Comments on: Why beautiful people have more daughters

By: me

me — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:00:52 +0000

don’t hate people, this is scientfically proven.

By: smritiweb.com » Why I cannot resist surfing the web

smritiweb.com » Why I cannot resist surfing the web — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 04:20:52 +0000

[...] this is hardwired into our brain due to evolutionary forces. Just like cats and laser pointers: Many cat owners know that the lasers are the easiest way to [...]

By: navin

navin — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 01:15:20 +0000

@Idetrorce, A couple of points:
1. I don’t think you can really disagree with me here, because, if you notice, I haven’t really given my personal views anywhere in the above article. I’ve just reported what the authors have written in their book.
2. Why do you disagree? It would be interesting to hear the reasons and then we can argue about those. Specifically, they cite scientific studies to back up their claim – if you disagree then you’ll need to give an argument as to why those studies might be flawed…

By: Idetrorce

Idetrorce — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 16:43:53 +0000

very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce

By: navin

navin — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:10:37 +0000

There’s one more that I really like. Evolution actually explains the conditions under which we would sacrifice something (even life) for someone else – a result which is initially surprising given that it goes against the principle of survival.

The basic idea is this: An individual can maximize the representation of his genes in succeeding generations by either increasing his own personal genetic fitness or by increasing the fitness of his relatives, as relatives are likely to share a great number of his genes. Link.

In other words, you have evolved in such a way that your willingness to sacrifice something for another person is dependent upon how “close” that person is to you. I am guessing that nationalism/patriotism can also be explained this way.

By: Venkat

Venkat — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 02:39:30 +0000

This is fascinating. I never imagined this particular kind of subtlety in evolution.

This now trumps the previous weirdest things I’ve learned about evolution:

1. That the eye evolved independently about 40 times

2. That in ant colonies, mathematical analysis shows that the “queen” ant is really slave to her daughters — they decide the pattern of reproduction.

Both are in Richard Dawkins works. The mathematics of evolution looks beguilingly simple — after all genetic algorithms are pretty trivial to code up. But it leads to amazingly subtle effects in practice.