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Old December 1st, 2009, 03:49 PM
James Brody James Brody is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Philadelphia area
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Arrow Omega 3s: Tomorrow's Collectivists or Loners

Stephen Suomi mentioned once that omega-3 supplements in the lab chow eliminated the hyperactive, assaultive, impulsive behavior of young rhesus reared without a mother. I wonder about Islam. It is known, for example, that aggressive males tend to have sons rather than daughters. And nurses tend to have daughters and engineers, sons. It could be that the West's great mistake in how we face Islam lies in our noticing the very noticeable males rather than the females who produce, rear, and surround them.

There are subtle aspects:

1) Some genes come in one form if from dad and a different form if from mom. Mom's contributions - in mice - tend to reduce fetal size and musculature while dad's increase both. Mom's genes, however, appear to increase the relative size of the cerebral cortex, dad's increase not only musculature, dental enamel, and deposits of high-energy brown fats but also the willingness of daughters to make nests, retrieve offspring, and nurse them.

2) The war between the sexes is duplicated by the war between the left and right cerebral cortex. That is, sons tend to have larger right frontal areas than daughters do. And the right cerebral cortex is not necessarily associated with spatial relations, music, and math but with novelty. The left side is associated not just with language but with familiarity. The brain is a "pattern-maker" that turns surprises and novelty into routines.

3) Further, with aging, the activity of our right and left mind changes. Aging brains, like aging cultures, have rituals and problems breaking them. The tendency is to repeat more often and more powerfully whatever worked in the past. Clerics, mothers, lawyers, teachers, and aging fathers lecture on what should be while sons, in particular, ask "why?" and seek their own solutions.

4) Finally, "liberalism" seems to align with social inhibition, lectures, and rule-bound conduct. It also aligns with depression and the classic irritability that goes with it. As environments stabilize, liberalism gains in strength. After all, in stable settings, whatever worked last week still works this week and next. And personal assets depend more on whom you know rather than on what you might do to them.

Bottom Lines:
1) Islam makes lots of children, six to every one reared by a westerner.
2) Islam thrives on scant rations.
3) Islam is saturated with wife-beating, feuds, religious wars, lower IQs, territoriality, and social rank.

These three things might be softened by a richer diet instead of a different religion. Christianity, after all, became peaceful when it also became better fed and in more stable cultures.

The West is cursed with higher IQs, declining populations, baby-slaughter (women kill more people - most of them black - than Joe Stalin did), family instability, pacifism, and secular relativism. And western females sort through males for those that are influential and kind rather than influential and nasty. And their sorting occurs pre-school, in courtship, marriage, and court proceedings as males are chosen as fit to keep or fit to incarcerate. (It also occurs politically as governments grow in size, cost, and complexity in relation to the number of women who participate in elections.)

Ironically: adopting Muslim traditions may have the longer-term effect of toughening up our males and getting us into more wars! On the other hand, remaining arrogant, secular, and wordy and escorted by undressed women makes us a banner-ad for invaders...

References:
Brody, James F (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. Http://rebellionphysicstopersonalwill.blogspot.com/
Burt, Austin, & Trivers, Robert (2006) Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard.
Cahill L (2006) Why sex matters for neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7: 477-484.
Cahill, Larry (2009) His brain, her brain. Scientific American Mind, 20(3) 40-47.
Goldberg E & Costa LD (1981) Hemisphere differences in the acquisition and use of descriptive systems Brain Lang 14(1): 144–173.
Goldberg E, Podell K, & Lovell M (1994) Lateralization of frontal lobe functions and cognitive novelty. J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci 6:371-378.
Goldberg, E. (2001) The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. NY: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, E. (2006) The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Brain Can Grow Stronger As You Grow Older. NY: Gotham.
Goldberg, E, Harner, Richard, Lovell, Mark, Podell, Kenneth, & Riggio, Silvana (1994) Cognitive bias, functional cortical geometry, and the frontal lobes: laterality, sex, and handedness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 6: 276-296.
Haig, D. (1993) Genetic conflicts in human pregnancy. Quarterly Review of Biology. 68, 495-532.
Haig, D. (2002) Genomic Imprinting and Kinship New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Hoff Sommers, Christina (2000) The War Against Boys. NY: Simon & Schuster.
Hoff Sommers, Christina (2008, March) Why can't a woman be more like a man? The American. Http://www.american.com/archive/2008...e-like-a-man/?
Hoff Sommers, Christina (June 2009) Baseless bias and the new second sex. The American. Http://www.american.com/archive/2009...new-second-sex
Parker, Kathleen (2008) Save the Males: Why Men Matter and Why Women Should Care. NY: Random House.
Pinker, S. (2002) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking.
Pinker S (2004) Why nature & nurture won't go away. Daedelus. 133, Fall, 5-17.
Sowell, T. (2002) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Basic Books.
Sowell, T. (2005) Redneck Blacks and White Liberals. San Francisco: Encounter.
Suomi, S. (2000) How gene-environment interactions shape individual development trajectories in rhesus monkeys. Presentation at The Relationship System, Georgetown Family Center, April 2000.
Suomi S (2006) How gene x environment interactions can shape behavioral and biological development in rhesus monkeys, humans, and other primates. Presentation at XVII Biennial Congress, International Society for Human Ethology, Detroit, MI, August 2.
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