How’s this for a display of human kin selection: Subjects were given a scenario of a bus hurtling toward a human and a nondescript dog, and they could only save one. Whom would they pick? It depended...
Consider this: the human genome codes for about 1,500 different TFs, contains 4,000,000 TF-binding sites, and the average cell uses about 200,000 such sites to generate its distinctive gene-expression...
Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart. And when you exhale, the parasympathetic half turns on, activating your vagus nerve in order...
When facing Me-versus-Us moral dilemmas of resisting selfishness, our rapid intuitions are good, honed by evolutionary selection for cooperation in a sea of green-beard markers.35 And in such settings...
This was based on studies of a rare disorder, congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). An enzyme in the adrenal glands has a mutation, and instead of making glucocorticoids, they make testosterone and ot...
There is often an inverse relationship between levels of intragroup and intergroup aggression. In other words, groups with highly hostile interactions with neighbors tend to have minimal internal conf...
The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so.
She was lionized, canonized, Nobel Prized (and was wonderfully inspirational, as disinterested in acclaim as in her ostracism, working until her nineties).
Second, nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation. If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the...
Knowledge emerged about synapses, neurotransmitter-ology was born, and this idea was modified—a new memory requires the formation of a new synapse, a new connection between an axon terminal and a dend...
If they’re told, The drug has a 95 percent survival rate, people, including doctors, are more likely to approve it than when told, The drug has a 5 percent death rate.
Expose subjects to evidence of someone else in pain. If their heart rate increases a lot (a peripheral indicator of anxious, amygdaloid arousal), they are unlikely to act prosocially in the situation....
A large percentage of what we think of when we talk about stress-related diseases are disorders of excessive stress-responses.
Drugs that decrease serotonergic tone (i.e., decreasing serotonin levels or sensitivity to serotonin) increase impulsive aggression; raising the tone does the opposite. This generates some simple pred...
Women prefer the smell of moderately related over unrelated men. And in a study of 160 years of data concerning every couple in Iceland (which is a mecca for human geneticists, given its genetic and s...
What the data show: the fewer social relationships a person has, the shorter his or her life expectancy, and the worse the impact of various infectious diseases. Relationships that are medically prote...
We love stress that is mild and transient and occurs in a benevolent context.
This system can indicate that this mouse is John Smith. How does it also tell that he’s your never-before-encountered brother? The closer the relative, the more similar their cluster of MHC genes and...
This leads to a thoroughly fascinating finding—social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals.
The single genetic variant identified that most powerfully predicted height explained all of 0.4 percent—four tenths of one percent—of the variation in height, and all those hundreds of variants put t...