Your face tells about your sexual behaviour
It seems your sexual behaviour is present in your face, for all to see. I guess “she looks like a slut” means she is one…
The science of religion
The science of religion
Mar 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition
From The Economist print edition
Science and religion have often been at loggerheads. Now the former has decided to resolve the problem by trying to explain the existence of the latter
Read more »
Linking population growth and violence
Young, alive but not very heaven
Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition
Quick tempers come with quick population growth
Why We Love
Time magazine article on love and evolution. The part on pheromones may be inaccurate as it mentions women synchronizing their menstrual cylces, and I am pretty sure I’ve read a recent study debunking that. But it seems to be up to date on the MHC detection issue, with the surprising conclusion that our high divorce rate may be affected by women selecting their mates while on birth control pills and realizing their choice is wrong after they get off it (nomally women prefer men with opposite MHC to their own; but while pregnant or on the pill, they prefer like MHC).
And most importantly, the wise advice: do not pick your mate with elevated levels of adrenalin — that seems to make them more appealing than they really are.
Here is the story:
The secrets of birth order
Research shows family pecking order does shape destiny.
From Time Magazine:
Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2007
The Power of Birth Order
It could not have been easy being Elliott Roosevelt. If the alcohol wasn’t getting him, the morphine was. If it wasn’t the morphine, it was the struggle with depression. Then, of course, there were the constant comparisons with big brother Teddy. Read more »
Hunter-gatherers were savage
For me a key point was this statistics: “Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one person per square mile. Farmers can live at 100 times that density.”
The way I see it is that there are too many people for this earth, and the rate of increase in population means we will have to come up with another miracle technology to be able to support more. Unless of course a nice global epidemic reduces the population, there will be more wars to secure raw resources (there is a limited amount of water, farmland, energy, minerals), with religion/culture as the excuse to start them.
Birth control, anyone?
Noble or savage?
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The trouble with men
Having sons shortens the mother’s life, and also affects younger siblings. Ouch.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=FAEB4508-E7F2-99DF-329AA2F69CCB6D5C
Social circle limit 150?
http://www.dailyreckoning.us/blog/?p=517
“One of the most fascinating tidbits from the new Bill Bonner book, Mobs,
Messiahs, and Markets http://www.agorafinancialpublications.com/Mobs.html,
is the discovery by anthropologists of a limit to the number of human
interactions the brain is capable of processing. Citing British
researcher Robin Dunbar:
‘The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals
with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship that goes with
knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way,
it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining
uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.’
“What’s more, Dunbar’s research uncovered dozens of examples of
hunter-gatherer cultures whose average village size was 150. So it goes
for the modern-day Hutterite communities of the Dakotas and the Canadian
Prairies. A cohesive fighting unit in the military is limited to about
150 or 200. But as Bonner and co-author Lila Rajiva point out, this
number is far smaller than what we find in most modern organizations.”
About
Although it started out as a means of practising expressing myself, this blog is turning out to be more of a compendium of interesting information I come across. One of these days I’ll have to actually write something as opposed to cut and paste. 
