It is such a common element of culture but when I look closely it doesn't make too much sense.
What are the general characteristics of a nerd?
- Smart and interested in academics.
- Physically underdeveloped and bad at sports.
- Socially awkward and unattractive.
Does this cluster make sense to you?
Sure, health problems can make you both unattractive (and subsequently awkward) and small/weak/uncoordinated. But what do smarts have to do with this? I'm guessing statistically a healthy kid is likely to do better at school than an unhealthy one.
So how do nerds come to be?
Is that because kids who don't do well socially are more motivated to excel academically?
Do smart cool athletic kids refrain from getting into nerd stuff because it's frowned upon in the cool circles?
Is being a nerd a sort of a "mild" autistic spectrum thing?
Also, a follow up question. Are nerds actually smarter on average by any measurement? Why or why not?
People have given me examples of specific movies that had jumpstarted the trope and claimed that it's perpetuated by marketing, but I was born in the Soviet Union and it seems like we had a very similar archetype behind the iron curtain – an awkward unassuming guy/kid in glasses who's into books and science. The Russian word for this kind of person is "botanist" for some reason.
Calling a nerdy classmate "Lysenko". What's he going to do, move my desk too close to my neighbor's? :troll:
Comrade, you are going to end up just like Vavilov.
Convergent evolution? Might just be autistic people who are bright and socially awkward kids with weird interests get lumped together. Kinda have to hang out with each other because most people won't hang out with them.
makes perfect sense actually
people who are interested in taxonomy, especially of plants, invertebrates, and other "marginal" organisms (aka anything that isn't lions, tigers, wooly mammoths) are probably interested in understanding/knowing things for its own sake