Evolution's Path May Lead To Shorter, Heavier Women

Hugh Pickens writes "Yale University researchers believe that if evolutionary pressures of sexual selection and reproductive fitness continue for another 10 generations, the trends detected in their study may mean that the average woman in 2409 AD will be 2 cm shorter, 1 kg heavier, will bear her first child five months earlier, and enter menopause 10 months later. 'There is this idea that because medicine has been so good at reducing mortality rates, that means that natural selection is no longer operating in humans,' says Stephen Stearns of Yale University. 'That's just plain false.' Stearns and his team studied the medical histories of 14,000 residents of the Massachusetts town of Framingham, using medical data from a study going back to 1948 spanning three generations, and found that shorter, heavier women had more children than lighter, taller ones. Women with lower blood pressure and cholesterol were also more likely to have large families as were women who gave birth early or had a late menopause. More importantly, these traits are then passed on to their daughters, who also, on average, had more children. The study has not determined why these factors are linked to reproductive success, but it is likely that they indicate genetic, rather than environmental, effects. 'The evolution that's going on in the Framingham women is like average rates of evolution measured in other plants and animals,' says Stearns. 'These results place humans in the medium-to-slow end of the range of rates observed for other living things.'"

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mod parent up: the stupidity of libertarians

[circletimessquare]

much like communist propaganda made a herd of idiots support autocrats at the expense of their impoverishment, libertarian propaganda makes a herd of idiots support monopolists at the expense of their impoverishment

libertarian propaganda, of course, being the mirror image of the evil that is marx's das kapital: the holy text of ayn rand

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html

Rand's particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism -- to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand's teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.

Heller maintains an appropriately critical perspective on her subject -- she writes that she is "a strong admirer, albeit one with many questions and reservations" -- while allowing the reader to understand the power of Rand's conviction and her odd charisma. Rand labored for more than two years on Galt's radio address near the end of "Atlas Shrugged" -- a long paean to capitalism, individualism and selfishness that makes Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good" sound like the Sermon on the Mount. "At one point, she stayed inside the apartment, working for 33 days in a row," Heller writes. She kept going on amphetamines and willpower; the writing, she said, was a "drops-of-water-in-a-desert kind of torture." Nor would Rand, sooner than any other desert prophet, allow her message to be trifled with. When Bennett Cerf, a head of Random House, begged her to cut Galt's speech, Rand replied with what Heller calls "a comment that became publishing legend": "Would you cut the Bible?"

market fundamentalists and agrarian fundamentalists loudly rage about their incredibly retarded ideologies, and us normal folk have to tolerate these ignorant assholes who do nothing but create suffering for us. i liked how this biography of rand linked her creation to her upbringing in revolutionary russia. in other words, the prophet of the libertarians was born as an angry revenge, a living vendetta, against the suffering of her upbringing in the birthing pains of communist russia. fitting and poetic: the idiocy of communism begat the idiocy of libertarianism, directly

Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. This was, perhaps, an understandable reaction against her childhood experience of Communism. Born in 1905 as Alissa Rosenbaum to a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, she was 12 when the Bolsheviks seized power, and she endured the ensuing years of civil war, hunger and oppression. By 1926, when she came to live with relatives in the United States and changed her name, she had become a relentless enemy of every variety of what she denounced as "collectivism," from Soviet Communism to the New Deal. Even Republicans weren't immune: after Wendell Willkie's defeat in 1940, Rand helped to found an organization called Associated Ex-Willkie Workers Against Willkie, berating the candidate as "the guiltiest man of any for destroying America, more guilty than Roosevelt."

death to libertarians and communists, mirror image morons and assholes who create suffering for us all with their loud ignorance they call an ideology