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Designer Dolls Become Desirable Collectables

Kan Hui, a senior stage set designer based in Beijing, stands in front of a vending machine (自动售货机) in a shopping center. She feeds in the money and a paper box rolls out.  Dolls are not just toys for little girls any more. They have become desirable collectables for many young Chinese under the age of thirty. 

Molly, a little girl with curly hair, wide eyes and pouting (撅着的) lips, is one of the best-selling- dolls in China Each Molly sells for 59 yuan and there are over one hundred editions of the doll in different series. For doll fans, it is an affordable way to build an "art" collection. 

In fact, what has made collecting designer dolls a new phenomenon is the concept of a "blind box". As the name implies, consumers have no idea which specific doll from a series they will get until they open the box.  Over 400 million Molly dolls are reported to have been sold throughout the country last year!

Psychologists say that collectors are trying to bring some order and meaning to their lives. That may be true, but I think they do it just because it is fun and sometimes educational. I have a friend who collects beer bottles. He does not recycle them for money. Instead, he has them lined up in neat rows on shelves, and over 200 of them are from more than 30 different countries-a good way to learn about geography.

Collecting Molly dolls is probably a fad (一时的风尚) that will be replaced by another one eventually 

Are we getting more stupid? According to Genld Crabtree, a scientist at Standord University in the US, we are. 

You may not want to hear this, but Crabtree believes that human intelligence reached its peak more than 2000 years ago and ever since then has been going downhill. "If an average Greek from 1,000 BC were transported to modern times, he or she would be one of the brightest among us," Crabtree told The Guardian.

At the heart of Crabree's thinking is a simple idea. In the past, intelligence is critical for survival when our ancestors had to avoid dangerous animals and hunt for food. The difference of being smart or stupid is often life or death. However, after the spread of agriculture, when our ancestors began to live in dense farming communities. The need to keep their intelligence in peak. -condition gradually reduced. 

This is not hard to understand. Most of the time, pressure is what keeps us going-you need the pressure from your teachers to finish your homework; the pressure of looking pretty encourages you to lose weight when summer comes. And the same is also true of our intelligence -if we think less, we become less smart

These mutaions (变异) are harmful to our intelligence and they were all developed in the past 3. 000 yean. The other evidence that Crabtree holds is in our genes. He found that among the 20000 to 50000 genes that we have that determine human intelligence, there are two or more mutations in each of us. 

However, Crabtree's theory has been criticized by some who say that early humans may have better hunting and surviving abilities but people today have developed a more diverse intelligence. For example, paring (用矛刺)a tiger doesn't necessarily require more brainpower than playing chess or writing a poem. Moreover, the power

of modern education means a lot more people have the opportunity to learn nowadays. 

"You wouldn't get Stephen Hawking 2, 00 years ago. He just wouldn't exit. " Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick. UK, told Live Science "But now we have people of his intellectual capability doing things and making

Insights(洞察力) that we would never have achieved in our environment of evolutionary adaptation. (进化适应)"