Marriage and divorce 'up weight'

To some extent, marriages for women promote weight gains that may be large enough to pose a health risk

Is nothing sacred? The sad demise of Norway's "sex priest"

“Christendom, as propagated by the church,” he says, “has been more hostile to sex than any other religion,” leading directly to widespread rape, abuse, and general unhappiness.

The Artificial Ape

Memes provably don't exist. Technological development is too complex to be explained by Darwinian like evolution.

Does a long-term relationship kill romantic love?

The conclusion of "Does a long-term relationship kill romantic love?" is in line with previous research findings: In an overwhelming majority of cases (from 6 of 7 to 9 of 10 couples) romantic love completely disappears. These findings relate to sexually monogamous couples.


Three types of love are identified:

Eros / Romantic love (intensity, sexual interest, and engagement)

Mania / Passionate love (romantic love with obsession) 

Storge / Companionate love (warm, less intense love, devoid of attraction and sexual desire.)

The chronologic sequence and research findings (My comments in parenthesis):

Passionate love - (This gets the couple together.) If it doesn't end soon enough, relationship satisfaction is decreased. Too much drama for the long-term.

Romantic love - (This builds and maintains the pair bond.) It declines later in all cases, but for 1 of 8 couples it remains high enough to maintain sexual interest and therefore continue.

Companionate love - Also called "friend love." Satisfaction with the relationship is lower than with romantic love. (This is where an overwhelming majority of marriages end up under the monogamy for life / one-and-only plan.)

From the paper:

Conclusion

Contrary to what has been widely believed, long-term romantic love (with intensity, sexual interest, and engagement, but without the obsessive element common in new relationships), appears to be a real phenomenon that may be enhancing to individuals’ lives— positively intense long-term romantic love sets a standard that couples (and marital therapists) can strive for that is higher than seems to have been generally considered realistic. This could also be distressing for long-term couples who have achieved a kind of contented, even happy—but not intensely romantic—status quo, assuming it is the best anyone can expect. Couples benefit from downward social comparison with other couples and will even distort their evaluation of their own relationship to an objectively unrealistically positive view.

These last two sentences may explain the more extreme resistance to polyamory often seen:

86% in the USA consider poly to be morally wrong.

Why biology should inform social policy

LEFT-LEANING politicians have traditionally blamed the structure of western society for the feckless and antisocial behaviour of its "underclass". Now biologists are chiming in.

Animals that live shorter, riskier lives tend to reproduce early, and that applies to humans living in tough circumstances, too. So teenaged mothers and wayward fathers may be an evolutionary response to deprivation, and many of the problem behaviours that plague western societies could be put down to a biological "die young, live fast" strategy.

The solution is to improve the health and wellbeing of the poorest in society and give all young people the prospect of a good job and a stake in their future. But that looks unlikely, given the economic downturn.

In recent years, though, we have gained considerable insights into the prerequisites for human fulfilment. Health and security may be top of the list, but we also thrive on community, fairness, bonding, altruism, playfulness and celebration. Hard-pressed politicians seeking inspiration would do well to look to these biological principles.

Can more sex make up for less life?

Does an extra dose of testosterone pay long-term dividends? A higher level of the hormone increases sex drive and attractiveness of males, leading to more offspring and increased evolutionary fitness; it also weakens the immune system, amplifies stress, and encourages recklessness, increasing the risk of departing the gene pool altogether. Looking at songbirds, Wendy Reed, a physiological ecologist at North Dakota State University, set out to determine whether, evolutionarily speaking, a little extra machismo is really worth it. And since testosterone has pretty much the same effect across all species, her results probably extend to humans as well.

Freedom from Sexual Self-Denial

Freedom from Sexual Self-Denial: Why Not Have Sex With People Who Aren't Your Partner?

Infidelity is treated as selfish, while monogamy is celebrated. But what's so great about living a life of self-denial?

Understanding the True Dynamics of Sexual Abuse

The less traumatic sexual abuse was when it happened, the more betrayal, guilt, isolation, and shame victims will feel and the more psychological distress and dysfunction they may experience in the aftermath. And because it is backwards, the trauma model is not just failing to help victims; it is actually causing some of the harm it was supposed explain by simultaneously exacerbating the victim's damaging beliefs

Existentialism Today: Terror Management Theory

This is the original introduction for a Letter, tentatively titled, "Can unconscious motivation explain the Climate Crisis."

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The purpose of this note is to alert researchers and activists to a recent development in social psychology which offers a scientifically validated way to understand the unconscious motivations of activists and others involved in social movements. Over the last 25 years, terror management theory (TMT) (Pyszczynski et al., 1999; 2004) has demonstrated its validity through hundreds of controlled experiments. This new approach has proved theoretically sound, as well as applicable in a wide range of practical situations. It has been applied in marketing, management, psychotherapy, politics, economics, and other areas. Terror management theory is based upon the work of a cultural anthropologist (Becker, 1973) (A Foundation has been established to disseminate the results of research in this area to both academics and the public at large. URL: http://www.ernestbecker.org/).


Terror management theory

The theory attempts to explain the foundations of culture and of personal identity. It is a subset of a framework that is known as generative death anxiety. The underlying idea of this framework is that many creative acts can be explained by the desire for immortality in some form, for example, through monuments, buildings, or other lasting objects or symbols. TMT considers culture to be a societal level reflection of individual identity processes. It defines culture as a system of meanings that supersedes the natural world and elevates humans to a higher plane of existence. It defines social identity as our membership in groups.

Terror management theory assumes that at a certain point in human evolution cognitive complexity reached a level which enabled self-awareness. This capacity for self-awareness and the corresponding awareness that the self will cease to exist in the future is the foundation for terror management theory. That is, the awareness of the inevitability of death in an animal programmed for self-preservation by evolution leads to the potential for paralyzing terror. The human species created culture to control this terror. Cultural worldviews ameliorate anxiety by:

:conceiving a universe with meaning

:providing standards of value

:promising death transcendence to those who meet those standards.


That is, terror management theory assumes that a successful society must create a cultural anxiety buffer that shields the individual from the awareness of death. When a death reminder is encountered, it is expected that one of two types of psychological reactions take place. One is worldview defense, that is, responses reinforcing the cultural belief system. The other is a striving to increase status, as defined by the cultural belief system, and thereby self-esteem, since increases in self-esteem have been shown to reduce anxiety. In the well adjusted individual, these responses occur unconsciously, so the individual need never become aware of the death reminder or the processes that suppress awareness of it.

Psychological Emergence of the Self and Modern Socio-Cultural Dilemmas

Cultural Attitudes and Rumors Are Lasting Obstacles to Safe Sex

Because a man buys a wife from her father for cows or cash, he “owns” her. If she refuses sex or insists on a condom, he may beat her or throw her out of the house.

Darwin dynasty's ill health blamed on inbreeding

Darwin was so concerned about inbreeding that he lobbied unsuccessfully in 1870 for questions about first-cousin marriages to be added to the following year's national census form.

At the time, "blood marriages" were common, unions with first or second cousins accounting for 10 per cent of all marriages, often to keep money or influence in the family. Today, around a fifth of all marriages in the world are consanguineous

The Mythology of Prostitution

Knowledge regarding sex work is increasingly being distorted by a group of influential activists, organizations, and some academics who regard the sex industry as a universally harmful institution.

The result is that prostitution policies are becoming increasingly divorced from sound research based on standard canons of scientific research. Prostitution policy is by no means unique in this regard; morality and dogma have also trumped science in recent policies on stem cells, HIV prevention, and needle-exchange programs

Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal

The images obtained showed that during intercourse in the "missionary position" the penis has the shape of a boomerang and 1/3 of its length consists of the root of the penis. During female sexual arousal without intercourse the uterus was raised and the anterior vaginal wall lengthened. The size of the uterus did not increase during sexual arousal.

The quest for the perfect female orgasm

Canner soon began to suspect that her employer -- along with many other pharmaceutical companies -- were exploiting women in pursuit of big bucks.

Scientists discover true love

A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.


(The fact that it is only 1 of 10 is generally not reported in the media.)

About Sam Harris’ claim that science can answer moral questions

As it turns out, there is much that Harris and I agree on, but I think his main target is actually moral relativism, and that he would get more mileage out of allying himself with philosophy (not to the exclusion of science), rather than taking what appears to be the same misguided scientistic attitude that Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have come to embody so well. But let us start with a summary of Harris’ arguments, with extensive quotations from the lecture, proceeding then to my commentary.

95% of victims of sexual exploitation by clergy are adult women

 One American report states that 'although clergy of any denomination can sexually exploit children, teens, men or women, over 95% of victims of sexual exploitation by clergy are adult women'. Another study found that 3.1% of regular women congregants (women in the congregation) had suffered sexual abuse.

In 2001 the European parliament passed an unprecedented motion, blaming the Vatican for the rapes of African nuns in the 1990s.

we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating: Nazism, Stalinism

The new Catholic Bishop of Parramatta, in Sydney's west, Anthony Fisher, drew broader comparisons.
"Last century we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating: Nazism, Stalinism, Pol Pot-ery, mass murder, abortion and broken relationships - all promoted by state-imposed atheism," he said.

How intellectuals who affect a liberal style, are imbued with reactionary ideas.

Ophelia Benson has the worst job in the blogosphere. She reads the papers of cultural studies and post-colonial academics - and given their  obscurantism she often must be their only reader - and explains how intellectuals who affect a liberal style, are imbued with reactionary ideas. The regurgitators of received wisdom hate her for it.

Competition drives cooperation among closely related sperm

These results suggest that sperm from promiscuous deer mice discriminate among relatives and thereby cooperate with the most closely related sperm, an adaptation likely to have been driven by sperm competition.