Friday, November 16, 2007
Evolutionary psychology
These two interesting topics have arrived me this morning
Today I would like to write about two articles published in the internet, both of them trying to describe and explain some human behavioral phenomenon. One on the articles deals with cheating, why we cheat, how much and who cheats more. The other article deals with the finding that there is or might be a relation between the way of upbringing and sexual maturity in girls.
By the study described in this article called Do-gooders can become the worst cheats there are only few people who really do not cheat. It seems that cheating is one weapon in the arm races for survival and is used as excuse or explanation for achieving “higher” goals.
The second article, called Early Puberty in Girls May Reflect Home Life, deals with the possible link between the way how good or how poor girls are cared for in their families and their sexual development. The basic idea is that the worse the parental care the faster sexual development. The proposed explanation for this idea might be that the child must get adjusted to its environment that means if the environment is unpleasant it is necessary to be able to reproduce faster, and vice versa.
There are other findings that support this idea. The age of the first sexual encounter in girls usually differs according to achieved schooling and anticipated further schooling. So girls who attend schooling to become hairdresser usually have their first sexual experience one or two years earlier than girls going for university career.
This in turn supports the idea of adaptation of organisms, in this case young human females, to their environment. This also includes the anticipation of further schooling for those who want and are able to pursue this path.
If there really is such adaptation, then, of course, the puristic idea of mutation is a sheer nonsense. Most probably there are many different ways of influencing the next generation, and mutation is only one of them, and most probably even not too much important. The most important way of influencing the next generation is the ability to adapt to environment and store this information about this adaptation in DNA, so that the next generation does not have to go through the same adaptation process again and can use its energy for further development. Mutation can actually be a very primitive way of adaptation in low level organism, and it can be an obsolete way of adaptation in higher level organisms, in which it actually does more harm.
Today I would like to write about two articles published in the internet, both of them trying to describe and explain some human behavioral phenomenon. One on the articles deals with cheating, why we cheat, how much and who cheats more. The other article deals with the finding that there is or might be a relation between the way of upbringing and sexual maturity in girls.
By the study described in this article called Do-gooders can become the worst cheats there are only few people who really do not cheat. It seems that cheating is one weapon in the arm races for survival and is used as excuse or explanation for achieving “higher” goals.
The second article, called Early Puberty in Girls May Reflect Home Life, deals with the possible link between the way how good or how poor girls are cared for in their families and their sexual development. The basic idea is that the worse the parental care the faster sexual development. The proposed explanation for this idea might be that the child must get adjusted to its environment that means if the environment is unpleasant it is necessary to be able to reproduce faster, and vice versa.
There are other findings that support this idea. The age of the first sexual encounter in girls usually differs according to achieved schooling and anticipated further schooling. So girls who attend schooling to become hairdresser usually have their first sexual experience one or two years earlier than girls going for university career.
This in turn supports the idea of adaptation of organisms, in this case young human females, to their environment. This also includes the anticipation of further schooling for those who want and are able to pursue this path.
If there really is such adaptation, then, of course, the puristic idea of mutation is a sheer nonsense. Most probably there are many different ways of influencing the next generation, and mutation is only one of them, and most probably even not too much important. The most important way of influencing the next generation is the ability to adapt to environment and store this information about this adaptation in DNA, so that the next generation does not have to go through the same adaptation process again and can use its energy for further development. Mutation can actually be a very primitive way of adaptation in low level organism, and it can be an obsolete way of adaptation in higher level organisms, in which it actually does more harm.
# posted by Dalibor @ 6:14 AM 
