s p o n s o r e d   l i n k s

Search

Your search yielded no results

  • Check if your spelling is correct.
  • Remove quotes around phrases to match each word individually: "blue smurf" will match less than blue smurf.
  • Consider loosening your query with OR: blue smurf will match less than blue OR smurf.

Sexual Selection and the American Novel

Submitted by acrobat on Thu, 03/06/2008 - 09:39

Sexual Selection and the American Novel

In the middle and late 1990s when I was pursuing a PhD in English, my fixed interest in evolution and human behavior was so outré that I quickly learned to avoid mentioning it to my peers and professors. My intellectual isolation was made bearable only by the new prevalence of email, which allowed me to hook up with kindred heretics around the world, and by a small handful of relatively obscure but thoroughly Darwinian works of literary scholarship. I learned much from Robert Storey's Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (Northwestern 1996) and from Joseph Carroll's landmark Evolution and Literary Theory (Missouri 1994), which combined a cruelly honed polemic against postmodernism with an inspiring call to situate literary scholarship within the emerging evolutionary paradigm. Though it lacked the revolutionary energy of Storey's and Carroll's offerings (Storey goes so far as to call Foucault an “ass” for his argument that man is a “recent invention” of the last several centuries, p. 59), I also took interest in Bert Bender's The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871-1926 (Pennsylvania 1996). Bender documented the ways that late 19th century and early 20th century American novelists struggled to come to grips with the new Darwinian worldview, especially with the implications of the theory of sexual selection.

»

Free Ebooks Polygamy in Islam

Submitted by acrobat on Sun, 11/23/2008 - 03:29

Polygamy or plurality of wives is one of the controversial questions connected with the family system of Islam. It should be noted that in many Muslim societies today the practice of polygamy is rare since the gap between the numbers of both sexes is not huge. One can, safely, say that the rate of polygamous marriages in the Muslim world is much less than the rate of extramarital affairs in the West. In other words, men in the Muslim world today are far more strictly monogamous than men in the Western world.

It is of interest to note that many, non-Muslim as well as Muslim, countries in the world today have outlawed polygamy. Taking a second wife, even with the free consent of the first wife, is a violation of the law. On the other hand, cheating on the wife, without her knowledge or consent, is perfectly legitimate as far as the law is concerned! What is the legal wisdom behind such a contradiction? Is the law designed to reward deception and punish honesty? It is one of the unfathomable paradoxes of our modern 'civilised' world. It should be remembered that the custom of polygamy existed before the advent of Islam among the Jews, the Arabs, the Persians and many other peoples of the world. All that Islam has done is that it restricted it.

»

PDF Ebook How Workers Get Poor Because Capitalists Get Rich

Submitted by antoq on Tue, 05/26/2009 - 08:51

Inequality in earnings has increased significantly in any countries over the last two decades or so. 1 One aspect of this is the increase in the earnings gap between workers and those who own capital assets. Another aspect is the increase in the earnings gap between workers belonging to different religious, ethnic or language groups. 2 Both aspects have been documented and debated at length. Our paper contributes to this literature by providing one explanation of how an initial increase in the incomes of capital owners, regardless of its cause, can feed back into the economy to: (a) reduce the earnings of workers of all communities, (b) increase the earnings gap between workers belonging to different communities even when there is no segmentation or discrimination in the labor market, and (c) increase the incomes of capital owners even further.

Two strands of thought motivate our analysis—the first emanating from a social observation, and the second from a question. The social observation is that “vertical” ties of community cut across “horizontal” class difference between poor and rich individuals. These community ties can be of different types—ethnic, religious, clan, etc—but they exert a pull and affect behavior over and above class position. This is the observation. The question is as follows: can the poor become poorer because the rich become richer? Or, to put the question differently, if the rich become richer for whatever reason, could this event, simply by itself, generate forces that would subsequently reduce the welfare of the poor? Both the observation and the question need elaboration. We start with the question.

»