There is a recent scientific study causing a buzz around the internet, talk radio, and elsewhere in recent days. Analysis of women's figures and IQ suggests that women with small waists and curvaceous hips are smarter than women who carry more weight around the waist in the trunk. The argument centers on Omega3 versus Omega6 fatty acids. I'm not at all sure that's the correct explanation.

In any case, feminists are certainly not going to like this. But I suspect it's true.

I recall a study in a medical publication from around 1970. It compared nurses' physiques with subjective assessments by physicians of whether they were "good" or "bad" nurses. The conclusion was that "good" nurses tended to carry their weight in hips and thighs while "bad" nurses carried more truncal obesity.

It is possible that considerable bias existed in this study. Perhaps physicians, mostly men in those days, simply ranked the women with small waists and curvy derrieres higher on the good-bad scale.

But given this new study, perhaps it was simply a reflection that the those nurses simply had a measurably higher average IQ and thus were better nurses. Looking back on the data from such a long time span and having many decades of experience with nurses, I think there may be something to both these studies, and certainly it's worthy of more research.