28 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Shorter People Live Longer
The study was conducted to evaluate one aspect of the entropy theory of aging, which hypothesizes that aging is the result of increasing disorder within the body, and which predicts that increasing mass lowers life span. The first evaluation of the impact of human size on longevity or life span in 1978, which was based on data for decreased groups of athletes and famous people in the USA, suggested that shorter, lighter men live longer than their taller, heavier counterparts. In 1990, a study...5 years on average. Suggesting the medical community's focus on encouraging parents to grow big children is misguided as it may be shortening their lifespans.
29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Crying as an Evolutionary Strategy
Crying evolved to serve the infant's purposes: to assure protection, adequate feeding, and nurturing for an organism that cannot care for itself. By definition, crying is designed to elicit a response, to activate emotions, to play on the empathy of another. The "other" is usually the mother or father or a related caretaker. The caretaker has also evolved the sensory mechanism to recognize that infant cries are a signal of unhappiness, and thus be motivated to do something about it. This ki...Infants cry to motivate mothers to care for them and to promote continual feeding that prevents the mother from ovulating.