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Despite a 50 percent divorce rate for first marriages and 65 percent the second time around; despite the staggering frequency of affairs; despite the fact that monogamy is a ship sinking faster than anyone can bail it out, we continue to cling to the wreckage with absolute faith in its structural soundness.
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Esther Perel (Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence)
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For starters, would your soul mate even still be alive? A hundred billion or so humans have ever lived, but only seven billion are alive now (which gives the human condition a 93 percent mortality rate). If we were all paired up at random, 90 percent of our soul mates would be long dead.
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Randall Munroe (What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions)
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But perhaps the most damning argument came from nature herself. Had David followed his own advice to look to nature for truth, he would have seen it. This dazzling, feathery, squawking, gurgling mound of counterevidence. Animals can outperform humans on nearly every measure supposedly associated with our superiority. There are crows that have better memories than us, chimps with better pattern-recognition skills, ants that rescue their wounded, and blood flukes with higher rates of monogamy. When you actually examine the range of life on Earth, it takes a lot of acrobatics to sort it into a single hierarchy with humans at the top. We don’t have the biggest brain or the best memory. We’re not the fastest or the strongest or the most prolific. We’re not the only ones that mate for life, that show altruism, use tools, language. We don’t have the most copies of genes in circulation. We aren’t even the newest creation on the block.
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Lulu Miller (Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life)
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People hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will.
People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life.
We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually.
Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate).
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Malcolm Collins
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It may seem unlikely that you will ever find yourself a soul mate given that men and women are so fundamentally different. Although divorce rates may be close to 50% in America, it has not always been that way http://datingbookreviews.net/
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books on dating
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Some scientist in Europe took a bunch of women and had them play online chess against male opponents in their same rating bracket. When the female players didn’t know the gender of their opponent, they won fifty percent of the games. When the female players were led to believe that their opponent was a woman, they won fifty percent of the games. When they were told that they were playing against men, their performance dropped. But in truth, their opponents were always the same.
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Ali Hazelwood (Check & Mate)
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Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts). Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none).41 It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.42 It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.
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Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
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This flu thing’s out of control,” Grady said, pointing his fork at the TV. “There’s talk of them doing quarantines.”
“Quarantines?”
“Yeah, like going into towns where infection rates are high and locking the place down. That sort of thing.”
Ciaran laughed. “You watch too much sci-fi, mate…
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Wayne Simmons (Fever)
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If we think of eroticism not as sex per se, but as a vibrant, creative energy, it’s easy to see that Stephanie’s erotic pulse is alive and well. But her eroticism no longer revolves around her husband. Instead, it’s been channeled to her children. There are regular playdates for Jake but only three dates a year for Stephanie and Warren: two birthdays, hers and his, and one anniversary. There is the latest in kids’ fashion for Sophia, but only college sweats for Stephanie. They rent twenty G-rated movies for every R-rated movie. There are languorous hugs for the kids while the grown-ups must survive on a diet of quick pecks. This brings me to another point. Stephanie gets tremendous physical pleasure from her children. Let me be perfectly clear here: she knows the difference between adult sexuality and the sensuousness of caring for small children. She, like most mothers, would never dream of seeking sexual gratification from her children. But, in a sense, a certain replacement has occurred. The sensuality that women experience with their children is, in some ways, much more in keeping with female sexuality in general. For women, much more than for men, sexuality exists along what the Italian historian Francesco Alberoni calls a “principle of continuity.” Female eroticism is diffuse, not localized in the genitals but distributed throughout the body, mind, and senses. It is tactile and auditory, linked to smell, skin, and contact; arousal is often more subjective than physical, and desire arises on a lattice of emotion. In the physicality between mother and child lie a multitude of sensuous experiences. We caress their silky skin, we kiss, we cradle, we rock. We nibble their toes, they touch our faces, we lick their fingers, let them bite us when they’re teething. We are captivated by them and can stare at them for hours. When they devour us with those big eyes, we are besotted, and so are they. This blissful fusion bears a striking resemblance to the physical connection between lovers. In fact, when Stephanie describes the early rapture of her relationship with Warren—lingering gazes, weekends in bed, baby talk, toe-nibbling—the echoes are unmistakable. When she says, “At the end of the day, I have nothing left to give,” I believe her. But I also have come to believe that at the end of the day, there may be nothing more she needs. All this play activity and intimate involvement with her children’s development, all this fleshy connection, has captured Stephanie’s erotic potency to the detriment of the couple’s intimacy and sexuality. This is eros redirected. Her sublimated energy is displaced onto the children, who become the centerpiece of her emotional gratification.
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Esther Perel (Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence)
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Bear with me a moment, now. Chicken-sexing. Since hens have a far greater commercial value than males, cocks, roosters, it is apparently vital to determine the sex of a newly hatched chick. In order to know whether to expend capital on raising it or not, you see. A cock is nearly worthless, apparently, on the open market. The sex characteristics of newly hatched chicks, however, are entirely internal, and it is impossible with the naked eye to tell whether a given chick is a hen or a cock. This is what I have been told, at any rate. A professional chicken-sexer, however, can nevertheless tell. The sex. He can go through a brood of freshly hatched chicks, examining each one entirely by eye, and tell the poultry farmer which chicks to keep and which are cocks. The cocks are to be allowed to perish. “Hen, hen, cock, cock, hen,” and so on and so forth. This is apparently in Australia. The profession. And they are nearly always right. Correct. The fowl determined to be hens do in fact grow up to be hens and return the poultry farmer’s investment. What the chicken-sexer cannot do, however, is explain how he knows. The sex. It’s apparently often a patrilineal profession, handed down from father to son. Australia, New Zealand. Have him hold up a new-hatched chick, a young cock shall we say, and ask him how he can tell that it is a cock, and the professional chicken-sexer will apparently shrug his shoulders and say “Looks like a cock to me.” Doubtless adding “mate,” much the way you or I would add “my friend” or “sir.
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David Foster Wallace (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Stories)
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Humans and most animal species make an unhappy marriage, for one or more of many possible reasons: the animal’s diet, growth rate, mating habits, disposition, tendency to panic, and several distinct features of social organization. Only a small percentage of wild mammal species ended up in happy marriages with humans, by virtue of compatibility on all those separate counts.
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
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Roney (2003) hypothesized that mere exposure to attractive women would activate cognitive adaptations in men designed to embody the qualities that women want in a mate. Specifically, he predicted that exposure to young attractive women would (1) increase the importance men place on their own financial success, (2) experience feeling more ambitious, and (3) produce self-descriptions that correspond to what women want. Using a cover story to disguise the purpose of the study, Roney had one group of men rate the effectiveness of advertisements containing young, attractive models and another group of men rate the effectiveness of ads containing older, less-attractive models. Following this exposure, the men responded to the key measures to test his hypotheses.
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David M. Buss (Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind)
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Ben went on, “Shifters mate for life, but did you know that we have a rather high rate of divorce considering. Do you know why?”
I shook my head.
“Because they think they don’t have to work for it. They fuck around and one day they find their mate and they think everything will work out because fate tells so. But that’s a load of crap. You love and you work for it, no matter-freaking-what, that’s how you find and hold onto your mate.
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Natalie Herzer (The Hunt is On (The Patroness, #2))
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Listen, Google,’ I will say, ‘both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in a different way, and it’s so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to do?’
And Google will answer: ‘Well, I know you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire history of your heart. I have exact data about each date you went on, and if you want, I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary, I can even provide you with accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounter you had with either of them. And naturally enough, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my superb algorithms, and on decades’ worth of statistics about millions of relationships – I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability of being more satisfied with him in the long run.
Indeed, I know you so well that I also know you don’t like this answer. Paul is much more handsome than John, and because you give external appearances too much weight, you secretly wanted me to say “Paul”. Looks matter, of course; but not as much as you think. Your biochemical algorithms – which evolved tens of thousands of years ago in the African savannah – give looks a weight of 35 per cent in their overall rating of potential mates. My algorithms – which are based on the most up-to-date studies and statistics – say that looks have only a 14 per cent impact on the long-term success of romantic relationships. So, even though I took Paul’s looks into account, I still tell you that you would be better off with John.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
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Bonobo sex comes in all forms: female to female, female to male, and male to male. I put the lady sex at the beginning of this list because bonobos also live in a matriarchy. Researchers have noted female Bonobos practicing tribbing (clitoris to clitoris rubbing) to help smooth out problems. Lead females will work out their tension together for around 20 seconds. In that time there is a measurable heart rate increase, facial flushing, shrieking, and clitoris engorgement. All the usual signs of pleasure and orgasm. They also participate in kissing with tongue, and oral sex. Males and females will of course procreate, and they do it more or less with everyone. They also practice some amount of face to face mating; looking at each other during the act.
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William Meadows (The Animal Penis Book: A comic filled journey of nature’s weirdest genitals)
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Not only do we look different from other apes, but each human sex also has distinctive body traits shaped by sexual selection. Men are taller and heavier on average than women, with more upper body strength, higher metabolic rates, more hair, deeper voices, and slightly larger brains. Some of these traits may have evolved for sexual competition against other males. But male bodies are also living evidence of the sexual choices made by ancestral females. Men grow beards, and possess penises that are much longer, thicker, and more flexible than those of other primates. These are more likely to reflect female choice than male competition. Women also evolved to incarnate male sexual preferences. Women have enlarged breasts and buttocks, narrower waists, and a greater orgasmic capacity than other apes.
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Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature)
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Sexual conflict occurs when one mating partner has an opportunity to increase its fitness at a cost to the other partner. On a genetic level, most sexual conflicts are interlocus conflicts that mainly concern the outcome of male-female interactions about the mating rate, fertility efficiency, relative parental effort, remating behavior, and female reproductive rate. In sexually antagonistic evolution, a trait that affords advantage to one sex is disadvantageous to the other. An example is the sexual arms race that evolves when resistance in one sex drives the evolution of coercive traits in the other sex. Without the restrictions of natural selection, this process may lead to a runaway amplification of male and female traits. The coevolutionary arms races between adaptations in one sex and counteradaptations in the other sex can be made visible by experimentally arresting evolution in one sex.
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Todd K. Shackelford and Aaron T. Goetz
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Psychologist Jon Maner and his colleagues conducted studies on attentional adhesion—the degree to which different visual stimuli capture and maintain focus.3 Participants in the studies were first asked to write about a time in their lives when they were sexually and romantically aroused—primes designed to activate mating adaptations. Different images then were presented in the center of the computer screen—an attractive woman (as pre-rated by a panel of people), a woman of average attractiveness, an attractive man, or a man of average attractiveness. Following this exposure, a circle or a square popped up randomly in one of the four quadrants of the screen. Participants were instructed to shift their gaze away from the central image as soon as the shape appeared elsewhere on the screen and then to categorize it as quickly as possible as being either a circle or a square. Men exposed to the image of the attractive woman had difficulty detaching. They took longer to shift their gaze away and longer to categorize the circles and squares correctly. Their attention adhered to the attractive woman. Some men, however, succumbed to attentional adhesion more than others. Men inclined to pursue a short-term mating strategy got especially stuck.
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David M. Buss (When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault)
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Our speed-dating lab study of the sexual over-perception bias led to several fascinating findings. We had women and men who had never met interact with each other for five minutes and then evaluate the other on their sexual interest in them and report on the level of their own sexual interest. Then interaction partners rotated, chatted with a new person, and did the ratings again. Each person interacted with a total of five members of the other sex. Our first finding confirmed the sexual over-perception bias—men over-inferred a woman’s sexual interest in them compared with women’s reports of their actual interest. Not all men, however, are equally vulnerable to the bias. Some proved to be accurate at inferring women’s interest or lack thereof. Men who scored high on narcissism and who indicated a preference for short-term mating were exceptionally prone to this bias—an inferential error that presumably promotes many sexual advances, even if many of them are not reciprocated. Narcissistic men apparently think they are hot, even when they’re not. Not all women were equally likely to be victims of the male bias. Rather, women judged to be physically attractive by the experimenters were especially prone to evoke men’s sexual over-perception. The irony is that attractive women, because they receive a larger volume of male sexual attention, are precisely the women who, on average, are least likely to reciprocate men’s sexual interest.
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David M. Buss (When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault)
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was dog-tired when, a little before dawn, the boatswain sounded his pipe and the crew began to man the capstan-bars. I might have been twice as weary, yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new and interesting to me—the brief commands, the shrill note of the whistle, the men bustling to their places in the glimmer of the ship's lanterns. "Now, Barbecue, tip us a stave," cried one voice. "The old one," cried another. "Aye, aye, mates," said Long John, who was standing by, with his crutch under his arm, and at once broke out in the air and words I knew so well: "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—" And then the whole crew bore chorus:— "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!" And at the third "Ho!" drove the bars before them with a will. Even at that exciting moment it carried me back to the old Admiral Benbow in a second, and I seemed to hear the voice of the captain piping in the chorus. But soon the anchor was short up; soon it was hanging dripping at the bows; soon the sails began to draw, and the land and shipping to flit by on either side; and before I could lie down to snatch an hour of slumber the HISPANIOLA had begun her voyage to the Isle of Treasure. I am not going to relate that voyage in detail. It was fairly prosperous. The ship proved to be a good ship, the crew were capable seamen, and the captain thoroughly understood his business. But before we came the length of Treasure Island, two or three things had happened which require to be known. Mr. Arrow, first of all, turned out even worse than the captain had feared. He had no command among the men, and people did what they pleased with him. But that was by no means the worst of it, for after a day or two at sea he began to appear on deck with hazy eye, red cheeks, stuttering tongue, and other marks of drunkenness. Time after time he was ordered below in disgrace. Sometimes he fell and cut himself; sometimes he lay all day long in his little bunk at one side of the companion; sometimes for a day or two he would be almost sober and attend to his work at least passably. In the meantime, we could never make out where he got the drink. That was the ship's mystery. Watch him as we pleased, we could do nothing to solve it; and when we asked him to his face, he would only laugh if he were drunk, and if he were sober deny solemnly that he ever tasted anything but water. He was not only useless as an officer and a bad influence amongst the men, but it was plain that at this rate he must soon kill himself outright, so nobody was much surprised, nor very sorry, when one dark night, with a head sea, he disappeared entirely and was seen no more. "Overboard!" said the captain. "Well, gentlemen, that saves the trouble of putting him in irons." But there we were, without a mate; and it was necessary, of course, to advance one of the men. The boatswain, Job Anderson, was the likeliest man aboard, and though he kept his old title,
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Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island)
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Listen, Google,’ I will say, ‘both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in different ways, and it’s so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to do?’ And Google will answer: ‘Well, I’ve known you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire biometric history of your heart. I have exact data about each date you went on and, if you want, I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary, I can even provide you with an accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounter you had with either of them. And naturally, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my superb algorithms, and on decades’ worth of statistics about millions of relationships –I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability that you will be more satisfied with him in the long run. ‘Indeed, I know you so well that I also know you don’t like this answer. Paul is much more handsome than John, and because you give external appearances too much weight, you secretly wanted me to say “Paul”. Looks matter, of course; but not as much as you think. Your biochemical algorithms –which evolved tens of thousands of years ago on the African savannah –give looks a weight of 35 per cent in their overall rating of potential mates. My algorithms –which are based on the most up-to-date studies and statistics –say that looks have only a 14 per cent impact on the long-term success of romantic relationships. So, even though I took Paul’s looks into account, I still tell you that you would be better off with John.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
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A major source of conflict is that men sometimes infer sexual interest on the part of a woman when it does not exist. A series of experiments has documented this phenomenon (Abbey, 1982; Lindgren, George, & Shoda, 2007). In one study, 98 male and 102 female college students viewed a 10-minute videotape of a conversation in which a female student visits a male professor’s office to ask for more time to complete a term paper. The actors in the film were a female drama student and a professor in the theater department. Neither the student nor the professor acted flirtatious or overtly sexual, although both were instructed to behave in a friendly manner. People who witnessed the tape then rated the likely intentions of the woman using a seven-point scale. Women watching the interaction were more likely to say that she was trying to be friendly, with an average rating of 6.45, and not sexy (2.00) or seductive (1.89). Men, also perceiving friendliness (6.09), were significantly more likely than women to infer seductive (3.38) and sexual intentions (3.84). A speed-dating laboratory procedure had men rate women’s sexual interest in them a er a brief interaction and compared those ratings to women’s self-reported sexual interest in each of the men (Perilloux et al., 2012). Again, men exhibited a sexual misperception bias, perceiving women as significantly more interested in them than women actually were. Men high in self-perceived attractiveness and female-evaluated mate value are especially vulnerable to the sexual over-perception bias (Kohl & Robertson, 2014; Perilloux et al., 2012). And men who pursue a short-term mating strategy are also more prone to the sexual over-perception bias (Perilloux et al., 2012), likely because this bias facilitates more frequent attempts to initiate sexual overtures.
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David M. Buss (Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind)
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Correlation and causality. Why is it that throughout the animal kingdom and in every human culture, males account for most aggression and violence? Well, what about testosterone and some related hormones, collectively called androgens, a term that unless otherwise noted, I will use simplistically as synonymous with testosterone. In nearly all species, males have more circulating testosterone than do females, who secrete small amounts of androgens from the adrenal glands. Moreover, male aggression is most prevalent when testosterone levels are highest; adolescence and during mating season in seasonal breeders. Thus, testosterone and aggression are linked. Furthermore, there are particularly high levels of testosterone receptors in the amygdala, in the way station by which it projects to the rest of the brain, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and in its major targets, the hypothalamus, the central gray of the mid-brain, and the frontal cortex. But these are merely correlative data. Showing that testosterone causes aggression requires a subtraction plus a replacement experiment. Subtraction, castrate a male: do levels of aggression decrease? Yes, including in humans. This shows that something coming from the testes causes aggression. Is it testosterone? Replacement: give that castrated individual replacement testosterone. Do pre-castration levels of aggression return? Yes, including in humans, thus testosterone causes aggression. Time to see how wrong that is. The first hint of a complication comes after castration. When average levels of aggression plummet in every species, but crucially, not to zero, well, maybe the castration wasn't perfect, you missed some bits of testes, or maybe enough of the minor adrenal androgens are secreted to maintain the aggression. But no, even when testosterone and androgens are completely eliminated, some aggression remains, thus some male aggression is testosterone independent. This point is driven home by castration of some sexual offenders, a legal procedure in a few states. This is accomplished with chemical castration, administration of drugs that either inhibit testosterone production or block testosterone receptors. Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise, castration doesn't decrease recidivism rates as stated in one meta-analysis. Hostile rapists and those who commit sex crimes motivated by power or anger are not amenable to treatment with the anti-androgenic drugs. This leads to a hugely informative point. The more experience the male had being aggressive prior to castration, the more aggression continues afterward. In otherwise, the less his being aggressive in the future requires testosterone and the more it's a function of social learning.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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In some parts of Sweden it was “a dream porridge,” in others a pancake, that was made in silence and heavily salted. The custom was that the girl would eat this salty food and then go to sleep without drinking anything. As she slept, her future husband would come to her in a dream and give her water to quench her thirst. No data are available on the success rate of Swedish girls using this system to find a mate.
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Mark Kurlansky (Salt: A World History)
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I have been known to shove my muzzle into people’s business and create some good matches.” “Not just good,” Andi said. “You have a 100 percent marriage or mating rate, whichever way you want to look at it. Whatever your secret is, I need you.” Gerri
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Milly Taiden (All Kitten Aside (Paranormal Dating Agency, #11))
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When asked “With respect to your job/career you would like to have, how important are the following to you?” The rating scale ranged from 1 (not important) to 7 (very important). Men exposed to young, attractive women rated “having a large income” to be 5.09, whereas men exposed to older, less attractive models rated it only 3.27—an astonishingly large effect. Similar differences occurred in rating the importance of “being financially successful.” A full 60 percent of the men exposed to young, attractive models described themselves as “ambitious,” compared to 9 percent of the men exposed to older, less-attractive models. Another study found that merely having a young woman in the same room caused men to increase the importance they attach to having material wealth (Roney, 2003). Similar effects have been found by others. Men “primed” with attractive images of women display more creativity, independence, and nonconformity, causing them to stand out from other men (Griskevicius, Cialdini, & Kenrick, 2006; Griskevicius, Goldstein, Mortensen, Cialdini, & Kenrick, 2006). Chinese men also increase risk taking when being observed by women (Shan et al., 2012). In short, when mating motives are “primed” by exposure to young, attractive women, a cascade of psychological shifts occurs in men such that they value and display precisely what women want and hence what men need to succeed in mate competition.
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David M. Buss (Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind)
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This adaptive logic suggests that the greater risk taking—and hence greater death rate—should occur among men who are at the bottom of the mating pool and who therefore risk getting shut out entirely. Men who are unemployed, unmarried, and young are greatly overrepresented in risky activities, ranging from gambling to lethal fights.
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David M. Buss (The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating)
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In general, males should tend to be more promiscuous than females. Since a female produces a limited number of eggs at a relatively slow rate, she has little to gain from having a large number of copulations with different males. A male on the other hand, who can produce millions of sperms every day, has everything to gain from as many promiscuous matings as he can snatch.
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Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
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At the rate the Kings were finding mates, they were going to have to take turns eating supper because not everyone would fit at the table.
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Donna Grant (Smoke and Fire (Dark Kings, #9))
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She shoved me out of the bed! The realization hit him as hard as the floor. His feline grace failed him. Far from hanging its head in shame, his inner lion rolled in mirth, tufted tail practically wagging. Not funny.
Except it was. He had a feeling this more assertive side of Arabella was his fault. Since the moment they’d met, he’d encouraged her to not take any shit, and apparently she’d decided to start with him. Dammit. When he’d told her to not let the world stomp all over her, he should have specified his exemption.
I’m her mate. Isn’t there a rule that says she can’t kick me out of bed?
Except she’d yet to realize what he had. Was it only a day ago since his life changed? Not even. At this rate, he’d be picking out fucking China patterns by noon.
Completely emasculated and by a woman who wanted nothing to do with him.
Flipping to his knees, he sat up and rested his chin on the mattress.
Arabella faced him, eyes wary, breathing shallow as she waited for his reaction. More like she waited to see if he’d explode.
She’d learn.
Hayder would never harm her, but he would use his infamous kitty-cat eyes against her.
He stared. You know you want me. You know you need me. Come on, baby. Melt. Melt for your lion.
She stared right back.
Hmm, this wasn’t working as planned.
He let the left side of his lip curl into a grin, tugging his cheek and popping his infamous dimple.
“I know what you’re doing.”
“What?”
“Trying to manipulate me into letting you back into bed.”
“Is it working?”
For a moment her expression shifted, a quick flip of emotions as she struggled to answer. “Yes it’s working. But I wish it wasn’t.”
“Why? Why fight it?”
“Because I think I need time.”
It turned out there was something more powerful than his dimple. Her honesty.
He groaned. “I think you were sent to kill me. Fine. If you insist, I’ll respect you even if I’d rather debauch you.”
Her eyes widened.
“Respect doesn’t mean I’m going to lie, baby. I want you. Bad. But I’ll listen to what you want. For now.”
And, yes, he said it ominously.
Let her think about it. Think about him. Soon even she wouldn’t be able to deny they were meant for each other.
He stood, all six foot plus naked feet of him.
And, yes, that did put a certain part of his anatomy in perfect view of a certain shocked gaze.
A sucked-in breath, cheeks that darkened, a certain awareness sizzling between them. She couldn’t hope to hide her pleasure or interest in what she saw.
“Sweet dreams, baby.” He winked and then turned, resisting an urge to catch her staring at his ass.
He knew she was. He could feel the crazy heat as she traced his path out of the room.
Go back. Want to snuggle. His lion couldn’t understand why they were back in the living room with its cramped couch that wouldn’t allow him to stretch out. Why couldn’t they snuggle in the nice warm bed and, even better, cuddle with a nice warm mate?
Respect, my furry friend. A lion had no use for respect though. His worldview was much simpler. Ours. Bed. Hungry. Not hungry for a steak but, rather, a sweet, creamy pie.
Hayder groaned. No need to keep reminding him of what he was missing. He knew. He hated it, but her wants had to take precedence over his.
Argh.
”
”
Eve Langlais (When a Beta Roars (A Lion's Pride, #2))
“
Regardless of the fact that the express purpose of God's Deluge is to kill off most of mankind--apart, of course, from Noah and his descendants--there is talk of the need to: 'heal the earth which the angels have corrupted ... that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things which the Watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons.'
[...]
From such admonishments we may reasonably deduce a number of things about the Watchers, most particularly that they must be about the right size and shape, and equipped, moreover, with the necessary organs and impulses to want, to have and to enjoy sex with human women. To me, the obvious conclusion from this is that the Watchers are in fact human, or at any rate extremely closely related at the genetic level to anatomically modern human beings--close enough, indeed, to make human women pregnant and to have "children of fornication" with them. These offspring are not sickly as one might expect from an even slightly mismatched genetic makeup. On the contrary, they thrive so vigorously that Enoch, or the "good" angels speaking through him, want not only to destroy the Watchers but also to 'destroy the children of the Watchers.'
[...]
So now further clarity begins to emerge. A group of bad angels, "Watchers of the heaven," have come to earth--"descended," specifically, on Mount Hermon in Lebanon--transferred some technology, mated with human females, and produced offspring who are in some way gigantic and are called Nephilim.
”
”
Graham Hancock (Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization)
“
Very quickly, the Obama administration lost political momentum. The obscene sight of those who had played a major role in setting the scene for the Crash (men like Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke) effectively returning to the scene of the crime as ‘saviours’, wielding trillions of freshly minted or borrowed dollars to lavish upon their banker ‘mates’, was enough to turn off even the hardiest of Mr Obama’s supporters. The result was predictable: as often happens during a deflationary period (think of the 1930s, for example), those who gainpolitically do not come from the revolutionary Left; they come from the loony Right. In the United States it was the Tea Party that grew on the back of a disdain for bankers, 6 a denunciation of the Fed, a clarion call for ‘honest’, metal-backed money, 7 and a revulsion towards all government. Ironically, the rise of the Tea Party increased the interventions of the Fed that the movement denounced. The reason was simple: once the Obama administration had lost its way, and could not pass any meaningful bills through Congress that might have stimulated the economy, onlyone lever was left with which anyone could steer America’s macroeconomy – the Fed’s monetary policy. And since interest rates were dwelling in the nether world of the first liquidity trap to hit the United States since the 1930s8 (recall Chapter 2 here), the Fed decided that quantitative easing or QE – the strategy that Chapter 8 describes in the context of the 1990s’ ‘lost Japanese decade’ – was all that was left separating America from a repugnant depression.
”
”
Yanis Varoufakis (Europe after the Minotaur: Greece and the Future of the Global Economy)
“
He checked his watch. “Make it quick, I’ve got a pressing appointment at the Drunken Monkey at two o’clock. Crucial meeting with a CHIS.” CHIS? It took her a moment to translate. Covert Human Intelligence Source – aka, criminal informer. Yeah, right, she thought, more like three pints and a dodgy pie with your dinosaur mates. All the same, she was beginning to realise she could learn a lot from an old-school throwback like Streaky. The other Detective Sergeants at Newham nick were younger, and mostly of the new breed. Smartly dressed and professional, they wouldn’t dream of drinking while on duty, but they seemed to her more like bank managers than real cops. So what if Streaky liked a few jars at lunchtime? Everyone knew he had a better clear-up rate than any of them. Which was probably why he hadn’t been shuffled off with a full pension years ago.
”
”
Anya Lipska (Where the Devil Can't Go (Kiszka and Kershaw Book 1))
“
men monopolizes the most desirable mates. Since accumulating wealth and status takes time and work for most men, the norm of polygamy pushes up the age of marriage for males, drives down the age of marriage for females, removes incentives for female educational and economic attainment, and increases the fertility rate. The surplus of unmarried males scrambling for an artificially reduced pool of marriageable females spurs the growth of crime and violence.
”
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights)
“
Alvarenga began to look forward to his strolls to the store—it not only calmed Córdoba but also allowed him to imagine life on land. Dr. John Leach, senior research fellow in survival psychology at the Extreme Environments Laboratory at the University of Portsmouth, England, suggests that by nurturing his sick mate, Alvarenga was building a foundation to maintain his own mental health. “If you’ve got a task to do, then you’re concentrating on that task, which provides a degree of meaning in your life. That’s one of the reasons that people like doctors and nurses have quite a high survival rate in concentration camps during wars,” says Leach. “If you’re a doctor or nurse in camp, you’ve got an automatic task, you’ve got a job that gives meaning to your existence, which is looking after others.
”
”
Jonathan Franklin (438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea)
“
Climate tugs at the individual threads of conflict too; personal irritability, interpersonal conflict, domestive violence. Heat frays everything. It increases violent crime rates, swearing on social media, and the liklihood that a major league pitcher, coming to the mound after his team mate has been hit by a pitch will hit an opposing batter in retaliation. The hotter it gets, the longer drivers will honk their horns in frustration. And even in simulations police officers are more likely to fire on intruders when the exercises are conducted in hotter weather. By 2099, one speculative paper tabulated, climate change in the United States would bring about an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 rapes, 3.5 million assaults, and 3.76 million robberies, burglaries and acts of larceny.
”
”
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
“
US Navy into which young men enlisted during the late 1930s and early 1940s was decidedly white. This had not always been the case. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, African Americans served in a largely integrated American Navy and made up about 25 percent of its enlisted strength. Some thirty thousand African Americans manned Union vessels during the Civil War, with little discrimination as to duties. After segregation was legalized in 1896, African American enlistments declined and black men were increasingly relegated to the galley or engine room. After World War I, African American enlisted personnel declined further as the Navy recruited Filipino stewards for mess duties. By June 1940, African Americans accounted for only 2.3 percent of the Navy’s 170,000 total manpower. The fleet had mostly converted from coal to oil, and the vast majority of African Americans performed mess duties. Black reenlistments in technical specialties were never barred, however, and a few African American gunner’s mates, torpedo men, and machinist mates continued to serve. Amendments to the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 guaranteed the right to enlist regardless of race or color, but in practice, “separate but equal” prejudices consigned most blacks to the Steward’s Branch. Its personnel held ratings up to chief petty officer, but members wore different uniforms and insignia, and even chief stewards never exercised command over rated grades outside the Steward’s Branch. The only measure of equality came when, just as with everyone else aboard ship, African American and Filipino stewards were assigned battle stations. Only then could they stand shoulder to shoulder with their white brothers in arms.13
”
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Walter R. Borneman (Brothers Down: Pearl Harbor and the Fate of the Many Brothers Aboard the USS Arizona)
“
Lady Georgina of the Summer Court," Heather added.
I turned in my seat to see two fae in the parking lot through the glass front door. The girl was on fire. Like, literally on fire. Her clothes had burned off, but you couldn't see much of her. You know, through the fucking fire.
"What is going on?" I asked.
"She's having some hot flashes." Thea came to stand near our table and crossed her arms with a sigh. "Alan is there trying to cool her off. The pregnancy has been rough on her."
I looked at the flaming fae again, and sure enough a big ginger dude with a wild beard was waving his hands in the direction of his mate, spraying her with a mist of water. He might have been trying to put out the fire or just trying to simmer it down.
"I've heard about this," Jerod said, standing up and tapping his chin. "You've had a little baby boom over here, haven't you?"
"Something like that." Thea met Devin's gaze, pressing her lips in an attempt not to smile, and went over to the door to greet them.
"The faerie gate is," Heather paused, "overcorrecting for a previous problem we'd had. Let's leave it at that."
I looked up at Ryker, who was watching the flaming fae. He looked down at me with a shrug. "Fae. I'm still not entirely sure how they work and I've been around a while.
”
”
Sabrina Blackburry (Dirty Lying Dragons (The Enchanted Fates, #2))
“
The captain walked the deck at a rapid stride, looked aloft at the sails, and then to windward; the mate stood in the gangway, rubbing his hands, and talking aloud to the ship—“Hurrah, old bucket! the Boston girls have got hold of the tow-rope!” and the like; and we were on the forecastle, looking to see how the spars stood it, and guessing the rate at which she was going,—when the captain called out—“Mr. Brown, get up the topmast studding-sail! What she can’t carry she may drag!” The mate looked a moment; but he would let no one be before him in daring. He sprang forward—“Hurrah, men! rig out the topmast studding-sail boom! Lay aloft, and I’ll send the rigging up to you!”—We sprang aloft into the top; lowered a girt-line down, by which we hauled up the rigging; rove the tacks and halyards; ran out the boom and lashed it fast, and sent down the lower halyards, as a preventer. It was a clear starlight night, cold and blowing; but everybody worked with a will. Some indeed, looked as though they thought the “old man” was mad, but no one said a word.
”
”
Charles William Eliot (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
“
A twig snaps. I whirl around just in time to see a flash in the shadows of the forest. Or is it? My heart rate quickens. Maybe it’s my mind playing tricks–for real this time and not because everyone is telling me that's what’s happening.
”
”
J.J. Wright (The Fang and the Flower)
“
Hee hee hee…” Christine and Heather watched as Iris became a drooling, nosebleeding mass of flesh as her mind became filled with images of increasingly mature rating. “Ugh, I can’t believe I actually hang out with this girl,” Christine muttered. “Why am I surrounded by perverts?” “Speaking of perverts…” Heather pointed over to the glass window of the store that they stood in front of. “You may want to do something about Lindsay. She looks like she’s lost an awful lot of blood.” Christine turned around to see what the woman meant. She began twitching when confronted by the sight of her tomboyish friend passed out cold, on the ground, her eyes swirling around inside of her eye sockets, with blood seeping out of her nose like a broken faucet. “Beboop! Beboop!” A pair of paramedics suddenly arrived on the scene. They were holding a stretcher between them, and the one in front was making siren-like sound effects. The two paramedics dressed in the white outfit of, well, paramedics, scooped up the nosebleeding girl and put her on the stretcher. Then they proceeded to rush out of the area. “Beboop! Beboop! Beboop!” They soon disappeared around a corner. “What. The fuck. Was that?” Christine asked of no one in particular
”
”
Brandon Varnell (A Fox's Mate (American Kitsune, #6))
“
Female primates and female humans may both be genetically predisposed to compete against and dominate other females in order to suppress, severely, the next female’s desirability, fertility, live-birth rate. We have seen how primates accomplish this. In a sense, humans do likewise. Advantages of class, caste, race, and geography function in similar ways. For example, I have seen women fight over the same mate or for the same child in truly primal or primate-like ways.
”
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Phyllis Chesler (Woman's Inhumanity to Woman)
“
Sex differences in personality are hypothesized to have arisen due to differential parental
investment by each sex. Parental investment theory (Trivers, 1972) predicts that males will devote more energy to mating effort and females will devote more resources to parental investment. Thus, it is not surprising that males are rated higher in personality domains
subsumed under the behavioral approach system, such as social dominance, sensation seeking, extraversion, and risk-taking. These
characteristics presumably provided survival and reproductive advantages to males in our
evolutionary past. However, females score higher on nurturance/love, which presumably also provided reproductive advantages to females and their offspring (Budaev, 1999; MacDonald, 1998; Buss, 1997).
”
”
Jon A. Sefcek
“
Several studies have demonstrated men’s preference for symmetrical women. In one study, asymmetry was found to be inversely related to male judgments of attractiveness (Singh, 1995).
Compared to women, men rate women’s facial attractiveness as rapidly and harshly declining with age (Henss, 1991). In addition, older men more than younger men have been found to prefer the scent of symmetrical women when the women are at high risk of conception (as measured by timing of their ovulatory cycle) (Thornhill et al., 2003). It is known that chemicals similar to estrogen stimulate hypothalamic responses in men but not in women, suggesting that males may have an
evolved mechanism to specifically detect ovulatory cues (Savic, Berglund, Gulyas, & Roland., 2001). Other studies suggest that men show olfactory sexual responses to couplins (sex pheromones) that may be present in the vaginal secretions of fertile women (Grammer & Jutte, 1997). However, these results are attenuated by other studies that have not found a relationship between the “scent of symmetry” among women’s and men’s mate preference (Thornhill et al., 2003; Thornhill &
Gangestad, 1999). Other physiological measures such as neuroimaging techniques have found that “attractive” (symmetrical) women’s faces stimulated reward-areas of the brains of male subjects, whereas average women and men’s faces did not, suggesting that symmetrical is pleasing (Aharon, Etcoff, Ariely, Chabris, O’Connor, & Breiter, 2001). Taken together, such findings suggest that
men’s partner-evaluation mechanisms are tuned to facial symmetry, which declines with age. That symmetry increases when women are most fertile also supports the notion that symmetry is tied to male mate-choice and that women signal their fitness through symmetry.
”
”
Jon A. Sefcek
“
Another universal male mate preference is youth (Buss, 1989). Buss has found that males on average prefer females who are 2.5 years younger than themselves, with ranges between two and seven years, depending on the culture. This finding is supported by recent U.S. Census data that shows that the largest proportion of heterosexual married and cohabitating couples include men who
are 2-5 years older than their partners (36.3% and 28.6%, respectively) (Fields and Casper, 2001). Notably, preferred age differences increase as men get older, with men preferring women who are increasingly younger relative to their own age (Kenrick & Keefe, 1992). Other studies have reported that women at the age of peak fertility, roughly 19-25 years of age, are typically rated as most attractive by men. It is probable that men are not responding to youth itself; rather, men may be
responding to the fertility benefits that young age implies. Youthful physical features such as facial neotony, clear skin, and strong hair-growth and behavioral traits such as novelty-seeking and playfulness signal fertility through the combined effects of estrogen. Because women have a narrow reproductive window compared to men, over evolutionary history men who impregnated young women would have had the greatest reproductive success. This is especially true of men who selected young long-term mates; these men would have reaped the benefits of his mate’s peak fertility in the short-term and also would have enjoyed a longer period in which to produce more children by the same mate.
”
”
Jon A. Sefcek
“
Although many personality traits do not show sex differences, women typically score higher on measures of nurturance and love. Presumably, these traits have provided reproductive and survival advantages to women and their offspring (MacDonald, 1998; Buss, 1997). In addition, women on average have higher levels of neuroticism than men. People who are rated high in neuroticism tend
to exhibit greater emotional liability. According to MacDonald (1995), neuroticism is associated with negative affect and avoidance behavior, or behavioral inhibition. Although neuroticism is negatively correlated with longevity and other indicators of “good genes,” it may be a component of a low risk or long-term female mating strategy. Thus, men may benefit from neuroticism in a partner through lower risk of extra-pair copulation (EPC). We know of no studies to date that have tested
this hypothesis. The higher prevalence of neuroticism in women suggests that the trait is not strongly selected against by men.
”
”
Jon A. Sefcek
“
Consider the master elk herd bull who has earned the right to mate with all the cows in the herd. Granted, mating is energy expensive, but just as expensive is all the stress and anxiety used in warding off the competition. This elk bull is virtually trapped in a constant state of fight-or-flight, and the choice is mandated by instinct: fight if necessary. He cannot eat enough, he cannot rest enough, and he’s using up his fat and bone marrow reserves at an alarming rate. That is why, when winter sets in, this huge, majestic, vital, and powerful animal is the elk most likely to die in late winter or early spring. The expenditure of all that energy can kill it. In effect, the alpha male’s “sacrifice” helps conserve the energy of all the other bulls, and may the best one win during the next rutting season.
”
”
Jon Young (What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World)
“
When most people judge others, it seems that they have an invisible belief gauge they rate someone on; If you believe in too many things you are considered a crackpot (aliens, fairys, bigfoot, gods, psychics, luck, magic, lake monsters, ghosts), but if you believe in too little you are considered insensitive (no God, no love at first sight, no destiny, no soul mates). Some people claim to have evidence for their beliefs, some people believe without any evidence. It is a real mixed up world to have a belief gauge in.
”
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J.S. Milik
“
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”
”
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