May 2011
8 posts
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 21
Pinker compares the mating habits of various species:
Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. The means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an “ape legacy” that humans are doomed to live by. Gorillas live on the fringes of forests in small groups of one male and several females, and the males fight each other for control over females, the males evolving to be twice...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 20
Pinker (but actually Trivers) on the difference attitudes towards sex between males and females:
Trivers has worked out how all the prominent differences between males and females stem from the difference in the minimum size of their investment in offspring. Investment, remember, is anything a parent does that increases the chance of survival in an offspring while decreasing the parent’s...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 19
Pinker on why there are 2 sexes:
Why do we make one big egg and lots of little sperm, instead of two equal blobs that coalesce like mercury? It is because the cell that is to become the baby cannot be just a bag of genes; it needs the metabolic machinery of the rest of a cell. Some of that machinery, the mitochondria, has its own genes, the famous mitochondrial DNA which is so useful in dating...
The Anti-Slut Dream
Tomorrow is Monday and I’ll have to go to school—Mcgill University; at least three classes; math in the morning, and two more I can’t recall; I need to become more organized, I haven’t printed out my schedule yet—but I am filled with despair and loneliness. I said tomorrow, but it’s today. It’s 3 AM, or some other ungodly hour of the night. I’m not keeping...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 18
Pinker explains the evolutionary origin of sex:
Why is there sex to begin with? […] Why don’t women give virgin birth to daughters who are clones of themselves instead[…]? Why do people and other organisms swap out half their genes for the genes of another member of the species[…]? It’s not to evolve faster, because organisms are selected for fitness in the present....
Childhood memories
When I was a kid, I snuck into my parents’ bedroom and put in the tape of Terminator 2. 10 seconds into the movie, there’s a pile of skulls and some sort of caterpillar tracks rolling over them and crushing them. Too terrified, I immediately stopped the movie and ejected it, and never watched any of their videos again.
Sexism in Amazon's video game recommendations for...
I have trouble understanding people who call out market research as sexism. The author is complaining about the selection of video games that Amazon has listed as recommendations for mother’s day gifts. She points out that the games are mostly exercise or simulations (in the sense of simulating cooking, simulating raising a family, etc.), and that they are primarily games for the Nintendo DS...
/r/SketchDaily: April 30th - Sadness
Felt like I took an “easy” way out, though.