It seems that women these days are too clever for their own good, at least when it comes to making babies. Research emerging from the London School of Economics examining the links between intelligence and maternal urges in women claims that more of the former means less of the latter. In an ideal world, such findings might be interpreted as smart women making smart choices, but instead it seems that this research is just adding fuel to the argument that women who don’t have children, regardless of the reason, are not just selfish losers but dumb ones as well.

Satoshi Kanazawa, the LSE psychologist behind the research, discussed the findings that maternal urges drop by 25% with every extra 15 IQ points in his book The Intelligence Paradox. In the opening paragraph of the chapter titled ‘Why intelligent people are the ultimate losers in life’, he makes his feelings about voluntary childlessness very clear:

If any value is deeply evolutionarily familiar, it is reproductive success. If any value is truly unnatural, if there is one thing that humans (and all other species in nature) are decisively not designed for, it is voluntary childlessness. All living organisms in nature, […]

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Children who drink soda tend to score slightly higher on scales that measure aggressive behavior than kids who don’t drink the carbonated beverages, according to a new study.

The study’s lead author cautioned, however, that the increase may not be noticeable for individual children and the researchers can’t prove soda caused the bad behaviors.

‘It’s a little hard to interpret it. It’s not quite clinically significant,’ Shakira Suglia, of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York, told Reuters Health.

Previous work by some of the study’s authors had found connections between soda drinking and violent behavior, but the link had not been studied in young children.

For the new analysis, the researchers used an existing study of mothers and their 2,929 children from 20 large U.S. cities. The mothers and children were first recruited between 1998 and 2000 to be periodically interviewed and evaluated.

Mothers completed a checklist on children’s behaviors over the previous two months to measure withdrawal, attention and aggression.

‘It’s things like how often does a child destroy his or her own belongings and how often do they destroy the belongings of others,’ Suglia said.

The mothers were also asked how many servings of soda their children drank per day and […]

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There are periods when history changes, not just in little ways, or in ways confined to a single country or region, but in a manner such that fundamental shifts in human understanding occur. Here are two examples of what I mean:

German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) called it the Axial Period, roughly the eighth to second century BCE, and mostly centered in the two centuries from 800 to 600. In that historically small time period, most of the world’s great pre-Christian religious movements and philosophical lines developed, and the consciousness of humanity changed. Confucius (555-478 BCE) and Buddha (567-487 BCE) were almost exact contemporaries as was Zoroaster, according to the best approximation, as well as Lao Tzu, founder of Taoism, and Mahavira, who is the most probable founder of Jainism. In the Middle East, the line of monotheistic prophets that began with Amos of Tekoa midway through the eighth century reached its culmination near the end of the sixth century with Deutro-Isaiac Judaism. At this same time, in the Northern Mediterranean, the Greeks were experiencing the birth of philosophical speculation with the work of Thales and his successors. And in Athens, democracy was established.1

In modern times, although it may […]

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The SWAT team is the big guns of policing in the United States, reserved for kidnappings, gunmen and other highly dangerous and potential volatile situations. Right?

Wrong, apparently, because in recent years, the use of SWAT teams for routine law enforcement matters has been on the rise, with sometimes fatal consequences. These highly trained police personnel are being sent out on gambling raids, ordered to break up underage parties and even dispatched to handle student loan fraud. Not the best use of taxpayer resources, given the expense of maintaining a SWAT team and sending members out on calls, but more than that, it’s a troubling indicator of something going deeply wrong in America.

In the United States, the police are kept separate from the military for a number of social and political reasons. Paramilitary forces like SWAT teams, developed in 1960s Los Angeles to address considerable social unrest, are intended to be used judiciously, in situations where a threat to civilian wellbeing and social stability is so significant that it justifies the use of considerable force and organized military tactics against members of the civilian community.

Thus, a potential terrorist threat or situations in which people’s lives are endangered by a gunman or […]

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When the FBI finally located Whitey Bulger in 2010 after searching for 16 years, the reputed mobster was suspected of involvement in 19 murders in the 1970s and ’80s, and was thought to be armed with a massive arsenal of weapons. He was also 81 at the time, in poor physical health, and looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. Of all the people who might meet the criteria for arrest by a SWAT team, one might think that Bulger would top the list.

Yet instead of sending in a tactical team to tear down Bulger’s door in the middle of the night, the FBI took a different appraoch. After some investigating, FBI officials cut the lock on a storage locker Bulger used in the apartment complex where he was staying. They then had the property manager call Bulger to tell him someone may have broken into his locker. When Bulger went to investigate, he was arrested without incident. There was no battering ram, there were no flash grenades, there was no midnight assault on his home.

That peaceful apprehension of a known violent fugitive, found guilty this week of participating in 11 murders and a raft of other […]

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