Environmental Factors Quotes

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I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.
Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1))
the fundamental attribution error is the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their intentions and personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors.
Patrick Lencioni (The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business)
You must realize, Mr. Blaine, that a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him.
Robert Sheckley (Immortality, Inc.)
a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him. A man contains all these things, but he is greater than their total.
Robert Sheckley (Immortality Inc.)
There can be no doubt that this resistance to killing one’s fellow man is there and that it exists as a result of a powerful combination of instinctive, rational, environmental, hereditary, cultural, and social factors. It is there, it is strong, and it gives us cause to believe that there just may be hope for mankind after all.
Dave Grossman (On Killing)
Check your environment and be sure that it is supportive. Some environments do not support progress. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not fertile lands for a farmer’s dream seeds. Change location.
Israelmore Ayivor (Shaping the dream)
Environmental factors cause them to go extinct, or they destroy themselves or their planet, such as what Earth would likely have done had we not intervened. Some civilizations are destroyed by AI because they fail to properly manage the power of AI to learn. Left unchecked, AI will always destroy its creators.
Steven Decker (Gods of Another Kind (Another Kind, #3))
How we eat, how much we exercise, how we manage stress, our exposure to environmental and food-based toxins, and the structural violence or “obesogenic environment” that influences these factors are what is truly driving our diabesity epidemic.
Mark Hyman (The Blood Sugar Solution: The UltraHealthy Program for Losing Weight, Preventing Disease, and Feeling Great Now! (The Dr. Mark Hyman Library Book 1))
Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered. In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck. Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students. This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not. The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.
Christopher Michael Langan
Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors—
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors—be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature?
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
Epigenetic factors, or factors beyond the control of your genes (such as diet, lifestyle, environmental exposures, and mindset), almost exclusively determine your life-span and quality of life.
Sayer Ji (Regenerate: Unlocking Your Body's Radical Resilience through the New Biology)
But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors—be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do the prisoners’ reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances?
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
Males are not genetically programmed to aggressively dominate females. Their ability to do so depends on environmental and social factors. The key ingredient for female empowerment is the strength of the sisterhood, from family to friends, to overthrow an oppressive patriarchy and foster a more egalitarian society.
Lucy Cooke (Bitch: On the Female of the Species)
Traffic will not yield to our will, neither will global finances, the environment, political rhetoric, nor people in general. There is no way to solve the problem of stress through blaming environmental factors.
Gudjon Bergmann (Yes! You Can Manage Stress: Regain Control of Your Life Using the Five Habits of Effective Stress Management)
The mysteries of life include the external and the internal conundrums that each person encounters in a world composed of competing ideologies and agents of change. Conflicting ideas include political, social, legal, and ethical concepts. Agents of change include environmental factors, social pressure to conform, aging, and the forces inside us that made us into whom we are as well as the forces compelling us to be a different type of person.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
Every textbook description of a disease should have, in our opinion, a section devoted to its evolutionary aspects. This section should address the following questions: 1. Which aspects of the syndrome are direct manifestations of the disease, and which are actually defenses? 2. If the disease has a genetic component, why do the responsible genes persist? 3. Do novel environmental factors contribute to the disease? 4. If the disease is related
Randolph M. Nesse (Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine)
In a landmark paper published almost thirty years ago, researchers compared environmental factors and cancer rates in thirty-two countries around the world.65 One of the strongest links between any cancer and any dietary factor was between colon cancer and meat intake.
T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
For us to witness aurora borealis at all, and to see certain colors, depends on where we are in the world. The timing has to be right. There are so many variables at play. So many environmental factors that need to align.” A weak smile crosses her face. “Just like fate.
Lauren Kung Jessen (Red String Theory)
Here’s the reality: “Infants and toddlers are natural night-wakers which has been shown to be protective against SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Children tend to differ not in whether they wake in the night or not, but in whether they need help being soothed back to sleep or not based on their own unique personality, health, environmental factors, etc. Sleeping patterns are neither a sign of a ‘good’ baby or a ‘bad’ baby, just a normal baby. Even adults tend to wake frequently at night, but typically just roll over or adjust their blankets or take a quick trip to the bathroom and then go back to sleep. They just often don’t remember any of it in the morning! In reality, night-waking is simply a biological norm1 that has been misconstrued as ‘problems sleeping’ or ‘sleep issues’ by the demands of our modern, hectic lifestyle.
L.R. Knost (The Gentle Parent: Positive, Practical, Effective Discipline (A Little Hearts Handbook))
Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors—be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature?
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
The article ended by downplaying “disparate access to medical care or other environmental factors,” arguing that “our data suggest that the proposed genetic component to preterm birth may be a greater etiological contributor than previously recognized”—despite presenting no genetic data whatsoever!22
Dorothy Roberts (Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century)
No one knows, because it is essentially impossible to determine, to what extent environmental factors contribute to cancers now. More than eighty thousand chemicals are produced commercially in the world today, and by one calculation 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans.
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
Errors of reductionism and biodeterminism take over in such silly statements as “Intelligence is 60 percent genetic and 40 percent environmental.” A 60 percent (or whatever) “heritability” for intelligence means no such thing. We shall not get this issue straight until we realize that the “interactionism” we all accept does not permit such statements as “Trait x is 29 percent environmental and 71 percent genetic.” When causative factors (more than two, by the way) interact so complexly, and throughout growth, to produce an intricate adult being, we cannot, in principle, parse that being’s behavior into quantitative percentages of remote root causes. The adult being is an emergent entity who must be understood at his own level and in his own totality. The truly salient issues are malleability and flexibility, not fallacious parsing by percentages. A trait may be 90 percent heritable, yet entirely malleable.
Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man)
A planet might deteriorate even if human beings existed upon it, if the society were itself abnormal and did not understand the importance of preserving the environment." "Surely," said Pelorat, "such a society would quickly be destroyed. I don't think it would be possible for human beings to fail to understand the importance of retaining the very factors that are keeping them alive." Bliss said, "I don't have your pleasant faith in human reason, Pel. It seems to me to be quite conceivable that when a planetary society consists of Isolates, local and even individual concerns might easily by allowed to overcome planetary concerns.
Isaac Asimov (Foundation and Earth (Foundation, #5))
This exciting new field of epigenetics--meaning literally "around" the gene--allows us to see how environmental factors alter our gene expression in a specific place within each cell. As a result, we now know that when we take active control of these factors, we can literally help control our health and genetic destiny.
Woodson Merrell (The Detox Prescription: Supercharge Your Health, Strip Away Pounds, and Eliminate the Toxins Within)
Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment. But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one. And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?
Peter Watts (Blindsight (Firefall, #1))
Defining yourself in terms of how you rank is always dangerous and ultimately immature. It doesn't matter whether the rank has to do with your grades, your weight or where you finished in the 800 meter race. Becoming a mature adult means, among other things, that you define yourself relative to your own potential, not relative somebody else's standard.
Leonard Sax (Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls: Sexual Identity, the Cyberbubble, Obsessions, Environmental Toxins)
DURING THE PAST TWO TO THREE DECADES, we have acquired substantial evidence that most chronic diseases in America can be partially attributed to bad nutrition. Expert government panels have said it, the surgeon general has said it and academic scientists have said it. More people die because of the way they eat than by tobacco use, accidents or any other lifestyle or environmental factor.
T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine-tuning. It is a consequence of the no-boundary condition as well as many other theories of modern cosmology. But if it is true, then the strong anthropic principle can be considered effectively equivalent to the weak one, putting the fine-tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is only one of many, just as our solar system is one of many. That means that in the same way that the environmental coincidences of our solar system were rendered unremarkable by the realization that billions of such systems exist, the fine-tunings in the laws of nature can be explained by the existence of multiple universes.
Stephen Hawking (The Grand Design)
Although all the characteristics of living things are dependent on both genetic and environmental factors, the differences between two individuals in their attributes may be due to either one or the other component (or both). That is, a difference in either genes or environment can generate a developmental difference arising from the interplay that always takes place between two factors within developing organisms.
John Alcock (Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach)
Many women, worried about breast cancer, have adopted vegetarian diets in an attempt to reduce their risk. Unfortunately, it may be that these grain- and starch-based diets actually increase the risk of breast cancer, because they elevate insulin—which, in turn, increases IGF-1 and lowers IGFBP-3. A large epidemiological study of Italian women, led by Dr. Silvia Franceschi, has shown that eating large amounts of pasta and refined bread raises the risk of developing both breast and colorectal cancer. Most vegetarian diets are based on starchy grains and legumes. Sadly—despite continuing perceptions of these as healthy foods—vegetarian diets don’t reduce the risk of cancer. In the largest-ever study comparing the causes of death in more than 76,000 people, it was decisively shown that there were no differences in death rates from breast, prostate, colorectal, stomach, or lung cancer between vegetarians and meat eaters. Cancer is a complex process involving many genetic and environmental factors. It is almost certain that no single dietary element is responsible for all cancers. However, with the low-glycemic Paleo Diet, which is also high in lean protein and health-promoting fruits and vegetables, your risk of developing many types of cancer may be very much reduced.
Loren Cordain (The Paleo Diet Revised: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat)
I like to ensure that I have music and art all around me. My personal favorite is old maps. What I love about old maps is that they are both beautiful and imperfect. These imperfections represent that some of the most talented in history were still very wrong (early cartography was very difficult). As the majority of my work is analysis and advisory, I find it a valuable reminder that my knowledge is limited. No matter how much data or insight I have, I can never fully “map out” any business. Yet, despite the incompleteness of these early cartographers, so much was learned of the world. So much done and accomplished. Therefore, these maps, or art pieces, serve as something to inspire both humility and achievement. This simple environmental factor helps my productivity and the overall quality of my work. Again, it’s like adding positive dice to my hand that are rolled each day.
Evan Thomsen (Don’t Chase The Dream Job, Build It: The unconventional guide to inventing your career and getting any job you want)
The development of cognition, motivation, and self-regulation does not end with adolescence; indeed, personality traits do not reach their maximum stability until the third or fourth decade of life. This suggests that life history strategies are partially open to revision for a large portion of the life course -possibly depending on factors such as success in mating and reproduction, major environmental fluctuations, or unexpected changes in health, wealth or status.
Marco del Giudice (Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach)
Perhaps the most visionary of emerging recommender systems is Google’s patented environment-based recommender system. The tech behemoth has patented "advertising based on environmental conditions," which draws on environmental factors such as temperature and humidity collected through device sensors. In addition to climatic factors, the technology is said to gather light, sound, and air composition and translates this information into criteria for what ads to serve users.
Oliver Theobald (Machine Learning: Make Your Own Recommender System (Machine Learning with Python for Beginners Book Series 3))
We’re going to be affected by environmental and genetic factors over which we have little or no control. But we each get to choose whether or not we stay a victim. We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we do get to choose how we respond to our experience.
Edith Eger (The Gift: 14 Lessons to Save Your Life)
But there is a critical point about differences between individuals that exerts arguably more influence on worker productivity than any other. The factor is locus of control, a fancy name for how people view their autonomy and agency in the world. People with an internal locus of control believe that they are responsible for (or at least can influence) their own fates and life outcomes. They may or may not feel they are leaders, but they feel that they are essentially in charge of their lives. Those with an external locus of control see themselves as relatively powerless pawns in some game played by others; they believe that other people, environmental forces, the weather, malevolent gods, the alignment of celestial bodies-- basically any and all external events-- exert the most influence on their lives.
Daniel J. Levitin (The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload)
The environmental factors said to be most influential in shaping us were not those he had predicted. The essay suggested that mothers and fathers are often convinced they have a decisive influence over their children’s development, but they “flatter themselves.” Hilda argued that our fate is more likely determined by what she called our “unique environment”—the one we do not share with anyone, not even our siblings. It is the environment we seek out and create for ourselves, for example, when we find something which delights and fascinates us and drives us in a certain direction.
David Lagercrantz (The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (Millennium, #5))
War, which is to say misplaced sexual energy, which we consider to be a larger factor than the economic, racial, and religious causes often cited. Contagious diseases, especially sexually transmitted ones. Overpopulation, leading – as we’ve seen in spades – to environmental degradation and poor nutrition.
Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1))
In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation—almost all of the nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, a factor in global warming. (Large cattle ranches are the major offenders in the Amazon, but small-scale farmers are responsible for up to a third of the clearing.) Fortunately, it is a relatively new practice, which means it has not yet had much time to cause damage. More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
[Irving Gottesman & James Shields] argued that schizophrenia could be caused by not just one gene but a chorus of many genes, working in tandem with, or perhaps activated by, various environmental factors [..] They proposed that there exists a "liability threshold" for genetic illness - a theoretical point beyond which some people might develop the illness. The causes that would collaborate to bring someone close to this threshold might be genetic or environmental - a family history of the disease and a traumatic childhood, perhaps. But without the critical mass of these factors, a person might live their entire life with a genetic legacy of schizophrenia and not become symptomatic
Robert Kolker (Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family)
Robert Hare has pointed out that sociologists are more likely to focus on the environmental or socially modifiable facets of the disorder, so prefer the term sociopathy, whereas psychologists and psychiatrists prefer to include the genetic, cognitive, and emotional factors as well as the social factors when making a diagnosis, and therefore would opt for psychopathy.
James Fallon (The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain)
Engel’s biopsychosocial model proposed that psychological and social factors could either protect a person from illness or increase his or her susceptibility to it. Such factors include a person’s beliefs and attitudes, how supported and loved a person feels by family and friends, the psychological and environmental stresses to which one is exposed, and personal health behaviors.
Jon Kabat-Zinn (Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness)
Importantly, maternal stress impacts fetal development. There are indirect routes—for example, stressed people consume less healthy diets and consume more substances of abuse. More directly, stress alters maternal blood pressure and immune defenses, which impact a fetus. Most important, stressed mothers secrete glucocorticoids, which enter fetal circulation and basically have the same bad consequences as in stressed infants and children. Glucocorticoids accomplish this through organizational effects on fetal brain construction and decreasing levels of growth factors, numbers of neurons and synapses, and so on. Just as prenatal testosterone exposure generates an adult brain that is more sensitive to environmental triggers of aggression, excessive prenatal glucocorticoid exposure produces an adult brain more sensitive to environmental triggers of depression and anxiety.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
It should be clear by now that I believe mental imagery to be a key factor in determining mental toughness. In fact, your own perception of yourself will dictate all of your subsequent behaviors, as well as what you’ll get out of life. You can’t do anything without a lot of psychological stress, when this image isn’t aligned with the picture you have in your mind. This will largely be a consequence of your past programming and environmental experiences.
Katherine Chambers (Mental Toughness: A Psychologist’s Guide to Becoming Psychologically Strong - Develop Resilience, Self-Discipline & Willpower on Demand (Psychology Self-Help Book 13))
This part concerns the unshakable feeling one gets, one thinks, after the unthinkable and unexplainable happens--the feeling that, if this person can die, and that person can die, and this can happen and that can happen...well, then what exactly is preventing everything from happening to this person, he around whom everything else happened? Just as some police--particularly those they dramatize on television--might be familiar with death, and might expect it an any instant--so does the author, possessing a naturally paranoid disposition, compounded by environmental factors that make it seem not only possible but probable that whatever there might be out there that snuffs out life is probably sniffing around for him, that his number is perennially, eternally up, that his draft number is low, that his bingo card is hot, that he has a bull's-eye on his chest and target on his back. It's fun. You'll see.
Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)
Toxic pheromone pollution. How can we combat that?” Charles Groh and I looked at each other. This was it. We’d finally arrived at the hard part. What had to be done. “The first step,” I said, “would be removing the factors that are causing the environmental disturbance.” “Remove petroleum products?” said the president. “And cell phones?” said the secretary of state. I nodded at both of them, then looked out at the faces around the table and on the screens.
James Patterson (Zoo)
Study a gene in only one environment and, by definition, you’ve eliminated the ability to see if it works differently in other environments (in other words, if other environments regulate the gene differently). And thus you’ve artificially inflated the importance of the genetic contribution. The more environments in which you study a genetic trait, the more novel environmental effects will be revealed, decreasing the heritability score. Scientists study things in controlled settings to minimize variation in extraneous factors and thus get cleaner, more interpretable results—for example, making sure that the plants all have their height measured around the same time of year. This inflates heritability scores, because you’ve prevented yourself from ever discovering that some extraneous environmental factor isn’t actually extraneous.fn22 Thus a heritability score tells how much variation in a trait is explained by genes in the environment(s) in which it’s been studied.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
As with previous “drug crises,” the opioid problem is not really about opioids. It’s mainly about cultural, social, and environmental factors such as racism, draconian drug laws, and diverting attention away from the real causes of crime and suffering. As you’ll discover throughout this book, there’s nothing terribly unique about the pharmacology of opioids that makes these drugs particularly dangerous or addictive. People have safely consumed them for centuries. And, trust me, people will continue to do so, long after the media’s faddish focus has faded, because these chemicals work. Fatal overdose is a real risk, but the odds of this occurring have been overstated. It is certainly possible to die after taking too much of a single opioid drug, but such deaths account for only about a quarter of the thousands of opioid-related deaths. Contaminated opioid drugs and opioids combined with another downer (e.g., alcohol or a nerve-pain medication) cause many of these deaths.
Carl L. Hart (Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear)
These genetic malfunctions are unlikely to produce schizophrenia in an individual unless they are stimulated by environmental conditions. By far the most causative environmental factor is stress, especially during gestation in the womb, early childhood, and adolescence—stages in which the brain is continually reshaping itself, and thus vulnerable to disruption. Stress can take the form of a person's enduring sustained anger, fear, or anxiety, or a combination of these. Stress works its damage by prompting an oversupply of cortisol, the normally life sustaining “stress hormone” that converts high energy glycogen to glucose in liver and in muscle tissue. Yet when it is called upon to contain a rush of glycogen, cortisol can transform itself into “Public Enemy Number One,” as one health advocate put it. The steroid hormone swells to flood levels and triggers weight gain, high blood pressure, heart disease, damage to the immune system, and an overflow of cholesterol. Stress is likely a trigger for schizophrenia.
Ron Powers (No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America)
And decay is highly dependent on environmental and situational factors. What’s the weather been like? Was the body buried? In what? Seeking better understanding of the effects of these factors, the University of Tennessee (UT) Anthropological Research Facility, as it is blandly and vaguely called, has buried bodies in shallow graves, encased them in concrete, left them in car trunks and manmade ponds, and wrapped them in plastic bags. Pretty much anything a killer might do to dispose of a dead body the researchers at UT have done also.
Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
The current decline in educational achievement is, like most things, multiply determined. The evidence points, first, to about 50-100 years of genetic decline in ability. It doesn’t take much–perhaps a one-point decline every 30 years–to reduce substantially the percentage in the upper range of IQ. With our present mean IQ of 100, 1 person in 250 would exceed an IQ of 140. If, however, the average dropped to 85, you’d have only 1 in 8,000 who would exceed an IQ of 140. We must suppose that academic standards are much affected by the percentages of high IQ individuals, and that their becoming more scarce will lower academic performance. So part of the remedy for this problem definitely lies in eugenic practices. But there are some environmental factors as well, such as the failure to do “streaming” in schools, in which children of much the same ability level are put together. And I think something in the way of general idleness and slackness has gotten into the system since the 1960s which could account for a part of the decline, particularly in the more precise subjects like mathematics.
Raymond B. Cattell
When I began to plan this book, I didn’t appreciate those complications, and I naïvely thought that the book would just be about environmental damage. Eventually, I arrived at a five-point framework of possible contributing factors that I now consider in trying to understand any putative environmental collapse. Four of those sets of factors— environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, and friendly trade partners—may or may not prove significant for a particular society. The fifth set of factors—the society’s responses to its environmental problems—always proves significant.
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)
Would she have enjoyed a more natural parent-child fit if she’d been an introvert herself? Not necessarily. Introverted parents can face challenges of their own. Sometimes painful childhood memories can get in the way. Emily Miller, a clinical social worker in Ann Arbor, Michigan, told me about a little girl she treated, Ava, whose shyness was so extreme that it prevented her from making friends or from concentrating in class. Recently she sobbed when asked to join a group singing in front of the classroom, and her mother, Sarah, decided to seek Miller’s help. When Miller asked Sarah, a successful business journalist, to act as a partner in Ava’s treatment, Sarah burst into tears. She’d been a shy child, too, and felt guilty that she’d passed on to Ava her terrible burden. “I hide it better now, but I’m still just like my daughter,” she explained. “I can approach anyone, but only as long as I’m behind a journalist’s notebook.” Sarah’s reaction is not unusual for the pseudo-extrovert parent of a shy child, says Miller. Not only is Sarah reliving her own childhood, but she’s projecting onto Ava the worst of her own memories. But Sarah needs to understand that she and Ava are not the same person, even if they do seem to have inherited similar temperaments. For one thing, Ava is influenced by her father, too, and by any number of environmental factors, so her temperament is bound to have a different expression. Sarah’s own distress need not be her daughter’s, and it does Ava a great disservice to assume that it will be. With the right guidance, Ava may get to the point where her shyness is nothing more than a small and infrequent annoyance.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
Whatever may be the ideological or idealistic characteristics of cultural expression, culture is an essential element of the history of a people. Culture is, perhaps, the product of this history just as the flower is the product of a plant. Like history, or because it is history, culture has as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of production. Culture plunges its roots into the physical reality of the environmental humus in which it develops, and it reflects the organic nature of the society, which may be more or less influenced by external factors. History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalances and conflicts (economic, political, and social) which characterize the evolution of a society; culture allows us to know the dynamic synthesis which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress.
Amílcar Cabral
Plants have long been, and still are, humanity’s primary medicines. They possess certain attributes that pharmaceuticals never will: 1) their chemistry is highly complex, too complex for resistance to occur — instead of a silver bullet (a single chemical), plants often contain hundreds to thousands of compounds; 2) plants have developed sophisticated responses to bacterial invasion over millions of years — the complex compounds within plants work in complex synergy with each other and are designed to deactivate and destroy invading pathogens through multiple mechanisms, many of which I discuss in this book; 3) plants are free; that is, for those who learn how to identify them where they grow, harvest them, and make medicine from them (even if you buy or grow them yourself, they are remarkably inexpensive); 4) anyone can use them for healing — it doesn’t take 14 years of schooling to learn how to use plants for your healing; 5) they are very safe — in spite of the unending hysteria in the media, properly used herbal medicines cause very few side effects of any sort in the people who use them, especially when compared to the millions who are harmed every year by pharmaceuticals (adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association); and 6) they are ecologically sound. Plant medicines are a naturally renewable resource, and they don’t cause the severe kinds of environmental pollution that pharmaceuticals do — one of the factors that leads to resistance in microorganisms and severe diseases in people.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria)
In the EPJ results, there were two statistically distinguishable groups of experts. The first failed to do better than random guessing, and in their longer-range forecasts even managed to lose to the chimp. The second group beat the chimp, though not by a wide margin, and they still had plenty of reason to be humble. Indeed, they only barely beat simple algorithms like “always predict no change” or “predict the recent rate of change.” Still, however modest their foresight was, they had some. So why did one group do better than the other? It wasn’t whether they had PhDs or access to classified information. Nor was it what they thought—whether they were liberals or conservatives, optimists or pessimists. The critical factor was how they thought. One group tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, although they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters (“We’re running out of everything”); others were cornucopian boomsters (“We can find cost-effective substitutes for everything”). Some were socialists (who favored state control of the commanding heights of the economy); others were free-market fundamentalists (who wanted to minimize regulation). As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.” The other group consisted of more pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds. Decades ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a much-acclaimed but rarely read essay that compared the styles of thinking of great authors through the ages. To organize his observations, he drew on a scrap of 2,500-year-old Greek poetry attributed to the warrior-poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” No one will ever know whether Archilochus was on the side of the fox or the hedgehog but Berlin favored foxes. I felt no need to take sides. I just liked the metaphor because it captured something deep in my data. I dubbed the Big Idea experts “hedgehogs” and the more eclectic experts “foxes.” Foxes beat hedgehogs. And the foxes didn’t just win by acting like chickens, playing it safe with 60% and 70% forecasts where hedgehogs boldly went with 90% and 100%. Foxes beat hedgehogs on both calibration and resolution. Foxes had real foresight. Hedgehogs didn’t.
Philip E. Tetlock (Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction)
All of us sit here at this conference and feel secure in our belief that we live in an era beyond this kind of…authoritarian regime change; but what sort of political climate do you think could potentially break apart our current stasis and deliver us back in time, so to speak? Thank you, I am gratified there has been so much interest in our little project. Gilead Studies languished for many years, I suppose those who had lived through those times did not want them resurrected for various reasons including what might have been done to them and what they themselves might have done. But at this distance, we can allow ourselves some perspective. It’s fortunate that is the last question as my voice is giving out. As to your question, in times of peace and plenty, it is hard to remember the conditions that have led to authoritarian regime changes in the past. And it is even harder to suppose that we ourselves would ever make such choices or allow them to be made. But when there is a perfect storm and collapse of the established order is in the works precipitated by environmental stresses that lead to food shortages, economic factors such as unrest due to unemployment, a social structure that is top heavy with too much wealth being concentrated among too few, then scapegoats are sought and blamed, fear is rampant, and there is pressure to trade what we think of as liberty for what we think of as safety. And, when the birth rate of any society is low enough to create an aging shrinking population, then commercial and military authorities will become alarmed. Their customer base and their recruitment base will be in jeopardy and there will be extreme pressure on women of childbearing age to make up the population deficit, thus our handmaid and her tale.
Margaret Atwood
For abolitionists, who advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, and free-soilers, who simply opposed the spread of slavery into the western territories, the existence of such a group proved the destructive effect of slavery on social morals and human industry and the inordinate economic power of the planter elite. It also served as an implicit warning of the disastrous consequences of the spread of slavery into nonslaveholding regions and its debilitating effect on the work ethic of otherwise stalwart white farmers. For slave-holders, particularly those at the apex of southern society, the idleness of rural working-class whites justified the “peculiar institution” and made clear the need for a planter-led economic and social hierarchy. Planter D. R. Hundley wrote, for example, that “poor whites” were “the laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the earth . . . [and exhibited] a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief.” To abolitionists and proslavery ideologues alike, therefore, southern poor whites utterly lacked industry, intelligence, social propriety, and honor, the essential ingredients for political and social equality and thus should not be trusted with political decision-making.7 Northern and southern middle- to upper-class commentators perceived this class of people as so utterly degraded that they challenged their assertion of “whiteness,” the one claim southern working-class whites had to political equality, “normative” status, and social superiority to free and enslaved blacks. Like Byrd and the author of “The Carolina Sand-Hillers,” journalists and travel writers repeatedly compared “poor whites” unfavorably to other supposedly inferior people of color, be they enslaved blacks, Indians, or even Mexican peasants. Through a variety of arguments, including genetic inferiority, excessive interbreeding with “nonwhites,” and environmental factors, such as the destructive influences of the southern climate, rampant disease, and a woefully inadequate diet, these writers asserted that “poor whites” were neither truly “white” nor clearly “nonwhite” but instead, a separate “‘Cracker’ race” in all ways so debased that they had no capacity for social advancement. This attitude is clear in an 1866 article from the Boston Daily Advertiser that proclaimed that this social class had reached depths of “[s]uch filthy poverty, such foul ignorance, such idiotic imbecility” that they could never be truly civilized. “[T]ime and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood,” the author concluded, “but I almost doubt if it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into respectability.”8 Contempt for working-class whites was almost as strong among African Americans as among middle-class and elite whites. Enslaved African Americans invented derogatory terms containing explicit versions of “whiteness” such as “(poor) white trash” and “poor buckra” (a derivative form of the West African word for “white man”). Although relations between slaves and non-elite southern whites were complex, many slaves deeply resented the role of poor whites as overseers and patrol riders and adopted their owners’ view that elite southern planters were socially and morally superior. Many also believed that blacks, enslaved and free, formed a middle layer of social respectability between the planter aristocracy at the top of the social system and the “poor whites” at the bottom. The construction of a “poor white” and “white trash” social and cultural category thus allowed black slaves to carve out a space of social superiority, as well as permitted the white planter elite to justify enormous economic and social inequality among whites in a supposedly democratic society.9
Anthony Harkins (Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon)
New Age environmentalism and conventional environmentalism that place limits on serious, in-depth ecological thinking have been increasingly replaced by social ecology that explores the economic and institutional factors that enter into the environmental crisis.
Murray Bookchin
The field of public health refers to the conditions that are not medical but that can produce or undermine health as the “social determinants of health.” These are the socioeconomic, environmental, and behavioral factors that research over many decades has shown to be strong influences on health.
Elizabeth H. Bradley (The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More is Getting Us Less)
Strategic Planning Today: A Six-Step Process  The strategic planning process offers incredible benefits if we pursue it correctly. The following six steps constitute one version of the process: mission, objective, situation analysis, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and control.  The first step in the process is to define your mission; as we saw at the beginning of this lecture, this is the core that guides you. Your mission is what you look to in setting your objectives.  The objectives established in the second step are chosen based on some notion of wanting to fulfill your mission. They should be clear, concise, achievable, and in some sense, measurable.  The third step, the environmental scan, is pivotal for most firms, and it is the most involved. Look at both the external and internal environments in which your firm functions. On a personal level, evaluate the external factors that impinge on you with respect to your objectives.  The fourth step is the actual formulation of strategy. Decide what you will actually do to get from where you are to where you want to be. Allocate resources and connect your management decisions with the people who will implement the plan.  The fifth step is implementation of strategy, and here is where many companies fail because they do not follow the military dictum to “supervise and refine.” This means not to simply issue orders and assume that they’ll be carried out.  The sixth step, control, involves developing a control mechanism to evaluate whether or not the plan is working. When the control or monitoring system tells you that something is amiss in your strategy, you can then circle back to your environmental scan to discover whether the relevant environmental factors have changed.
Anonymous
In a major study, researchers in Queensland collated the results of 2,748 papers and concluded the average variation across all human traits and diseases is caused by 49 per cent genetic factors and 51 per cent environmental factors.
Will Storr (Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us)
Further, although it makes sense for doctors and public health officials to categorize diseases based on whether they are caused by infections, malnutrition, tumors, and so on, an evolutionary perspective suggests that we should also look at the extent to which diseases are caused by evolutionary mismatches between the environmental conditions (including diet, physical activity, sleep, and other factors) for which we evolved and the environmental conditions that we now experience.
Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
The first is that the conservative cause has been polluted by the ideology of big business, by the global ambitions of the multinational companies, and by the ascendancy of economics in the thinking of modern politicians. Those factors have led conservatives to enter into alliance with people who regard the effort to conserve things as both futile and quaint. The second reason is that the truth in environmentalism has been obscured by the agitated propaganda of the environmentalists and by the immensity of the problems that they put before us. When
Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
The main finding was that vegan and lacto-ovo vegetarian diets were associated with a nearly one-half reduction in risk of type 2 diabetes compared with the risk associated with nonvegetarian diets after adjustment for a number of socioeconomic and lifestyle factors, as well as low BMI, that are typically associated with vegetarianism. Pesco- and semi-vegetarian diets were associated with intermediate risk reductions: between one-third and one-quarter. These data indicate that vegetarian diets may in part counteract the environmental forces leading to obesity and increased rates of type 2 diabetes, though only vegan diets were associated with a BMI in the optimal range. Inclusion of meat, meat products, and fish in the diet, even on a less than weekly basis, seems to limit some of the protection associated with a vegan or lacto-ovo vegetarian diet. These findings may be explained by adverse effects of meat and fish, protective effects of typical constituents of vegan and lacto-ovo vegetarian diets, other characteristics of people who choose vegetarian diets, or a combination of these factors.
Serena Tonstad
Some people argue that economics is an exception to this general story. Economics, they say, provides a much more analytically precise and tightly integrated body of theory—a theory that is explicitly linked to a small set of generally accepted assumptions about human beings’ motivations and decision-making procedures, and that has been rigorously tested against quantified empirical evidence. Among all the social sciences, economics alone, these boosters contend, has a defensible claim to true scientific status. Economics certainly deserves to be regarded as the queen of the social sciences; unlike the others, it has unquestionably produced useful knowledge on a wide range of issues that affect our daily lives. Yet we should be suspicious of its bold claims to scientific status. Modern neoclassical economic theory is firmly grounded in the kind of mechanistic worldview (described in “Complexities”) that sees the economy as a machine, and to explain the operation of this machine it imports many of the concepts of nineteenth-century classical physics. So it stresses the natural tendency of the economy to find a stable equilibrium and the possibility of isolating the effect of changes in different economic factors (like changes in interest rates) on economic performance.25 As well, to achieve its simplicity and elegance, the theory focuses on the behavior of independent individuals operating in a market—individuals who are atomized, rational, similar in preferences, and stripped of any social attributes. But this makes the theory largely asocial and ahistorical: there’s generally no place in it for large-scale historical, cultural, and political forces that sometimes have a huge impact on our economies—forces like the emancipation of women, rising environmental consciousness, or democratization in poor countries. Because it’s insensitive to broad social forces, modern economic theory is also surprisingly insensitive to its own tight relationship with capitalism. Nevertheless, it’s clearly a product of capitalism—a specific, historically rooted economic system—and it only makes sense in the context of capitalism.26
Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?)
Nobody can seriously doubt that environmental factors modify the expression of sex differences. The problem with socialization theories is that they ask the environment to do all of the work. They fail to recognize that the environment is acting on an evolved organ—the mind. Of course, forces such as reinforcement, imitation, cognitive schema, and conformity all modulate our actions. The pleasure of social approval, the ability to learn through observation, our internal representations, and the desire to be like others—these are part of human psychology everywhere. The question is whether these processes alone can explain the origins of the cross-cultural differences between male and female. Altering reinforcement contingencies for sex-typical behavior can temporarily change it: boys and girls will show cross-sex play where the environment is manipulated to encourage it and social approval is contingent on it. But when that intervention is removed, children revert to the same-sex preference that characterizes children everywhere.
Anne Campbell (A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women)
Environmental factors matter a great deal in the ripening of grapes. If, for example, a grape does not get enough sunlight or gets too much light or warmth from the sun, it can cause the fruit to go into “survival mode.” Sometimes the effect is that grapes do not fully mature and balance sweetness with acidity, and they can be too much of one or the other. So the product is much more concentrated. Similarly, as our environmental factors around us grow extreme, we, too, go into survival mode. This can greatly influence our ability to balance and can cause a sort of concentration of our own product. Jessica, right now you may not be able to produce a full-bodied Cabernet. Right now, you may be a port, and that is okay, isn’t it? In fact, it’s wonderful. Allow yourself this moment. The
Tarana Burke (You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience)
To stop mutations, we need to stop changing the global environment. That is a hard job to do! So much pollution is being released every year that it is possible we are already in thermal runaway on a global scale. We may already be on the way to being a hot world like planet Venus. Some people think humanity will go extinct in the next century. It is a very real possibility. But global warming is just a small part of environmental change. The global electronics revolution may be a much bigger factor!
Steven Magee (Magee’s Disease)
This new environmental determinism (as, for instance, preached by John Dewey and his behaviorist forerunners) is an even more evil invention than Calvin's doctrine concerning predestination. Environment is merely a factor, an influence exercised on the human free will, but not a fatal and coercive power.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (The Menace of The Herd: Or, Procrustes at Large)
Once a child is born with this limiting neurological glitch, what are the environmental factors that determine whether or not he will go on to display the full-fledged symptoms of sociopathy? And at present, we simply do not know.
Martha Stout (The Sociopath Next Door)
No it doesn’t. There are many complex genetic and environmental factors that can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, but sugar is not a cause. It’s not uncommon to assume that because type 2 diabetes is characterised by having high blood sugar, consuming sugar must be the culprit. These two are not the same
Joshua Wolrich (Food Isn’t Medicine)
Here are a few notable things that can spark inflammation and depress the function of your liver: Alcohol overload—This is relatively well-known. Your liver is largely responsible for metabolizing alcohol, and drinking too much liquid courage can send your liver running to cry in a corner somewhere. Carbohydrate bombardment—Starches and sugar have the fastest ability to drive up blood glucose, liver glycogen, and liver fat storage (compared to their protein and fat macronutrient counterparts). Bringing in too many carbs, too often, can elicit a wildfire of fat accumulation. In fact, one of the most effective treatments for reversing NAFLD is reducing the intake of carbohydrates. A recent study conducted at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and published in the journal Cell Metabolism had overweight test subjects with high levels of liver fat reduce their ratio of carbohydrate intake (without reducing calories!). After a short two-week study period the subjects showed “rapid and dramatic” reductions of liver fat and other cardiometabolic risk factors. Too many medications—Your liver is the top doc in charge of your body’s drug metabolism. When you hear about drug side effects on commercials, they are really a direct effect of how your liver is able to handle them. The goal is to work on your lifestyle factors so that you can be on as few medications as possible along with the help of your physician. Your liver will do its best to support you either way, but it will definitely feel happier without the additional burden. Too many supplements—There are several wonderful supplements that can be helpful for your health, but becoming an overzealous natural pill-popper might not be good for you either. In a program funded by the National Institutes of Health, it was found that liver injuries linked to supplement use jumped from 7 percent to 20 percent of all medication/supplement-induced injuries in just a ten-year time span. Again, this is not to say that the right supplements can’t be great for you. This merely points to the fact that your liver is also responsible for metabolism of all of the supplements you take as well. And popping a couple dozen different supplements each day can be a lot for your liver to handle. Plus, the supplement industry is largely unregulated, and the additives, fillers, and other questionable ingredients could add to the burden. Do your homework on where you get your supplements from, avoid taking too many, and focus on food first to meet your nutritional needs. Toxicants—According to researchers at the University of Louisville, more than 300 environmental chemicals, mostly pesticides, have been linked to fatty liver disease. Your liver is largely responsible for handling the weight of the toxicants (most of them newly invented) that we’re exposed to in our world today. Pesticides are inherently meant to be deadly, but just to small organisms (like pests), though it seems to be missed that you are actually made of small organisms, too (bacteria
Shawn Stevenson (Eat Smarter: Use the Power of Food to Reboot Your Metabolism, Upgrade Your Brain, and Transform Your Life)
Although gravitation is an important force in the immediate environment of large objects like trees and human beings, it is not felt by bacteria in a liquid medium. For them, because of their size, Brownian motion is a dominant environmental factor, while we are not buffeted to and fro by bombarding molecules. But that size disparity is a consequence of genetic differences between life-forms, so just as environment is a factor in the development of an organism, so genes are a factor in the construction of the environment.
Richard C. Lewontin (Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health)
As with previous “drug crises,” the opioid problem is not really about opioids. It’s mainly about cultural, social, and environmental factors such as racism, draconian drug laws, and diverting attention away from the real causes of crime and suffering. As you’ll discover throughout this book, there’s nothing terribly unique about the pharmacology of opioids that makes these drugs particularly dangerous or addictive. People have safely consumed them for centuries. And, trust me, people will continue to do so, long after the media’s faddish focus has faded, because these chemicals work. Fatal overdose is a real risk, but the odds of this occurring have been overstated. It is certainly possible to die after taking too much of a single opioid drug, but such deaths account for only about a quarter of the thousands of opioid-related deaths. Contaminated opioid drugs and opioids combined with another downer (e.g., alcohol or a nerve-pain medication) cause many of these deaths.19 People are not dying because of opioids; they are dying because of ignorance.
Carl L. Hart (Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear)
Height is affected by both genetic and environmental factors during the period you are growing: good health essentially allows you to grow as high as your genes will let you (but no more); bad health and poor nutrition stunt your growth. As our energy-balance model predicts, human bodies indeed have become bigger since the Industrial Revolution.
Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
The 5C structure is generic—useful to product, marketing, and more—whereas the way we presented the sections in this chapter is very focused on product management. It’s good to know what the “C”s stand for because you’ll likely hear 5C mentioned. Plus if you need to do a situational analysis on your feet in a meeting or interview, it’s relatively easy to remember. Company: This refers to the company’s experience, technology, culture, goals, and more. It’s similar to the material we covered in the “Why Does the Company Exist?,” “How Do We Know If Our Product’s Good?,” and “What Else Has Been, Is Being, and Will Be Built?” sections. Customers: Who are the people buying this product? What are the market segments? How big are they? What are people’s goals with buying this product? How do they make buying decisions? Where do they buy this type or product? This is similar to what we covered in the “Customers and Personas” and “Use Cases” sections. Collaborators: Who are the external people who make the product possible, including distributors, suppliers, logistical operators, groundwork support personnel, and so on? Competitors: Who is competing for your customers’ money? This includes actual and potential competitors. You should look at how they position their product, the market size they address, their strengths and weaknesses, and more. Climate: These are the macro-environmental factors, like cultural, regulatory, or technological trends and innovations.
Product School (The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager)
One way to avoid the design problems encountered by the transcendental meditation researchers would be to keep one of the variables fixed. This could be either the number of meditators or the “target” of consciousness-induced order. Beyond this, as philosopher Evan Fales and sociologist Barry Markovsky of the University of Iowa suggested after reviewing the Maharishi effect, “Presumably, if the material world can be influenced in purposive ways by collective meditation, inanimate detectors could be constructed and placed at varying distances from the collective meditators.”6 This is essentially the approach that we took, although our motivations were based upon a logical extension of laboratory research on mind-matter interactions using random-number generators, and not by the claims of the transcendental meditators. Properties of Consciousness Whatever else consciousness may be, let us suppose that it also has the following properties, derived from a combination of Western and Eastern philosophies.7 The first property is that consciousness extends beyond the individual and has quantum field–like properties, in that it affects the probabilities of events. Second, consciousness injects order into systems in proportion to the “strength” of consciousness present. This is a refinement of quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s observation about one of the most remarkable properties of life, namely, an “organism’s astonishing gift … of ‘drinking orderliness’ from a suitable environment.”8 Third, the strength of consciousness in an individual fluctuates from moment to moment, and is regulated by focus of attention. Some states of consciousness have higher focus than others. We propose that ordinary awareness has a fairly low focus of attention compared to peak states, mystical states, and other nonordinary states.9 Fourth, a group of individuals can be said to have “group consciousness.” Group consciousness strengthens when the group’s attention is focused on a common object or event, and this creates coherence among the group. If the group’s attention is scattered, then the group’s mental coherence is also scattered. Fifth, when individuals in a group are all attending to different things, then the group consciousness and group mental coherence is effectively zero, producing what amounts to background noise. We assume that the maximum degree of group coherence is related in some complicated way to the total number of individuals present in the group, the strength of their common focus of attention, and other psychological, physiological, and environmental factors. Sixth, physical systems of all kinds respond to a consciousness field by becoming more ordered. The stronger or more coherent a consciousness field, the more the order will be evident. Inanimate objects (like rocks) will respond to order induced by consciousness as well as animate ones (like people, or tossed dice), but it is only in the more labile systems that we have the tools to readily detect these changes in order. In sum, when a group is actively focused on a common object, the “group mind” momentarily has the “power to organize,” as Carl Jung put it.10 This leads us to a very simple idea: as the mind moves, so moves matter.
Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
With a limited number of genes, humans enjoy a stable human genome. We inherit it from our parents, and it can give us a genetic predisposition for a variety of biological and pathological traits. Conversely, the human microbiota expresses one hundred times more genes than humans, is extremely plastic, and can change from individual to individual and within the same individual over time, all as the consequence of a variety of environmental factors that can shape its composition and function. Our human genome has coevolved with the trillions of constantly changing microorganisms found in and on the human body.
Alessio Fasano (Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health)
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I think breast cancer results from a complex interaction of genetic and environmental factors, in which lifestyle choices, such as diet, use of alcohol, and exposure to estrogenic toxins, may have much more influence than emotions. I do believe that grief and depression may suppress immunity, giving malignant cells the chance to grow into perceptible tumors; but I reject the idea that people give themselves cancer by failing to express anger and other emotions.
Andrew Weil (Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself)
Furthermore, we’re prone to make what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. Research shows that when we observe others, our explanations for their behaviors tend to overemphasize dispositional factors—their personality type and the values we assume they have—while downplaying situational factors, such as social pressures or environmental circumstances. By contrast, when explaining our own behaviors, we tend to attribute good outcomes to dispositional factors—in particular, our skill and diligence—and bad outcomes to situational ones.
Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
Tips from Psychology 1. Make sustainable behavior the social default When asked directly, people vehemently deny that their actions might be influenced by trendiness or popular opinion. However, we are biologically programmed to care what other people think of us and to try to make our behavior fit in. This is a product of our evolution: early humans who were ostracized from their group faced almost certain death out on their own. Because of this biological programming, all people internalize and act on messages from other people, both explicit and implicit messages, about the kinds of behaviors expected and accepted by society. At the same time, people significantly underestimate the extent to which these social messages influence them. A recent study of household energy use confirms this: when asked outright, participants told experimenters that “what neighbors are doing” was the least likely factor to influence their behavior. However, the results showed that out of four different types of informational messages (environmental impact, money savings, how-to instructions, and how much neighbors are cutting back), the message about neighbors’ behavior was the only message that resulted in participants measurably reducing their own electricity use (Schultz, et al, 2007).
Christie Manning (The Psychology of Sustainable Behavior)
Evolution in the cognitive niche has endowed our species with remarkable abilities such as language, abstract reasoning, and sophisticated mentalizing. These species-typical innovations have been accompanied by rapid changes in brain structure and functionality. While adaptations such as language are hugely beneficial, they are also likley to carry some costs. A number of authors have argued that vulnerability to psychosis is one of those costs -the price our species pays for its unique set of cognitive skills. From this perspective, there are no individual fitness benefits to psychosis proneness; vulnerability to schizophrenia and other psychoses is a general byproduct of our evolved design, and unfortunate combinations of genetic and environmental factors determine the onset of a full-fledged disorder in some individuals.
Marco del Giudice (Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach)
People at risk for schizophrenia seem to be more susceptible to a wide range of environmental factors, an effect that could be partly mediated by a hyperreactive stress response system.
Marco del Giudice (Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach)
The definition of gross national product is nonsense, because they don’t put such factors as environmental damage and limited resources into the calculation. In the mean time there is another parameter, the gross domestic product, but this is not much better.
Andreas Eschbach (One Trillion Dollars: An absolutely gripping page turning thriller about a man who inherits a life-changing fortune)
The psychiatrists lobbying for the Durham decision had broadened their own mandate from illness to mental health, and from the individual to society, and were arguing for a system that would treat crime the same way. If crime was a symptom of illness, then perpetrators were also victims, or at least bystanders of their own behavior. Doctors would act like lawyers, offering exonerating explanations of illness, while lawyers would become like doctors, demanding treatment in place of prison for those who could be healed instead of punished. As expert witnesses, psychiatrists would explain to the jury how a particular disorder, in combination with specific environmental factors, had produced behavior for which a defendant could hardly be held responsible. They would also provide the remedy, which would allow the perpetrator turned patient to return quickly to society as a productive member.
Jonathan Rosen (The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions)
Here are just a few things people “know” about sex, attraction, and desire: - Sexual attraction and desire, whether queer or heterosexual, are universal; everyone experiences them and should experience them in the same way. - Sex is a necessary, unavoidable part of life and inherent to human nature. - Everyone is allosexual—experiencing sexual attraction and desire in normative ways. Anyone who does not have sex is merely celibate or abstinent, suppressing their sexual urges for moral, spiritual, or religious reasons, and people who claim not to want sex are disordered or stunted in some way. - Sex occurs because sexual attraction and desire signal that we actively want to have sex with someone. - Desire for sexual contact is sustained, especially within committed romantic relationships. - Partnered sex is more important, more valuable, and more mature than solo sex. - These ideas are immovable and not influenced by societal expectations, permissions, or other environmental factors. […] Asexuality itself […] is already a challenge to these “truths” […]. Asexual consciousness recognizes that none of the things we “know” to be true about sex are immovable, and they are always influenced by societal expectations, permissions, or other environmental factors.
Sherronda J. Brown (Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture)
Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 Sun oriented streetlamps are a creative and practical lighting arrangement that bridles the force of the sun to enlighten streets, pathways, and public spaces. In urban communities like Bangalore, where energy proficiency and natural manageability are key needs, the reception of sun based streetlamps has been picking up speed. This article investigates the different parts of sun based streetlamps, including their advantages, estimating factors in Bangalore, an examination of various items, experiences into a main supplier like SuneaseSolar, ways to choose the right streetlamp, and rules for establishment and support. 1. Prologue to Sunlight based Streetlamps What are Sunlight based Streetlamps? Sun oriented streetlamps are independent lighting frameworks that bridle the force of daylight to enlighten open air spaces like roads, pathways, and public regions. These lights comprise of sun powered chargers, Drove lights, batteries, and a regulator to deal with the energy stream. Significance of Sun based Streetlamps Sun based streetlamps assume a significant part in improving wellbeing, security, and perceivability in metropolitan and provincial regions where customary lattice power might be untrustworthy or inaccessible. They offer a practical and productive lighting arrangement that decreases reliance on non-renewable energy sources and adds to a greener climate. 2. Advantages of Sun powered Streetlamps Energy Effectiveness Sun oriented streetlamps are profoundly energy-effective as they work by changing over daylight into power, taking out the requirement for lattice power. This outcomes in lower energy utilization and decreased fossil fuel byproducts, making them an economical lighting choice. Cost Reserve funds By using sun powered energy, sun based streetlamps help in chopping down power charges fundamentally over their life expectancy. The underlying interest in sun powered streetlamps is balanced by long haul cost reserve funds because of negligible upkeep prerequisites and no power costs. Ecological Effect Sunlight based streetlamps add to natural preservation by using inexhaustible sun oriented energy and decreasing carbon impressions. They help in fighting environmental change and advancing a cleaner, greener planet by diminishing dependence on non-sustainable power sources. 3. Factors Influencing solar street light price in bangalore Nature of Parts The cost of sun oriented streetlamps in Bangalore can change in view of the nature of parts utilized, like sun powered chargers, batteries, and Drove lights. More excellent parts frequently bring about better execution and strength, yet may come at a greater cost. Government Endowments and Motivators Government endowments and motivators can affect the last expense of sun based streetlamps in Bangalore. Different plans and projects might offer monetary help or tax reductions, making sunlight based lighting more reasonable and appealing for shoppers. Establishment and Support Expenses Extra factors like establishment and upkeep expenses can impact the general cost of sunlight based streetlamps. Legitimate establishment and normal support guarantee ideal execution and life span, prompting likely expense reserve funds over the long haul. 4. Examination of solar street light price in bangalore Market Investigation of Various Brands A correlation of sunlight based streetlamp costs in Bangalore ought to incorporate an examination of various brands and their contributions. Factors like brand notoriety, item quality, and after-deals backing can affect the cost and generally an incentive for purchasers. Highlights and Particulars While contrasting sun powered streetlamp costs in Bangalore, it's fundamental to consider the highlights and determinations presented by various models.
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Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 Introduction to Solar Rooftop Systems Understanding Solar Energy Importance of Solar Rooftop Systems Harnessing the power of the sun to generate clean and renewable energy has become increasingly essential in today's world. Solar rooftop systems offer a sustainable solution for both residential and commercial properties to reduce reliance on traditional grid electricity and lower carbon emissions. By understanding the fundamentals of solar energy and recognizing the significance of solar rooftop installations, individuals and businesses in Bangalore can pave the way towards a more environmentally conscious and cost-effective energy future. # Solar Rooftop in Bangalore - Sunease Solar ## Introduction to Solar Rooftop Systems ### Understanding Solar Energy Solar energy is like the coolest kid on the block when it comes to renewable energy sources. It's basically sunlight transformed into electricity, which is pretty neat if you ask me. ### Importance of Solar Rooftop Systems Solar rooftop systems are like the superheroes of the energy world - they harness the power of the sun right from your rooftop. They not only help you save money but also reduce your carbon footprint. Win-win! ## Benefits of Solar Rooftop Installations ### Financial Savings Imagine cutting down on those hefty electricity bills - that's what solar rooftop installations do. They help you save money in the long run while also increasing the value of your property . It resembles having your cake and eating it as well! ### Environmental Impact By switching to solar energy, you're basically giving Mother Earth a virtual high-five. Solar rooftop installations reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help combat climate change. So, you're not just saving money, you're saving the planet. NBD. ### Energy Independence Who doesn't want to be a little more independent, am I right? Solar Rooftop in Bangaloreprovide you with a sense of self-sufficiency when it comes to energy. You're not at the mercy of fluctuating electricity prices anymore. It's like taking control of your energy destiny. ## Solar Rooftop Initiatives in Bangalore ### Government Policies and Incentives Bangalore is all about that solar love. The government has rolled out various policies and incentives to promote solar rooftop installations. It resembles they're saying, "Here's something special to do your change to sun oriented considerably better." ### Community Programs and Awareness Communities in Bangalore are coming together to spread the good word about solar energy. From awareness campaigns to collective installations, they're making sure everyone knows that solar is the way to go. It's like a solar revolution, but with a cool community twist. ## Sunease Solar: A Leader in Solar Rooftop Solutions ### Company Overview Sunease Solar is basically the Gandalf of solar rooftop solutions - wise, reliable, and always there when you need them. They're experts in the field, making the switch to solar as easy as pie (solar-powered pie, of course). ### Product Offerings From sleek solar panels to cutting-edge inverters, Sunease Solar has it all. They offer top-notch products that are not only efficient but also look pretty darn good on your rooftop. It's like having the Ferraris of solar installations. ### Customer Success Stories Customers love Sunease Solar, and for good reason. Their success stories speak volumes about the quality of service and satisfaction they provide. It's like a feel-good movie, but with solar panels instead of actors. 5. Key Features of Solar Rooftop Systems Panel Efficiency and Durability When it comes to Solar Rooftop in Bangalore, panel efficiency and durability are key factors to consider.
Solar Rooftop in Bangalore
We can dismiss one claim about the achievement gap outright: there is no credible evidence for innate differences in intelligence between racial groups. I will not summarize all the evidence against the hereditarian view, because Richard Nisbett has done so cogently in his book Intelligence and How to Get It. Here are a couple of the most telling findings: first, if there were genetic differences in intelligence between people of African and European descent, then the more ancestors a person has from Africa, the lower his or her IQ should be, on average. Several studies have tested this hypothesis by, for example, measuring people’s racial heritage with blood tests and correlating that with their IQs. Overwhelmingly, these studies show no relationship between racial ancestry and intelligence. Second, the gap between blacks and whites on IQ tests and standardized tests narrowed substantially in the fifteen-year period from 1975 to 1990, which is much too rapid a change to be accounted for by changes in the gene pool. And finally, there is ample evidence that environmental factors are completely responsible for the differences between the races in IQ and standardized tests.2
Timothy D. Wilson (Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change)
Several studies have shown that children with ADHD have a higher tendency to be raised in homes with less financial security. They are more likely not to get enough nurturing and emotional support, and their parents are emotionally unavailable. In addition, children with ADHD may be more likely to live in neighborhoods with toxic pollution levels, cigarette smoking, heavy traffic, and other potential sources of environmental toxins. In addition to environmental factors, certain lifestyle choices during
Leila Molaie (ADHD DECODED- A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO ADHD IN ADOLESCENTS: Understand ADHD, Break through symptoms, thrive with impulses, regulate emotions, and learn techniques to use your superpower.)
Here are just a few things people “know” about sex, attraction, and desire: - Sexual attraction and desire, whether queer or heterosexual, are universal; everyone experiences them and should experience them in the same way. - Sex is a necessary, unavoidable part of life and inherent to human nature. - Everyone is allosexual—experiencing sexual attraction and desire in normative ways. Anyone who does not have sex is merely celibate or abstinent, suppressing their sexual urges for moral, spiritual, or religious reasons, and people who claim not to want sex are disordered or stunted in some way. - Sex occurs because sexual attraction and desire signal that we actively want to have sex with someone. - Desire for sexual contact is sustained, especially within committed romantic relationships. - Partnered sex is more important, more valuable, and more mature than solo sex. - These ideas are immovable and not influenced by societal expectations, permissions, or other environmental factors.
Sherronda J. Brown (Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture)
Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 Solar street lights have emerged as a sustainable and efficient lighting solution, harnessing the power of Solar Street Light Price in Bangalore, a city known for its technological advancements and focus on sustainable practices, the adoption of solar street lights has been on the rise. This article delves into the pricing dynamics ofSolar Street Light Price in Bangalore, exploring the factors influencing costs, comparing price ranges, and providing valuable insights for individuals or organizations looking to invest in this eco-friendly lighting option. 1. Introduction to Solar Street Lights Overview of Solar Street Lighting If you've ever walked down a dark street and thought, "Wow, this could really use some more light," then solar street lights are here to save the day. These nifty lights are like your regular street lights but with a green twist – they harness the power of the sun to illuminate your path. Importance of Solar Energy in Street Lighting Solar energy is like that reliable friend who always has your back – it's renewable, sustainable, and abundant. By using solar energy in street lighting, we reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, cut down on electricity bills, and contribute to a cleaner, greener future. Plus, who doesn't love soaking up some vitamin D during the day and then basking in solar-powered light at night? 2. Benefits of Solar Street Lights Energy Efficiency and Cost Savings Picture this: solar street lights gobbling up sunlight during the day, storing it in their metaphorical bellies, and then gleefully lighting up the streets at night without a care in the world. Not only are they energy-efficient, but they also help save on electricity costs in the long run. It's like having your cake and eating it too – or in this case, having your light and saving on bills. Environmental Impact and Sustainability If the planet could talk, it would give a standing ovation to solar street lights. By opting for solar-powered lighting, we reduce carbon emissions, lower our environmental footprint, and take a step towards a more sustainable future. It's basically like hitting the eco-friendly jackpot – brighter streets, happier planet. 3. Factors Affecting Solar Street Light Prices in Bangalore Quality and Brand Reputation Just like choosing between a gourmet burger and a fast-food one, the quality of solar street lights can vary. Brands with a good reputation often come with a higher price tag, but they also offer reliability and performance that's worth the extra dough. Technology and Features From fancy motion sensors to remote-control options, the technology and features packed into solar street lights can influence their prices. It's like picking a smartphone – the more bells and whistles, the higher the cost. But hey, who doesn't love a little extra tech magic in their lighting? 4. Price Range Analysis of Solar Street Light Price in Bangalore bustling city, solar street light prices can vary based on features, quality, and brand. It's like playing a price-matching game where you can find something that still sparkles like a diamond while staying within your budget. Popular Models and Their Prices Bangalore offers a wide range of popular solar street lights at a variety of price points, ranging from sleek, contemporary designs to robust, effective models. There is a solar street light with your name on it, whether you are a tech-savvy enthusiast or a buyer with a tight budget. 5. Tips for Choosing the Right Solar Street Light Considering Your Lighting Needs Prior to entering the solar street light market, consider your lighting requirements.
Solar Street Light Price in Bangalore
Here are just a few things people “know” about sex, attraction, and desire: - Sexual attraction and desire, whether queer or heterosexual, are universal; everyone experiences them and should experience them in the same way. - Sex is a necessary, unavoidable part of life and inherent to human nature. - Everyone is allosexual—experiencing sexual attraction and desire in normative ways. Anyone who does not have sex is merely celibate or abstinent, suppressing their sexual urges for moral, spiritual, or religious reasons, and people who claim not to want sex are disordered or stunted in some way. - Sex occurs because sexual attraction and desire signal that we actively want to have sex with someone. - Desire for sexual contact is sustained, especially within committed romantic relationships. - Partnered sex is more important, more valuable, and more mature than solo sex. - These ideas are immovable and not influenced by societal expectations, permissions, or other environmental factors. […] Asexuality itself […] is already a challenge to these “truths” […].
Sherronda J. Brown (Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture)
ADHD symptoms appear to come and go in response to environmental factors,
Leila Molaie (ADHD DECODED- A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO ADHD IN ADOLESCENTS: Understand ADHD, Break through symptoms, thrive with impulses, regulate emotions, and learn techniques to use your superpower.)
An important environmental factor that contributes to obesity is the availability of high-fat, high-Calorie fast foods.
Jean Brainard (CK-12 Biology)
He had not been right, had not been normal. And then his natural predisposition had been encouraged and further corrupted by “environmental factors.” That was what his first psychologist had called it. “Environmental factors.” Like being raped by a thirty-three-year-old man at the age of seven, Doctor? she’d wanted to yell. Is that an “environmental factor?
Gregg Hurwitz (The Tower)
Incorrect radiation levels may be able to affect your sex drive and it may be proven in the future that human sex drive is governed more by radiation types and levels than any other factor, even more so than hormones! Generally, a feeling of contentment replaces sexual desire in natural radiation environments.
Steven Magee (Electrical Forensics)