Category Archives: Science

Is Reproductive Drive responsible for shaping our cultures, society and even religions, including Islam?

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Book Review by F. Sheikh

Book “Conflicts Of Fitness” Islam, America and Evolutionary Psychology.

Author: A. S. Amin

It is a fascinating read that postulates how the reproductive drive to maximize fitness influences evolution of different cultures, societies and even religions.  It also provokes intriguing questions and thinking.

Author lays the ground work of the rest of the book in Polygamy Chapter. It explains animals’ reproductive biology and how polygamy works in a society in different scenarios. It explains polygamy in Islam. It introduces us to terms of Paternity Confidence, short-term reproductive strategies, long-term reproductive strategies and how these effect our attitudes and decision-making from casual sex to traditional marriage, from interpreting religious edits to human rights motives, from dressing flashy to wear Hijab, from conservatism to modernization and from peaceful stability to terrorism. The book also touches upon helpful hints to find a better suit by employing reproductive instincts.

It familiarized us to the term ‘conflicts of fitness’ which is also the title of the book, and how it creates conflict in the society when one’s pursue of short-term reproductive strategy conflicts with the other’s goal of long-term commitment. This conflict of fitness influences from individuals to society at large and from Western countries, where casual sex and short-term commitment is prevalent to conservative Muslim countries, which mostly practice long-term commitment. Is this causing clash of civilization?

The book looks at some practices in Islam, like polygamy, Hijab and interpretation and selection of Hadiths, through the lens of evolutionary psychology and how the short and long-term reproductive strategies play a role in these practices. The author touches upon terrorism and its association with long-term reproductive strategy, but this relationship seems very tenuous and incidental.

As I mentioned the book provokes some intriguing thinking and questions, and the one question that repeatedly keep creeping up in my mind, while reading the book, is the question of cause or effect. For example, do short-term reproductive strategies or commitment  emerge as incidental consequence of modernization, education, women independence  and sexual  liberation or it is the short-term reproductive drive that pursues the policies of modernization, education, women independence and sexual liberation to achieve short-term reproductive strategies? Or both perpetuate each other?

After reading the book, it allures you to know more about the subject and I can relate to the author when he describes how he got hooked to the topic and spent many years in writing this book. It is obvious from the reference section why he spent so much time. I congratulate the young author for doing a wonderful job in writing this book and would highly recommend for everyone, especially young generation, to read it. It is also available in Kindle Edition and makes it easy to get it in few minutes from Amazon.

The promising young author, Dr. A.S. Amin will be our guest speaker at TFUSA monthly meeting in April or May, and it will be a great session to hear the author’s views and his response to questions which naturally emerge while reading the book on such a complex topic. In order to enjoy the discussion, please read the book before coming to session.

 

Nergis Mavalvala: The Karachiite who went on to detect Einstein’s gravitational waves

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The article rightly lauds the achievements and key role of the Karachi native Nergis Mavalvala in providing validation for a key aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity.  
Regretably there are so many talented people floundering in Pakistan  because of the failing educational system.    

Nasik Elahi

http://www.dawn.com/news/1239270/nergis-mavalvala-the-karachiite-who-went-on-to-detect-einsteins-gravitational-waves

What is general relativity? by David Tong

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It is one of the best simple understandable explanation from Newton’s law of gravity to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Watch video below or continue to read below(f.sheikh).

The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity. Einstein wasn’t the first to come up with such a theory — back in 1686 Isaac Newton formulated his famous inverse square law of gravitation. Newton’s law works perfectly well on small-ish scales: we can use it to calculate how fast an object dropped off a tall building will hurtle to the ground and even to send people to the Moon. But when distances and speeds are very large, or very massive objects are involved, Newton’s law becomes inaccurate. It’s a good place to start though, as it’s easier to describe than Einstein’s theory.

Suppose you have two objects, say the Sun and the Earth, with masses $m_1$ and $m_2$ respectively. Write $r$ for the distance between the two objects. Then Newton’s law says that the gravitational force $F$ between them is

\[ F=G_ N\frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}, \]

where $G_ N$ is a fixed number, known as Newton’s constant.

The formula makes intuitive sense: it tells us that gravity gets weaker over long distances (the larger $r$ the smaller $F$) and that the gravitational force is stronger between more massive objects (the larger either of $m_1$ and $m_2$ the larger $F$).

Different force, same formula

There is another formula which looks very similar, but describes a different force. In 1785 the French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb came up with an equation to capture the electrostatic force $F$ that acts between two charged particles with charges $Q_1$ and $Q_2$:

\[ F = \frac{1}{4 \pi \epsilon _0} \frac{Q_1 Q_2}{r^2}. \]

Here $r$ stands for the distance between the two particles and $\epsilon _0$ is a constant which determines the strength of electromagnetism. (It has the fancy name permittivity of free space.)

The problem with Newton

Newton’s and Coulomb’s formula are nice and neat, but there is a problem. Going back to Newton’s law, suppose you took the Earth and the Sun and very quickly moved them further apart. This would make the force acting between them weaker, but, according to the formula, the weakening of the force would happen straight away, the instant you move the two bodies apart. The same goes for Coulomb’s law: moving the charged particles apart very quickly would result in an immediate weakening of the electrostatic force between them.

But this can’t be true. Einstein’s special theory of relativity, proposed ten years before the general theory in 1905, says that nothing in the Universe can travel faster than light — not even the “signal” that communicates that two objects have moved apart and the force should become weaker.

Why we need fields

This one reason why the classical idea of a force needs replacing in modern physics. Instead, we need to think in terms of something — new objects — that transmit the force between one object and another. This was the great contribution of the British scientist Michael Faraday to theoretical physics. Faraday realised that spread throughout the Universe there are objects we today call fields, which are involved in transmitting a force. Examples are the electric and magnetic fields you are probably familiar with from school.

EinsteinAlbert Einstein (1879-1955) in 1921.

A charged particle gives rise to an electric field, which is “felt” by another particle (which has its own electric field). One particle will move in response to the other’s electric field — that’s what we call a force. When one particle is quickly moved away from the other, then this causes ripples in the first particle’s electric field. The ripples travel through space, at the speed of light, and eventually affect the other particle. In fact, the particle that is moved also generates a magnetic field and emits electromagnetic radiation. The end result is a complex interaction of rippling fields — but the point is that the force is really one particle being affected by ripples propagating through the field of the other.

It took scientists a long time to fully develop this field picture of electromagnetism. The main credit goes to the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, who not only realised that the electric and magnetic forces were two aspects of a unified force of electromagnetism, but also replaced Coulomb’s simple law of electrostatics with four equations that describe how electric and magnetic fields respond to moving charged particles. Maxwell’s four formulae are some of the most amazing equations in physics because they capture all there is to know about electricity and magnetism.

Gravity and spacetime

So what about gravity? Just as with electromagnetism there needs to be a field giving rise to what we perceive as the gravitational force acting between two bodies. Einstein’s great insight was that this field is made of something we already know about: space and time. Imagine a heavy body, like the Sun, sitting in space. Einstein realised that space isn’t just a passive by-stander, but responds to the heavy object by bending. Another body, like the Earth, moving into the dent created by the heavier object will be diverted by that dent. Rather than carrying on moving along a straight line, it will start orbiting the heavier object. Or, if it is sufficiently slow, will crash into it. (It took Einstein many years of struggle to arrive at his theory — see this article to find out more.)

Another lesson of Einstein’s theory is that space and time can warp into each other — they are inextricable linked and time, too, can be distorted by massive objects. This is why we talk, not just about the curvature of space, but about the curvature of spacetime.

The equation

The general theory of relativity is captured by a deceptively simple-looking equation:

\[ R_{\mu \nu } - \frac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu \nu } = \frac{G_ N}{8 \pi c^4}T_{\mu \nu }. \]

Essentially the equation tells us how a given amount of mass and energy warps spacetime. The left-hand side of the equation,

\[ R_{\mu \nu } - \frac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu \nu }, \]

describes the curvature of spacetime whose effect we perceive as the gravitational force. It’s the analogue of the term $F$on the left-hand side of Newton’s equation.

The term $T_{\mu \nu }$ on right-hand side of the equation describes everything there is to know about the way mass, energy, momentum and pressure are distributed throughout the Universe. It is what became of the term $m_1 m_2$ in Newton’s equation, but it is much more complicated. All of these things are needed to figure out how space and time bends. $T_{\mu \nu }$ goes by the technical term energy-momentum tensor. The constant $G_ N$ that appears on the right-hand side of the equation is again Newton’s constant and $c$ is the speed of light.

What about the Greek letters $\mu $ and $\nu $ that appear as subscripts? To understand what they mean, first notice that spacetime has four dimensions. There are three dimensions of space (corresponding to the three directions left-right, up-down and forwards-backwards of space) and one dimension of time (which only has one direction). If you want to understand how a moving bit of mass affects spacetime, you need to understand how it affects each of those four dimensions and their various combinations.

(As an analogy, think of the way you’d describe an object moving at constant speed along a straight line in Newton’s classical physics. You need two pieces of information: the direction and the speed of the motion. The direction is given by three numbers, each telling you by how much the object moves in each of the three directions of space. Therefore, the motion is described by a total of four numbers, three relating to space and one giving the speed. Since speed is distance covered per unit time, we need three bits of information relating to space and one to time, in order to describe the motion.)

Click link below for full article;

https://plus.maths.org/content/what-general-relativity

‘The Libido Crash’ By Katherine Rowland

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( For ADULTS only and not for the shy ones, but I am sure you are still going to read it)

Header essay marilyn nyc17585

IN the drawer of her bedside table, Julie maintains an archive of lust. Here are the naked Polaroids she slipped in between her husband’s business papers, explicit notes once left on mirrors, Anaïs Nin, a riding crop. Come evening, Julie used to watch her husband’s movements from across the room, eager for the moment when dinner was done, the kids were asleep and all other intrusions to pleasure had been dismissed. When strangers asked if they were newlyweds, Julie loved responding that they had been married for years, and believed that they were inured to the frazzled disinterest that had settled over the bedrooms of her friends. ‘You always hear how attraction fades with time – the honeymoon period comes to an end. But I always thought that was other people’s misfortune,’ she says.

So when her longing began to dull, Julie struggled to discern what was going on. She blamed the stress of work, the second child, her busy and travel-heavy schedule, the effect of changing seasons, until she had run down the available excuses, and still found she would rather go for a jog on Sunday mornings than linger in bed.

These days, Julie says it feels ‘like suffocating’ to endure her husband’s affections. ‘I’m supposed to get home from working all day, play with the kids, cook dinner, talk about entertaining things, and then crawl into bed and rather than sleep perform some sexual highwire act. How is that possible? That sounds like hell, honestly.’

Julie still loves her husband. What’s more, her life – from the dog, to the kids, to the mortgaged house – is built around their partnership. She doesn’t want to end her marriage, but in the absence of desire she feels like a ‘miserable fraud’.

‘I never imagined I would ever be in the self-help section in the book store,’ she says, but now her bedside table heaves with such titles asSex Again (2012) by Jill Blakeway: ‘Despite what you see on movies and TV, Americans have less sex than people in any other country’;Rekindling Desire (2014) by Barry and Emily McCarthy: ‘Is sex more work than play in your marriage? Do you schedule it in like a dentist appointment?’; Wanting Sex Again (2012) by Laurie Watson: ‘If you feel like sex just isn’t worth the effort, you’re not alone’; and No More Headaches (2009) by Juli Slattery.

‘It’s just so depressing,’ she says. ‘There’s this expectation to be hot all the time – even for a 40-year-old woman – and then this reality where you’re bored and tired and don’t want to do it.’

Survey upon survey confirms Julie’s impressions, delivering up the conclusion that for many women sex tends toward numbed complacency rather than a hunger to be sated. The generalised loss of sexual interest, known in medical terms as hypoactive sexual desire, is the most common sexual complaint among women of all ages. To believe some of the numbers – 16 per cent of British women experience a lack of sexual desire; 43 per cent of American women are affected by female sexual dysfunction; 10 to 50 per cent of women globally report having too little desire – is to confront the idea that we are in the midst of a veritable crisis of libido.

Today a boisterous debate exists over whether this is merely a product of high – perhaps over-reaching – expectations. Never has the public sphere been so saturated in women’s sexual potential. Billboards, magazines, television all proclaim that healthy women are readily climactic, amorously creative and hungry for sex. What might strike us as liberating, a welcome change from earlier visions of apron-clad passivity, can also become an unnerving source of pressure. ‘Women are coming forward talking about wanting their desire back to the way it was, or better than it was,’ says Cynthia Graham, a psychologist at the University of Southampton and the editor of The Journal of Sex Research. ‘But they are often encouraged to aim for unrealistic expectations and to believe their desire should be unchanging regardless of age or life circumstances.’

Others contend that we are, indeed, in the midst of a creeping epidemic. Once assumed to be an organic feature of women, low desire is increasingly seen as a major impediment to quality of life, and one deserving of medical attention. Moreover, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy in 2010 found ‘a higher percentage of women with low sexual desire feel frustrated, concerned, unhappy, disappointed, hopeless, troubled, ashamed, and bitter, compared with women with normal desire’.

To make matters worse, according to Anita Clayton, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, most women don’t delve into the causes of their waning desire, but settle instead for a sexless norm. She writes inSatisfaction (2007):

You erode your capacity for intimacy and eventually become estranged from both your sensual self and your partner. The erosion is so gradual, you don’t realise it’s happening until the damage is done and you’re shivering at the bottom of a chasm, alone and untouched, wondering how you got there.

Fearful of this end, Julie sought medical help, taking a long and dispiriting tour of conflicting advice (‘Your experiences place you in a near majority of women, but your disinterest in sex isn’t normal’), ineffectual treatments (men’s testosterone cream, antidepressants, marital counselling) and dashed hopes (‘Each time I tried out a new therapy, I told myself it was going to get better’).

Julie is hardly alone. Instead, she counts among a consumer population of millions that pharmaceutical firms are now trying to capture in their efforts to fix the problem of desire. But what exactly are they trying to treat? A physical ailment? A relationship problem? An inevitable decline? Could low desire be a correlate of age, a result of professional stress, a clear outlier on the sexual-health spectrum or a culturally induced state of mind?

For drug makers, these questions pose more than a philosophical quandary. It is only by proving that low desire and its favoured tool of measurement – libido – are diagnosable, medical problems that new drugs can be approved.

The task has been herculean, and fraught with confusion. ‘Some of the statistics that get circulated are based on very badly designed studies,’ says Katherine Angel, a researcher on the history and philosophy of science and former fellow at the Wellcome Trust in London. As a result, it’s possible to interpret ‘the presence of fluctuating levels of sexual desire as indications of a medical problem, rather than natural fluctuation over time’.

That hasn’t stopped big pharma from entering the fray. In the case of women’s libido, the industry has spent years in hot pursuit of the condition and its chemical cure, a female analog to the blockbuster drug Viagra. Yet the more scientists try to hone in on the nature of desire, and the more they try to bottle or amplify it, the more elusive it becomes.

The idea that women could suffer from low desire and benefit from medical intervention reflects a major social shift. Looking back 150 years, it would be hard to conceive that doctors would be concerned with too little desire. The Victorian era is notorious for its desexualised treatment of women. Upheld as moral counterweights to men, women were thought to be sexually passive, untroubled by lust.

Yet another Victorian idea, the notion that love must constitute the centre of marriage, has amplified anxiety over lost desire today. Breaking with a long tradition of unions brokered chiefly for economic and social advantage, the Victorians privileged romantic affection between husband and wife. In the 20th century, this idea expanded to encompass sensual intimacy, and reciprocal pleasure was seen as the key to strong marriages – and the greater good.

The turn toward sensual reciprocity made partnerships more democratic, and couples were meant to provide each other with sexual, spiritual, emotional and social fulfillment. But these gains introduced new stressors, says the family historian Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen State College in Washington State. ‘New expectations were piled on to marriage – many of which were good,’ she says, ‘but they occurred in tandem with new pressures, sex among them, as well as diminished expectations for social life outside of marriage.’

In an infamous cartoon in The New Yorker in 2001, one woman confides to a friend over drinks: ‘I was on hormone replacement for two years before I realised what I really needed was Steve replacement.’ Medicine has been reluctant to engage the question of just how much monogamy and long-term togetherness affect sexual function and desire, and the ‘Steve’ problem remains an issue that is tacitly acknowledged and yet under-discussed. To return to Julie’s growing pile of self-help titles, the books all promise to return, revive, restorewithout really getting down to the brass tacks of why desire extinguished in the first place. As Julie notes, the honeymoon grinds to an end, but the issues leading there are complex. In short supply is attention to the way mind and body react to social structures such as popular media, faith and marriage.

click link below for full article;

https://aeon.co/essays/can-women-s-lost-libido-be-fixed-with-mere-drugs

posted by f. sheikh