Darrel K. Whipple wrote:
>
> Tweeters,
>

My unlearned opinion is that we all have those "EIGHT intelligences."
Only the need or desire to exercise them brings them out.

Example--I know someone that is blind as a result of an accident and he
said that if he concentrates he can percieve objects in front of him
when he is walking. I have seen him walk around things that he didn't
know were there. Also his hearing becomes very acute. In this case there
was a need.

My wife and I agree that birds were just birds and never really noticed
or heard them until we started birding. Now we are always watching and
listening. This is a case of desire.

Way back when I used to hunt, there were many times I would sense that a
deer was near and sure enough one would be near by.

I believe NEED and or DESIRE is the key to development of these "EIGHT
intelligences"


Jerry Converse...pHdud-Mud-mDv-and xyz. Jack of all trades and master of
none. ;-))
Grand Coulee, WA


> What I'm getting at is, what's going on here? Are these abilities a form of
> intelligence? Is "nature smarts" something that Tweeters have noticed in
> themselves and their comrades?
>
> If we're talking about an innate ability that appears in varying degrees
> among us, and then of course is developed to a different degree by each
> individual, then who would be the prime exemplars--the geniuses--exhibiting
> this form of intelligence? John Muir? Rachel Carson? Roger Tory Peterson?
>
> POW! I'm brooding over these things periodically, and the other day I get
> this ad for a conference on the "Multiple Intelligences," not the Seven
> Intelligences that we educators have been hearing about for over a decade,
> propounded by Howard Gardner of Harvard and applied to education by David
> Lazear, but EIGHT intelligences. Gardner (without consulting me) has added
> another intelligence to the list--just last year in 1997, and I missed it!
>
> The eighth intelligence is called "naturalist", and I'm trying to find out
> more about what it is, or what Gardner says it is. Is anybody out there
> "up" on this?
>
> My Internet search yielded one good article by Leslie Wilson and a reference
> to a likely-good article in the September 1997 issue of _Educational
> Leadership_, which I haven't seen yet.
>
> As I understand it so far, naturalist intelligence is supposed to be the
> ability to distinguish living things among other features of the physical
> environment (obviously a quality having evolutionary advantages). Is it
> more than that? Also, is there a site in the brain where this intelligence
> is located, as the other intelligences, such as linguistic and
> logico-mathematical and spatial, can claim? Leslie Wilson poses these
> questions.
>
> Why would anyone on Tweeters care about this stuff? Should I be talking
> only to educators or intelligence theorists? I just thought that the people
> who are most evidently exercising this alleged form of intelligence are
> indeed the people on Tweeters.
>
> And what does it matter? Well, it looks to me like a breakthrough for
> environmental education. If teachers are advised to teach to all the
> intelligences of their students, then the naturalist finally gets its due (I
> naively hope). And it seems to me that this kind of intelligence--among
> others--may be just what we want to develop in tomorrow's ecological problem
> solvers.
>
> Any thoughts, self-analysis, etc.?
>
> Oh, the article I mentioned is at
> http://www.uwsp.edu/acad/educ/lwilson/learning/natintel.htm
>
> Darrel Whipple
> Rainier, Oregon
> dwhipple at columbia-center.org
>