Day: July 20, 2005

Research indicates that men and women are attracted to mates that smell different than themselves, and are more likely to be genetically different. However, women are more attracted to faces of men who are genetically similar: “Facial attractiveness and smell give us contradictory messages about how to select mates”. The suggestion is that:

“Filtering” for mates takes place at two levels – the first based on facial likeness to select someone not too distantly related, and the second based on smell, essentially to avoid in-breeding.

A rigorous new double-blind study contradicts earlier research on the power of prayer.

Praying for sick strangers does not improve their prospects of recovering, according to a large, carefully designed study that casts doubt on the widely held belief that being prayed for can help a person heal.

The researchers acknowledged that it was impossible to make any firm conclusions because of the difficulty of studying something such as prayer. The study, for example, could not accurately measure factors as fundamental as the “dose” of prayer administered and could not account for the possible effects of family members praying for patients on their own, the researchers noted.