BrainMan

I believe that Cosmides and Tooby are the primary source of this theory, not David Buss. In fact, they have a good deal of information on the topic on thier webpage at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology there at UCSB: http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/index.html

iglak- You are artifically increasing the odds of winning by staying because you list four cases of door 3, when the cases are not actually distinct- there are only two distinct cases at door three. What it should look like is this: You pick 1. They eliminate 2. You stay on 1. You lose. You pick 1. They eliminate 2. You switch to 3. You win. You pick 2. They eliminate 1. You stay on 2. You lose. You pick 2. They eliminate 1. You switch to 3. You win. You pick 3. They eliminate 1 or 2. You switch to 1 or 2. You lose. You pick 3. They eliminate 1 or 2. You stay on 3. You win. The number of times you win by staying is 1/3. The number of times you win by switching is 2/3.

When you give people "games" such that people have the chance to either cooperate or cheat (gaining an advantage- say in cash- at the expense of others), certain people under certain circumstances will cheat. As it turns out, if you give photographs of all people involved to other participants and ask them to pick out the cheaters, they are able to do so at a rate far above random.

You have a balance, so you can subtract numbers as well as add (by plaing counterweights on the other side of the balance). So fo example, to get 2 you place 3 on one side and 1 on the other. For 5, you place 9 on one side and 3 and 1 on the other. This works for all possible whole numbers. In fact, the general solution for any set of whole numbers you can generate is: for how many numbers you need, (3^N - 1)/2. and the exact numbers needed to generate all numbers is {1. 3, 9, ...3^(n-1)}. In this case, we are given that it must generate numbers up to 121, so we have: (3^N - 1)/2 = 121. Solving for N we have 5. 5 weights are needed to generate all numbers between 1 and 121. Understand now? Sorry if my explination sucks...Im not sure how to explain it better.

For (3), the answer is 5. [i edited my last post to include this answer.] The exact weights you need are {1, 3, 9, 27, 81}.

It seems I misunderstood (4) a little. Instead of breaking it up into two piles, you just take 10 coins form one bag, 9 from another, then 8, 7, 6, ect... the number of tenths of a gram it is over will reveal the counterfit.

(1) The fastest way I know is 4. (2) Again, fastest way I can see is 4. (3) The answer is 5. (4) Split the bags into two groups of five. Take five coins from a bag on each side, four coins from another, then 3, 2, 1 [and mark bags based on the pile A or B and the number of coins 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5]. Whichever side is heaver tells you which pile of five bags to look at, and the number of tenths of a gram it is over tells you which bag.

Since I fist thought about going into psychology (about 6 or 7 years ago) to the present, every report I have ever seen has claimed that the job market for clinical psychology is growing and will continue to do so for quite some time (in the US).

What I would suggest is start by looking at where your grades fall, what you might predict your test scores to be, and how much money you might have to spend- along with size of university you want, location, ect.- and focus in on jus those schools. These are more important than looking for a specific program- as most chemistry programs for undergraduates will look the same. From there, then you can apply to the most attractive schools (or whatever you think you can get into) based, in part, on what the program looks like- what the exact requirements are for the degree, what opportunities for research or participation are available for undergraduates, ect. just narrow down your school choice generally first, and then start looking at the chemistry departments from the fewer choices you have left.

It depends, fisrt of all, on what is meant by "stored". If you mean an accurate and detailed memory of a past event, then most definitiely not. If you mean that past events do not erase themselves- such that a life where the event happened and one where it didn't would be identical, with no way to distinguish between them- then perhaps. The hypnosis stuff is bunk. Dont buy it.

However, you should always check with whatever school you wish to apply to for details about exactly what you need as part of your application- it will vary some on a school by school basis.

The alternative is that if you are embodied, you no more follow the laws of nature than the laws of nature follow you. In other words, you would (in a very real sense) BE the laws of nature. What scientific test can you come up witht hat would distinguish between you (finite, embodied creature) following the laws of nature and you (again, embodied creature) BEING the laws of nature? There seems to be no real difference other than how we choose to develope our metaphysics- whether or not we choose to give ourslves free will. [Note that "choice" here make no metaphysical commitment- it is simply the word that describes the decision making process, be it determined or free...but again, Im not sure these are actually different anywhere other than in courtrooms.]

Do butterflys sleep? Do all insects sleep? When, exactly, did sleep evolve? Hmmm...

The problem here is defining inside and outside with respect to yourself. Lets suppose, for the moment, that you ARE your body. That you control your own thinking could be takn as meaning that the internal states of your body (your brain) are more important in determining these processes than outside stimuli are. In this case, you are not controlled by any nature (the world outside yourself) other than your own nature (the part of the world that is you). No supernaturalism needed for self-controled thought. There are other ways to look at it without having to make the assumption that you are your body (arguably outside your mind, and thus simply making an identification right off the bat is question-begging). What we would have is a space, of many dinmensions, that constitutes your mind. A subspace of the mental space is your conscious (and controlled) thoughts. The space changes over time (it expands and contracts, changes shape, ect.), and you might even consider death to be a singularity (a black hole) in experiential space. *You*, as a self, are embedded in the space and changes of experience could be described as your having followed some path through the experiential space. Basically, you would be living in a "bubble" of consciousness. There is no distinction between experiencing a change of state of "the world" and hallucinating. LSD would take you through a path of experiential space no less real than living without LSD use, for instance. The only real difference is that of survivability- your ability to avoid the black holes. In this case, all of nature is the nature you attribute sucessfully to the world- where sucess is predictive ability, thus avoiding the black holes. But "the world" is a bit of an illusion, because it never needs to be identical to your own state- you just need to navigate it sucessfully. The question here is if you can sucessfully attribute controlled thought to inner space, but attribute the cause to something outside of that space- like the brain, which we hallucinate the world as containing. It is difficualt to see how. If your thoughts are caused by something outside your space, then how can you maintain that it is self-controlled given you are inbedded within the inside space. Either free will is an illusion, or, taking sucessful navigation as "truth", identifying self with brain is a sucessful strategy- which leads back to the fist case where free will is possible.

Abiogenesis is actually ill-defined (to the extent that life is also ill-defined). It is bascally the process(es) whereby life was formed. In other words, we started with a bunch of chemicals and ended up with evolving lifeforms. Exactly how such a transition took place is what abiogenesis is supposed to be about.

Fingerprints help with fine sensations.

Think three headed frogs could become popular as pets? There could be money to be made in this discovery!

I have trouble comprehending mundane things like how we can possibly walk around without bumping into things (walking = series of recovered falls; vision = energy striking a 2-D plate lined with receptors and a bunch of neurons hooked up), or why things fall. That you have trouble understanding a complex process that presumably happened billions of years ago and no one really understands isn't much of a problem as I see it. It is the people that think they do know that I worry about. There are a couple of things going on here. First of all, understand that we are "starting in the middle" so to speak. People noticed that fossils changed over time- evolution was a theory to explain why we saw these changes. Then Darwin spent years collecting huge amounts of new data and proposed a mechanism of change- natural selection. Then genetics, blah blah blah the rest is history. The thoery was meant to explain the evidence he had and it made great sense- and it also allowed many great predictions and discoveries. When you say you have trouble understanding crutial parts of the theory, I think you are slightly mistaken. Abiogenesis, for exampl, is not a part of the theory of evolution. Rather, it is an implication of the theory. We use the theory (along with other facts) to arive at the conclusion that life started from a single anscestor. What you seem to be having trouble with are some of the implications. The theory implies things that seem implausible or difficult to explain. Notice two things: 1) This is not specific to evolutionary theory- all sciences and all theories have standing problems that are difficult to explain, which is why scientists keep thier jobs; 2) not being able to explain these things is not a failing of the theory- it is the sucess of a theory to generate new questions and new discoveries and even new problems. The only reason I say all this is because it seems as if you could only be happy with the full story- with perfect knowledge. But maybe we can't have that. Maybe we can't ever know exactly how life started. That converging evidence and scientific advances allowed us to understand that abiogenesis should have occured some 4 billion years ago seems like a huge sucess of the theory to me. I feel like Im just rembling pointlessly, so Ill stop now. Maybe something I said was worthwhile...maybe not... :|

By "how" are you looking for a specification of the environmental forces, genetic processes, and so forth? Are you looking for the (hypothesized) line of decent leading from earlier animals to the mammals? Something broader like the line of decent from bacteria to mammal?

Well then, you have solved one of the mysteries of my strange childhood. Thank you!

ECT is still used and, as Glider pointed out, very effective. I spoke recently with some of the researchers at Washington University (in St. Louis) that have been exploring the posibility of memory problems in patients that have undergone ECT. The memory deficits seen in the patients, although real, is supposedly very minor- at least in the patients they have been looking at.

It is just a simple solution to store all the components needed beforehand. It is then just a matter of stimulating the right tissues with reproductive hormones for the eggs to develop fully and be released. The question is not why this happens with females, the question is why this doesn't happen with males. Unlike females, who produce one (or a few) eggs a month, males must be able to produce huge quantities of sperm on the fly. If Iggie the caveman can knock up two different females in a two hour period of time, so much the better for his genes. But all these sperm need the right environment to live in, and dont live very long anyway. If men had all the sperm (along with the proper living environment for those sperm) they would need at birth, they would have to lug around giant sack-like organs the size of a football field. Sadly, if this was the strategy Iggie used, he would not easily have survived in the brutish real world of yester-years. Not a bad just-so story, was it?

Transcrainial magnetic stimulation can do all sorts of strange things to a person's mind.

Maybe. The problem is that I searched and searched, but I couldn't find any evidence of it afterwards. It looked like it had hit the wall on the other side of the room, but the wall looked just fine. I couldn't find anything on the floor either. Could the molten metal really have been so hot that it burned away into gas?

It might seem a reasonable question to ask. But it now seems clear that, on average, males and females have the same IQ. I have taken a number of psychology courses that have point this fact out and moved on without further mention. What I would like to do is look at what the undergraduate psychology courses (at least at my school) tend to leave out. First of all, average IQ scores cannot have average differences for sex. This is a matter of test construction. IQ tests purposely eliminate questions that lead to sex biases in the score. The question of average differences in IQ becomes meaningless given this fact. What isn't meaningless is the fact that males and females will still show average differences on subsections of the test. Male sare better on some secions and females better on others, such that the average scores will balance out. Another meaningful difference is a difference in variance. Males are much more variable than females are. In other words, females tend to cluster around average scres, while males are more spread out with larger numbers at the very high end and the very low end of the scale. When someone claims that there are no differneces in IQ between males and females, aren't they missing something? Aren't they just pointing out the meaningless facts as they must be- as the test is designed- and ignoring the important facts?