Crack Pot Ideas

I was reading a short article in this month's Discover magazine about a British researcher who has a hypothesis that beautiful people give birth to more daughters than homely people. The thinking is that it is to the benefit of the species to produce good-looking female offspring, because they more easily find mates and have children. It seemed logical to him so he decided to test the idea. Sounds plausible on the surface, given what we know about how natural selection works. The researcher's analysis showed that beautiful people produce daughters at a slightly higher rate than ugly folks. The real problem with the research is that it was based entirely on the subjective interpretation of beauty by the researchers. They rated people from one (butt-ugly) to 5 (holey-moley), by sight to define the beautiful group. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as someone said and so there is no objective criteria by which to test the data. Crap alert! This research is suspect ,in my opinion, because it was destined to prove the researcher's bias. Speaking of crap, I have a few hypotheses of my own that, haven't proved out either. I have long believed that young women's biological urge to have children is immune to the changes in societal norms. That is to say that I believe that the shifting roles of the sexes in our culture has not affected the desire among women to be mothers. This is purely anecdotal, because I have no scientific training nor have I had the motivation to actually check into it. I use the 'cause I say method and my data is entirely anecdotal. I have alway believed that while American birth rates are falling overall, the percent of women who have at least one child has remained constant. The same number of women are having fewer children. It turns out that I am full of baloney on this one. This is why I rarely check out my assumptions. According to census data, the percentage of 40 year-old women in the United States that have never had a child has gone from 10 percent to 19 percent in the past 30 years. Here's another one. I have observed that you see many more black / white intereracial couples where it is black man / white woman, than the opposite, white man / black woman. My observation happens to be true. Interracial couple where the man is black are 2.5 times more common than where the man is white. I had this idea that it was rooted in our biology. My top-of-the-head belief was that because men have traditionally been the protectors of the tribe, family, village, or what-have-you, that it was to our survival benefit to be suspicious of people who didn't look like us or belong to our tribe, if you will. Well, I am wrong again and the proof is while black men are more likely to marry whites than black women are, the opposite it true for Asian men and women. Asian women are far more likely to marry white men than are Asian men to marry white women. Go figure. Plus I totally failed to recognize that my idea had to be wrong, because black men were marrying women of a different race, and according to my hypothesis, they should have been biologially wired to avoid these women. This is important because it illustrates what happens when your own bias corrupts the research. I think I was really looking for excuses for the reluctance of white men to marry black women, apart form the obvious explanation, that it is bigotry. Bigotry plays a role, but other many factors are present too. Lastly, when I was a boy my parents were alcoholics. I observed that they, along with their alcoholic friends, all smoked. My father was also a compulsive card player. When he dragged me to his poker games, I saw men who seemed to be addcited to three different things. My hypothesis was that addictions are symptoms of an underlying process and addicts often have multiple addictions. Anecdotal evidence of this idea can be observed in any casino. Gamblers are more likely to smoke than the general population. Alcoholics and drug addicts are more likely to smoke that people in general. Whether the additon is chemical or process, such as gambling, complusive eating, etc. the likelihood is, that if a person has one addition, they have others. I think I'm right on this one. Merle. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor