salter	Goal-directed adaptive behavior.
Reuven Feuerstein	The theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability describes intelligence as "the unique propensity of human beings to change or modify the structure of their cognitive functioning to adapt to the changing demands of a life situation".
Shane Legg & Marcus Hutter	A synthesis of 70+ definitions from psychology, philosophy, and AI researchers: "Intelligence measures an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments", which has been mathematically formalized.
Alexander Wissner-Gross	F = T ∇ S${\displaystyle {}_{\tau }}$ "Intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, τ. In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped".

Human

Main article: Human intelligence

Human intelligence is the intellectual power of humans, which is marked by complex cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness. Intelligence enables humans to remember descriptions of things and use those descriptions in future behaviors. It is a cognitive process. It gives humans the cognitive abilities to learn, form concepts, understand, and reason, including the capacities to recognize patterns, innovate, plan, solve problems, and employ language to communicate. Intelligence enables humans to experience and think.

Intelligence is different from learning. Learning refers to the act of retaining facts and information or abilities and being able to recall them for future use, while intelligence is the cognitive ability of someone to perform these and other processes. There have been various attempts to quantify intelligence via testing, such as the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test. However, many people disagree with the validity of IQ tests, stating that they cannot accurately measure intelligence.

There is debate about if human intelligence is based on hereditary factors or if it is based on environmental factors. Hereditary intelligence is the theory that intelligence is fixed upon birth and not able to grow. Environmental intelligence is the theory that intelligence is developed throughout life depending on the environment around the person. An environment that cultivates intelligence is one that challenges the person's cognitive abilities.

Much of the above definition applies also to the intelligence of non-human animals.

Emotional

Main article: Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is thought to be the ability to convey emotion to others in an understandable way as well as to read the emotions of others accurately. Some theories imply that a heightened emotional intelligence could also lead to faster generating and processing of emotions in addition to the accuracy. In addition, higher emotional intelligence is thought to help us manage emotions, which is beneficial for our problem-solving skills. Emotional intelligence is important to our mental health and has ties into social intelligence.

Social

Main article: Social intelligence

Social intelligence is the ability to understand the social cues and motivations of others and oneself in social situations. It is thought to be distinct to other types of intelligence, but has relations to emotional intelligence. Social intelligence has coincided with other studies that focus on how we make judgements of others, the accuracy with which we do so, and why people would be viewed as having positive or negative social character. There is debate as to whether or not these studies and social intelligence come from the same theories or if there is a distinction between them, and they are generally thought to be of two different schools of thought.

Book smart and street smart

Concepts of "book smarts" and "street smart" are contrasting views based on the premise that some people have knowledge gained through academic study, but may lack the experience to sensibly apply that knowledge, while others have knowledge gained through practical experience, but may lack accurate information usually gained through study by which to effectively apply that knowledge. Artificial intelligence researcher Hector Levesque has noted that:

Given the importance of learning through text in our own personal lives and in our culture, it is perhaps surprising how utterly dismissive we tend to be of it. It is sometimes derided as being merely "book knowledge," and having it is being "book smart." In contrast, knowledge acquired through direct experience and apprenticeship is called "street knowledge," and having it is being "street smart".

Nonhuman animal

Main article: Animal cognition

The common chimpanzee can use tools. This chimpanzee is using a stick to get food.

Although humans have been the primary focus of intelligence researchers, scientists have also attempted to investigate animal intelligence, or more broadly, animal cognition. These researchers are interested in studying both mental ability in a particular species, and comparing abilities between species. They study various measures of problem solving, as well as numerical and verbal reasoning abilities. Some challenges in this area are defining intelligence so that it has the same meaning across species (e.g. comparing intelligence between literate humans and illiterate animals), and also operationalizing a measure that accurately compares mental ability across different species and contexts.

Wolfgang Köhler's research on the intelligence of apes is an example of research in this area. Stanley Coren's book, The Intelligence of Dogs is a notable book on the topic of dog intelligence. (See also: Dog intelligence.) Non-human animals particularly noted and studied for their intelligence include chimpanzees, bonobos (notably the language-using Kanzi) and other great apes, dolphins, elephants and to some extent parrots, rats and ravens.

Cephalopod intelligence also provides an important comparative study. Cephalopods appear to exhibit characteristics of significant intelligence, yet their nervous systems differ radically from those of backboned animals. Vertebrates such as mammals, birds, reptiles and fish have shown a fairly high degree of intellect that varies according to each species. The same is true with arthropods.

g factor in non-humans

Main article: g Factor in Non-Humans

Evidence of a general factor of intelligence has been observed in non-human animals. The general factor of intelligence, or g factor, is a psychometric construct that summarizes the correlations observed between an individual's scores on a wide range of cognitive abilities. First described in humans, the g factor has since been identified in a number of non-human species.

Cognitive ability and intelligence cannot be measured using the same, largely verbally dependent, scales developed for humans. Instead, intelligence is measured using a variety of interactive and observational tools focusing on innovation, habit reversal, social learning, and responses to novelty. Studies have shown that g is responsible for 47% of the individual variance in cognitive ability measures in primates and between 55% and 60% of the variance in mice (Locurto, Locurto). These values are similar to the accepted variance in IQ explained by g in humans (40–50%).

Plant

Main articles: Plant perception (physiology) § Plant cognition, and Plant cognition

It has been argued that plants should also be classified as intelligent based on their ability to sense and model external and internal environments and adjust their morphology, physiology and phenotype accordingly to ensure self-preservation and reproduction.

A counter argument is that intelligence is commonly understood to involve the creation and use of persistent memories as opposed to computation that does not involve learning. If this is accepted as definitive of intelligence, then it includes the artificial intelligence of robots capable of "machine learning", but excludes those purely autonomic sense-reaction responses that can be observed in many plants. Plants are not limited to automated sensory-motor responses, however, they are capable of discriminating positive and negative experiences and of "learning" (registering memories) from their past experiences. They are also capable of communication, accurately computing their circumstances, using sophisticated cost–benefit analysis and taking tightly controlled actions to mitigate and control the diverse environmental stressors.

Artificial

Main article: Artificial intelligence

Scholars studying artificial intelligence have proposed definitions of intelligence that include the intelligence demonstrated by machines. Some of these definitions are meant to be general enough to encompass human and other animal intelligence as well. An intelligent agent can be defined as a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success. Kaplan and Haenlein define artificial intelligence as "a system's ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation". Progress in artificial intelligence can be demonstrated in benchmarks ranging from games to practical tasks such as protein folding. Existing AI lags humans in terms of general intelligence, which is sometimes defined as the "capacity to learn how to carry out a huge range of tasks".

Singularitarian Eliezer Yudkowsky provides a loose qualitative definition of intelligence as "that sort of smartish stuff coming out of brains, which can play chess, and price bonds, and persuade people to buy bonds, and invent guns, and figure out gravity by looking at wandering lights in the sky; and which, if a machine intelligence had it in large quantities, might let it invent molecular nanotechnology; and so on". Mathematician Olle Häggström defines intelligence in terms of "optimization power", an agent's capacity for efficient cross-domain optimization of the world according to the agent's preferences, or more simply the ability to "steer the future into regions of possibility ranked high in a preference ordering". In this optimization framework, Deep Blue has the power to "steer a chessboard's future into a subspace of possibility which it labels as 'winning', despite attempts by Garry Kasparov to steer the future elsewhere." Hutter and Legg, after surveying the literature, define intelligence as "an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments". While cognitive ability is sometimes measured as a one-dimensional parameter, it could also be represented as a "hypersurface in a multidimensional space" to compare systems that are good at different intellectual tasks. Some skeptics believe that there is no meaningful way to define intelligence, aside from "just pointing to ourselves".