If gender conflicts continue at their current rate, my partner gloomily observed, men may fade into extinction and women will manage fine without them. What with test-tube babies, cloning, a falling birth-rate, and have-it-all career women prevailing like never before, it seems as if old-fashioned, instinct-driven sexual selection was totally out of fashion. But a study from four British universities suggests it is alive and well, and busy shaping the next generation.In spite of emancipation, the feminist movement, gender equality, and consistent efforts to avoid gender-stereotyping, men still prefer to marry women who are not too brainy. In the study a high IQ hampered a woman"s chance of getting married, with a 40 percent drop in marital prospects for every 16-point rise. The opposite was true for their male class-mates. Top-earning men were 8 per cent more likely to be married than their low-earning peers.How interesting that we automatically assume that men are put off by cleverness in women. Perhaps the brainy women did not wan to get married. Possibly they could not find men clever enough to satisfy them. But these interpretations hardly merit more than a passing thought because this study simply reinforces what we know to be broadly true: that most women do want a committed partner and that most stable marriages occur in a power relation, with the man being the center.We usually think of competitiveness as a male activity, and so it is mainly, which is all the more reason for it causing stress in a marriage. Our ancestry certainly included a long phase when the males competed for the alpha role, in which the top male took all the advantages and most of the group matings. Most men nurse secret dreams of being "benign" dictators. No man likes his wife to earn more than he does. We see how fragile are the marriages of those in which the female has thewhip handin the shape of fame, success, and wealth. In contrast, marriages where the female status is obviously inferior, including arranged marriages, there is a greater stability.Women have to accept that coming into our own and achieving the full potential of our (seemingly superior) capacity to use education will undoubtedly make us more inaccessible as partners. More choosy, and therefore less successful. What might be the meaning of"whip hand" in Paragraph 4
A. control
B. desire
C. intelligence
D. commitment
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In Second Nature, Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman argues that the brain and mind are unified, but he has little patience with the claim that the brain is a computer. Fortunately for the general reader, his explanations of brain function are accessible, reinforced by concrete examples and metaphors.Edelman suggests that thanks to the recent development of instruments capable of measuring brain structure within millimeters and brain activity within milliseconds, perceptions, thoughts, memories, willed acts, and other mind matters traditionally considered private and impenetrable to scientific scrutiny now can be correlated with brain activity.The author describes three unifying insights that correlate mind matters with brain activity. First, even distant neurons will establish meaningful connections (circuits) if their patterns are synchronized. Second, experience can either strengthen or weaken synapses (neuronal connections). Finally, there is reentry, the continued signaling from one brain region to another and back again along massively parallel nerve fibers.Edelman concedes that neurological explanations for consciousness and other aspects of mind are not currently available, but he is confident that they will be soon. Meanwhile, he is comfortably hazarding a guess: "All of our mental life.., is based on the structure and dynamics of our brain," Despite this optimism about the explanatory powers of neuroscience, Edelman acknowledges the pitfalls in attempting to explain all aspects of the mind in neurological terms. Indeed, culture--not biology--is the primary determinant of the brain"s evolution, and has been since the emergence of language, he notes.However, I was surprised to learn that he considers Sigmund Freud "the key expositor of the effects of unconscious processes on behavior". Such a comment ignores how slightly Freud"s conception of the unconscious, with its emphasis on sexuality and aggression, resembles the cognitive unconscious studied by neuroscientists.Still, Second Nature is well worth reading. It serves as a bridge between the traditionally separate camps of "hard" science and the humanities. Readers without at least some familiarity with brain science will likely find the going difficult at certain points. Nonetheless, Edelman has achieved his goal of producing a provocative exploration of"how we come to know the world and ourselves". The author disagrees with the idea that the neuroscience-based cognitive unconscious can be______
A. studied irrelevantly to sexual behavior
B. affected by the language acquisition
C. clearly explained by Freud"s theory
D. examined under cultural backgrounds
In Second Nature, Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman argues that the brain and mind are unified, but he has little patience with the claim that the brain is a computer. Fortunately for the general reader, his explanations of brain function are accessible, reinforced by concrete examples and metaphors.Edelman suggests that thanks to the recent development of instruments capable of measuring brain structure within millimeters and brain activity within milliseconds, perceptions, thoughts, memories, willed acts, and other mind matters traditionally considered private and impenetrable to scientific scrutiny now can be correlated with brain activity.The author describes three unifying insights that correlate mind matters with brain activity. First, even distant neurons will establish meaningful connections (circuits) if their patterns are synchronized. Second, experience can either strengthen or weaken synapses (neuronal connections). Finally, there is reentry, the continued signaling from one brain region to another and back again along massively parallel nerve fibers.Edelman concedes that neurological explanations for consciousness and other aspects of mind are not currently available, but he is confident that they will be soon. Meanwhile, he is comfortably hazarding a guess: "All of our mental life.., is based on the structure and dynamics of our brain," Despite this optimism about the explanatory powers of neuroscience, Edelman acknowledges the pitfalls in attempting to explain all aspects of the mind in neurological terms. Indeed, culture--not biology--is the primary determinant of the brain"s evolution, and has been since the emergence of language, he notes.However, I was surprised to learn that he considers Sigmund Freud "the key expositor of the effects of unconscious processes on behavior". Such a comment ignores how slightly Freud"s conception of the unconscious, with its emphasis on sexuality and aggression, resembles the cognitive unconscious studied by neuroscientists.Still, Second Nature is well worth reading. It serves as a bridge between the traditionally separate camps of "hard" science and the humanities. Readers without at least some familiarity with brain science will likely find the going difficult at certain points. Nonetheless, Edelman has achieved his goal of producing a provocative exploration of"how we come to know the world and ourselves". Edelman firmly believes that______
A. mind matters will eventually be explained from a neurological perspective
B. experience will have an ill effect on neuronal connections
C. distant neurons will help synchronize their firing pattern
D. brain signals will repeatedly go from one brain region to another
Our trouble lies in a simple confusion, one to which economists have been prone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Growth and ecology operate by different rules. Economists tend to assume that every problem of scarcity can be solved by substitution, by replacing tuna with tilapia, without factoring in the long-term environmental implications of either. But whereas economies might expand, ecosystems do not. They change--pine gives way to oak, coyotes arrive in New England--and they reproduce themselves, but they do not increase in extent or abundance year after year. Most economists think of scarcity as a labor problem. Imagining that only energy and technology place limits on production. To harvest more wood, build a better chain saw; to pump more oil, drill more wells; to get more food, invent pest-resistant plants.That logic thrived on new frontiers and more intensive production, and it held off the prophets of scarcity- from Thomas Robert Malthus to Paul Ehrlich- whose predictions of famine and shortage have not come to pass. The Agricultural Revolution that began in seventeenth-centur) England radically increased the amount of food that could be grown on an acre of land, and the same happened in the 1960s and 1970s when fertilizer and hybridized seeds arrived in India and Mexico. But the picture looks entirely different when we change the scale. Industrial society is roughly 250 years old: make the last ten thousand years equal to twenty-four hours, and we have been producing consumer goods and CO2for only the last thirty-six minutes. Do the same for the past 1 million years of human evolution, and every thing from the steam engine to the search engine fits into the past twenty-one seconds. If we are not careful, hunting and gathering will look like a far more successful strategy of survival than economic growth. The latter has changed sc much about the earth and human societies in so little time that it makes more sense to be cautious than triumphant.Although food scarcity, when it occurs, is a localized problem, other kinds of scarcity are already here. Groundwater is alarmingly low in regions all over the world, but the most immediate threat to growth is surely petroleum. What happened in the 1960s and 1970s
A. Food production increased in India.
B. Fertilizer began to be used in England.
C. Hybridized plants were grown in the US.
D. Land expansion occurred in Mexico.
Our trouble lies in a simple confusion, one to which economists have been prone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Growth and ecology operate by different rules. Economists tend to assume that every problem of scarcity can be solved by substitution, by replacing tuna with tilapia, without factoring in the long-term environmental implications of either. But whereas economies might expand, ecosystems do not. They change--pine gives way to oak, coyotes arrive in New England--and they reproduce themselves, but they do not increase in extent or abundance year after year. Most economists think of scarcity as a labor problem. Imagining that only energy and technology place limits on production. To harvest more wood, build a better chain saw; to pump more oil, drill more wells; to get more food, invent pest-resistant plants.That logic thrived on new frontiers and more intensive production, and it held off the prophets of scarcity- from Thomas Robert Malthus to Paul Ehrlich- whose predictions of famine and shortage have not come to pass. The Agricultural Revolution that began in seventeenth-centur) England radically increased the amount of food that could be grown on an acre of land, and the same happened in the 1960s and 1970s when fertilizer and hybridized seeds arrived in India and Mexico. But the picture looks entirely different when we change the scale. Industrial society is roughly 250 years old: make the last ten thousand years equal to twenty-four hours, and we have been producing consumer goods and CO2for only the last thirty-six minutes. Do the same for the past 1 million years of human evolution, and every thing from the steam engine to the search engine fits into the past twenty-one seconds. If we are not careful, hunting and gathering will look like a far more successful strategy of survival than economic growth. The latter has changed sc much about the earth and human societies in so little time that it makes more sense to be cautious than triumphant.Although food scarcity, when it occurs, is a localized problem, other kinds of scarcity are already here. Groundwater is alarmingly low in regions all over the world, but the most immediate threat to growth is surely petroleum. What does the passage say about the predictions made by Thomas Robert Malthus and Paul Ehrlich
A. They proved to be useful.
B. They have not come true.
C. They proved to be accurate.
D. They have not drawn enough attention.