As the aunt-by-marriage of a rock star, I can truthfully say that I have partied with rock stars… but after last Saturday night, I can also say with some certainty: Rock stars got nothin’ on Nobel Laureates.
In my day job as public radio salesperson, I helped Dr. Lawrence Krauss, the director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University, promote his recent Origins Symposium. Basically he invited about 100 of the world’s leading scientists to Tempe, locked them in a room and asked two questions:
What is the origin of the universe? What is the origin of life? Discuss.
Apparently all that thinking really takes it out of you because the attendees – among them, seven Nobel Laureates, the discoverer of Lucy, the sequencer of the human genome, and Lawrence (the guy that did the show on How William Shatner Changed the World) – all needed to kick back with a few cocktails on Saturday night. Little old me (on behalf of my sister-in-law, the swimsuit model) managed to procure an invitation for two: Fly, meet wall.
Read on, get smarter…

It was the first cocktail party I’ve ever had to cram for, and by cram, I mean I made flash cards for Val and me to study on the drive to the party – call it Drive-by Jeopardy. And yes, the writers for Jeopardy actually do call these guys to make sure their questions are correct. I learned that Saturday night.
“Nobel Prize in Medicine… discovered the Hepatitis B virus… developed the vaccine… saved millions of lives.”
“Who is Baruch Blumberg?”
“Author… TV Producer… Host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday”
“I know this one! I know this one! – Who is Ira Flatow!”
Uncertain as to how many civilians (i.e., non-Nobel Laureates) had been invited to the party, we agreed our fallback position would be: “What a pretty sunset!” (It was) and “What a lovely home!” (Ditto).
Clearly, we were treading water in the shallow end of the intellectual gene pool, and I had a lot less to add than Val, who is a New York Times Bestselling Author – one of about 12 at the party. Though my only contribution to the scientific discourse was, “I made an A in Chemistry 113 last semester,” I can say with pride that at least I wasn’t the one that fell into the swimming pool trying to procure a cold bottle of wine. (Right, Scott?)
So here’s a quick recap of what it’s like to party with the greatest minds in the universe: Drinks spilled… Magic happened… Arses grabbed asses… Hoops were shot (No shirts and skins – just coats and ties – and come to think of it, they were more like bricks than hoops).
Since returning like a pumpkin-clad Cinderella from the Nobel Laureate cocktail party, I’ve been bombarded with questions about what I learned from this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (and I can say once because I probably won’t be invited back). I’ve compiled the most illuminating pearls of wisdom gleaned (OK, overheard) from the evening – and I’m passing them along so you too can absorb the greatness thirdhand:
“I’ve been to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. The wallpaper needs work. Just awful… Ghastly.”
— I study baboons. What do you do?
— I’m on the same intellectual level as a baboon, so we’ll get along just fine.
“You teach high school physics? You, sir, are doing God’s work, and I don’t even believe in God.”
— So I understand things like tree rings, but how can you tell if the rock is 3 billion years old?
— Oh, you’ve never seen the rings on the inside of a rock? They’re right there – all 3 billion of them.
“The Amazing Randy was great… but I think the Fabulous Larry was may have had a slight edge.”
— Wait, I don’t think I follow – they have transsexuals in your Montessori school?
— We call them friends.
— OK, friends. But they’re students? In Montessori? How old does that make these friends?
— No, the students aren’t trannies – that conversation ended a while ago, keep up.
“I guess if you’re an atheist, you’re not going to go to hell for being a dirty old man.”
Yeah, your IQ just increased exponentially, and now you’re wishing you could retake the SAT and go into cosmology, right? Oh! Oh! Pick me! Pick me! I can answer that: Resounding YES! Here’s why:
At the Origins Symposium on Monday (yes, they actually let me in – it was the public presentation), I learned that evolution doesn’t necessarily naturally select for intelligence – it’s just a happy by-product of our big brains – so you can rest-assured that you won’t wake up one day to find that your evolved dog solving quadratic equations. Natural selection picks things that are a lot more useful – like reproductive endowments and eyesight. Makes sense to have evolved eyeballs on a planet that has a pretty big source of light, no? … Makes even more sense to be reproductively well-endowed so you can pass on your genes, right? Well, maybe not all of you…
So if I followed along correctly, we took our one small step away from Australopithecus afarensis and made our giant leap into homo sapiens as those big brains evolved. After Monday, I’d like to think my brain was a little bigger – after the party on Saturday, not so much. That being said, I was able to formulate my own hypothesis on evolution based on my observations at the party – and I plan to test this experiment in the field in my second job as pop-cultural anthropologist and shidduch to the stars…
Nobel Laureates, cosmologists, physicists, geochemists, biologists, geneticists, cognitive psychologists and the like are endowed with big brains – but they also must be well-endowed – because they have an inordinate capacity for attracting hot wives.
Read that again: Big brains… hot wives. Big brains… hot wives. Big brains… hot wives. And here you kept looking at the size of their hands and feet! Not only were their wives HOT, they were SMART (not unlike all my single female friends).
So, a word to all the single ladies: STOP CHASING THE MEATHEAD NEANDERTHALS. Get physical with physicists! Be bionic with biologists! Develop some chemistry with chemists!
Your fellow hotties have already given the smart guys their Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval – and yet you persist in your unfulfilling attempts to reproduce with evolutionarily inferior knuckledraggers. Don’t chase the rock stars – they’ve got nasty rashes on their big brains from the groupies! Don’t chase the jocks – they’ve already shrunk their big brains with performance-enhancing drugs! And please, don’t pollute yourselves with the Axe-body-sprayed, shaven-chested, spike-haired, popped-collared douchebags you find in bars – they don’t have big brains and never did!
Be more evolved in your mating selections – because in the end, the nerds win. Big brains… hot wives!
(Clearly, if this little experiment works, I might even secure a return invitation to the next Nobel Laureate cocktail party. Hooray! And now, I will gladly make my reservations for Oslo this December where I will pick up my [ig]Nobel Prize for this contribution to the advancement of biology. Thank you.)