WHITNEY CURTIS | news editor

Judging a woman's smarts by the width of their hips is just plain stupid.

So ladies, you thought your intelligence was all your own, a product of your genetics, background and education right?

Well, guess what? Researchers would say you are wrong.

A U.S. study of 16,000 women and girls found that the width difference between a woman’s waist and hips is directly related to her cognitive abilities, BBC News reported.

Researchers conducting the study hypothesized that these higher intelligence levels are connected with wider hips due to the fatty acids located in this area of the body.

Thank goodness scientists and specialists are not entirely convinced of the findings.

Is this what measuring intelligence has now come down to? Finding causation factors such as the size of a woman’s hips to determine how smart people are? A woman’s hips are an inherent part of her female qualities. What’s next? Will we soon be measuring male intelligence by the size of their “inherent male quality?”

I can see the OB nurseries in hospitals now, each equipped with a special tool to measure every baby girl’s hip-to-waist ratio to determine her intelligence potential. Once at home from the nursery, the baby’s mom and dad will overfeed and under-exercise her until she is positively brilliant.

What is really disappointing about this report is the lack of scientific evidence in the study. Everything is speculation, yet that factor is underplayed in the report. The truth is, the correlation between a woman’s hips and her intelligence could be a product of a number of other factors.

Have researchers realized that America, as a nation, is becoming increasingly more educated, thus, as a whole, we are more intelligent. Also, wake up and smell the fast-food chains. The U.S. is the fattest nation in the world. Are these two factors related? Maybe. Maybe not.

Studies do show that the majority of college students gain some weight while in college, probably from all of the late night Donut Man runs, frequent trips to grab pizza or burgers from Heritage instead of a salad from the Caf, and the constant sitting on our butts either writing papers or watching The Office. Meanwhile, most of us are becoming more intelligent as we eat crap and write these papers.

Still, that does not mean that by eating we are instantly becoming smarter, and that the size of our hips is a causation factor in our intelligence.

When talking to my roommate and best friend, Madison Allen, she made the comment, “If there is a direct correlation between your hips and your intelligence, America would not only be the fattest nation in the world, but the most intelligent.”

At least one man caught the gaping hole in the logic and research. Martin Tovee, of Newcastle University, commented in the report that other factors would, of course, have a great impact on the results from the study.

“On the fatty deposits being related to intelligence front, it’s very hard to detangle that from other factors, such as social class, for instance, or diet,” Tovee said.

This study strangely reminds me of the old myths about phrenology, the study of the bumps on a person’s head to determine their intelligence and personality attributes.

People used to feel each other’s heads and say, “You must be (this much) intelligent.” Will we soon be stopping our friends to feel and examine the size of their hips?

I always imagined science to have come a long way in its research and theories, but the more I hear, the more I realize Solomon was right when he said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” The new research and ideas we hear about aren’t that far from the ones that were postulated years earlier.

I can only hope that by the time my children have grown there will be new discoveries made on the intelligence front, and no one will be measuring my daughters hips and telling her she is only smart because of her big bones or fat cells.