Homosexuality May Have Evolved In Humans Because It Helps Us Bond, Scientists Say. Scientists have long been puzzled by homosexuality, as it seems to be at odds with the basic human drive to reproduce. Various theories have been offered--from the notion that homosexual men make more diligent uncles than their heterosexual counterparts (and thus are better at ensuring the survival of their relatives) to the notion that the same gene that codes for homosexuality in men makes women more fertile. Now researchers from the University of Portsmouth in England have put forth a controversial new theory. They say homosexuality evolved in humans and other primates because it helps us form bonds with one another.
“From an evolutionary perspective, we tend to think of sexual behavior as a means to an end for reproduction," Dr. Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist at the university and one of the researchers, said in a written statement. Then the researchers measured levels of the hormone progesterone in the women's saliva. What did the researchers find? The sex lives of early humans. The science of gay. Study On Near-Death Experiences Sheds Light On Consciousness After Death. The Science of Sleep: Dreaming, Depression, and How REM Sleep Regulates Negative Emotions. By Maria Popova “Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation.” For the past half-century, sleep researcher Rosalind D.
Cartwright has produced some of the most compelling and influential work in the field, enlisting modern science in revising and expanding the theories of Jung and Freud about the role of sleep and dreams in our lives. In The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives (public library), Cartwright offers an absorbing history of sleep research, at once revealing how far we’ve come in understanding this vital third of our lives and how much still remains outside our grasp. One particularly fascinating aspect of her research deals with dreaming as a mechanism for regulating negative emotion and the relationship between REM sleep and depression: The more severe the depression, the earlier the first REM begins.
Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. Choose your destiny in the multiverse. Stephen Hawking’s Charming Children’s Book about Time-Travel, Co-Written with His Daughter. By Maria Popova A pig and a supercomputer walk into a black hole… It’s not uncommon for famous authors of “adult” literature to have also penned lesser-known but no less lovely children’s books — take, for instance, those by Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, James Joyce, E. E> Cummings, and Sylvia Plath. Famous scientists, on the other hand, are more likely to become the subject of a children’s book rather than the author of one. In 2007, Hawking wrote George’s Secret Key to the Universe (public library) — a charming, imaginative story about the mesmerism of space and the allure of time-travel, featuring lovely semi-Sendakian crosshatch illustrations by Garry Parsons. One morning, George — a little boy raised by lo-fi, bookish parents who believe technology is evil — discovers that his pet pig Freddy has disappeared.
And so begin the adventures, on which George encounters black holes (and learns — of course! Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Share on Tumblr. Researcher Finds Support For One Of Darwin's Controversial Theories. When Charles Darwin first put forward his revolutionary theory of evolution, he was met with considerable opposition and skepticism from both scientific and religious circles. While this is now entirely accepted by the scientific community, some of his ideas have continued to cause controversy for more than 150 years. One contentious hypothesis, for example, suggested that organisms could cross vast distances and oceans and then successfully establish themselves in a new geographic location. To achieve this “jump dispersal,” it was proposed that organisms could hitch a ride on various objects such as mats of vegetation and icebergs, or even just blow in the wind. Although this idea has been largely dismissed by the scientific community, new research on island dwelling organisms suggests that he may have been right after all.
Using statistical modeling to compare Darwin’s theory with a competing theory, strong evidence in support of jump dispersal was found. The Surprising Source of Our Sexual Morals. Pablo Hidalgo/Shutterstock People often ask what kind of human sexual relationship is most evolutionarily "natural. " Is human nature adapted for promiscuity or long-term relationships, for example? And if we're wired for long-term relationships, what kind—monogamy or some type of polygamy? It turns out that people are probably adapted—biologically and psychologically—for all of the above. That is, people appear to be, sexually, "strategically pluralistic": We are adapted for various kinds of long-term and short-term relationships, and the mating strategy we choose depends on factors including our gender (on average and cross-culturally, men are more interested than women in short-term relationships), our attractiveness, and the specific characteristics of our sociocultural and ecological environments [1,2].
This evolved flexibility leads to considerable diversity across individuals and cultures in the mating strategies that people pursue. References Gangestad, S. Copyright Michael E. 50 Science Misconceptions. 10 things you didn't know about vaginas.
How a baby was trained to fear. Spreading Continents Kick-Started Plate Tectonics Billions of Years Ago. First described in the 1960s, plate tectonics explains how volcanoes build mountains and shape oceans. But have these large-scale motions always been this way? A new computer model suggests that plate tectonics was kick-started by gravity and the spreading of continents during the early days of Earth. The work was published in Nature this week. Today, plate tectonics and the resulting movements of the crust and upper mantle (or lithosphere) are primarily driven by the “negative buoyancy” of cold plates—the top is cooler and denser than what’s below—which causes one plate to slip under another in a process called subduction. During the Archaen eon around 2.5 billion to 4 billion years ago, however, Earth’s interior was much hotter, volcanic activity was more prominent, and the ocean crust was presumably thicker. Watch an 87-million-year-long story in this nine-second video.
Image/video: Patrice F Rey, Nicolas Coltice and Nicolas Flament. What are you laughing at? – the science behind laughter. Were we happier in the stone age? We are far more powerful than our ancestors, but are we much happier? Historians seldom stop to ponder this question, yet ultimately, isn't it what history is all about? Our understanding and our judgment of, say, the worldwide spread of monotheistic religion surely depends on whether we conclude that it raised or lowered global happiness levels. And if the spread of monotheism had no noticeable impact on global happiness, what difference did it make? With the rise of individualism and the decline of collectivist ideologies, happiness is arguably becoming our supreme value. With the stupendous growth in human production, happiness is also acquiring unprecedented economic importance. Consumerist economies are increasingly geared to supply happiness rather than subsistence or even affluence, and a chorus of voices is now calling for a replacement of GDP measurements with happiness statistics as the basic economic yardstick.
The Whig view of history Paradise lost Paradise now Lonely and grey? Comment le langage est-il venu ? Rencontre avec Jean-Marie Hombert et Gérard Lenclud. Un nouveau scénario vient expliquer l’apparition du langage. Jean-Marie Hombert est linguiste, Gérard Lenclud anthropologue. Ils sont les auteurs de Comment le langage est venu à l’homme (Fayard, 2014), un ouvrage qui compile des siècles de débats, d’hypothèses et de spéculations sur les origines du langage.
À l’encontre de certains chercheurs prônant que la parole résulte d’une mutation soudaine de notre espèce, eux défendent que le processus a été graduel. Le langage serait-il le propre de l’humain ? Gérard Lenclud – Tout dépend, évidemment, de la définition que l’on donne du langage. Jean-Marie Hombert – Lorsque l’on parle de l’origine du langage humain, le mot « origine » renvoie à l’idée d’un commencement absolu. Quels sont les prérequis définissant le langage ? J. Selon vous, le langage est donc apparu graduellement. G.L. – Le terme de trace est équivoque. J. Il y a 120 000 ans commence la dernière glaciation. Peut-on penser que le langage ait été inventé une fois, ou plusieurs ? J. J. Archimedes. Darwin’s Battle with Anxiety. By Maria Popova A posthumous diagnosis of the paralyzing mental malady that afflicted one of humanity’s greatest minds.
Charles Darwin was undoubtedly among the most significant thinkers humanity has ever produced. But he was also a man of peculiar mental habits, from his stringent daily routine to his despairingly despondent moods to his obsessive list of the pros and cons of marriage. Those, it turns out, may have been simply Darwin’s best adaptation strategy for controlling a malady that dominated his life, the same one that afflicted Vincent van Gogh — a chronic anxiety, which rendered him among the legions of great minds evidencing the relationship between creativity and mental illness. Stossel writes: Observers going back to Aristotle have noted that nervous dyspepsia and intellectual accomplishment often go hand in hand.
For 25 years extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence: occasional vomiting, on two occasions prolonged during months. Stossel chronicles Darwin’s descent: Right-brained? Left-brained? Take the brain test! Walking fish replays evolution from land to sea. 3 More Things You Didn't Realize About How Your Brain Works. We all pride ourselves on making considered, well-thought-out decisions, and avoiding snap judgments based on little or no information. But despite our insistent belief in our “reasoning,” the fact is that a lot of the time, we’re doing nothing of the kind. Human beings are actually hardwired to make snap judgments, or to engage in what Daniel Kahneman has called “fast” thinking—much of it taking place outside of our conscious awareness. At the risk of making you feel like a puppet on a string (albeit your own brain's string) consider the following research and ask yourself, “Who’s driving the car that’s me?”
(For more on this topic, see my earlier post.) 1. Did you know that if you just ask people to think about a library, they’re more likely to lower their voices to a whisper? Even objects in a room can cue behavior, as another experiment by Bargh and his colleagues demonstrated. 2. 3. You take an immediate shine to Jack or Jill because you’re certain that he or she is open and honest. La vie de l'embryon : de la fécondation à la naissance (cycle À la recherche de nos origines 1/3) Powers of Ten: The amazing scale of the universe.
10 Mind-Blowing Theories That Will Change Your Perception of the World. Reality is not as obvious and simple as we like to think. Some of the things that we accept as true at face value are notoriously wrong. Scientists and philosophers have made every effort to change our common perceptions of it. The 10 examples below will show you what I mean. 1. Great glaciation. Great glaciation is the theory of the final state that our universe is heading toward. 2. Solipsism is a philosophical theory, which asserts that nothing exists but the individual’s consciousness. Don’t you believe me? As a result, which parts of existence can we not doubt? 3. George Berkeley, the father of Idealism, argued that everything exists as an idea in someone’s mind. The idea being that if the stone really only exists in his imagination, he could not have kicked it with his eyes closed. 4. Everybody has heard of Plato.
In addition to this stunning statement, Plato, being a monist, said that everything is made of a single substance. 5. 6. Enternalism is the exact opposite of presentism. Internal Time: The Science of Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired. By Maria Popova Debunking the social stigma around late risers, or what Einstein has to do with teens’ risk for smoking.
“Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal performance.) This perceived superiority of those who can get by on less sleep isn’t just something Napoleon shared with dictators like Hitler and Stalin, it’s an enduring attitude woven into our social norms and expectations, from proverbs about early birds to the basic scheduling structure of education and the workplace. The distribution of midsleep in Central Europe. This myth that early risers are good people and that late risers are lazy has its reasons and merits in rural societies but becomes questionable in a modern 24/7 society. The scissors of sleep. Chronotypes vary with age: [T]he less stress smokers have, the easier it is for them to quit. (Thanks, Jalees.) Think You're Thinking? 6 Reasons to Think Again. 1. I base my decisions on facts.
A special shout-out to Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Twersky for giving us the “availability heuristic,” which explains the quick and ready answers and facts that pop in our heads which, alas, have nothing to do with thinking and are the ones we’re most likely to rely on when we make a choice or decision. The bottom line is that this mental shortcut —which highlights the most recent, most often repeated, and most mentally available “facts”—results in our overestimating the importance of certain bits of information and lures us into thinking that good things as well as bad ones are more probable than they actually are. This kind of fast “connect the dots” thinking was valuable in human evolutionary history when dangers and perils—as well as rewards— were largely physical and required fast responses.
In 2014, most of our choices are far more benign. Quick quiz here: The animal most likely to kill an American? 2. Not true, either. Who Connects Best Online, and Why. Diego Cervo / Shutterstock Psychologists have long been interested in the concept of attachment, which has its origins in our childhood experiences, primarily with those who raised us. Being raised in a family where nurturance is combined equally with structure creates what are called secure parent-child (or caregiver-child) attachments.
The secure child, in turn, is likely to grow into an adult who is unafraid to venture into the world and who is also capable of forming and sustaining relationships. But what happens if something goes awry? Anxiety and Avoidance in Real-World Relationships There are two variations on so-called insecure attachment styles that can emerge from developmental years that are characterized by a great deal of rejection, ambivalence, or abuse. They are described well in an article published by R. Where Do You Fall?
Answer each item as it describes you as follows: 0 = Not at all / 1 = Describes me a little / 3 = Describes me a lot ___ I often feel unlovable. 7 Survival Tips That Could Save Your Life. #2 Is Awesome! Have you ever wondered how to filter water, keep away the mosquitos or how to make a solar microwave? These tips might save your life one day. 1. Need some light in a pinch and a candle alone won’t cut it? Grab a soda can and cut open the sides, fold them out and place the candle in. This will reflect your light and give you some decent protection from the elements. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. For a visual preview of all of the tips in this list, watch the video!
Credits: HouseholdHacker. Scientists Are Beginning To Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative. Evidence That Friends Really Are The Family We Choose. Common Science Myths That Most People Believe. Women Who Have Children Older, Live Longer. Biggest Misconceptions About The Universe Explained. The Science of Stress, Orgasm and Creativity: How the Brain and the Vagina Conspire in Consciousness. How the Universe Works: Stephen Hawking’s Theory of Everything, Animated in 150 Seconds.