30 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Why Marriage is Not Like Prostitution
What's more, most males could not possibly afford to buy a
woman's reproductive potential if courtship were a simple economic exchange. What would be an appropriate market price for a nine-month pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, the exhaustion of breast-feeding, and twenty years of maternal care? At least half a million dollars at a basic salary of $25,000, one would think. How much do men spend on courtship in the first few months? Perhaps a tenth of 1 percent of the proper market price. Th... 1 
notes
notesNo amount of gifts and showy displays can pay for the investment a female would have to make in offspring.
29 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
Learning New Langugages Instills Brain Growth
Even something that has been
traditionally seen as the purview of the
young—the ability to learn new languages
—continues to change the landscape of the
brain late into life. When a group of adults
took a nine-month intensive course in
modern standard Chinese, their brains’
white matter reorganized progressively
(as measured monthly) in the left
hemisphere language areas and their right
hemisphere counterparts—as well as in
t h e genu (anterior end) of the corpus
collosum, that networ... 1 notes
notesAdults who learned Chinese showed white matter reorganization in their brains.
08 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Prenatal Influences as Information for the Fetus
The notion of prenatal influences may conjure up frivolous attempts to enrich the fetus, like playing Mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly. In reality, the nine-month-long process of shaping and molding that goes on in the womb is far more visceral and consequential than that. Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life—the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the emotions she feels, the chemicals she’s exposed to—are shared in some fashion w...Folksonomies: pregnancy fetal development
Folksonomies: pregnancy fetal development
2 
2 Diet and other environmental factors are data for the fetus about the conditions of the world outside the womb and influence its development to be best adapted to that environment.
21 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Animal Instinct and Child Birth
What, then, is the difference between human and other animals?
Are their bodies made differently? As a matter of fact they are remarkably similar. Cat and dog bodies are used in premedical anatomy studies due to the similarity of structures with identical name and function. Is it that they just can't experience pain? Following a natural-childbirth newspaper article, an indignant letter to the editor asserted cats can have kittens without pain because they cannot feel pain as human beings do...Humans don't have instincts when it comes to childbirth, but they can train for it.
08 FEB 2011 by ideonexus
Pregnant Celebrities are News
"In this world, pregnancy is considered news, and it is a nine-month news cycle," the editor-in-chief of Star magazine has said. Issues featuring pregnant celebrities are often among the magazines' best sellers. The mother of all celebrity pregnancies, of course, was that of actress Demi Moore, who appeared naked and seven months pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair> in 1991. Back then, the image still had the power to shock: on its first day on the stands, the issue sold out during the mo...The focus of gossip magazines on pregnant celebrities mirrors a more general interest the average person has in the pregnant woman as a curiosity.
