Berno's blog hangover.

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And the greatest of these....

Brains or Intercourse

I always wonder why people do research to discover the obvious. Now researchers have “discovered” that smart people have less intercourse than people of average intelligence.
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligence.php

One reason the dimwitted get so much action is that they tend to be more attractive than smart people. That’s not a coincidence. It’s genetics. Hot/dumb people are more likely to mate with other hot/dumb people and produce hot/dumb kids. Here’s a headline you’ll never see: “Nobel Prize winner for physics thanked his supermodel parents for all of their support.”

I once saw a study that said smart people are more likely to have bad eyesight than dumb people. That explains a lot. If smart people could see each other clearly, there would never be another smart baby created except by genetic mutation.

You would think that smart people would use their intelligence and creativity to improve their sex lives. But I don’t need to tell my readers that when you have an excellent imagination, a partner just slows things down. People of average intelligence have more intercourse, sure, but I’ll bet the Mensans are winning the orgasm competition by about ten to one. Add that to the things you don’t really need to do any research on.

This leads me to my question of the day. Would you be willing to give up 10 points of IQ for a dramatic and permanent increase in your sex life (with other humans)?


Why rich women have sons

Females are tougher, so if you're a poor mother, you're more likely to have a daughter, a study shows.

RICH, married, well-educated women tend to have more sons, while those who are poorer and unhealthy tend to have more daughters, a study shows.

Put simply, the reason is that women are tougher than men. According to evolutionary theory, women living in poorer communities are predisposed to have daughters to ensure survival of the family line because the men are at greater risk of dying younger.

The US research, published recently in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, looked at a database of 50 million people. It holds a mirror to poor health and education in black America, where black mothers have long had fewer boys than white mothers.

And it has depressing implications for countries such as India and China, where female infanticide occurs, since the findings suggest these countries cannot avoid having an excess of daughters.

The idea has proved true for a range of species, such as insects, birds, pigs, sheep, dogs, mink and deer.

"We find that married, better educated and younger [which is advantageous from a biological perspective] mothers are more likely to bear sons," said Professor Lena Edlund, who co-wrote the study with Professor Douglas Almond, a colleague at Columbia University in New York.
"For instance, relative to a mother with some college education, a mother without a high school degree was approximately 0.6 per cent less likely to bear a boy.

There has been little research in Australia into sex distribution at birth. However, the National Perinatal Statistics Unit at the University of NSW has just started researching the subject. "In Australia we have historically had quite stable ratios, about 106 boys to 100 girls, which is in the normal range," Jishan Dean, the unit's acting director, says.

The research is looking at whether recent migrants from India and China, with their cultural preference for boys, are influencing Australian birth patterns, she says. The researchers will also look at socioeconomic factors.

The US study provides powerful confirmation of an idea set out more than three decades ago by Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist, and Dan Willard, a mathematician, who boil life down to one factor - having as many offspring as possible and thus passing on as many genes to future generations as possible.

The Trivers-Willard hypothesis argues that strong, healthy women tend to have sons, ensuring their genes and family lines are passed on. These sons, in turn, are strong and outdo other weaker male offspring to reproduce, thus ensuring survival of the fittest and of the family line.
Weaker or poor mothers tend to have weaker sons who do not do well and are more likely to die early - earlier than women in the same society.

To ensure survival of the family line, the women tend to have daughters because they are more likely to survive long enough to become mothers themselves.
Although the results strictly apply to the US, Edlund says that she would expect the effect of a bias towards girls at the bottom social strata to be more pronounced in developing countries because infant mortality is up to 10 times greater than in America.

Being bilingual 'protects brain'

Being fluent in two languages may help to keep the brain sharper for longer, a study suggests.
Researchers from York University in Canada carried out tests on 104 people between the ages of 30 and 88.
They found that those who were fluent in two languages rather than just one were sharper mentally.
Writing in the journal of Psychology and Ageing, they said being bilingual may protect against mental decline in old age.
Previous studies have shown that keeping the brain active can protect against senile dementia.

Research has shown that people who play musical instruments, dance or read regularly may be less likely to develop the condition.
Other activities like doing crosswords or playing board games may also help.
Language skills
This latest study appears to back up the theory that language skills also have a protective effect.
Dr Ellen Bialystok and colleagues at York University assessed the cognitive skills of all those involved in the study using a variety of widely recognised tests.
They tested their vocabulary skills, their non-verbal reasoning ability and their reaction time.
Half of the volunteers came from Canada and spoke only English. The other half came from India and was fluent in both English and Tamil.
The volunteers had similar backgrounds in the sense that they were all educated to degree level and were all middle class.

The researchers found that the people who were fluent in English and Tamil responded faster than those who were fluent in just English. This applied to all age groups.
The researchers also found that the bilingual volunteers were much less likely to suffer from the mental decline associated with old age.
"The bilinguals were more efficient at all ages tested and showed a slower rate of decline for some processes with aging," they said.
"It appears...that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses."
The UK's Alzheimer's Society welcomed the study.

"These findings, that early development of second language may improve a specific aspect of cognitive function in later life, are very interesting," said Professor Clive Ballard, its director of research.
"It is a possibility that the acquisition of a second language in early childhood may influence the process of the development of neuronal circuits.
"However, the results of this particular study need to be interpreted cautiously as they were comparing groups of individual of different nationalities, educated in different systems. "It is also well recognised that education in general can bestow benefits on cognitive function in later life."

......> All from some article.