Proof that Women are more Responsible

"Sperms and eggs contribute equal numbers of genes, but eggs contribute far more in the way of food reserves: indeed, sperms make no contribution at all and are simply concerned with transporting their genes as fast as possible to an egg. At the moment of conception, therefore, the father has invested less than his fair share (i.e. 50 per cent) of resources in the offspring. Since each sperm is so tiny, a male can afford to make millions of them everyday. This means he is potentially able to beget a very large number of children in a very short period of time, using different females. This is only because each new embryo is endowed with adequate food by the mother in each case. This therefore places a limit on the number of children a female can have, but the number of children a male can have is virtually unlimited. Female exploitation begins here." The Selfish Gene P. 142

Depressing? Maybe! Maybe Not!

"... if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.

I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things. " - Bertrand Russell

Things that make you go hmmm...

"It is now widely accepted that the Universe we inhabit emerged from a hot, dense fireball called the Big Bang. In the 1920s and 1930s, astronomers first discovered that our Galaxy was simply one island of stars scattered among many similar galaxies and then that groups of these galaxies were moving apart from one another as the space between them stretched. This idea of an expanding universe had actually been predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, completed in 1916, but it had not been taken seriously until the observers made their discoveries. When it was taken seriously, mathematicians discovered that the equations exactly describe the kind of expansion we observe, with the implication that if galaxies are getting farther apart as time passes then they must have been closer together in the past; and long ago all the matter in the Universe must have been piled up in a dense fireball.

It is the combination of theory and observation that makes the idea of the Big Bang so compelling; clinching evidence in support of the idea came in the 1960s with the discovery of a weak hiss of radio noise, the cosmic background radiation, that comes from all direction in space and is interpreted as the leftover radiation from the Big Bang itself. Like the expansion of the Universe, the existence of this background radiation was predicted by theory before it was observed experimentally. By the end of the twentieth century, the combination of theory and observations had established that the time that has elapsed since the Big Bang is about 14 billion years, and that there are hundreds of millions of galaxies like our own scattered across the expanding Universe. The question cosmologists are now confronting is how the Big Bang itself occurred -- or, if you like, how did the Universe begin?"

-- The Origins of the future: ten questions for the next 10 years P. 51-52

Amazing Stuff from science...