Of religious freedom and game theory

Freedom House's January report on the presence of hateful Wahhabist propaganda in North American mosques is disturbing. But should it be suppressed? A Christian minister demurs in the current issue of The Internationalist, in an essay titled Why Censorship Is Not the Answer.

Is freedom, in the political arena, just a large-scale version of "Prisoner's Dilemma"?

Darwinian Dating

A couple of studies on mating strategies that piqued my interest:

"Worthless" gifts get the good girls.

Men who spend big money wining and dining their dates are not frittering away hard-earned cash. According to a pair of UK researchers, they are merely employing the best strategy for getting the girl without being taken for granted.

Using mathematical modelling, Peter Sozou and Robert Seymour at University College London, UK, found that wooing girls with costly, but essentially worthless gifts – such as theatre tickets or expensive dinners out – is a winning courtship strategy for both sexes.

Females can assess how serious or committed a male plans to be and males can ensure they are not just seducing 'gold-diggers' – girls who take valuable presents with no intention of accepting subsequent dates.

But one hitch in the theory, says the article, is that:

The model also fails to take the potential effects of cheating females into account. “Some female birds raise their chicks with a 'nice' male and engage in short-term copulations with an attractive male - there is similar evidence among humans. In this way, females may get the best of both worlds.”

This latter hypothesis was tested in a different study: Odour and Mating Preferences.

WHAT'S a girl to do when faced with the choice between a powerful action man who has great DNA but is likely to love her and leave her, and a carpet-and-slippers kind of bloke who will hang around and bring up the kids but may not be Mr Right in the genes department? Well, ideally, she should fool the latter into bringing up the former's children. And a piece of evidence that this is exactly what happens emerged this week from a research group led by Jan Havlicek of Charles University, in Prague.

Dr Havlicek and his colleagues were interested in discovering whether women are attracted by the smell of dominant men...

We'll bypass the unpleasant details of the test's methodology and get straight to the results:

The upshot of the trial was that women did, indeed, find the odour of dominants sexier than that of wimps—but only in special circumstances. These circumstances were first that the woman was already in a relationship and second that she was in the most fertile phase of her cycle. In other words, dominant males' scent was only more attractive at the point where a woman could both conceive and cuckold her mate. Which, given previous studies that show dominant men are indeed more likely than others to leave a woman holding the baby, makes perfect sense.

Wimps, then, need to make lots of money to get a mate, and then install a chastity belt on her to keep her faithful?