02 FEB 2014 by ideonexus

 Alternative Reason for Age-Related Cognitive Decline

As adults age, their performance on many psychometric tests changes systematically, a finding that is widely taken to reveal that cognitive information-processing capacities decline across adulthood. Contrary to this, we suggest that older adults'; changing performance reflects memory search demands, which escalate as experience grows. A series of simulations show how the performance patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning models as they acquire knowledge. The simulati...
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The idea that as we grow older, our brains have more information to sort through, which makes it take longer to find the data we need.

21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus

 Human Race Differences the Result of Sexual Selection

Most of the genetic differences between races are trivial. And yet others, those physical differences between a Japanese individual and a Finn, a Masai, and an Inuit, are striking. We have the interesting situation, then, that the overall differences in gene sequences between peoples are minor, yet those same groups show dramatic differences in a range of visually apparent traits, such as skin color, hair color, body form, and nose shape. These obvious physical differences are not characteris...
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Cultural norms in different societies probably shaped many of the physical differences we see between races today, different definitions of beauty.