This table of contents will hopefully make our sprawling writings more accesible to new readers. We write about a lot of subjects and the objective here is to present our different articles thematically rather than chronologically. At the top of this post is a list of topics which links further down where our articles on that particular topic is presented with a link and a very short summary. This table of content post will (hopefully) be continuously updated.

Topics

Human evolution
Sexuality
History
Gender relations
Politics
Medicine
Psychology
Technology
Space
Pronatalism
Biographical
Personal

Human evolution

Why do women have breasts? (Tove)
The scientific community is notably uninterested in explaining the permanently big bosoms of human females. Here is an attempt to explain this curious phenomenon.

Overcoming male reproductive greed (Tove)
Part 1 of a three-part series about the enormous difficulties human nature put in the way of human development.

Violent enough to stand still (Tove)
Part 2. For very long times, male-male competition favored warriors over workers. That made investment and technological innovations mostly irrelevant.

Why do humans ever develop? (Tove)
Part 3. Why did humans finally develop civilization in spite of the strong forces of nature that work against it?

The life and works of the apefant (Tove)
Being a mother of five, Tove knows a lot about infants. But she knows too little about apefants to make up many meaningful theories about how and when the behavior of human infants evolved. Meanwhile, Andy is a dedicated zookeeper who works in the ape house of a Swedish zoo, but has no children. Their joint knowledge could take the understanding of infants one baby step further.

Sexuality

Fifty Shades of Apes (Tove)

Part one of a series on the evolutionary history of female sexuality: Human females prefer submissive sexual roles much more than dominant ones and they show puzzling signs to get sexually aroused from thinking of sexual violence. The only logical explanation lies millions of years back in time, when our ancestors were apes.

The bonobo exception (Tove)
Part two on the evolutionary history of female sexuality. The bonobo chimpanzee is female dominated and less aggressive than the common chimpanzee. The divergence of the bonobo and the chimpanzee says something interesting about hominid flexibility. Still, it is unlikely that our ape ancestors were like the bonobo.

Rape - a crime enabled by politeness (Tove)
Part one in a series of three on the evolutionary psychology of sexual coercion. Ultimately, most sexual coercion builds on subtle force.

Why are women so bad at resisting rape? (Tove)
Part 2. There is a natural explanation why women are not better at violently resisting sexual advances they don't like: A large part of all marriages in history were based on coercion.

A natural history of consent (Tove)
Part 3. Why are most men not interested in committing rape? The answer might lie in self-domestication

Make sex useful again (Tove)
An argument that sexual desire is overhyped. Most people care more about relationships to people they like than about maximizing their sexual pleasure. For that reason, adapting sex to the needs of relationships is the rational thing to do, rather than the other way round.

A rational view of female modesty (Tove)
We all practice sexual modesty. We just don't talk about it in Western society. What is the appropriate amount of modesty in order to maximize happiness and the strength of society?

The ambivalent nature of female sexuality (Tove)
When scientists ask women what they want, they mostly say they want a stable monogamous relationship with a nice man. When scientists try to figure out what women desire, dark secrets are revealed: Women are into violent pornography more than men, they get tired of having sex with their loving husbands and they make up fantasies about being raped. How is this combination possible?

Exploit thy neighbor: A rational reason to dislike pornography (Tove)
Pornography builds on fantasy. And evolution has made us fantasize about reproductive deals too good to be true. This becomes a problem if people take fantasy so seriously that they waste their time waiting for fabulous deals instead of investing in fair deals.

History

Occitania - the country that never was (Anders)
The nation states of Western Europe might seem eternal. In fact they are artificial creations that just happened to live long enough to become entrenched.

Middle income kingdom (Anders)
In terms of economics, China is like two countries. The cities have GDPs similar to Europe and the US. The countryside is more like Latin America. What can explain the divide?

The history of Montaillou (Anders)
The tiny village of Montaillou in southern France is one of our very best windows into the lives of ordinary people in the Middle Ages. Due to a series of circumstances there exists an archive of information about the people of Montaillou from the early 14th century.

The origins of patriarchy (Tove)
The reason why males dominate females in more or less all human society until modernity is a simple one: Only the societies that were the best at making war survived. Those societies tended to be dominated by warriors, who were almost invariably male.

Historical movie Friday (Anders)
A list of some historical movies that not only gives you instant enjoyment but also teaches you something about lesser known periods of history.

A letter from Hitler (Anders)
Analysis of the correspondence between Hitler and French prime minister Daladier in the days leading up to WW2.

Chateau-mania (Anders)
A history of the French chateau. With lots of photos.

Gender relations

Why are all the ladies chasing the Chads? (Tove)
Free sexuality encourages women to choose only a minority of men, for one simple reason: Having casual sex feels awkward for most people, especially women. Only a few men know how to shovel that awkwardness into the background. They get a disproportionate share of all casual sex.

Is feminism caused by a lack of male investment? (Tove)
In the 1970s, the now mostly forgotten psychology professor Marcia Guttentag wrote a book about how gender ratios affect gender relations. She noticed that feminist movements only tend to arise when there are many females compared to males and males are not very motivated to invest in females. Can we learn something from this today?

The tomboy manifesto (Tove)
Natural selection was much stronger on the male side than on the female side. Daughters inherit traits from their successful fathers. That means females are probably not as feminine as would be evolutionarily optimal for them. Being a psychologically male-leaning female is the most natural thing in the world (one of them).

Becky is depressed (Tove)
Teenage depression is on the (Substack) news. Tove suggests that since girls with low academic ambitions are much more affected than other groups, the increase in depression rates could be due to changes in gender relations.

Politics

A climatologist’s view of climate change (Anders)
Although Anders has never worked in the field he actually has a masters degree in climatology. Here he explains why climatologists tend to be incorrigible climate skeptics.

Games people play, public version (Tove)
In his 1964 bestseller Games People Play, psychologist Eric Berne argued that some people act unpleasantly on purpose: People of the right status, in the right situations can deliberately break social norms and still only increase their own status, because they know how to make their victims look uncharitable or bigoted if they protest. Tove suggests this is what Woke provocation is about.

In love with the state (Tove)
A take at explaining Scandinavians’ strange love of government.

The curse of the elite university (Anders)
The very best American universities are far superior to their European counterparts. This is great for elite researchers and elite students. But maybe not for society as a whole.

Medicine

The evolutionary causes of pregnancy nausea (Tove)
Tove combines her own experience of being pregnant with studies indicating that Ramadan fasting causes increased rates of disease and disability. Could pregnancy nausea be nature's way of forcing women in early pregnancy to uphold an unusually even blood sugar level?

Outdoor germs and allergies (Tove)
The fact that allergies are related to cleanliness have been known for quite some time. Here Tove presents the idea that what really causes allergies is modern parents' successful crusade to stop their children from putting everything in their mouths.

The environmental causes of myopia - a case study (Tove)
Our teenage son was diagnosed with incipient myopia and told by an optician just to wait for it to get worse and then get glasses. Surprisingly, he was able to cure himself through frequently looking out of the window.

Do babies die from sleeping on their tummies? (Tove)
Many babies prefer to sleep on their tummies rather than on their backs. How dangerous is it to let them have their way?

Psychology

Good behavior causes teenage depression (Tove)
People do a lot of things in order to feel good. Many of those things are not entirely wholesome. What happens when society gets better and better at preventing young people from doing unwholesome things? Maybe young people will simply feel less good.

Why autism exists (Tove)
A wild speculation about the evolutionary advantages of being a bit autistic.

IQ and intelligence: A bifurcated tail (Tove)
Assuming that IQ and intelligence do not match perfectly means that at the tail end of the curve the difference between measured IQ and actual intelligence can vary wildly. As exemplified by a few high IQ individuals who are no obvious geniuses.

Confessions of an everyday apophenia (Tove)
A loosely written second part of the article above. IQ measures the ability to use concepts others have developed. The ability to think new things is something else entirely.

What is intelligence? (Tove)
A third part of the IQ series: Intelligence is not IQ. It is IQ plus something else plus something else.

Technology

Hands of gods (Anders)
Humans are more than their brains. That is why humanity has less to fear from AI than is sometimes advertised.

My long goodbye to Windows XP (Anders)
An outrageous letter of confession from someone who used Windows XP up until late 2022. Also some musings on general computer security.

Delivery drones of yesteryear: Rohrpost (Anders)
An introduction to the very peculiar technology of pneumatic tube systems, a system for delivering letters and small packages that was once widespread but is now non-existent.

Hexagonal cities (Anders)
Why are city streets built according to a square grid? Here is an argument for building them hexagonally instead.

Space

Human colonies on Mars are a bad idea (Anders)
Some people want humanity to colonize Mars. That is about the worst idea ever. Here you get to know why.

Asteroid mining for fun and profit (Anders)
Mining the asteroids for resources is not a new idea. Here is a suggestion for a cost-effective way to put these resources to good use. Also a general review of asteroid mining.

Up where we belong (Anders)
A book review on Gerard K. O’Neill’s classic High Frontier. The book that established space colonization as a serious business.

Pronatalism

Do you like your ideas? Then have children (Tove)
Ideas sometimes spread just because they are very appealing to the human mind. But mostly they spread because they make people procreate and win wars. Now that wars largely are gone, procreation is what is left.

Amish in space (Tove)
Humans are an expansionist species. When we stop expanding, we lose an important part of ourselves. Venturing into space is our best opportunity to follow our expansionist instincts. In other words, we should do like the Amish, minus the technophobia.

Biographical

Primates of Manhattan (Tove)
Writer Wednesday Martin moves to the very expensive Upper East Side of Manhattan with her new financier husband. She rapidly transforms into one of the primates herself. A combined book-review and small theory of what makes people awful.

Unfortunately, I am the Unabomber (Tove)
After being persuaded into reading the Unabomber Manifesto, Tove found eerie similarities between the Unabomber's life and thoughts and her own.

How not to read Lacan (Tove)
In his time, Jacques Lacan was a prominent psychoanalyst. Unfortunately, his insights, whichever they were, are lost to the afterworld, for one simple reason: Lacan never learned to write.

Personal

How I cured myself with evolutionary psychology (Tove)
As a teenager, Tove suffered from persistent depression. In her early 20s she moved out to the countryside, got married and had children and gave up on most ambitions. The depression disappeared entirely.

The anti-blog blog post (Anders)
Good reasons not to read blogs. Also a history of why we started this blog.

Trial by a lying media (Anders)
More history on why we started this blog. But mostly an argument why no one should ever trust Swedish mass media.

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