I think the fatal fly with this idea is the very questionable presumption that investors behave rationally.
Didn't read the article, I see. Far from presuming that investors behave rationally, they are trying to understand the neural basis of irrational or inconsistent behavior.
These blogs only get the coverage they do because of the sexiness of new technology
I don't think it is solely attributable to novelty. I think that it is a combination of immediacy and the ability to link to other sources. This was really evident in the "Rathergate" affair, in which bloggers were able to display and debate the key features that demonstrated that the memos were forgeries. The whole argument played out and a clear conclusion emerged in a matter of a few days, while the major media continued to equivocate about it for weeks.
For fuck's sake, blogging is not "the media" any more than me telling my friends about the CD I just bought is "the media." Am I the only person who puts absolutely no stock in what some schmuck on the internet has to say? Or at least, take it with great big grains of salt?
I certainly do--but then I feel the same way about Dan Rather.
Let's face it, somebody who is getting enough readership so that he is running advertisements is part of "the media," even if it is on the "small press" end of things.
However, according to Zephyr Teachout the money wasn't paid to Kos for any technical consulting, but to buy his loyalty.
However, it is also made clear that there was no actual transaction or quid pro quo. They simply hoped that as a result of working for them, he would be more positively disposed toward them.
We were paying him in part because WE hoped that he, and Kos, would blog positive things about Dean, but that was never explicit or implicit in the contract. This has to do with OUR motives, not some contract, and no compromise on their part.
His choice to post a disclosure was therefore appropriate and sufficient. Readers knew the nature and extent of his involvement with the campaign, and could weight his remarks accordingly. Needless to say, he could not have been expected to read the minds of the Dean campaign and disclose what they hoped to gain by employing him.
You clearly didn't read the definitions. A law is an observation of the natural world, usually (if not always) described in mathematics. Thoeries are attempts to explain why the natural world behaves as it does, and usually consist of a number of laws or mathematical formulas. The theory of relativity, for instance, has e=mc^2, as well as the gravity formulas (that are incredibly close to Newton's in a non-relativistic scope). Also, laws have a context, like Newton's being for non-quantum, non-relativistic bodies, and Einstein's, which were applicable to our observable universe (you don't expect it to work in another one without tweaking, do you?)
Observations are singular. For example, "On January 3rd, 2005, an object of weight two grams falling in an evacuated cylinder was observed to accelerate at 9.8 meters/sec^2 plus or minus 5%." When a set of observations are generalized so that they make predictions about events not yet observed (e.g. F = ma), they constitute a theory. If the theory is very simple and seems very reliable, people used to sometimes call it a "law," although the term is virtually obsolete these days.
laws have a context, like Newton's being for non-quantum, non-relativistic bodies, and Einstein's, which were applicable to our observable universe
No, Newton placed no restrictions on his Laws. He and everybody else at the time treated them as generally true at all velocities. Subsequent research showed that his "Laws" were not quite accurate, and that corrections were required at all velocities, becoming large at high velocities. But we still call them "Laws" for purely historical reasons.
Please don't ever link to talkorigins.org when discussing open minds again.
Is is a site notorious for exaggeration and plain misinformation about such topics.
I can understand why creationists find links to talkorigins.org upsetting, because it is a rich source of citations of the original scientific literature that debunk the misleading and dishonest arguments favored by creationists.
Seriously though, why is it such a horible thing to have an alternate view presented. Do you realy think these children can only handle one view, or that thay are completely incapable of making there own desisions on who they are going to believe. I mean after all, if evolution is so obviously the only possible answer, they shouldn't the evidence be able to speek for itself, why should it be above question and debate?
Studying the history of why a particular outmoded theory was abandoned by practicing scientists might be a task for a PhD student of the history of science. It is not a job for elementary or secondary school students. There are hundreds and hundreds of outmoded theories that have been discarded by practicing scientists. The evidence that led to their being discarded occupies thousands and thousands of pages of highly technical specialized journals. It is simply unreasonable and unfair to expect students to examine and understand all of this evidence in a basic, introductory class. And it is a waste of limited class time in a course that is intended to teach current scientific knowledge, not scientific history.
There is no scientific reason to select one obsolete theory out of all of these and insist that students recapitulate the decades of study that led to it being abandoned, especially when much of this evidence cannot be properly understood without the background of advanced training in genetics, biochemistry, and mathematics.
In point of fact, gravity is a law (note definition 6) [webster.com]. General Relativity and Special Relativity are theories (note definition 5) [webster.com]. A crude explanation of the difference between a law and a theory, in scientific parlance, is: Laws describe what is happening, theories attempt to describe why. Those attempts, after the initial few tries, are generally very good. Even the ones I don't agree with are generally well thought out.
In science, a "law" is just a simply stated theory that is generally accepted. The term is pretty much obsolete. Science progresses fast enough these days that hardly anybody has the confidence to label a theory a law. But the term is sometimes still used for older theories. Ironically, many of these are now known to be not quite right. For example Newton's "Laws" of motion and gravity have been proved to be less accurate than Einstein's theories of relativity and gravitation.
Oh, and a minority should decide what the majority wants their kids to learn in schools their taxes fund?
In a science class? Absolutely. Only a minority of people are scientists, and the job of a science class is to teach what that minority of specialists think. One could, I suppose, decide that children shouldn't learn science. But to teach something else and label it "science" is dishonest.
There is a large difference. Gravity is accepted by probably about 99.9999999999% of the world. Evolution is accepted by a minority of the world.
Science is decided by scientists, not by a vote of the general population. Biologists who don't accept evolution are about as common as astronomers who don't accept gravity.
The real reason scientists resent such stickers is that it is an attempt to lie to students about our profession. The fact is that evolution is absolutely fundamental to biology. There is no meaningful scientific debate about whether life evolved, only about the details of the mechanism, comparable to the debates of physicists about the subtleties of quantum gravity.
The difference between a theory and a law is that a law can be absolutely proven, a theory cannot.
A "law" is just an obsolete term for a theory that everybody believes. These days, science is progressing fast enough that scientists are hesitant to call anything a law. An ironic consequence of this is that many of the principles called "Laws" are now known to be wrong, or at least not entirely correct. For example, Newton's "Laws of motion" have been superseded by Einstein's equations of relativistic motion.
You're confusing microevolution with macroevolution. I want to know who on gods green earth OBSERVED monkeys turning into humans.
The notion that there is a meaningful distinction between "micro" evolution and "macro" evolution has been disproved by genome sequencing projects, which have revealed that all of the difference between species are due to an accumulation "micro" changes of exactly the sort that are produced by mutation--an incredible vindication of a theory that predated knowledge of the gene.
No, nobody "observed" monkeys turning into humans. And nobody has observed atoms in the distant stars. Nevertheless, we can state with great confidence that the distant stars are made of atoms, and that we and the monkeys had a common ancestor.
Here's what I don't understand: Why does mentioning evolution make this a religious issue? It wouldn't be an issue of church and state if the stickers said, for example, "Einstein's theory of relativity is a theory, not a fact." Our understanding of evolution is in the domain of science. It has nothing to do with religion.
It wouldn't be a problem because there is no religious sect that is pressuring schools to teach Aristotle's theory of motion as a reasonable alternative to Einstein's theory of relativity. But for that very reason, there is nobody pressuring schools to put on such a sticker about relativity. So what makes it a violation of separation of church and state is singling out evolution, when in fact most of what is in every science textbook is theory.
It is not clear to me what the sticker has to do with separation of church and state. The sticker made no reference to any religious beliefs, and only cautioned the reader to take the material with a grain of salt. This is *always* good advice: people should never blindly accept any theory as fact.
From a scientific standpoint, it is misleading because it creates a false dichotomy between theory and fact. All scientific explanations and generalizations are theories. The only facts are observations. "I saw an apple fall" is a fact. "Objects fall toward the center of the earth" is a theory. Some theories are more well founded than others. Evolution is one of the strongest, on a par with gravity.
Did VCRs also spontaneously arise out of the primordial soup? A VCR is a far far simpler device than a self-reproducing automaton
No, and neither did we. But both are derived indirectly from something that spontaneously arose out of the primordial soup, so it is not surprising that there are some similarities. Indeed, there is reason to believe that human creativity arises out of neural randomization/selection processes that are somewhat similar to evolution. So the resemblance between things that evolved and things that were designed by man probably reflects similar fundamental mechanisms.
One would think that there are enough current ethical problems to keep academics busy without speculating on future ones. As seems to be typical with these ethical discussions of future technology, this one is both too early and too late. Too early because it's really too soon to predict what the real ethical issues will be with robots, except that there will likely be ones that nobody has anticipated. Too late, because, to the extent that the ethical concerns can be anticipated, the science fiction writers have already pretty much mapped out the territory.
Exactly. This is a bold move by Apple essentially because they are admitting that they may have been wrong.
Not really. After all, they weren't wrong. For new computer users, a single-button mouse is much less intimidating and easier to learn. Apple has supported multibutton mice for years, although they haven't sold them. But these new low-cost Macs are intended for relatively sophisticated users who will be configuring their own systems.
The name "shuffle" is another very clever bit of marketing. You don't need a screen to select which song to play next because the iPod Shuffle is intended for shuffle play. Apple's web site turns the potential negative of no screen into an asset by urging buyers to let it "surprise" them.
He is 30 years old and still pre-med? He clearly isn't the brightest spark in the world.
This certainly isn't the brightest comment in the world. Not everybody goes to college immediately out of high school, and not everybody goes to med school immediately out of college. Plenty of people do other things before deciding to go to med school.
Yes, it was a dumb thing to do. But being pre-med does not automatically make you conversant with contract law. He should have read the fine print and realized that he had signed a NDA, but have you really never clicked "accept" on a user agreement without bothering reading through to the end?
The irony of global warming is that the US, which has been dragging its feet on CO2 reduction measures, probably has more to lose than most. Many countries may well experience a net gain, once the dust...er...water settles, but the US enjoys a particularly favorable climate. Rolling the climate dice again is unlikely to be in our best interest.
Why lay out several hundred dollars plus monthly fees, when I can just get it all from my cable company for less?
Actually, you pay just about as much per month and you get considerably less. The Time Warner DVR pretty much sucks, with one important exception: it will let you record two different shows at the same time. There is no way for TiVo to add this capability while it is restricted to controlling a cable box. But the Cable Card TiVos will match this capability, while adding additional features, such as more storage.
I'm not surprised that TiVo never really managed to find cable partners. The cable companies are looking for a lowest cost solution that will satisfy the typical cable subscriber who has a cheap standard definition TV and is mainly interested in being able to pause/instant replay live TV. So the cable company PVRs have low capacity hard disks and relatively primitive software that lacks the complex searching and prioritization capabilities of a TiVo unit.
However, the cable companies are going to have a hard time satisfying the videophiles with the multi-thousand dollar HD/surround sound systems. The cable company PVRs available only hold a few hours of HD. Of course, storage is constantly getting cheaper, but the problem the cable companies face is that if they release a better system, a lot of customers are going to be calling up wanting to swap their old systems out for a new one.
So there seems to be a real opportunity for TiVo to skim the cream by offering a higher-end PVR for a few hundred bucks up front and about the same monthly fee that the cable companies are charging for their boxes. Moreover, there is no reason for TiVo to rush. After all, cable customers don't own their boxes, so they have no commitment. They could abandon their cable PVRs overnight if TiVo offers a significantly better box with more storage and better software. It might even make sense for TiVo to wait a while to allow the cable company PVRs to "age" a bit, so that the TiVo boxes look even better by contrast.
In addition, TiVo, with its Netflix connection, will be in a position to compete with the cable companies for delivery of PPV material.
CRTs have better contrast and brightness and last longer. They handle multiple resolutions well. They are also generally substantially cheaper. To my eye, nothing else matches a top-quality direct view CRT, although the most expensive LCD displays come close.
However, they are also heavy and unavailable in larger screen sizes.
Homosexuality is observed widely throughout the animal kingdom. At some level, it must be genetic. That does not necessarily mean that whether a particular individual is homosexual or heterosexual is determined by genetic differences. It means that mammalian sexuality has frequently evolved in such a way that homosexual behavior is possible. If homosexuality were strongly detrimental to fitness, then mammals would have doubtless have evolved stronger safeguards to restrict sexual interactions to the opposite sex.
The relatively high frequency (compared to mutation rates) of homosexuality in the human population implies that there is some benefit of homosexuality (or at least the capacity for homosexuality) to fitness. This could mean that homosexuals propagate their genes indirectly (e.g. by assisting siblings in child-rearing), or it could mean that a capacity for homosexuality is an unavoidable consequence of genes that in other contexts increase reproductive fitness. For example, a gene might increase the likelihood of homosexuality in males, but increase fertility or sexual attractiveness in females. Or an increased probability of homosexuality could be linked to intellectual traits that also confer important advantages that (when they do not result in homosexuality) improve reproductive success.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the fatal fly with this idea is the very questionable presumption that investors behave rationally.
Didn't read the article, I see. Far from presuming that investors behave rationally, they are trying to understand the neural basis of irrational or inconsistent behavior.
These blogs only get the coverage they do because of the sexiness of new technology
I don't think it is solely attributable to novelty. I think that it is a combination of immediacy and the ability to link to other sources. This was really evident in the "Rathergate" affair, in which bloggers were able to display and debate the key features that demonstrated that the memos were forgeries. The whole argument played out and a clear conclusion emerged in a matter of a few days, while the major media continued to equivocate about it for weeks.
For fuck's sake, blogging is not "the media" any more than me telling my friends about the CD I just bought is "the media." Am I the only person who puts absolutely no stock in what some schmuck on the internet has to say? Or at least, take it with great big grains of salt?
I certainly do--but then I feel the same way about Dan Rather.
Let's face it, somebody who is getting enough readership so that he is running advertisements is part of "the media," even if it is on the "small press" end of things.
However, it is also made clear that there was no actual transaction or quid pro quo. They simply hoped that as a result of working for them, he would be more positively disposed toward them.
His choice to post a disclosure was therefore appropriate and sufficient. Readers knew the nature and extent of his involvement with the campaign, and could weight his remarks accordingly. Needless to say, he could not have been expected to read the minds of the Dean campaign and disclose what they hoped to gain by employing him.
You clearly didn't read the definitions. A law is an observation of the natural world, usually (if not always) described in mathematics. Thoeries are attempts to explain why the natural world behaves as it does, and usually consist of a number of laws or mathematical formulas. The theory of relativity, for instance, has e=mc^2, as well as the gravity formulas (that are incredibly close to Newton's in a non-relativistic scope). Also, laws have a context, like Newton's being for non-quantum, non-relativistic bodies, and Einstein's, which were applicable to our observable universe (you don't expect it to work in another one without tweaking, do you?)
Observations are singular. For example, "On January 3rd, 2005, an object of weight two grams falling in an evacuated cylinder was observed to accelerate at 9.8 meters/sec^2 plus or minus 5%." When a set of observations are generalized so that they make predictions about events not yet observed (e.g. F = ma), they constitute a theory. If the theory is very simple and seems very reliable, people used to sometimes call it a "law," although the term is virtually obsolete these days.
laws have a context, like Newton's being for non-quantum, non-relativistic bodies, and Einstein's, which were applicable to our observable universe
No, Newton placed no restrictions on his Laws. He and everybody else at the time treated them as generally true at all velocities. Subsequent research showed that his "Laws" were not quite accurate, and that corrections were required at all velocities, becoming large at high velocities. But we still call them "Laws" for purely historical reasons.
Please don't ever link to talkorigins.org when discussing open minds again.
Is is a site notorious for exaggeration and plain misinformation about such topics.
I can understand why creationists find links to talkorigins.org upsetting, because it is a rich source of citations of the original scientific literature that debunk the misleading and dishonest arguments favored by creationists.
Seriously though, why is it such a horible thing to have an alternate view presented. Do you realy think these children can only handle one view, or that thay are completely incapable of making there own desisions on who they are going to believe. I mean after all, if evolution is so obviously the only possible answer, they shouldn't the evidence be able to speek for itself, why should it be above question and debate?
Studying the history of why a particular outmoded theory was abandoned by practicing scientists might be a task for a PhD student of the history of science. It is not a job for elementary or secondary school students. There are hundreds and hundreds of outmoded theories that have been discarded by practicing scientists. The evidence that led to their being discarded occupies thousands and thousands of pages of highly technical specialized journals. It is simply unreasonable and unfair to expect students to examine and understand all of this evidence in a basic, introductory class. And it is a waste of limited class time in a course that is intended to teach current scientific knowledge, not scientific history.
There is no scientific reason to select one obsolete theory out of all of these and insist that students recapitulate the decades of study that led to it being abandoned, especially when much of this evidence cannot be properly understood without the background of advanced training in genetics, biochemistry, and mathematics.
In point of fact, gravity is a law (note definition 6) [webster.com]. General Relativity and Special Relativity are theories (note definition 5) [webster.com]. A crude explanation of the difference between a law and a theory, in scientific parlance, is: Laws describe what is happening, theories attempt to describe why. Those attempts, after the initial few tries, are generally very good. Even the ones I don't agree with are generally well thought out.
In science, a "law" is just a simply stated theory that is generally accepted. The term is pretty much obsolete. Science progresses fast enough these days that hardly anybody has the confidence to label a theory a law. But the term is sometimes still used for older theories. Ironically, many of these are now known to be not quite right. For example Newton's "Laws" of motion and gravity have been proved to be less accurate than Einstein's theories of relativity and gravitation.
Oh, and a minority should decide what the majority wants their kids to learn in schools their taxes fund?
In a science class? Absolutely. Only a minority of people are scientists, and the job of a science class is to teach what that minority of specialists think. One could, I suppose, decide that children shouldn't learn science. But to teach something else and label it "science" is dishonest.
There is a large difference. Gravity is accepted by probably about 99.9999999999% of the world. Evolution is accepted by a minority of the world.
Science is decided by scientists, not by a vote of the general population. Biologists who don't accept evolution are about as common as astronomers who don't accept gravity.
The real reason scientists resent such stickers is that it is an attempt to lie to students about our profession. The fact is that evolution is absolutely fundamental to biology. There is no meaningful scientific debate about whether life evolved, only about the details of the mechanism, comparable to the debates of physicists about the subtleties of quantum gravity.
The difference between a theory and a law is that a law can be absolutely proven, a theory cannot.
A "law" is just an obsolete term for a theory that everybody believes. These days, science is progressing fast enough that scientists are hesitant to call anything a law. An ironic consequence of this is that many of the principles called "Laws" are now known to be wrong, or at least not entirely correct. For example, Newton's "Laws of motion" have been superseded by Einstein's equations of relativistic motion.
You're confusing microevolution with macroevolution. I want to know who on gods green earth OBSERVED monkeys turning into humans.
The notion that there is a meaningful distinction between "micro" evolution and "macro" evolution has been disproved by genome sequencing projects, which have revealed that all of the difference between species are due to an accumulation "micro" changes of exactly the sort that are produced by mutation--an incredible vindication of a theory that predated knowledge of the gene.
No, nobody "observed" monkeys turning into humans. And nobody has observed atoms in the distant stars. Nevertheless, we can state with great confidence that the distant stars are made of atoms, and that we and the monkeys had a common ancestor.
Here's what I don't understand: Why does mentioning evolution make this a religious issue? It wouldn't be an issue of church and state if the stickers said, for example, "Einstein's theory of relativity is a theory, not a fact." Our understanding of evolution is in the domain of science. It has nothing to do with religion.
It wouldn't be a problem because there is no religious sect that is pressuring schools to teach Aristotle's theory of motion as a reasonable alternative to Einstein's theory of relativity. But for that very reason, there is nobody pressuring schools to put on such a sticker about relativity. So what makes it a violation of separation of church and state is singling out evolution, when in fact most of what is in every science textbook is theory.
It is not clear to me what the sticker has to do with separation of church and state. The sticker made no reference to any religious beliefs, and only cautioned the reader to take the material with a grain of salt. This is *always* good advice: people should never blindly accept any theory as fact.
From a scientific standpoint, it is misleading because it creates a false dichotomy between theory and fact. All scientific explanations and generalizations are theories. The only facts are observations. "I saw an apple fall" is a fact. "Objects fall toward the center of the earth" is a theory. Some theories are more well founded than others. Evolution is one of the strongest, on a par with gravity.
Did VCRs also spontaneously arise out of the primordial soup? A VCR is a far far simpler device than a self-reproducing automaton
No, and neither did we. But both are derived indirectly from something that spontaneously arose out of the primordial soup, so it is not surprising that there are some similarities. Indeed, there is reason to believe that human creativity arises out of neural randomization/selection processes that are somewhat similar to evolution. So the resemblance between things that evolved and things that were designed by man probably reflects similar fundamental mechanisms.
The software alone is clearly worth $500, and it's nice that they throw in that cute little computer as a bonus.
One would think that there are enough current ethical problems to keep academics busy without speculating on future ones. As seems to be typical with these ethical discussions of future technology, this one is both too early and too late. Too early because it's really too soon to predict what the real ethical issues will be with robots, except that there will likely be ones that nobody has anticipated. Too late, because, to the extent that the ethical concerns can be anticipated, the science fiction writers have already pretty much mapped out the territory.
If this would be windows, everybody would be writing about it.
Beta software crashes! News at 11!
Exactly. This is a bold move by Apple essentially because they are admitting that they may have been wrong.
Not really. After all, they weren't wrong. For new computer users, a single-button mouse is much less intimidating and easier to learn. Apple has supported multibutton mice for years, although they haven't sold them. But these new low-cost Macs are intended for relatively sophisticated users who will be configuring their own systems.
The name "shuffle" is another very clever bit of marketing. You don't need a screen to select which song to play next because the iPod Shuffle is intended for shuffle play. Apple's web site turns the potential negative of no screen into an asset by urging buyers to let it "surprise" them.
Apple does not make money on Ipods. They only make money on Itunes songs.
No, actually it is the other way around.
He is 30 years old and still pre-med? He clearly isn't the brightest spark in the world.
This certainly isn't the brightest comment in the world. Not everybody goes to college immediately out of high school, and not everybody goes to med school immediately out of college. Plenty of people do other things before deciding to go to med school.
Yes, it was a dumb thing to do. But being pre-med does not automatically make you conversant with contract law. He should have read the fine print and realized that he had signed a NDA, but have you really never clicked "accept" on a user agreement without bothering reading through to the end?
The irony of global warming is that the US, which has been dragging its feet on CO2 reduction measures, probably has more to lose than most. Many countries may well experience a net gain, once the dust...er...water settles, but the US enjoys a particularly favorable climate. Rolling the climate dice again is unlikely to be in our best interest.
Why lay out several hundred dollars plus monthly fees, when I can just get it all from my cable company for less?
Actually, you pay just about as much per month and you get considerably less. The Time Warner DVR pretty much sucks, with one important exception: it will let you record two different shows at the same time. There is no way for TiVo to add this capability while it is restricted to controlling a cable box. But the Cable Card TiVos will match this capability, while adding additional features, such as more storage.
I'm not surprised that TiVo never really managed to find cable partners. The cable companies are looking for a lowest cost solution that will satisfy the typical cable subscriber who has a cheap standard definition TV and is mainly interested in being able to pause/instant replay live TV. So the cable company PVRs have low capacity hard disks and relatively primitive software that lacks the complex searching and prioritization capabilities of a TiVo unit.
However, the cable companies are going to have a hard time satisfying the videophiles with the multi-thousand dollar HD/surround sound systems. The cable company PVRs available only hold a few hours of HD. Of course, storage is constantly getting cheaper, but the problem the cable companies face is that if they release a better system, a lot of customers are going to be calling up wanting to swap their old systems out for a new one.
So there seems to be a real opportunity for TiVo to skim the cream by offering a higher-end PVR for a few hundred bucks up front and about the same monthly fee that the cable companies are charging for their boxes. Moreover, there is no reason for TiVo to rush. After all, cable customers don't own their boxes, so they have no commitment. They could abandon their cable PVRs overnight if TiVo offers a significantly better box with more storage and better software. It might even make sense for TiVo to wait a while to allow the cable company PVRs to "age" a bit, so that the TiVo boxes look even better by contrast.
In addition, TiVo, with its Netflix connection, will be in a position to compete with the cable companies for delivery of PPV material.
CRTs have better contrast and brightness and last longer. They handle multiple resolutions well. They are also generally substantially cheaper. To my eye, nothing else matches a top-quality direct view CRT, although the most expensive LCD displays come close.
However, they are also heavy and unavailable in larger screen sizes.
Homosexuality is observed widely throughout the animal kingdom. At some level, it must be genetic. That does not necessarily mean that whether a particular individual is homosexual or heterosexual is determined by genetic differences. It means that mammalian sexuality has frequently evolved in such a way that homosexual behavior is possible. If homosexuality were strongly detrimental to fitness, then mammals would have doubtless have evolved stronger safeguards to restrict sexual interactions to the opposite sex.
The relatively high frequency (compared to mutation rates) of homosexuality in the human population implies that there is some benefit of homosexuality (or at least the capacity for homosexuality) to fitness. This could mean that homosexuals propagate their genes indirectly (e.g. by assisting siblings in child-rearing), or it could mean that a capacity for homosexuality is an unavoidable consequence of genes that in other contexts increase reproductive fitness. For example, a gene might increase the likelihood of homosexuality in males, but increase fertility or sexual attractiveness in females. Or an increased probability of homosexuality could be linked to intellectual traits that also confer important advantages that (when they do not result in homosexuality) improve reproductive success.