Amerika

Personal metrics and history data can reveal for us where we stand among others. This can be done in an impartial, analytical manner, divided in tripartite.

Overlap between categories often comes into play, so the divisions are not strict, but simply serve to assist in understanding methodology. For example, inner drive derived from willful character can produce an overachiever athelete, which enhances some aspects of physique.

We can discover our personal attributes in order, from our outermost, more tangible parts to what lies hidden deep within:

Physique
Physique can be subdivided into consistent healthiness of biological functions and longevity, strength, endurance, and agility for general physical fitness, and beauty or handsomeness.

Regular check ups with a family doctor may give us a periodic indication of our own health. The absence or presence of troublesome symptoms is an obvious, but not necessarily decisive indication as well.

Aging or resilience against aging effects over time fairly defines longevity. Heredity, for better or worse, plays a central role. Balding at age thirty-five, or mere hair thinning at fifty-five are examples.

Quality of diet, partaking of vices, and the presence of stressors are to an extent environmental factors that may affect the timeliness of aging. But again, heredity can offer us resilience or vulnerability to environmental pressures.

There are many forms of physical fitness tests we can take on our own. For example, the Army and Marines use a standard test of three parts with different minimal scoring standards divided by age group.

The three parts are upper body and abdominal strength endurance and a running distance speed endurance test. There are civilian equivalents with their own forms and standards that can give us alternative indications about how physically fit we are.

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But, what if beauty was consistently measurable by examing face proportions according to a standard? The Marquardt Beauty Analysis does just that.

“Beauty” is defined as “the quality or combination of qualities in an entity which evokes in the perceiver a combination of a sense of “strong attraction” and a sense of “strong positive emotion”. Thus we can postulate that the perception or “recognition” of beauty is actually nothing more than a strong correlation of what we subconsciously expect “humanness” to appear to be.

beauty

Intelligence
Stephen Hawking is a famous example of a man who possesses widely divergent attributes with intelligence on the high end. Although, to be fair, some of us prefer Carl Sagan’s cosmophilosophy for giving us an interface between
ourselves and the universe.

Our minds in relation to understanding are perhaps similar to stars and smaller celestial objects, from the hefty super giant classes, to the commonplace and mundane objects like our Sun, on down to the dim brown dwarf proto star. Minds are similar to these objects in two ways.

They have gravity well properties of intensity for collecting knowledge, as if information were matter and energy pulled in. Volume of matter and level of energy over a given time frame represents understanding during the course of life.

They have luminosity properties where what was attracted is processed in the stellar crucible and cast back out as if it were radiance. Our emission of understanding potentially affect others minimally, or in a life changing manner. Similarly, our understanding might have little impact beyond limited surroundings or it may radically, if subtly and indirectly transform an entire civilization.

If any one of our attributes affects the outcome of our lives, it is intelligence. IQ can be a critical factor in multiple ways:  on the importance of IQ.

The findings, published in the Nov. 5 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, offer exciting new insight about how parents pass on personality traits and cognitive abilities, and how brain diseases run in families.

The team found that the amount of gray matter in the frontal parts of the brain is determined by the genetic make-up of an individual’s parents, and strongly correlates with that individual’s cognitive ability, as measured by intelligence test scores.

More importantly, these are the first images to uncover how normal genetic differences influence brain structure and intelligence.

sciencedaily

Character
Character is possibly the least concrete in terms of ability to define. Are we doing what we are supposed to when nobody is looking? Or, are we dishonest at times except when others are present to judge us?

Do we have the courage to value truth even if we are made to pay in some form such as unpopularity? Or, do we prefer public illusions, shallow rewards from the less-than-peers all around us and living a corrosive lie in degredation of our character?

Personal history and reputation can give ourselves an indication of our own character. There is often overlap between character and our other attributes. Have we diligently applied ourselves during life within the scope of our abilities, or mostly slacked off just to look cool and feel good?

Integrity of character can manifest as awards and earnings: a college degree, an honorable discharge from military service, advancement in rank during years of martial arts lessons. Lack of integrity, and thus not applying ourselves may indicate a wanting in character. All those hours tapping the beer keg, or mouth agape before the Playstation console and the television will almost certainly amount to nothing at all.

Employers, customers and business associates judge our performance and reputations. An employer in particular may see having a college degree or military service not only in terms of our intelligence or endurance, but as a mark of character, as someone who can tough it out and bring goals to successful completion.

Our individual accomplishments may serve as a type of metric by which we may brave the judgement of others in order to find our character in order, or for some reason lacking, where we then fear and protest their judging us.

Along with drive and ethics (or its lack), wisdom comes into play. Here is an example of possibly, depending on context, unethical wisdom from an accomplished character in history:

“Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others experience” – Otto Von Bismarck

Conclusion
Life offers us challenges that are opportunities for physical, mental and spiritual growth. If life consistently beats us, it is probable that one or more of our own tripartite attributes were not up to the task.

We each have multiple observable attributes that vary between us as individuals. These qualities or shortcomings are essentially hereditary traits or gene expression carried in human bodies in our world.

Knowing this gives us a tool, at least in a rough outline form described above. As with almost any tool, we then have an instrument for either creation or destruction as we choose, but in either case, a foundation for the expansion of human power.

Tags: DNA, eugenics