Researchers found that job candidates who use more hand gestures in their interviews are more likely to get hired. Why do hand gestures have such an impact? Hands show intention. When someone can see your hands, they feel more at ease and are more likely to befriend you.Bottom Line: Keep your hands visible. Never skip a handshake.

Show Your Hands

Think back to caveman days for a moment. When a stranger approached our caveman ancestors, the best way to tell if the stranger had good or bad intentions was to look at their hands. Were they carrying a rock or a spear? As the stranger introduced themselves, our ancestors watched their gestures to make sure they weren’t going to reach out and attack or steal precious belongings. Even though in modern times we aren’t often subjected to physical harm, this survival mechanism remains.

It’s In Your Hands

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">As humans, we are constantly looking for winners. Winner: n. Victor; a person likely to be successful.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Winners typically take up as much space as physically possible.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Bottom Line: Stand like a winner. Look like a winner. Interact like a winner.</li></ul>

Why Is Confidence So Important?

“Being memorable boils down to inducing chemical pleasure. When you produce dopamine during a conversation, you not only give your partner more enjoyment, you are also assigned more significance, which increases your memorability.

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Your typical “hello,” “hi,” and “hey” get terrible reply rates in direct messages. “Howdy,” “hola,” and even “yo” rank better. The best greetings, “how’s it going” and “what’s up,” ask a question—even if they are slangy and informal, they do the trick. They ignite some kind of spark.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Unique questions, unexpected stories, and uncommon occurrences keep us alert in conversation. In other words, being different wakes people up.</li></ul>

Conversation Sparkers

“We don’t like, remember, or enjoy being around boring people. We are attracted to people who give us mental pleasure, who push our hot buttons, keep us mentally alert, and learn our names.”

“Another way of highlighting is to celebrate the victories of others as if they were your own. Good feelings multiply around other good feelings—and divide when they are not matched. When you see someone who is proud, excited, or passionate—mirror and match it. This associates you with their feelings of pleasure.”

“We remember people who make us feel good and who make us want to be the best version of ourselves.”

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">“People are attracted to others who are similar to themselves.” </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Without realizing it, we are constantly searching for reasons to think, feel, or say, “Me too!” </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Don’t fall into the “Not me!” trap; instead, find a way to say “Me too!”</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Find and follow threads of similarity to be more socially attractive.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Every time you offer help, support, and advice, you create a deeper bond with someone and a permanent similarity.</li></ul>

How To Be Ridiculously Likable

“Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival—to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.”

There were five different ways people tended to express love,1. Words of Affirmation: People with this love language express their care through spoken or written word—love letters, texts, and verbal expressions of love.2. Gifts: People with this love language express their care through small gifts or tokens of appreciation—jewelry, candy, or flowers.3. Physical Touch: People with this love language express their care through touch—hugs, cuddles, pats on the back, loving embraces.

5 Love Languages

4. Acts of Service: People with this love language express their care by doing things for others—cooking their spouse dinner, running errands, or crafting something for them.5. Quality Time: People with this love language express their care with their time. They want to simply be in the presence of the people they care about.

“Whether you want your pitch to go viral, your e-mail to be read, or people to like your status updates, hook people with the power of stories.”

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">To get people motivated, give them ownership.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Humans are purpose-driven creatures. We want to believe there are reasons behind everything we do. Before leaders can inspire action, they have to get emotional buy-in.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Always use the word “because” when asking for something. “Because” implies purpose. Whether you are pitching yourself, trying to get a date, or convincing a friend to choose your favorite restaurant for dinner, you always want to have your why at the ready.</li></ul>

The Word  ‘Because’

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Secrets are about releasing a vulnerability. When we share them—even with strangers—we get relief. We feel less alone.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The secrets act as a catalyst for turning strangers into fast friends.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Don’t be afraid to ask for advice, share a vulnerability, or admit a weakness—they bond you to people.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Mistakes humanize us. We all make mistakes, and we like people who are like us.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The Ben Franklin Effect: When someone does a kindness for you, they are more likely to like you. </li></ul>

VULNERABILITY IS ATTRACTIVE

Asking for advice softly admits a vulnerability. When you ask for advice, you are admitting a gap in knowledge or a need for help in an authentic, non-scary way. Asking for advice gets people talking. Remember how much people like to talk about themselves?

ASK FOR ADVICE

“You don’t impress people by mentioning your accolades, accomplishments, or awards. You impress them by mentally turning on their reward systems.”

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">As humans, we so desperately want to be known. We want to feel like people get us, like we have someone on our side, like a group wants to have us as a member. Making people feel this way is called attunement—and it is one of the most underutilized social skills.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Attunement turn people on by making them feel wanted, liked, and known. We are often so wrapped up in our own thoughts, schedules, and agendas that we forget to tune into other people’s feelings, needs, and values.</li></ul>

SOCIAL ATTUNEMENT

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">The most likable students also liked the most other people.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">We are more inclined to enjoy being with people who visibly enjoy being with us.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">In social psychology, this is called the reciprocity effect. We also feel the need to give back the kind of treatment we receive. So if someone smiles at us, we smile back. If someone asks us questions, we feel the need to ask questions back. If someone shares a vulnerability, we feel the need to share a vulnerability back.</li></ul>

Reciprocity

“The greatest gift we can give the people we encounter is to help them feel accepted for who they are.

“Being curious about someone is one of the best ways to show you like them.”

As a human behavior hacker, Vanessa Van Edwards created a research lab to study the hidden forces that drive us. This is the first comprehensive, science backed, real life manual on how to captivate anyone—and a completely new approach to building connections..

Do you feel awkward at networking events? Do you wonder what your date really thinks of you? Do you wish you could decode people? You need to learn the science of people.   As a human behavior hacker, Vanessa Van Edwards created a research lab to study the hidden forces that drive us. And she’s cracked the code. In Captivate, she shares shortcuts, systems, and secrets for taking charge of your interactions at work, at home, and in any social situation. These aren’t the people skills you learned in school. This is the first comprehensive, science backed, real life manual on how to captivate anyone—and a completely new approach to building connections.   Just like knowing the formulas to use in a chemistry lab, or the right programming language to build an app, Captivate provides simple ways to solve people problems. You’ll learn, for example…   · How to work a room: Every party, networking event, and social situation has a predictable map. Discover the sweet spot for making the most connections. · How to read faces: It’s easier than you think to speed-read facial expressions and use them to predict people’s emotions. · How to talk to anyone: Every conversation can be memorable—once you learn how certain words generate the pleasure hormone dopamine in listeners. When you understand the laws of human behavior, your influence, impact, and income will increase significantly. What’s more, you will improve your interpersonal intelligence, make a killer first impression, and build rapport quickly and authentically in any situation—negotiations, interviews, parties, and pitches. You’ll never interact the same way again.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

communication

Communication

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Vanessa Van Edwards

Captivate

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude!! (Dare to know) “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment.

Immanuel Kant ( 1724 – 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers.

Immanuel Kant was one of the most influential philosophers in the whole of Europe, who changed Western thought with his examinations of reason and the nature of reality. In these writings he investigates human progress, civilization, morality and why, to be truly enlightened, we must all have the freedom and courage to use our own intellect. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

philosophy

Philosophy

writing

Reading & Writing

education

Learning & Education

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Immanuel Kant

An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'

“To maintain respect, don’t be greatly loved. You should be neither greatly feared nor greatly loved. Love leads to familiarity, and when this makes its appearance, esteem departs. Be loved with appreciation rather than affection, for such love is a mark of great people.”

“A decision openly declared is never respected; instead, it opens the way to criticism, and if things turn out badly, you’ll be unhappy twice over.”

“A person without knowledge is a world in darkness. Judgement and strength, eyes and hands; without courage, wisdom is sterile.”

“Make people depend on you . An image is made sacred not by its creator but by its worshipper.”

“Princes like to be helped, but not surpassed. Advice should be offered as if a reminder of what they’ve forgotten, not an insight that they’ve never had.”

“Have intelligent support . The good fortune of the powerful: to be accompanied by outstanding minds that can save them from tight spots caused by their own ignorance and fight difficult battles for them.”

“There’ s much to know and life is short, and a life without knowledge is not a life. It’s a singular skill effortlessly to learn much from many, gaining knowledge from all.”

“Sharp players never move the piece their opponents are expecting, and especially not the one they want them to.”

“Know how to leave things to one side , for if knowing how to refuse is one of life’ s great lessons, an even greater one is knowing how to say no to yourself, to important people, and in business.”

“Think with the few and speak with the many”

“They can avoid the most difficult confrontation with a smile: the courage of the greatest of the great captains was based on this. A polite tactic in refusing is to change the subject, and there’ s no greater act of caution than to conceal that you have understood.”

“Truth is normally seen and rarely heard”

“Understand yourself : your temperament, intellect, opinions, emotions. You can’t be master of yourself if you don’t first understand yourself. There are mirrors for the face, but none for the spirit: let discreet self-reflection be yours.”

“Performing a service for another works like a charm, and the best way to win friends is to do people favours.”

“The most self-sufficient person must leave a door open to friendship, from where all help will come. You need a friend of sufficient influence over you to be able to advise and admonish you freely.”

“Anything popular, do yourself; anything unpopular, use others to do it .”

“A person has everything who cares nothing about what matters little. There’s no greater absurdity than taking everything seriously. Similarly, it’s stupid to take things to heart that don’t concern you, and not to take to heart those that are important.”

“Undertake what’s easy as if it were hard, and what’s hard as if it were easy . In the first case, so that confidence doesn’ t make you careless; in the second, so that lack of confidence doesn’t make you discouraged.”

“There are others whose first word on every occasion is ‘no’; with these people, you need real skill. And with everyone, the right moment: catch them when they’re in good spirits, when their bodies or their minds are satisfied. Unless the listener’s careful attention detects the petitioner’s subtlety, then happy days are the days when favours are granted, for inner happiness streams outwards.”

“A gift given afterwards is due payment; the same beforehand becomes an obligation. This is a subtle way of transforming obligations, for what was for the superior an obligation to reward becomes for the recipient an obligation to repay.”

“There’ s nothing easier than deceiving a good person. The person who never lies is more ready to believe, and one who never deceives is more trusting.”

“Leave people hungry : nectar should only ever brush the lips. Desire is the measure of esteem. Even with physical thirst, good taste’ s trick is to stimulate it, not quench it. Hard-won happiness is twice as enjoyable.”

Baltasar Gracián(1601-1658), was a Spanish Jesuit and Baroque prose writer and philosopher.

'Better mad with the crowd than sane all alone' In these witty, Machiavellian aphorisms, unlikely Spanish priest Baltasar Gracián shows us how to exploit friends and enemies alike to thrive in a world of deception and illusion. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658). Gracián's work is available in Penguin Classics in The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence.

history

History

strategy

Strategy

problemsolving

Problem Solving

Baltasar Gracián

How to Use Your Enemies

Men will not look at things as they really are, but as they wish them to be—and are ruined.

He who is the cause of another becoming powerful is ruined; because that predominancy has been brought about either by astuteness or else by force, and both are distrusted by him who has been raised to power.

”He who obtains sovereignty by the assistance of the nobles maintains himself with more difficulty than he who comes to it by the aid of the people, because the former finds himself with many around him who consider themselves his equals, and because of this he can neither rule nor manage them to his liking. But he who reaches sovereignty by popular favour finds himself alone, and has none around him, or few, who are not prepared to obey him.”

“Therefore a wise prince ought to adopt such a course that his citizens will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then he will always find them faithful.

But to exercise the intellect the prince should read histories, and study there the actions of illustrious men, to see how they have borne themselves in war, to examine the causes of their victories and defeat, so as to avoid the latter and imitate the former.

“A wise prince ought to observe some such rules, and never in peaceful times stand idle, but increase his resources with industry in such a way that they may be available to him in adversity, so that if fortune chances it may find him prepared to resist her blows.”

“Nevertheless he ought to be slow to believe and to act, nor should he himself show fear, but proceed in a temperate manner with prudence and humanity, so that too much confidence may not make him incautious and too much distrust render him intolerable.”

“Whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved?It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you.”

It is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.

“You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second.”

"But to enable a prince to form an opinion of his servant there is one test which never fails; when you see the servant thinking more of his own interests than of yours, and seeking inwardly his own profit in everything, such a man will never make a good servant, nor will you ever be able to trust him; because he who has the state of another in his hands ought never to think of himself.”

“On the other hand, to keep his servant honest the prince ought to study him, honouring him, enriching him, doing him kindnesses, sharing with him the honours and cares; and at the same time let him see that he cannot stand alone, so that many honours may not make him desire more, many riches make him wish for more, and that many cares may make him dread chances."

“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”

“A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it.”

And well-ordered states and wise princes have taken every care not to drive the nobles to desperation, and to keep the people satisfied and contented, for this is one of the most important objects a prince can have.

The Prince is a 16th-century political treatise written by Italian diplomat, philosopher, and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli in the form of a realistic instruction guide for new princes...

The most famous book on politics ever written, The Prince remains as lively and shocking today as when it was written almost five hundred years ago. Initially denounced as a collection of sinister maxims and a recommendation of tyranny, it has more recently been defended as the first scientific treatment of politics as it is practiced rather than as it ought to be practiced. Harvey C. Mansfield's brilliant translation of this classic work, along with the new materials added for this edition, make it the definitive version of The Prince, indispensable to scholars, students, and those interested in the dark art of politics. This revised edition of Mansfield's acclaimed translation features an updated bibliography, a substantial glossary, an analytic introduction, a chronology of Machiavelli's life, and a map of Italy in Machiavelli's time. "Of the other available [translations], that of Harvey C. Mansfield makes the necessary compromises between exactness and readability, as well as providing an excellent introduction and notes."—Clifford Orwin, The Wall Street Journal "Mansfield's work . . . is worth acquiring as the best combination of accuracy and readability."—Choice "There is good reason to assert that Machiavelli has met his match in Mansfield. . . . [He] is ready to read Machiavelli as he demands to be read—plainly and boldly, but also cautiously."—John Gueguen, The Sixteenth Century Journal

Niccolò Machiavelli

The Prince

<ul><li>A scientist from outer space would immediately classify humans as a third species of chimpanzee.</li><li>Scientists right here on Earth know that we share more than 98 percent of our genetic makeup with the other two chimps. The difference between our genes and chimps’ genes is small. Yet that small difference must have been responsible for the things that make humans unique.</li></ul>

 WHAT MAKES US HUMAN?

<ul><li>Human children took years to acquire the information and experience they needed to be efficient hunter-gatherers, just as today they take years to learn how to be farmers or computer programmers.</li><li>Human children depend on parents to bring food to them. This seems natural to us, but it is exceptional in the primate world. Baby apes gather food for themselves as soon as they are weaned.</li><li>That parental burden means that care by the father as well as the mother is important if the child is to survive.</li></ul>

A STRANGE LIFE CYCLE

<ul><li>For animals, copulation is a dangerous luxury. Animals in the act of mating burn energy and neglect opportunities to obtain food. </li><li>They are also vulnerable to predators who want to eat them or rivals who want to take over their territory. </li><li>Copulation is something to be accomplished in the minimum time needed for fertilization.</li><li>Sex is pleasurable, but evolution made it that way. If our species weren’t getting some evolutionary benefit from our sexual activities, the world would have been taken over by mutant humans who evolved not to enjoy sex.</li></ul>

Dangerous Luxury 

<ul><li>The answer must have to do with the cost of repair. Think again about car repairs. Suppose you buy an expensive car that you expect to last for a long time. It makes sense to invest in regular maintenance, which is cheaper than discarding your car and buying a new one every few years.</li><li>In the same way, how much energy an animal “should” invest in biological repairs depends on the cost of the repairs, and how long the animal can expect to live with and without them.</li></ul>

Why can’t we naturally repair or replace everything in our body?

<ul><li>People from sunny Africa have black skin. So do people from other sunny areas, such as southern India and New Guinea. Skin gets paler as you move north or south away from the equator, until you reach northern Europe, where you find the palest skin of all.</li><li>Obviously, dark skin evolved in people who were exposed to a lot of sunlight, because dark skin protects against sunburn.</li></ul>

Does Natural Selection Explain Skin Color?

<ul><li>Darwin had noticed that many animals have features with no obvious survival value, such as the long, colorful tails of male peacocks and the dark, shaggy manes of male lions.</li><li>These features do help animals get mates, however, either by attracting individuals of the opposite sex or by intimidating rivals. Their genes will get passed on, and those genes will spread through a population because of sexual selection, or mating preferences, not because of natural selection.</li></ul>

Sexual Selection and Physical Appearances

“In the framework of evolutionary biology, success is measured in terms of leaving more offspring.”

<ul><li>Agriculture brought great increases in the amount of food we were able to store. This meant that more people could survive. But agriculture also brought disease, inequality between the sexes and between social classes, and the tyranny of powerful rulers.</li><li>Agriculture began to appear only about ten thousand years ago.</li><li>For most of our history, all humans had to be hunter-gatherers, living by hunting wild animals and gathering wild food plants.</li><li>Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture? They adopted it, of course, because it is an efficient way to get more food for less work.</li></ul>

AGRICULTURE, FOR BETTER AND WORSE

<ul><li>Nutrition is another difference. Farmers concentrate on crops such as rice and potatoes, which are high in carbohydrates.</li><li>Hunter-gatherers are healthy and suffer from little disease. They enjoy a varied diet, and they do not experience the food shortages and famines that can happen to farmers who are dependent on just a few crops.</li><li>t is almost unimaginable for Bushmen, who use 85 edible wild plants, to starve to death. In the 1840 s, however, about a million irish farmers and their families starved when a plant disease attacked potatoes, which they relied on as their staple crop and food.</li></ul>

The Lives of Hunter-Gatherers

Why would we do something that we know to be harmful or dangerous?<ul><li>They do so because our drugs of abuse are addictive—once you start, the chemistry of the drug affects the brain, making you want to continue.</li><li>Ten thousand years ago we “displayed” by challenging a lion or a tribal enemy. Today we do it in other dangerous ways, such as driving fast or consuming dangerous drugs.</li></ul>

WHY DO WE SMOKE, DRINK, AND USE DANGEROUS DRUGS?

<ul><li>It is the instinct to rely on handicap signals as a sign of strength. Whiskey and cigarette ads are cleverly directed at that old instinct, with their messages that smoking and drinking will bring status and make us attractive. </li><li>Drug addicts and alcoholics not only lead shorter lives, but they also become less attractive, not more, to possible mates. They also lose the ability to care properly for children.</li></ul>

False Messages

What would happen if we found alien —or it found us. Would we and the aliens sit down together for fascinating discussions? Would they share their advanced technology with us?<ul><li>Throughout history, human explorers who discovered technically less advanced humans responded by shooting them, devastating their populations with new diseases, and destroying or seizing their territory. Any advanced terrestrials who found us would surely treat us the same way.</li><li>For all practical purposes, we’re alone in a crowded universe. Thank goodness!</li></ul>

The Silence Is Deafening—Thank Goodness

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">One cloud is the risk of a nuclear war that could destroy us all.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The second cloud is the risk of an environmental collapse. One potential cause of such a collapse is the gradual extinction of most of the world’s species.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Isn’t extinction a natural process? If so, why should we worry about the extinctions that are happening now? Yes, every species will eventually go extinct. But the current human-caused rate of extinction is much higher than the natural rate.</li></ul>

THE SECOND CLOUD

“We’re still more than 98 percent chimp in our genes.”

At some point during the last 100,000 years, humans began exhibiting traits and behavior that distinguished us from other animals, eventually creating language, art, religion, bicycles, spacecraft, and nuclear weapons—all within a heartbeat of evolutionary time….

The Development of an Extraordinary Species We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet -- having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art -- while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins? In this fascinating, provocative, passionate, funny, endlessly entertaining work, renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning author and scientist Jared Diamond explores how the extraordinary human animal, in a remarkably short time, developed the capacity to rule the world . . . and the means to irrevocably destroy it.

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Jared M. Diamond

The Third Chimpanzee

<ul><li>Most male mammals have no involvement with either their offspring or their offspring’s mother after inseminating her; they are too busy seeking other females to inseminate.</li><li>We're exceptional animals in that our fathers and mothers often remain together after copulating and are both involved in rearing the resulting child.</li></ul>

THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES

<ul><li>If fertilization is external, neither mother nor father is automatically committed to anything further, and both are theoretically free to seek another partner with whom to produce more fertilized embryos.</li><li>Yes, their just-fertilized embryos may need some care, but mother and father are equally able to try to bluff the other into providing that care.</li><li>But if fertilization is internal, the female is now pregnant and committed to nourishing the fertilized embryos until birth or laying.</li><li>If she is a mammal, she is committed for even longer, through the period of lactation.</li></ul>

External Vs Internal Fertilization 

<ul><li>But males of mammals and other internally fertilized animals have no corresponding confidence in their paternity.</li><li>Yes, the male knows that his sperm went into a female’s body. Sometime later, out of that female’s body, comes a baby. How does the male know whether the female copulated with other males while he wasn’t looking?</li><li>In the face of this uncertainty, the evolutionary conclusion reached by most male mammals is to walk off the job immediately after copulation, seek more females to impregnate, and leave those females to rear their offspring.</li></ul>

Uncertainty In Male's Paternity

<ul><li>Our sex is ultimately laid down by our genes, which in humans are bundled together in each body cell in twenty-three pairs of microscopic packages called chromosomes.</li><li>One member of each of our twenty-three pairs was acquired from our mother, and the other member from our father.</li><li>Men, who have a big chromosome (termed an X chromosome) paired with a small one (a Y chromosome).</li><li>Women instead have two paired X chromosomes.</li></ul>

Sex Chromosome

<ul><li>Many X chromosome genes specify traits unrelated to sex, such as the ability to distinguish red and green colors.</li><li>However, the Y chromosome contains genes specifying the development of testes.</li><li>In the fifth week after fertilization human embryos of either sex develop a “bipotential” gonad that can become either a testis or an ovary.</li><li>If a Y chromosome is present, that bet-hedging gonad begins to commit itself in the seventh week to becoming a testis, but if there’s no Y chromosome, the gonad waits until the thirteenth week to develop as an ovary.</li></ul>

Bipotential Gonad

<ul><li>The evolutionary battle of the sexes has resulted in parental care being provided by the mother alone in about 90 percent of all mammal species.. Not only do males of those species have no need to lactate; they also don’t have to bring food, defend a family territory, defend or teach their offspring.</li><li>Only for those 10 percent of mammal species in which male parental care is necessary does the question of male lactation even deserve consideration.</li></ul>

WHY DON’T MEN BREAST-FEED THEIR BABIES?

Those minority species include lions, wolves, gibbons, marmosets— and humans. But even in those species requiring male parenting, lactation isn’t necessarily the most valuable form that the father’s contribution can take. What a big lion really must do is to drive off hyenas and other big lions bent on killing his cubs.

THE NON-EVOLUTION OF MALE LACTATION 

<ul><li>Human milk is more dilute in nutrients, sugary, and low in fat.</li><li>Breast-fed babies acquire stronger immune defenses and are less susceptible to numerous diseases, including diarrhea, ear infections, early-age-onset diabetes, influenza, necrotizing enterocolitis, and SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).</li><li>The helpless condition of human infants makes lots of parental care necessary for many years.</li></ul>

Importance Of Breastfeeding 

Why do most animals consider sex fun only when the female can be fertilized?<ul><li>There’s a simple reason why most other animals are sensibly stingy about copulatory effort: sex is costly in energy, time, and risk of injury or death.</li><li>Natural selection favors those individuals whose behavior lets them pass their genes to the most babies.</li></ul>

<ul><li>For the cavewoman, the male’s departure would expose her eventual child to the likelihood of starvation or murder.</li><li>What can she do to keep that man? Her brilliant solution: remain sexually receptive even after ovulating! Keep him satisfied by copulating whenever he wants! In that way, he’ll hang around, have no need to look for new sex partners, and will even share his daily hunting bag of meat.</li><li>Recreational sex is thus supposed to function as the glue holding a human couple together while they cooperate in rearing their helpless baby.</li></ul>

THE EVOLUTION OF RECREATIONAL SEX

It arose at a time when our ancestors were still promiscuous or living in harems. At such times, concealed ovulation let the ancestral ape-woman distribute her sexual favors to many males, none of which could swear that he was the father of her child but each of which knew that he might be. As a result, none of those potentially murderous males wanted to harm the ape-woman’s baby, and some may actually have protected or helped feed it.

THE ANIMAL WITH THE WEIRDEST SEX LIFE

<ul><li>By the criterion of services offered to mates and children, males of most mammal species are good for nothing except injecting sperm.</li><li>The males of many territorial animal species, such as songbirds, lions, and chimpanzees, spend much time patrolling their territories.</li></ul>

WHAT ARE MEN GOOD FOR? 

<ul><li>The show-offs also gains some advantages apart from adultery, such as prestige in his tribe’s eyes. Others in the tribe want him as a neighbor because of his gifts of meat, and they may reward him with their daughters as mates. For the same reason, the tribe is likely to give favored treatment to the show-off’s children.</li><li>A woman is best off married to a provider, but a man is not best off being a provider.</li></ul>

Advantages Of Show-off

<ul><li class="ql-align-center">Parent’s interests may be better served by abandoning one offspring and devoting resources to other offspring, whereas the offspring’s interests may be best served by surviving at the expense of its parents.</li><li class="ql-align-center">Natural selection ensures that our body unconsciously maintains and repairs itself.</li></ul>

<ul><li>Menopause - a woman’s egg supply gets depleted or impaired by around the time she is fifty years old. The challenge is to understand why we evolved that seemingly self-defeating detail of reproductive physiology.</li><li>That one cruel fact underlying human female menopause: the birth of each child immediately jeopardizes a mother’s previous children because of the mother’s risk of death in childbirth.</li></ul>

MAKING MORE BY MAKING LESS - FEMALE MENOPAUSE 

<ul><li>Even in affluent, twentieth-century Western societies, the risk of dying in childbirth is seven times higher for a mother over the age of forty than for a twenty-year-old mother.</li><li>But each new child puts the mother’s life at risk not only because of the immediate risk of death in childbirth but also because of the delayed risk of death related to exhaustion by lactation, carrying a young child.</li></ul>

THE EVOLUTION OF FEMALE MENOPAUSE 

<ul><li>Animals whose lifestyles carry a high risk of accidental death are evolutionarily programmed to stint on repair and to age rapidly.</li><li>Turtles, protected in the wild by a shell, are programmed to age more slowly than other reptiles, while porcupines, protected by quills, age more slowly than mammals comparable in size.</li></ul>

Risk Of Accidental Death 

<ul><li>We too rely on signals as arbitrary as a widowbird’s tail and a bowerbird’s crest. Our signals include faces, smells, hair color, men’s beards, and women’s breasts.</li><li>Human females signal reproductive maturity by expansion of the breasts. Later in life, we signal our waning fertility and attainment of wise elder status by the whitening of our hair.</li></ul>

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING 

<ul><li>Muscles are a truthful signal of male quality, like a deer’s antlers.</li><li>One might reason that beauty says nothing about good genes, parenting qualities, or food-gathering skills. However, the face is the part of the body most sensitive to the ravages of age, disease, and injury.</li><li>Especially in traditional societies, individuals with scarred or misshapen faces may thereby be advertising their proneness to disfiguring infections, inability to take care of themselves, or burden of parasitic worms.</li></ul>

THE EVOLUTION OF BODY SIGNALS

<ul><li>Our remaining candidate for a truthful signal is women’s body fat.</li><li>Lactation and child care are a big energy drain on a mother, and lactation tends to fail in an undernourished mother.</li><li>Hence a woman’s body fat would be a truthful signal to a man that she was capable of rearing his child.</li><li>Women of all populations tend to accumulate fat in the breasts and hips, to a degree that varies geographically.</li><li>Men throughout the world tend to be interested in women’s breasts, hips, and buttocks.</li></ul>

DISTRIBUTION OF WOMEN'S BODY FAT 

<ul><li>Scientists have suggested that large fatty breasts are not only an honest signal of good overall nutrition but also a deceptive specific signal of high milk-producing ability (deceptive because milk is actually secreted by breast glandular tissue rather than by breast fat).</li><li>Similarly, it has been suggested that fat deposition in the hips of women is also both an honest signal of good health and a deceptive specific signal suggesting a wide birth canal (deceptive because a truly wide birth canal would minimize the risk of birth traumas but mere fat hips would not).</li></ul>

Deceptive Specific Signal 

<ul><li>The length of the erect penis is only about 1 ¼ inches in gorillas and 1 ½ inches in orangutans but 5 inches in humans, even though males of the two apes have much bigger bodies than men.</li><li>The size of the penis that we evolved was unfortunately limited by the length of a woman’s vagina.</li><li>Hence a large penis’s cost should be regarded as a lost-opportunity cost: the energy squandered on one structure comes at the expense of energy potentially available for another structure.</li></ul>

WHY MEN HAVE LARGE PENIS?

<ul><li>Almost anyone would assert that the functions of the penis are to eject urine, inject sperm, and stimulate women physically during intercourse.</li><li>But the comparative approach teaches us that those functions are accomplished elsewhere in the animal world by a relatively much smaller structure than the one with which we encumber ourselves.</li><li>Thus, even the most familiar and seemingly most transparent piece of human sexual equipment surprises us with unsolved evolutionary questions.</li></ul>

UNSOLVED EVOLUTIONARY QUESTION

"Our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices."

To us humans, the sex lives of animals seem weird. But it's our own sex lives that are truly bizarre. Stranger yet, we have sex at any time, even during periods of infertility, such as pregnancy or post-menopause. Why does the human female, virtually alone among mammals, go through menopause? Why does the human male stand out as one of the few mammals to stay with the female he impregnates, to help raise the children that he sired? Why is the human penis so unnecessarily large?

Why are humans one of the few species to have sex in private? Why do humans have sex any day of the month or year, including when the female is pregnant, beyond her reproductive years, or between her fertile cycles? Why are human females one of the few mammals to go through menopause? Human sexuality seems normal to us but it is bizarre by the standards of other animals. Jared Diamond argues that our strange sex lives were as crucial to our rise to human status as were our large brains. He also describes the battle of the sexes in the human and animal world over parental care, and why sex differences in the genetic value of parental care provide a biological basis for the all-too-familiar different attitudes of men and women towards extramarital sex.

parenting

Parenting

Jared Diamond

Why is Sex Fun?

<ul><li>The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.</li><li>Our brains were made for nexting, and that’s just what they’ll do.</li><li>Happiness is a word that we use to indicate an experience and not the actions that give rise to it.</li></ul>

The Joy Of Next 

“Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.”

“Imagination’s tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us.”<ul><li>No one can imagine every feature and consequence of a future event, hence we must consider some and fail to consider others. The problem is that the features and consequences we fail to consider are often quite important.</li><li>Our experience is compressed as a summary phrase (“Dinner was disappointing”) or a small set of key features (tough steak, corked wine, snotty waiter) in memory.</li></ul>

First Shortcoming Of Imagination 

“Imagination’s tendency to project the present onto the future.”<ul><li>When imagination paints a picture of the future, many of the details are necessarily missing, and imagination solves this problem by filling in the gaps with details that it borrows from the present.</li></ul>

Second Shortcoming Of Imagination

Despite the third word of the title, this is not an instruction manual that will tell you
anything useful about how to be happy. Instead, this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy….

In this fascinating and often hilarious work – winner of the Royal Society of Science Prize 2007 – pre-eminent psychologist Daniel Gilbert shows how – and why – the majority of us have no idea how to make ourselves happy. We all want to be happy, but do we know how? When it comes to improving tomorrow at the expense of today, we're terrible at predicting how to please our future selves. In ‘Stumbling on Happiness’ Professor Daniel Gilbert combines psychology, neuroscience, economics and philosophy with irrepressible wit to describe how the human brain imagines its future – and how well (or badly) it predicts what it will enjoy. Revealing some of the amazing secrets of human motivation, he also answers thought-provoking questions – why do dining companions order different meals instead of getting what they want? Why are shoppers happier when they can't get refunds? And why are couples less satisfied after having children while insisting that their kids are a source of joy?

Captivate

An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'

How to Use Your Enemies

The Prince

The Third Chimpanzee

Prince Rahul