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The purpose of this article is to develop a model of life history theory that incorporates environmental influences, contextual influences, and heritable variation. I argue that physically or psychologically stressful environments delay maturation and the onset of reproductive competence. The social context is also important, and here I concentrate on the opportunity for upward social mobility as a contextual influence that results in delaying reproduction and lowering fertility in the interest of increasing investment in children. I also review evidence that (...) variation in life history strategies is influenced by genetic variation as well. Finally, I show that cultural shifts in the social control of sexual behavior have had differential effects on individuals predisposed to high- versus low-investment reproductive strategies. (shrink)

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MacDonald develops an evolutionary perspective on Judaism. Judaism is conceptualized as a group evolutionary strategy characterized by a high degree of endogamy and resistance to genetic and cultural assimilation. Data are provided to support the author's theory that Judaism is characterized by a high level of within-group altruism and competition with outgroups. Finally, MacDonald argues that Judaism has been characterized by eugenic practices aimed at high intelligence and high investment parenting. After outlining a theory of evolutionary group strategies, MacDonald discusses (...) the evidence from modern studies showing population genetic differences between Jews and Gentiles. He then shows that Jewish religious writing points to a pronounced tendency toward idealizing endogamy and condemning exogamy, and he points to the ways religious ideology and practice have facilitated the genetic and cultural separation of Jews and Gentiles. He then reviews evidence for resource and reproductive competition and the importance of kin-based cooperation and altruism as well as assortative mating for intelligence and resource aquisition ability among Jews. This study is a highly original attempt to develop an evolutionary understanding of one of the world's great religions. As such, it will be of concern to scholars and researchers in the fields of sociobiology and religion as well as the general reading public. (shrink)

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The role of Jewish activism in the transformative changes that have occurred in the West in recent decades continues to be controversial. Here I respond to several issues putatively related to Jewish influence, particularly the “default hypothesis” that Jewish IQ and urban residency explain Jewish influence and the role of the Jewish community in enacting the 1965 immigration law in the United States; other issues include Jewish ethnocentrism and intermarriage and whether diaspora Jews are hypocritical in their attitudes on immigration (...) to Israel versus the United States. The post-World War II era saw the emergence of a new, substantially Jewish elite in America that exerted influence on a wide range of issues that formed a virtual consensus among Jewish activists and the organized Jewish community, including immigration, civil rights, and the secularization of American culture. Jewish activism in the pro-immigration movement involved: intellectual movements denying the importance of race in human affairs; establishing, staffing, and funding anti-restrictionist organizations; recruiting prominent non-Jews to anti-restrictionist organizations; rejecting the ethnic status quo as a goal because of fear of a relatively homogeneous white majority; leadership in Congress and the executive branch. (shrink)

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Leading archaeologists and historians provide new studies of slavery, slave resistance and the economic, environmental and political consequences of slave trading in Africa, from the first millennium AD through to the nineteenth century.

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Domain-general mechanisms are evolutionarily ancient, resulting from the evolution of affective cues signaling the attainment of evolutionary goals. Explicit processing is a particularly important set of domain-general mechanisms for constructing human groups – enabling ideologies specifying future goal states and rationalizing group aims, enabling knowledge of others' reputations essential to cooperation, understanding the rights and obligations of group membership, monitoring group members, and providing appropriate punishments to those who deviate from group aims.

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Stanovich & West's assumption of discrete System 1 and System 2 mechanisms is questionable. System 2 can be understood as emerging from individuals who score high on several normally distributed cognitive mechanisms supporting System 1. Cognitions ascribed to System 1 and System 2 appear to be directed toward the same evolutionary significant goals, and thus are likely to have emerged from the same selection pressures.

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Campbell's target article significantly advances the field but fails to give adequate weight to individual differences. Moreover, there is no convincing rationale why males gain by making females less aggressive than they would otherwise be. It is also as likely that patriarchal ideology serves women's interests by canalizing genetic influences on individual differences within a more adaptively circumscribed range as it is to counter their interests by preventing them from challenging male hegemony.

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This commentary argues that age changes in heritability are incompatible with Charney's theory. The new genetics must be tempered by the findings that many epigenetic phenomena are random and are linked to pathology, thus making them peripheral to the design of complex adaptations. Behavior-genetic findings are compatible with strong maternal effects; G E interactions are unlikely to be an important aspect of normal development.

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The Ceci et al. article is consistent with tenure being a necessary condition for controversial research. In the absence of tenure, as in the United Kingdom, professors have been fired and suspended for politically controversial issues. There are a variety of reasons why tenure does not ensure that professors will engage in controversial research, including career interests and the desire to be liked. (Published Online February 8 2007).

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This commentary focuses on the omission of genetic and environmental variation in several competing evolved motive dispositions that not only react to different environmental contexts but also result in people structuring contexts to obtain psychological rewards. Cross-cultural research is poor evidence for alternate strategies because natural selection may operate to produce geographical variation in dispositional tendencies. Finally, I defend a traditional concept of plasticity in opposition to the alternate strategies concept of flexibility.

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The evolutionary theory of sex implies a theoretically principled account of the causal mechanisms underlying personality systems in which males pursue a relatively high-risk strategy compared to females and are thus higher on traits linked to sensation seeking and social dominance. Females are expected to be lower on these traits but higher on traits related to nurturance and attraction to long-term relationships. The data confirm this pattern of sex differences. It is thus likely that these traits have been a focus (...) of natural selection rather than the traits of gregarious/aloof and arrogant/unassuming hypothesized by Depue & Collins. (shrink)

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Averageness is purportedly the result of stabilizing selection maintaining the population mean, whereas facial paedomorphosis is a product of directional selection driving the population mean towards an increasingly juvenile appearance. If selection is predominantly stabilizing, intermediate phenotypes reflect high genetic quality and mathematically average faces should be found attractive. If, on the other hand, directional selection is strong enough, extreme phenotypes reflect high genetic quality and juvenilized faces will be found attractive. To compare the effects of stabilizing and directional selection (...) on facial paedomorphosis (juvenilization), graphic morphing and editing techniques were used to alter the appearance of composite faces to make them appear more or less juvenile. Both facial models and judges of attractiveness were from the CSU-Long Beach campus. Although effect sizes for both preferences were large, the effect for averageness was nearly twice that found for juvenilization, an indication that stabilizing selection influences preferences for facial paedomorphosis more so than directional selection in contemporary humans. (shrink)

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