Friday, November 06, 2009

Teenage Pregnancy: My Selfish Gene Theory

I have been reading "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins recently. Considering my knowledge of genetics is rudimentary at best and my understanding of evolution is not much better I felt that it would be worth reading into these fields so I could hold my own in a conversation. I am about two thirds of the way through the book and it is enlightening. I shouldn't really call it a book I suppose, it is more like one huge argument by someone who is extremely arrogant and self important. That being said the argument is compelling and in the field of Ethnology, Dawkins is quite important. I am not sure if I want to read his newer books about religion because having seen his rants in movies like Religulous or on The Colbert Report, I cannot distinguish his view from that of Evangelicals. He is essentially an evangelical atheist. I don't care for those people on the fringe who have no interest in listening.
The interesting thing about The Selfish Gene is it doesn't just explain how using the gene as the evolutionary unit that evolution would take place but gives you the tools to think in a genetic-based-evolution way. By the third chapter when he frames a new experiment you cannot help but stop reading for a few minutes and think about the puzzle and try to use the tools gained thus far to work out a solution. It really teaches a new way to think. It isn't long before you start thinking about other things with regard to the selfish gene. So here is my completely uneducated evolutionary stable idea:

If we assume that men and women are dirt sluts until marriage and after marriage are wholly monogamous, then it stands to reason that evolution would favour genes that promote premarital pregnancy since after marriage if one partner is not virile/fertile than neither person can procreate. Whereas those who seek to impregnate/be impregnated before this switch in sexual behaviour from filthy sluttery to monogamy will be more likely to produce offspring.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Kiva

Traveling around Academic Earth, which is a sweet website unto itself, I discovered a site called Kiva. For those of you who have never heard of Academic Earth, it is a website that has viewable lectures from a number of top rated schools in America. Among them are Princton, Yale, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. Profs agree to have individual courses filmed and put online so people can watch them for free. The website lacks an interactive component where members can discuss the course but hopefully that changes in the future. I am currently watching a course from Berkeley called "Current Issues in International and Area Studies". This course is just a series of guests. The guests all seem to be pretty decent thus far which is good because the Prof kind of sucks.
Anyways Kiva, introduced by one of the guest speakers of the aforementioned course, is a website that helps hook people up with individuals in the third world who require micro finance loans to start their businesses. The pay back rate is about 97.5% which means that if someone were to look at the website as a donation system and not an investment it would mean for $500 you could be doing the equivalent of about $20000 worth of help. A lot of the entrepreneurs on the website seem to have genuinely decent ideas and the website has a decent track record from what I read. I haven't signed up yet, though I think it is a possibility. I urge anyone interested in the world of micro financing to take a look even if it is only out of interest. The minimum loan increment is $25, a lot of the loans guarantee against currency risk and many of the organizations have a long term perfect record. You could probably help out many people while the initial $25 remaining safe.
FYI, There are 'communities' on Kiva that allow you to both communicate with like minded people and coordinate your loans for the maximum benefit of a particular segment (gender, nationality, industry, etc.). Within these communities the group who has lent the most money? "Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious" with a distant second being "Kiva Christians".