What Is With Tesla and Newton?

Illuminerdi

-Or other extreme geniuses who never had time for women. Imagine if people like that just took a few minutes out of their lives to populate the earth.

zoobyshoe

Like Michelangelo, they were deathly scared of women, never got the hang of talking to women, and thought women were alien life forms.

Michelangelo equated sex with death, sin, corruption. He also considered himself so ugly he didn't think any woman would want him. Newton probably never overcame his resentment of his mother for leaving him in foster care while she ran off to be with her new husband. He suspected most women were treacherous. Tesla had severe OCD and couldn't stand the sight of certain female ornaments like earrings and the buttons on their dresses. All were also obsessed with their work and never took a break long enough to get the hang of being social with women, which would have been a slow and arduous remedial endeavor in their cases.

Gnosis

Talk about humorless responses.

Danger

I actually found that quite amusing. True, but amusing nonetheless. Newton was a raving Jes... (oops! I've been warned to not use that phrase) ...Christian fanatic. He probably would have made a mess in his pants if he'd seen a woman's elbow.
There's also the possibility that one or more of them were gay. Just because that was never referred to in those days doesn't mean that it didn't exist.

zoobyshoe

Well, I'll get right on it, then.
It's interesting you should raise this train of speculation because recently, when I was crawling on all fours through the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A, toward the mother of all strange deaths, I happened to consider that Edgar Allan Poe left no progeny, no child of his macabre loins, no spawn of his dark alcoholic meanderings in the gutters of that city, or any of the fine American cities he drank his way through, when, to my surprise, I encountered nothing less than the revenant of the great poe-et, himself, crawling in the other direction.

"What ho! Poe!" I hailed him.

"Hoobie Joobie, Zooby!" he replied.

"It rhymes," I said, "but it's not your best work."

"Shut up! Do you have any money?"

"No. I wanted to ask you why you never fornicated with about 3000 women in order to produce a mass of literary geniuses to help populate the earth."

"Why should I have?"

"Just askin'. Inquiring Illuminerdi want to know."

"Do they have any money?"

"Possibly. A few dollars."

"Tell them to paypal me. I'll answer as soon as it comes through. Gotta go."

Jack21222

They might not have had time to do all of the wonderful things they did in their respective fields if they were busy raising kids. Besides, the earth is populated enough.

Just curious, why do you care whether or not long-dead strangers had kids?

Illuminerdi

Eugenic fascination: In western societies, intelligent people are having less children on average and there are two very high profile examples of the most intelligent people having no children. Is Idiocracy true?

Evo

How do you explain geniuses born of average parents and average people born of geniuses?

Illuminerdi

It's probabilistic. Despite it having a degree of reliability, a system as complex as a human being has some stochastic processes involved.

Jack21222

From http://xkcd.com/603/

Illuminerdi

I'm an xkcd fan, but eh—
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence

Evo

Sorry, but we aren't heading down that path.