“DOES the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?”

If you answered the latter, you’re among a quarter of Americans who also got it wrong, according to a new report by the National Science Foundation.

A survey of 2,200 people that was released Friday revealed some alarming truths about the state of American ignorance about even the most simple scientific facts, with many failing to an answer even the most basic astronomy and science questions, according to a release about the survey.

Out of nine questions in the survey, participants scored an average 6.5.

Only 39 percent answered correctly with “true” when asked if “The universe began with a huge explosion.”

Only 48 percent knew that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” according to the statement. Without at least a simple understanding of biological evolution, understanding the realities of racial issues becomes impossible.

The survey was conducted in 2012, but the results were only presented on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

Heliocentrism, the theory that the earth and planets revolve around a relatively stationary sun, became widely accepted in the 16th century, when Nicolaus Copernicus introduced his astronomical model of the universe, which led to the Copernican Revolution.

Darwinian evolution, the means by which all forms of life diverge and divide into races – which ultimately become new species – was first posited by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace in 1859.

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Source: ABC News

by A. Helian

JONATHAN HAIDT IS ONE OF THE MOST coherent thinkers in the social sciences today. A Professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, he specializes in the study of morality and emotion, and how they vary across cultures. He describes himself as an atheist, and embraces the notion that there is such a thing as “human nature,” in the sense that our behavior is profoundly influenced by innate predispositions. For that alone he would have suffered the anathemas of his fellow experts in the behavioral sciences a few short decades ago. Until quite recently they were still in thrall of the collective delusion that human behavior is almost entirely determined by culture and education. But Haidt doesn’t stop there. His work focuses on our moral nature, and he is of the opinion that moral reasoning is not the basis of moral judgment. Rather, he supports what he calls the social intuitionist model, according to which moral judgments are the result of quick, automatic intuitions, including moral emotions. Moral reasoning commonly only appears after moral decisions have already been made, serving to rationalize them after the fact. Innate, evolved traits play a significant role in the process. In Haidt’s words from the paper, “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,”

The social intuitionist model… proposes that morality, like language, is a major evolutionary adaptation for an intensely social species, built into multiple regions of the brain and body, that is better described as emergent than as learned yet that requires input and shaping from a particular culture. Moral intuitions are therefore both innate and enculturated.

Obviously, we have come a long way since the 60s and 70s, when the entire orthodox scientific establishment was defending the cherished but palpably absurd dogma that “human nature” was almost entirely the result of education and culture, and the effect of innate predispositions of the kind Haidt (pictured above) refers to on human behavior were insignificant. In one of the more remarkable paradigm shifts in scientific history, they have finally been forced by the weight of evidence to abandon that delusion. For all that, they have shown a remarkable resistance to facing the obvious implications of the truth they have finally embraced. Nowhere has that been more true than in the field of morality.

If what Haidt says is true, then human morality is the expression of evolved behavioral traits. As such, it cannot be other than subjective in nature. Objective good and evil cannot exist because there is no legitimate basis for their existence. Morality has no purpose, nor does it serve any higher end. It exists purely and simply because it has increased the odds that carriers of the genes that give rise to it would survive and reproduce those genes. In spite of these seemingly elementary facts, no human illusion is as persistent and resilient as the belief in objective good.

Haidt explores some related issues in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis. It’s a good read, consisting of a collection of interesting ideas, insights and recent research results and concluding with an examination of the question, “What is the meaning of life.” According to Haidt, the question, “What is the meaning of life?” really consists of two sub-questions: What is the purpose of life? and What should be our purpose within life? He does not attempt an answer to the first, but focuses on the second, noting that it refers to what we should do to have a good, happy, fulfilling and meaningful life. Haidt devotes the final portion of the book to the question. There is something rather striking about his answer. It requires acceptance of the theory of group selection.

Why is that striking? Back in the day when, as noted above, virtually the entire orthodox scientific establishment was proclaiming the dogma that “human nature” was almost exclusively the result of education and culture, the most influential and significant writer insisting that the establishment was wrong, recognized as such at the time by proponents of both points of view, was Robert Ardrey. Well, it so happens that Ardrey, a brilliant writer with a profound grasp of the big picture, was right and the establishment was wrong about the role of the innate on human behavior. Yet today his name is hardly mentioned in the same breath with Galileo, or any of the other great destroyers of false orthodoxies in the sciences for that matter. Rather, he has been almost entirely forgotten. It happens, you see, that Ardrey was outside the academic pale. He was, in fact, a playwright for much of his career, and it would be too painful for the guild of “experts” to admit that a mere playwright like Ardrey had correctly insisted on an abundantly obvious truth at a time when they were still collectively defending a cherished but palpably false delusion.

Eventually, when the delusion collapsed, resulting in one of the more remarkable paradigm shifts in the history of the sciences, the “experts” constructed an entire alternative reality, exemplified by Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, according to which, incredibly, Ardrey had been “totally and utterly wrong,” and the real hero had been the more respectable and palatable E.O. Wilson, no matter that the ideas he set forth in books like Sociobiology and On Human Nature were no more than a reformulation of Ardrey’s thought. Now the chances that Pinker ever actually read Ardrey before dismissing him as “totally and utterly wrong” are vanishingly small, but he cited Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene as the basis of his claim, as if Dawkins were as infallible as the pope. Dawkins, in turn, based his entire criticism of Ardrey on some remarks he made in his book The Social Contract about a theory that was of no particular significance whatsoever as far as the fundamental question of the role of the innate on human behavior is concerned. And what was that theory? Why, none other than the theory of group selection, without which Haidt’s “Happiness Hypothesis” evaporates in the mist. It appears that Dawkins was somewhat premature in announcing its demise. Such are the narratives that occasionally pass for “history” in the sciences. Meanwhile, Ardrey remains an unperson. I should think he deserves better.

Read the original article at Helian Unbound

THE SOLE CHARACTERISTIC that ultimately distinguishes living from non-living matter is classical Darwinian evolution. Life is simply matter that evolves.

A simple analysis of the definition of life leads to the conclusion that living matter is inanimate matter that evolves. Evolution is the sole feature that differentiates living matter from non-living matter.

Consider a definition of life from the old college days:

Life is the property of a highly organized molecular complex, the stability of which is maintained by its constant utilization of energy.

It seems a bit flowery, so to simplify:

Life is organized matter self-maintained by energy utilization….

Energy utilization is essential to maintain the stability of life forms because, without it, life forms are very unstable and decompose into non-living matter. In fact, life forms are so unstable that, even with energy utilization, they all eventually die….

Does the Definition Exclude All Non-Living Matter?

There are many examples of non-living matter maintained by their utilization of energy. Some examples are waterfalls, volcanoes, hurricanes, and stars. So, a definition of life requires something more to exclude such non-living matter. Adding something about reproduction might help:

Life is organized matter self-maintained by energy utilization and a process that reproduces its structure for self-maintained energy utilization in the future….

By specifying that life must include a reproductive process, inanimate matter like waterfalls and hurricanes are excluded. However, some scientists might argue rather convincingly that stars reproduce. To eliminate stars as living matter, a process that more faithfully reproduces itself could be added:

Life is organized matter self-maintained by energy utilization and a process that accurately reproduces its structure for self-maintained energy utilization in the future.

This simple definition seems to eliminate stars and other forms of inanimate matter. Specifying a nucleic acid-based reproductive mechanism rather than just a reproductive process would accurately define all of the known forms of life. But the general definition above allows for the possibility of other hypothesized mechanisms such as those based on lipids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or polyphosphates.

Perfect Clones Can’t Cut It.

Any life form with a reproductive process that creates an exact copy or a perfect clone of itself would satisfy the requirement of a process that accurately reproduces itself. Such a process would always produce the same exact structure and function for energy utilization and self-maintenance in a given environment. However, in a changed environment, functional energy utilization and self-maintenance might benefit from, or even require, new structure(s).

Every Environment Changes With Time.

In order for a life form to persist through time, it must have a mechanism that provides for structural changes to function in a changed environment. Some life forms can produce exact copies or perfect clones, but most importantly, they also provide mechanisms for introducing structural changes by mutation or recombination. No life forms exist that cannot provide such changes. So, the definition of life becomes:

Life is organized matter self-maintained by energy utilization and a process that accurately reproduces its general organizational structure with a mechanism that allows for structural changes to utilize energy for self-maintenance in a changed environment.

Based on this definition of life, the sole characteristic that distinguishes living from non-living matter is a reproductive mechanism that allows for structural changes to utilize energy for self-maintenance in a changed environment.

Adaptation is Essential.

When successful structural changes to utilize energy for self-maintenance in a changed environment are produced, adaptation is said to occur. Over time, with continuously changing environments and adaptations, life forms undergo natural selection and classical Darwinian evolution. Thus, for periods of time exceeding the lifespans of individuals, the sole characteristic that distinguishes living and non-living matter is the process of Darwinian evolution. So, what is life?

Life is matter that evolves.

Most fundamentally, the definition becomes:

Life is evolution.

The two are inseparable. Given the fact that all life forms die, how do they persist through time and changing environments? Every environment harboring life forms must change, simply because of their existence, so evolution is the only way life forms can persist through time. Not only did Charles Darwin discover what makes life possible despite the fact that all life forms eventually die, he unwittingly discovered the sole feature that distinguishes living from non-living matter. Charles Darwin defined life.

Life is Evolution.

*  *  *

Sources:

Goode, M. Dennis, biophysics course, 1974, Department of Zoology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1976. ISBN 0-19-286092-5.

Read the full article at Suite101.com

Studies in Britain and America have found they have IQs 14 points above average.

The findings dispel the myth of the dumb blondes or good-looking men not being very bright.

It appears that those already physically blessed attract partners who are not just good looking but brainy too, according to research by the London School of Economics.

The children of these couples will tend to inherit both qualities, building a genetic link over successive generations between them.

LSE researcher Satoshi Kanazawa told the Sunday Times: ”Physical attractiveness is significantly positively associated with general intelligence, both with and without controls for social class, body size and health.

‘The association between attractiveness and general intelligence is also stronger among men than among women.’

In other research on social standing, he found that middle-class girls tended to have higher IQs than their working- class counterparts.

Among the millions of examples of  beauty and brains, there’s supermodel Lily Cole (pictured, top of page) who went  to  Cambridge University, actress Kate Beckinsale, an Oxford graduate, and physicist Brian Cox (pictured), one-time keyboard player with Dream.

In Britain, the study found that men who are physically attractive had IQs an average 13.6 points above the norm while women were about 11.4 points higher.

Kanazawa’s findings were based on the National Child Development Study which followed 17,419 people since their birth in a single week in March, 1958.

Throughout their childhood up to early adulthood, they were given a series of tests for academic progress, intelligence and marked on appearance.

The American research was taken from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health which involved a similar study of 35,000 young Americans.

Read the full article at the Daily Mail

I SEE this question posted with some regularity in the personal ads, so I thought I’d take a minute to explain things to the ladies out there who haven’t figured it out.

What happened to all the nice guys?

The answer is simple: You did.

See, if you think back, really hard, you might vaguely remember a Platonic guy pal who always seemed to want to spend time with you. He’d tag along with you when you went shopping, stop by your place for a movie when you were lonely but didn’t feel like going out, or even sit there and hold you while you sobbed and told him about how horribly the (other) guy — the one that you were intimate with — treated you.

At the time, you probably joked with your girl friends about how he was a little puppy dog, always following you around, trying to do things to get you to pay attention to him. They probably teased you because they thought he had a crush on you. Given that his behavior was, you thought, a little pathetic, you vehemently denied having any romantic feelings for him, and buttressed your position by claiming that you were “just friends.” Besides, he totally wasn’t your type. I mean, he was a little too old or too young, too short, or too  poor, or didn’t know how to dress himself, or basically be or do any of the things that your tall, good-looking, fit, rich, stylish boyfriend at the time pulled off with such ease.

Eventually, your Platonic buddy drifted away, as your relationship with the boyfriend got more serious and spending time with this other guy was, you thought, a little weird, if you weren’t dating him. More time passed, and the boyfriend eventually cheated on you, or became “boring,” or you realized that the things that attracted you to him weren’t the kinds of things that make for a good, long-term relationship. So, now, you’re single again, and after having tried the bar scene for several months having only encountered players and douche bags, you wonder, “What happened to all the nice guys?”

Well, once again, you did.

You ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy. You laughed at his consideration and resented his devotion. You valued the aloof boyfriend more than the attentive “just-a-” friend.

Eventually, he took the hint and moved on with his life. He probably came to realize, one day, that modern women aren’t really attracted to guys who hold doors open; or make dinners just because; or buy you a Christmas gift that you mentioned, in passing, that you really wanted five months ago; or listen when you’re upset; or hold you when you cry. He came to realize that, if he wanted a woman like you, he’d have to act more like the jerk boyfriend that you had. He probably cleaned up his look, started making some real money, and generally acted like more of an ass than he ever wanted to be.

Fact is, now, he’s probably “getting some,” and in a way, your ultimate rejection of him is to thank for that. And I’m sorry that it took the complete absence of “nice guys” in your life for you to realize that you missed them and wanted them. Most women will only have a handful of nice guys stumble into their lives, if that.

So, if you’re looking for a nice guy, here’s what you do:

1.) Build a time machine.
2.) Go back a few years and pull your head out of where it’s been.
3.) Take a look at what’s right in front of you and grab hold of it.

I suppose the other possibility is that you still don’t really want a nice guy, but you feel the social pressure to at least appear to have matured beyond your infantile taste in men. In which case, you might be in luck, because the nice guy you claim to want has, in reality, shed his nice guy mantle and is out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you.

If you were five years younger.

So, please: either stop misrepresenting what you want, or own up to the fact that you and your social set have ruined your life. You’re getting older, after all. It’s time to excise the mental garbage and posing and deal with reality. You didn’t want a nice guy then, and he certainly doesn’t goddamned want you now.

Sincerely,

A Recovering Nice Guy.

EDITOR’S NOTE: It is the sex-without-love attitudes inculcated by the mass media and the anti-Nature “sophisticates” that are responsible for the breakdown in the love relations between men and women in the West. And the resulting below-replacement birthrates spell our doom unless we change things, fast. Nice guys have the right instincts, but little insight. Both sexes need to treasure and love and appreciate each other if we intend to survive as a civilization — and have meaningful lives as individuals. — M.P. Shiel

ACCORDING to Wired magazine, the Pentagon just spent $4,000,000 to learn how to read our minds. (Er, I mean read “the enemy’s” minds! And we do seem to have a lot of enemies these days.) Leaving aside the question of just why anyone who could truly read minds would have any need of something so crude as weapons, this is pretty scary stuff if there’s any truth to it.

‘Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they’ll read each other’s minds.

‘At least, that’s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon’s mad-science division Darpa. The agency’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” That’s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy.

‘Before being vocalized, speech exists as word-specific neural signals in the mind. Darpa wants to develop technology that would detect these signals of  “pre-speech,” analyze them, and then transmit the statement to an intended interlocutor. Darpa plans to use EEG to read the brain waves. It’s a technique they’re also testing in a project to devise mind-reading binoculars that alert soldiers to threats faster the conscious mind can process them.

‘The project has three major goals, according to Darpa. First, try to map a person’s EEG patterns to his or her individual words. Then, see if those patterns are generalizable – if everyone has similar patterns. Last, “construct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range.”…

Last year, the National Research Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency released a report suggesting that neuroscience might also be useful to “make the enemy obey our commands.”…

Earlier I said that this is pretty scary stuff if there’s any truth to it. Upon deeper consideration, I’ve decided that it’s very unlikely there’s any truth to it at all. Forcing people to “obey our commands”? Come on. More likely, all this “psychic combat” “research” is nothing but a racket; a con game that illustrates for us a sycophantic relationship between not-too-bright military bureaucrats carving out a comfortable niche for themselves, and clever “contractors” who have figured out a way to cut themselves in on a slice of the biggest military budget ever seen on planet Earth. (Currently, the U.S. military budget is nearly the size of all the other military budgets in the world combined.)

Since no is really minding the store (it’s “unpatriotic” to notice when our war machine is misused for evil purposes, and “anti-Semitic” — even if you’re Jewish — to notice that Zionists and neocons use our men as cannon fodder) — a large part of this huge sum is bound to find its way into the pockets of crooks. Better them than warmongers, I suppose.

review and notes by M.P. Shiel

NIGEL BARBER’S The Science of Romance is so thought-provoking that I had a hard time sleeping (no, not for that reason!) after finishing it last night. It puts what was once in the realm of mystery and romance and speculation and dogma into the bright light of biological science. For example, have you ever wondered why the younger woman / older man couple is so common, and why the reverse is relatively rare? Have you ever wondered why Huxley’s couplet — Higgamus hoggamus, woman’s monagamous / Hoggamus huggamus, man is polygamous — rings so true? And where does the double standard come from that sets such a severe judgement on female infidelity, but is more forgiving toward the male “sowing his wild oats”?

A few excerpts will show you the kind of insights Barber provides on nearly every page:

THE DOUBLE STANDARD OF AGING

Men’s physical attractiveness to women declines with age, but the decline is generally less steep than that of women to men. In what might be called the second cardinal rule of dating, men want partners who are a year or two younger than they are, while women, in general, want to date older men. As men age, they want women who are increasingly younger than they are. A man of forty, for example, is likely to want a partner who is ten years younger. Why?

The most fundamental reason relates to limitation of women’s ability to conceive children with advancing years. Fertility reaches a high point in the early twenties and stays on a plateau until the age of thirty-five, after which it declines sharply. Natural selection would have caused men to select fertile women as wives since those who were attracted to women over fifty would have left no offspring to carry on their unusual taste. However, men see women as more attractive at twenty than at forty. This is right at the beginning of their most fertile phase in the life span.

Men are thus most attracted to women who are at the beginning of their reproductive career. If a man marries a woman of this age, then he has the potential of giving her all of her children and thereby hitting the reproductive jackpot. Natural selection has thus favored men who are attracted to younger fertile women rather than older fertile women. For this reason, the perception of youthfulness is critical to the physical attractiveness of women. This helps explain the success of the cosmetics industry, as women attempt to conceal signs of aging and try to appear younger and more attractive.

Men reach the peak of their physical attractiveness to women in the late teens or early twenties. However, as they grow older, they acquire social status and wealth, which enhances the value of the overall package as far as a marriage partner is concerned. Although men deteriorate with age, their physical appearance is less critical to their overall attractiveness. One important cue to feminine youthfulness that plays an important role in women’s physical attractiveness is their bodily shape….

THE GROUND RULES OP HUMAN COURTSHIP

Understanding courtship in other species illuminates differences between the sexes and explains why there are conflicts of interest between men and women in courtship and marriage. The conclusion that women are sexier in appearance than men suggests that women are competing among themselves for access to men. Yet this conclusion does not ring true in the real world. According to anthropologist Don Symons, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, sexual intercourse is everywhere a female favor granted to men. Any woman, whatever her looks, can succeed in becoming pregnant.

Why then do people of both sexes consistently rate women as more physically attractive? They do not need to be physically attractive to have sex with men. They are obviously not competing over opportunities for sexual intercourse. Instead, they are competing to marry desirable husbands who can help them to raise children.

Men’s bargaining position is based on social status and wealth. In subsistence hunter-gatherer societies, such as the Siriono of Brazil, a man’s sexual attractiveness to women is based largely on his reputation as a successful hunter. In modern societies, women are more interested in a man’s education and income level than his hunting ability, but this concern represents the same underlying need to find a mate who will be a good provider of food and other economic goods. Even though modern women sometimes earn more than most men, their evolved psychology has not changed. They are still attracted to successful men….

In early subsistence societies, as well as more recent ones, women were constantly pregnant, breast-feeding, or caring for children or all three. This would have interfered with their ability to work and acquire surplus food or property. Today, the birth rate is much lower due to the use of effective birth control techniques. Moreover, children spend the day in daycare or with babysitters, which frees their mothers for full-time occupations. Successful rearing of children among our hunter-gatherer ancestors was a cooperative enterprise in which men contributed to feeding, sheltering, carrying, protecting, and caring for their offspring. The critical importance of fathers for the survival of their children is demonstrated by the Ache of Paraguay, who are more than twice as likely to die during childhood if they lose their father. Women, in general, have evolved to compete for husbands with social status and wealth because these are reliable cues to the ability to protect and care for children.

Physically attractive women (as assessed from high school yearbook photographs) are much more likely to marry. They also marry up the social ladder, finding husbands that are wealthier than their parents; the same, however, is not true of men. Physically attractive women move up into wealthy elites through marriage, while physically attractive men do not.

SEX DIFFERENCES IN SEXUAL JEALOUSY

Men tend to be very upset by the sexual infidelity of their wives. This fits with evolutionary logic because their reproductive interests are seriously threatened. When a wife is unfaithful to her husband, there is a good chance that the lover may father her child. British biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis found that women often timed their infidelities to coincide with ovulation and that they were less likely to use contraception with the lover than with their husband. This meant that the lover was more likely to sire any children conceived at the time of the affair.

A cuckolded husband risks not raising a child of his own and also wastes his paternal investment on the offspring of another man. It would be surprising if our male ancestors had been indifferent to this possibility. If they were, they would have left few offspring of their own to carry on their lackadaisical habits. This helps to explain why sexual infidelity is more distressing to husbands and why even the suspicion of infidelity can, unfortunately, provoke deadly aggression by men against their wives. Note that the emotional response of sexual jealousy would protect paternity even in societies where people did not grasp the connection between intercourse and pregnancy….

Although difficult to quantify because it is often concealed by the victim, abuse by husbands and lovers is a leading cause of injury for women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four years. It is estimated that one woman in four will be a victim of physical assault by a partner or ex-partner during her lifetime. American women, too, often use physical aggression against their husbands, and at least one researcher has found that women are violent more often than men. Yet husband battering is a far less severe social problem because fewer women have a murderous intent and because of the obvious fact that men are larger, stronger, and better able to defend themselves.

Violence against women the world over is produced by a psychology, derived from evolution, of male possessiveness and sexual jealousy. Male sexual possessiveness is accommodated by the legal codes of many countries. Marriage, in many countries, is considered to make a woman the sexual property of her husband. Under British law, a husband could sue his wife’s lover for “criminal conversation” and be awarded damages. The idea was that the lover had infringed a property right of the husband and was therefore liable for damages. Archaic though the law may seem, it has actually been invoked in the twentieth century to curtail the activities of adulterous male lovers.

By the same logic, adultery was considered an unbearable insult to the husband. If he caught his wife in the act of adultery, according to the in flagrante delicto principle, he was justified in killing both the spouse and her lover. This principle was the law of the land in the state of Texas until 1960. In contrast, serious aggression by wives against husbands is most often a response to being threatened, or feeling threatened, in an abusive relationship.

DOMESTICATING MEN

The conflicting interests of men and women are as old as sexual reproduction itself. Going all the way back in evolutionary time to the first sexually reproducing animals on earth, females are the ones that produced the largest sex cells. Eggs are much more energetically expensive to produce than sperms, which are tiny and produced in large numbers. Females thus invest more in offspring from the very beginning. Males therefore compete among themselves for access to the greater investment of the females.

It’s also worth thinking about this in terms of group evolution. We don’t evolve — or even survive — as isolated individuals. In addition to being a social and necessarily tribal species in general, we also must evolve in groups.

Now you could lose 50 or 75 per cent. of your men in war, and the remaining men of your tribe or race could still father just as many children with your women as would have been fathered without the war. Similarly, your men could “sow wild oats” for a few years while away from home, looting another people or searching for the golden fleece, and the same would hold true.

But your ethnic group or people can only survive if enough of its females give birth to the next generation of your people. That’s the only way for that generation to come into the world — through their wombs. And the percentage of your population which is female and also of childbearing age is very limited. So you can see how devastating it can be if a conquering tribe takes or impregnates all or half or even ten per cent. of your women. You would be on your way to extinction. Hence the general principle which underlies the instinctive protection of women’s fidelity to their husbands and to the group: eggs are infinitely precious, far more precious than sperm.

While female investment in offspring is almost always very large, male investment is highly variable. At a minimum, a male might contribute only his sperm. At a maximum, he might take responsibility for all care of the young. Surprising as it may seem, the latter happens. For example, among jacana birds, it is the males that incubate the eggs and take care of the hatchlings. Among most monogamous birds, like grebes, there is a fairly equitable distribution of the work of caring for the chicks.

When both sexes cooperate to care for the young, this leads to the establishment of very strong bonds of mutual affection that are extraordinarily persistent. For grebes, swans, and human beings, the pair bond can last a lifetime. Despite the strong bonds of love and companionship, ancient conflicts of interest linger in the shadows, one of the most important being conflict over sexual infidelity….

Male psychology evolved to become less choosy in the selection of a sexual partner. The cost to a man of being promiscuous was not great, whereas for a woman a single sexual encounter could result in the huge commitment of pregnancy and child rearing, Women who mated indiscriminately would leave fewer surviving offspring than women who were more cautious in the selection of a partner. The more selective would choose men who were physically attractive, and thus had good genetic characteristics, or contributed to nurturing the child, or both. In either case children of the discriminating woman would have a greater chance of surviving whether this was due to superior genes, better nutrition, or better protection from enemies and predators. This means that women would have evolved a high degree of selectiveness in their choice of sexual partners.

By contrast, the male partner in casual sexual encounters would have increased his probability of leaving more children without paying any of the costs of child rearing. Our male ancestors who enjoyed casual sexual relationships with several women would have been more reproductively successful than men who were faithful to a single partner. Their male children would have inherited the genetic basis for having a roving eye through the father’s genes. This explains why modern men are more interested in casual sexual relationships than women are. The reproductive benefits of philandering exceed the reproductive costs for men, whereas the costs exceed the benefits for women. Needless to say, ancestral men were not necessarily interested in having babies, and may not even have made a connection between sexual intercourse and reproduction. Natural selection designed them to be interested in casual sex for its own sake and this tended to increase their reproductive success. The same argument can be made about the greater eagerness to mate of males of other species.

Like males of all species, men compete for the reproductive resources of women. At the same time, women compete over help from men in raising their children. Given that the sexes have evolved differences in their needs and objectives, there is a potential for conflict. Anthropologists see the marriage contract, in different societies around the world, as one solution to this conflict. If men agree to support the children of the marriage, in return they are given an opportunity to father them.

Fathers in most societies perform some childcare services, but women everywhere do the lion’s share of this work. Paternal support revolves around helping to provide food, shelter, and protection, each of which would have been critical for survival in the evolutionary past. In one of the few remaining subsistence societies, the forest-dwelling Ache of Paraguay, support of fathers is crucial. In fact, 45 percent of children who lost their fathers to death or divorce at any point before the age of fifteen died before themselves reaching the age of fifteen years, compared to a 20 percent mortality rate for children who had fathers present in their families. The absence of a father triples the risk of death due to illness, and doubles the risk of being killed by other Ache. Reading between the lines, one can see that if Ache women did not marry, their chances of raising children to maturity alone would be fairly bleak.

Given that it is difficult to raise children, that a mother’s very great investment in her offspring is lost if the children die before reaching maturity, and that the presence of the father provides considerable insurance against the hostile forces of nature, the case for bonding with a particular man and obtaining masculine support must have been compelling for our female ancestors.

Whereas women have no choice but to make a very great investment in each of their children, if only because they must carry the fetus during pregnancy, men can theoretically pursue different reproductive strategies. If they abandoned their children, far more would have died before reaching maturity. Yet they could have made up for high infant mortality by siring many children through many women. Instead of being dads, they could behave like cads.

The behavior of modern men reveals a certain amount of emotional ambiguity about whether to be cads or dads. (Of course women may also feel ambiguous about marriage, but this usually seems to take the form of asking whether their current partner is worthy of them rather than dreams of sexual gratification with a limitless supply of attractive men; female fantasies are more likely to involve being wanted by men.) Some men who are happily married and love their wives are perfectly capable of having extramarital affairs without feeling much guilt or remorse, at least while they are getting away with it. Yet there are only a handful of preindustrial societies in which children grow up apart from their fathers and in some of these the absence of their father is temporary. From the point of view of the evolutionary dance between the sexes, men have been pulled away from their cad tendencies and turned into dads. Instead of constantly wandering around trying to impregnate women, ancestral men at some point began to stay at home and take responsibility for their children. They became domesticated, in the sense of organizing their hunting activities around a home base.

Barber doesn’t tread deeply enough in politically dangerous waters to tell us that biologically different human groups — races — have notably different reproductive strategies; that some groups have a much higher cad-to-dad ratio, and these tend also to be groups with higher birthrates generally, and who arrive at sexual maturity more quickly. He continues:

The notion of women domesticating men is slightly misleading, however. Men stayed at home and behaved like dads presumably because this maximized the number of children they could raise to maturity. Why could they not leave more offspring by behaving like cads all of the time? One possible reason is that the male relatives of their female love interest protected her, which would have made being a cad quite risky. Another plausible reason is that impregnating a woman takes a surprising amount of time. Whatever the reason, there is no need to see the sexual behavior of men as driven by conscious reproductive intent. Other species manage fine without any such intentions and so, in all probability, did our ancestors.

Modern couples deciding to have a child often experience several months, or even years, of steady sexual intercourse before the woman conceives. Unlike most other mammals, including the primate order to which we belong, women do not have a distinct period of sexual heat, or estrus, which induces mating at a time when impregnation is most likely. There is a very slight increase in women’s sexual motivation around the time of ovulation, but the probability of having sexual intercourse is roughly the same at all stages of the menstrual cycle.

Among humans, ovulation is cryptic, or concealed. This phenomenon could reflect the evolutionary dance of the sexes. According to University of Michigan biologists Richard Alexander and Katherine Noonan, concealed ovulation is a means by which our female ancestors got fathers to invest in their children. If men cannot detect when women are ovulating, then a cad strategy may not produce as many surviving children as a dad strategy. If one assumes that Alexander and Noonan are correct, concealment of ovulation is an effective technique by which women have reined in men’s polygynous tendencies, inducing them to stay at home with their wives, fathering most or all of a woman’s children and helping them to survive to maturity.

Stated from the woman’s perspective, women who had a very high sex drive around the time of ovulation, and who clearly advertised their reproductive condition to strange men, as female chimpanzees do through conspicuous sexual swellings, for example, would have been vulnerable to cads. They would have received less paternal investment for their children and would have raised fewer children to maturity. Concealed ovulation undermines a cad strategy and promotes a dad strategy because a man cannot time intercourse to coincide with a woman’s time of highest fertility. For this reason he may be more reproductively successful by staying with a single woman and siring all of her children, rather than pursuing many different women with a low probability of impregnating any of them. Once again, these “strategies” are unconscious products of natural selection.

One thing I’ve long believed is that humans, especially more highly evolved human groups, were gradually evolving away from a low-investment in children (“cad”) spread-your-seed-everywhere strategy toward a high-investment strategy that involves mating for life — and that romantic love, celebrated in poetry and art all through Western civilization from Ovid to the Provencal balladeers of courtly love to Keats and Poe, is evidence of our as-yet imperfect evolution in that direction.

A long evolutionary history of living with men who were physically stronger likely promoted the more finely tuned interpersonal skills of women. Women made up for a relative lack of bodily strength by developing aptitudes for predicting and controlling the behavior of men.

Absolutely fascinating, and likely to set the reader thinking about many things — not just sex, but human societal structures, morality, parenting, politics, and racial matters — from a biological perspective instead of a dogmatic one. This is exactly the kind of thinking we need among the decision-makers of our civilization. Thank you, Nigel Barber. Every intelligent man and woman should read this book and consider its implications.

The Science of Romance – by Nigel Barber
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573929700/

PERHAPS THE MOST intriguing question of all is “Where did I come from?” Or, perhaps stated in a slightly more general way, “Where did humans come from?” Or, “Why are humans the way they are?” “What is consciousness?” “What is intelligence?” “Why are people ethical?” “Why am I able to ask questions?” “Is there a higher power that created humans and is responsible for us? — and If so where did it come from?”

There may be an infinite number of these questions but in fact there is a rather simple explanation to all of the questions stated above if one is willing to observe and weigh a few obvious things. The key elements of modern human evolution are discussed in Intelligent Design – of humans by humans and for humans where the most critical factor is the development of human speech.

The ability to speak permits a selective positive feedback loop to form, vastly improving the selective process and permitting it to be greatly accelerated by what is currently termed artificial selection. With artificial selection it is possible to see intended effects in the offspring in the next generation and if the quality is desirable to inform your peers to keep selecting for that quality in following generations. Part of this process is to select against those qualities which are considered to be inferior. There is always an abundance of qualities which must be weighed and balanced against one another before decisions are made which tend to become locked in for the remainder of the decider’s life and for the lives of their offspring. Because these decisions are realized to be of such importance they are made with great care.

Artificial selection is a subset of Sexual Selection which is a subset of Natural Selection. Ultimately the demands of natural selection must be satisfied because it is a killing process whereby only those individuals who manage to survive are around to produce the next generation. With some species there are vast hordes of perfectly healthy specimens which are killed off with only on average a single typical member surviving to reproduce. By human moral standards this is needlessly cruel — but we are not the ones to make those choices.

With sexual selection there is some degree of purposeful behavior by the species because they choose healthy members for reproduction, not simply the luckiest typical member. This more refined process speeds up the adaptation of the species to its local environment because the members best adapted to it are healthiest. This method has an additional benefit of permitting a broader genome to exist where some outliers survive which is sometimes advantageous for the species — because when the environment shifts a bit those who have not been so narrowly adapted may now be better adapted and get to reproduce more abundantly.

There was a time in the past when our ancestors didn’t speak as modern humans do, and then there was a more recent time when they were fully human and like us in every way but culture. The transition between these two states was between 100 thousand years ago and 40 thousand years ago. For all humans to have evolved so similarly with so many varied and unique human qualities there had to be a small population in a contained area for a sustained period of time. I favor the population isolated in some location such as the islands of Zanzibar during the ice ages. At that location the low sea levels would give these islands the ideal confining conditions for this rapid and thorough human evolution to take place after the basic speech patterns had gotten started, perhaps elsewhere before the population was isolated.

The rest of our human qualities follow on relatively quickly in a few tens of thousands of years — perhaps far less. With artificial selection, massive changes can be brought about in a few generations as may be seen in all sorts of domestic animals. It is particularly conspicuous in the varieties of dogs that have been recently brought into being, but similar changes exist in all of man’s genetically manipulated domesticated life forms.

This human ability to manipulate genetic code is based on the ability to speak – to be able to discuss what is better, to be able to communicate and remember what qualities are best are all dependent upon speech. The thing which is new in this old idea is that it has been applied to humans themselves by themselves for a very long time. We just think about it as mate selection, plain old sexual selection — and such it is, but it is mediated by speech and that gives people the ability to improve their adaptive standing in the world. If one pursues language back to its roots through vast eons of time moving back toward a pre-verbal condition from which it perforce must have come, it becomes apparent that something rather like human verbal development from infancy through maturity recapitulates genetic development from pre-verbal to fully verbal potentialities. The first twenty years of a human’s life recapitulates the first twenty thousand years of humanity’s life.

The birth of a human being is recorded to the minute on a birth certificate but in fact this exact minute could probably be varied by a month or more and still produce a perfectly normal baby. The same can probably be said for the birth of humanity.

The exact moment that some females first communicated verbally to each other the qualities which they preferred in males and passed this ability to the other members of their group is the moment of the birth of modern humanity.

However, this exact moment, just like the exact moment of the birth of a baby, might be varied quite a lot. But, when this local social custom becomes a common habit with these women and then a routinized tradition for the whole society, then the groundwork is laid for this to become encoded into the genes.

That first gene which made conversing just a little bit easier or more efficient might also be considered as the birth moment for modern humans. At first this genetic ability would be almost imperceptible but if it conferred a genetic advantage, which it surely would, then that gene would spread through the whole group and through any group with which they interbred.

In the picture above, we see Michelangelo’s “God creating man” with the usual old-man-God being replaced by Goya’s Naked Maja as the new ancestral-mother-God and we also see her advisers helping her make her choice of Adam over the man portrayed as falling away at the bottom.

Communication with others goes back genetically even to plants where they chemically warn each other of danger. Some monkeys possess some twenty or so single verbal calls linked to single situations and one must suppose that almost modern humans with vastly larger brains than monkeys would have an even larger collection of single words. A big breakthrough comes when there are word pairs which communicate more complex thoughts. Not just single words such as raptor, snake or cat for appropriate warnings and reactions but word pairs such as raptor tree, raptor ground, snake tree, snake ground, or cat tree, cat ground which give the hearers of these communications a new advantage in what is appropriate behavior.

When there are word pairs as part of the vocabulary there arises the problem-opportunity of word order where tree snake means a different kind of snake than ground snake. It seems strange that word order could have a genetic component but much of living processes requires an order of events so there could be a genetic component to paying attention to word order because there might be significance in that quality. This genetic quality would take a while to become stabilized but as it does so it permits ever greater possibilities for potential meaning and for the possibility of pairs of word pairs and then genetically potentiating the possibility of complex sentences.

With each of these improvements in human speaking abilities there comes an improvement in the ability to discuss the qualities of potential mates and with that an improvement in mate selection and a further improvement of all of the genetic qualities of the species.

This has been a positive feedback cycle for quite a long time but now with the development of syntax there comes the possibility and the probability to start selecting mates in quite a refined way for all of the qualities which we call human. Because these people are now fully articulate their selective refinements can become rather sophisticated and move into the realm of art, story telling, music, work habits, morality, kindness, reliability, honesty, knowledge of traditions and a whole host of things we call human virtues.

Most of this process of artificial selection has been moderated by females because their commitment to the next generation is personally greater than males.

Thus it is that most females will have a child or two but there are many males who have none and some males who have a great many. This is simply because females perceive some males as more worthy of breeding. Men pursue many women but women choose a few men. This is the way it is now and there is little doubt that that is the way it has been for a very long time. Thus it is that women have controlled the evolution of humanity and still do. The Gods that created humanity were our foremothers.

Read the full article on Probaway Life Hacks

by David Derbyshire, The Daily Mail, London

SALT LAKE CITY – Humans are evolving at a faster rate than at any time in history, according to a study.

Scientists say the speed of natural selection has accelerated so much that within a few generations we will have evolved resistance to diseases such as diabetes and malaria.

But are some hominids evolving backwards?

Instead of people from different parts of the world becoming more alike over time, they have actually been diverging, the study suggests.

Dr. Henry Harpending, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah who led the study, looked for clues about the speed of evolution in the DNA of 270 people from around the world.

The research showed that the population explosion since the Ice Age 10,000 years ago had accelerated the rate of genetic change.

“We aren’t the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago,” he told the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The dogma has been these are cultural fluctuations, but almost any temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influence.

‘We are getting less alike’

“Human races are evolving away from each other. Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin.

“We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity.”

The study looked for genetic evidence of natural selection – the evolution of favorable gene mutations – during the past 80,000 years by analyzing DNA from northern Europe, China, Japan and Africa’s Yoruba tribe.

The Europeans were mostly represented by data from Utah Mormons. It looked at genetic variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms.

These are mutations that appear in DNA and if they are favorable, can spread quickly through natural selection.

The rate of evolution increased 40,000 years ago – after modern humans had left Africa and were colonizing the world – and sped up even more when agriculture was developed 12,000 years ago.

Gene common to Europeans but not Africans and Chinese

These changes included the emergence of paler skin in Europeans to cope with the lack of sunlight in northern climes, and the spread of a gene that allows adults to drink milk without being ill.

Today, that gene is common in Europeans, but rare in Africans and Chinese.

Although the study found growing differences between races, it does not take into account mass migrations of the past 100 years which have brought together people from parts of the world that were once isolated.

Dr. Harpending said differences between races “cannot be used to justify discrimination.”

“People have rights and should have opportunities whatever their group,” he said.

Co-author Dr John Hawks from the University of Wisconsin, said people were evolving resistance to diseases…

Another recently discovered gene, CCR5, originated about 4,000 years ago and now exists in about 10 per cent of the European population.

It was discovered recently because it makes people resistant to HIV/Aids. But its original value might have come from obstructing smallpox, Dr. Hawks said.

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