"There probably is no God - so relax and enjoy your life.”

I'm as mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more

Fittest Males Don't Always Get The Girl
ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2008) — The fittest males don't always get the girl, USC biologists report. Study tackles a paradox in species from fruit flies to humans: If warriors win the spoils, why don't males evolve towards super-aggressiveness?


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There is more to mating than beating up the competition, according to a new study.

Female fruit flies sometimes choose males who win fights, sometimes choose males who do not fight, and sometimes choose males for no obvious reason, say biologists from the University of Southern California; Cal State University, Sacramento; and the University of California, Davis.

The findings help explain the large variation in aggressiveness in most species, including humans.

"If aggression makes you more likely to father children, all males should be selected to be very aggressive. Male fruit flies (like humans and other animals) show a lot of genetic variation in aggression, and we wanted to find out why," explained study leader Brad Foley, a post-doctoral researcher at USC.

One reason for the variation, according to the study and to previous research on lizards by other groups, may be that no fighting strategy works all the time, just as in the game rock-scissors-paper.

"We showed in fruit flies that even the most genetically aggressive flies can have an Achilles heel, and lose against males who are (for the most part) wimps," Foley wrote.

"There's no single way to win a fight, or win mates," he added. "Females didn't necessarily prefer aggressive males -- some males mated less when they lost fights, but some males mated more if they didn't fight. Moreover, different females preferred different males."

"Unexpected interactions between individuals can define winners and losers (so-called 'chemistry')," Foley concluded. "In order to understand why flies, and humans, and other animals, are so genetically different from each other, we need to stop imagining there's a 'best' kind of strategy."

So while Hamlet was described to have "the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword," it is not clear which part drove Ophelia mad.

Journal reference: Cabral LG, Foley BR, Nuzhdin SV (2008) Does Sex Trade with Violence among Genotypes in Drosophila melanogaster?. PLoS One 3(4): e1986.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001986

The other member of the research team were Larry Cabral of Cal State Sacramento (co-corresponding author with Foley), and Foley's supervisor Sergey Nuzhdin, professor of molecular and computational biology at USC. The paper was written at USC based on experiments conducted at the University of California, Davis, where Foley and Nuzhdin worked previously.

Funding for the study came from the National Science Foundation.

Adapted from materials provided by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

One wouldn't exactly expect any university to produce a study which said feminism was bad.

Feminism And Romance Go Hand In Hand
Science Daily — Contrary to popular opinion, feminism and romance are not incompatible and feminism may actually improve the quality of heterosexual relationships, according to Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan, from Rutgers University in the US. Their study* also shows that unflattering feminist stereotypes, that tend to stigmatize feminists as unattractive and sexually unappealing, are unsupported.

It is generally interpersonal power of feminism: is feminism good for romantic relationships? Sex Roles (DOI 10.1007/s11199-007-9319-9)
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Springer.perceived that feminism and romance are in direct conflict. Rudman and Phelan’s work challenges this perception. They carried out both a laboratory survey of 242 American undergraduates and an online survey including 289 older adults, more likely to have had longer relationships and greater life experience. They looked at men’s and women’s perception of their own feminism and its link to relationship health, measured by a combination of overall relationship quality, agreement about gender equality, relationship stability and sexual satisfaction.
They found that having a feminist partner was linked to healthier heterosexual relationships for women. Men with feminist partners also reported both more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction. According to these results, feminism does not predict poor romantic relationships, in fact quite the opposite.
The authors also tested the validity of feminist stereotypical beliefs amongst their two samples, based on the hypothesis that if feminist stereotypes are accurate, then feminist women should be more likely to report themselves as being single, lesbian, or sexually unattractive, compared with non-feminist women.
Rudman and Phelan found no support for this hypothesis amongst their study participants. In fact, feminist women were more likely to be in a heterosexual romantic relationship than non-feminist women. The authors conclude that feminist stereotypes appear to be inaccurate, and therefore their unfavorable implications for relationships are also likely to be unfounded.
* Reference: Rudman LA & Phelan JE (2007).

If you are living life like there is no God, you better be right.

but heres the question, what does faith hurt?

YOU ARE BEING WATCHED
So why do religious concepts provoke moral behavior even in non-believers? It’s because both religion and morality are evolutionary adaptations, says Jesse Bering, who heads the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast, UK. Morality does not stem from religion, as is often argued, he suggests: they evolved separately, albeit in response to the same forces in our social environment. Once our ancestors acquired language and theory of mind —the ability to understand what others are thinking — news of any individual’s reputation could spread far beyond their immediate group. Anyone with tendencies to behave pro-socially would then have been at an advantage, Bering says: “What we’re concerned about in terms of our moral behavior is what other people think about us.” So morality became adaptive.

At the same time the capacity for religious belief would also have emerged. Our reputation-conscious ancestors would have experienced a pervasive feeling of being watched and judged, he says, which they would readily have attributed to supernatural sources since the cognitive system underlying theory of mind also seeks to attribute intentionality and meaning, even where there is none. So the same adaptations that led to morality could also have driven the evolution of religion.

Meanwhile, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York argues that religious practices are also important for group cohesion and are therefore subject to group selection. As humans have become ever more social over the past 100,000 years, and especially from 10,000 years ago, when agriculture led to huge division of labour in societies, religion and morality would have co-evolved as ways to promote social cohesion. “Religion did play a crucial role in giving us our moral nature, at least evolutionarily speaking,” says psychologist Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia.

Nowadays, adds Bering, whether we believe in a God or not, the brain architecture that causes us to behave as though we might get caught behaving badly is still present. As a result, atheists are no more likely to be immoral than believers. Indeed, his own
experiments show that, regardless of whether people believe in supernatural beings, both adults and children cheat less when performing a task in private if Bering has first primed them with the idea that there maybe a “god” or a “ghost” watching.

Cultural and technological advances have also changed the way we live, making western liberal societies poor models for understanding the link between religion and morality, according to Haidt. He argues that we are now far more individualistic than our ancestors are. “Technology has changed our lives so we can live in new ways. We can now be moral without religion. We have developed other means of social control,” he says, such as laws, police forces and CCTV cameras.

Yet religion does still have the power to galvanize individuals in any society. Brain- Imaging experiments by Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania indicate that people in religious or meditative states show a transient decrease in brain activity in regions representing our map of the body and our sense of self. Religious feelings do seem to be quite literally self-less, which may be one of religion’s biggest draws. Many human activities — from music festivals to military service — tap into our powerful urge for group bonding. Haidt believes that we also have an evolved desire to elevate ourselves beyond our own selfish interests to a more helpful, group- oriented and selfless plane.
Haidt says this sense of elevation is mediated through a physiological response in the release of a hormone called oxytocin, which makes us feel happy and good about ourselves. Elevation can come in many forms: we might get it from pursuing a noble goal, doing good, reading great prose, witnessing something skilful, experiencing awe or empathizing with someone else who is feeling good. Still, religious people have an extra source of elevation that many atheists lack — and scientists like Dawkins may do well to realize that even the most logical and articulate argument against religion will never eradicate this evolutionary sense of meaning.

Even if many no longer need religion for social cohesion or moral guidance, and think that atheism is the only rational route, we should nevertheless recognize that religion has had a pivotal role in our evolutionary history. It can still reinforce moral values and work with our innate moral sense. It can also be used to justify immoral behavior towards those who do not embrace our beliefs. Like it or not, religion remains an important part of what we are. •

NewScientistat http://archive.newscientisLcom

YOU ARE BEING WATCHED
So why do religious concepts provoke moral behavior even in non-believers? It’s because both religion and morality are evolutionary adaptations, says Jesse Bering, who heads the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast, UK. Morality does not stem from religion, as is often argued, he suggests: they evolved separately, albeit in response to the same forces in our social environment. Once our ancestors acquired language and theory of mind —the ability to understand what others are thinking — news of any individual’s reputation could spread far beyond their immediate group. Anyone with tendencies to behave pro-socially would then have been at an advantage, Bering says: “What we’re concerned about in terms of our moral behavior is what other people think about us.” So morality became adaptive.

At the same time the capacity for religious belief would also have emerged. Our reputation-conscious ancestors would have experienced a pervasive feeling of being watched and judged, he says, which they would readily have attributed to supernatural sources since the cognitive system underlying theory of mind also seeks to attribute intentionality and meaning, even where there is none. So the same adaptations that led to morality could also have driven the evolution of religion.

Meanwhile, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York argues that religious practices are also important for group cohesion and are therefore subject to group selection. As humans have become ever more social over the past 100,000 years, and especially from 10,000 years ago, when agriculture led to huge division of labour in societies, religion and morality would have co-evolved as ways to promote social cohesion. “Religion did play a crucial role in giving us our moral nature, at least evolutionarily speaking,” says psychologist Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia.

Nowadays, adds Bering, whether we believe in a God or not, the brain architecture that causes us to behave as though we might get caught behaving badly is still present. As a result, atheists are no more likely to be immoral than believers. Indeed, his own
experiments show that, regardless of whether people believe in supernatural beings, both adults and children cheat less when performing a task in private if Bering has first primed them with the idea that there maybe a “god” or a “ghost” watching.

Cultural and technological advances have also changed the way we live, making western liberal societies poor models for understanding the link between religion and morality, according to Haidt. He argues that we are now far more individualistic than our ancestors are. “Technology has changed our lives so we can live in new ways. We can now be moral without religion. We have developed other means of social control,” he says, such as laws, police forces and CCTV cameras.

Yet religion does still have the power to galvanize individuals in any society. Brain- Imaging experiments by Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania indicate that people in religious or meditative states show a transient decrease in brain activity in regions representing our map of the body and our sense of self. Religious feelings do seem to be quite literally self-less, which may be one of religion’s biggest draws. Many human activities — from music festivals to military service — tap into our powerful urge for group bonding. Haidt believes that we also have an evolved desire to elevate ourselves beyond our own selfish interests to a more helpful, group- oriented and selfless plane.
Haidt says this sense of elevation is mediated through a physiological response in the release of a hormone called oxytocin, which makes us feel happy and good about ourselves. Elevation can come in many forms: we might get it from pursuing a noble goal, doing good, reading great prose, witnessing something skilful, experiencing awe or empathizing with someone else who is feeling good. Still, religious people have an extra source of elevation that many atheists lack — and scientists like Dawkins may do well to realize that even the most logical and articulate argument against religion will never eradicate this evolutionary sense of meaning.

Even if many no longer need religion for social cohesion or moral guidance, and think that atheism is the only rational route, we should nevertheless recognize that religion has had a pivotal role in our evolutionary history. It can still reinforce moral values and work with our innate moral sense. It can also be used to justify immoral behavior towards those who do not embrace our beliefs. Like it or not, religion remains an important part of what we are. •

NewScientistat http://archive.newscientisLcom

If you include psychological motivations, then you could make an argument that virtually all actions are somewhat selfish in motivation.