Scientists Find Gene That Predicts Happiness In Women 323
An anonymous reader writes "For reasons that scientists have not conclusively determined, women are happier than men. And now, researchers think that they may have pinpointed one of the reasons for that. They have found a gene in women that predicts the level of happiness in women. 'After controlling for various factors, ranging from age and education to income, the researchers found that women with the low-expression type of MAOA were significantly happier than others. Compared to women with no copies of the low-expression version of the MAOA gene, women with one copy scored higher on the happiness scale and those with two copies increased their score even more. While a substantial number of men carried a copy of the "happy" version of the MAOA gene, they reported no more happiness than those without it.'"
Multiple orgasms (Score:3, Interesting)
That gene wouldn't happen to have an association with the one that allows for multiple orgasms in women, would it?
GATTACA (Score:5, Interesting)
Now you can analyze your girlfriend's* DNA and see if she's only acting happy and would become miserable after marriage!
*Yeah this is Slashdot but the theory is sound
you fail at biology forever (Score:4, Interesting)
reproduction for females is costly and dangerous, reproduction for males is cheap
for a man any cooter will do, for a woman a specific wang is sought after
and historically the number of wanted wangs has been much smaller than the number of available cooters, roughly 20% of men
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in other words, yes random screwing is easier for women but that's irrelevant because that's not what women want, they want screwing by the small subset of desirable men and that is just as hard if not harder harder than a random man finding a random woman
Achievement disparity (Score:5, Interesting)
Could this be a major contributor to the disparity in achievement between men and women? Women have achieved great things as scientists, CEOs, politicians, and in many other areas. Despite this, by and large, men strive for achievement more than women (as a group). Is it because men, on average, are less content? Could this be the primary motivating factor for men to achieve greater things than their predecessors? Perhaps men then to just "want it" more than women. I'm not denying that discrimination and disenfranchisement are contributing factors, but maybe they don't play as big a role as people think.
I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
But I wonder if this gene is activated or deactivated by the monthly increase or decrease in certain hormones.
The Results Were Skewed (Score:4, Interesting)
Sally Albright: Most women at one time or another have faked it.
Harry Burns: Well, they haven't faked it with me.
Sally Albright: How do you know?
Harry Burns: Because I know.
Sally Albright: Oh. Right. Thats right. I forgot. Youre a man.
Harry Burns: What was that supposed to mean?
Sally Albright: Nothing. Its just that all men are sure it never happened to them and all women at one time or other have done it so you do the math.
The odds are the women were faking happiness during the study. You do the math. In the mean time, I'll have what she's having.
Re:Achievement disparity (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Spoilers (Score:5, Interesting)
Women have a much easier time than men getting laid. That's scientific fact.
Whoa there, partner. That's not science: That's social role. If you were in a different culture, it would be a different story. Try being a woman in feudal china: You had no rights. You slept with whomever the eldest male told you to. You married whomever your family told you to. For most of human history as it turns out, women were not given much choice on who they'd have sex with, and rape was a viable and commonly-practiced method of procreation. There's a 5% chance you're directly descended from Ghenghis Khan. And in pre-modern times, the spoils of a battle were often women. Generals had serious morale problems if they didn't produce enemy women on a regular basis -- it was one of the sign-up bonuses.
So don't tell me that it's a scientific fact. This isn't like gravity -- it existed 5 billion years ago, it'll still exist 5 billion years from now. That is a scientific fact. What you're talking about is just a re-arrangement of prejudices and commonly held conceptions and perceptions of the world as it exists right now. And if there's anything science teaches us, it's that the only constant... is change. These social values and ideas you think are eternally unchanging are right now in a state of flux; It's just happening too slowly for you to perceive it. So don't assume just because you, or even a thousand people like you, observe something and agree it's true that it becomes a scientific fact. Science has rules; One of which is to ensure your sample isn't biased. Yours... very much... is.
So some women naturally produce antidepressants? (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought this sounded familiar.
MAOA = Monoamine Oxidase A.
MAOI = Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor, a common class of antidepressant.
So in people with low-expression (doesn't make much) genes for MAOA, they have less of this depression-causing gene, and are happier. For everyone else, have some of this over-prescribed medication!
This sounds very much like "research" which was heavily funded by a pharmaceutical company that makes lots of MAOIs.
Breaking news! People with fewer natural antidepressant genes are more depressed! Have some moclobemide!
The only interesting thing for me here is that these MAOA genes seem to only work as described in women.
Re:you fail at biology forever (Score:5, Interesting)
Pregnant women still seek sex.
So...evolutionary forces should have made some sort of mechanism to turn off the sex drive while the woman is pregnant in order to prove to you that the sex evolved for the purpose of procreation? Evolution would only do that if the sex drive was sufficiently detrimental during pregnancy. That said, a secondary evolutionary benefit of sex is the strengthening of the pair bonds between parents, which could have been selected for and explain the generally horny nature of humans compared to other animals.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:you fail at biology forever (Score:4, Interesting)
Pregnant women still seek sex.
I heard this explained recently using the example of horses (I think this came from a cracked article, so take it with a grain of salt). If there are multiple males around and a male will kill any offspring perceived not to be his own, then the female will mate with all the available males so that they all perceive the offspring as their own. Obviously this is not perfectly applicable to modern humans, but it doesn't seem far fetched that the biological urge would still be buried in our DNA somewhere.
The logical course of action then is for sex-deprived people to start killing all offspring that isn't theirs so that the opposite sex will put out more for fear of not passing on their genes.
Re:Spoilers (Score:5, Interesting)
>Whoa there, partner. That's not science: That's social role.
In the vast majority of the animal kingdom, the female chooses which male partner to breed with. The males of a great many species look superficially different then the females. Bright colors, fancy displays, loud noises and songs, antlers and horns.. These are the things most commonly found on males. The females, especially in non-pairing or social grouping animals are very bland in color.
That's not social role, that's evolution saying it's easy for a woman to get laid.
Re:Spoilers (Score:5, Interesting)
There are similar studies done across cultures, and they support the same thing.
There's a fairly obvious explanation for that, too. From evolutionary perspective, it makes more sense for man to have sex with as many women as he can, since that increases the chances of him spreading his genes around. So, natural selection favors men like that.
For a woman, that same perspective makes for bonding with a single man. She doesn't increase the chance of spreading her genes by having sex with multiple men - it's one baby at a time either way - but, what with primates being strong adherents of the K strategy [wikipedia.org], and with Homo in particular having significantly higher than average male contribution to progeny, it is important to secure the attention of one particular male to contribute to her progeny - which he'll do if it's also his progeny (or at least he believes so).
Of course, it's all somewhat more complicated - for example, from the above also follows that sexual selection by women will favor men who don't openly fuck everything that moves - females will tend to avoid such males because they're more likely to spread their effort across the many children they have, but they can't avoid them if they don't know. And so we arrive at the present "pretend to be monogamous when somebody's looking" arrangement...
Re:Spoilers (Score:4, Interesting)
For most of human history as it turns out, women were not given much choice on who they'd have sex with, and rape was a viable and commonly-practiced method of procreation.
Now it's your turn to back up your assertions. While I agree that there has been a significant power difference between the genders for most (if not all) of human history, that is different from saying women had not much choice in the matter of who they ended up with. Humans are relatively unique among the primates in using pair-bonding as the dominant reproductive strategy (where almost every male has a chance to pass on his genes), rather than the alpha-male hierarchy seen in chimp, gorilla, and other ape societies. Genghis Khan is notable because he is the exception, rather than the rule, in our social organization.
Moreover, I would argue that human intelligence, and much of the culture that flows from it, is a sexually-selected trait, much like the feathers on a peacock's tail... females are generally attracted to men who can conspicuously show off their mental agility and creativity through displays such as music and dance, or through the accumulation of wealth. If women had no choice in who they mated with, these displays would be pointless from an evolutionary perspective. It is precisely because women had a choice in who they paired with that the selection pressure for intelligence far exceeded what was necessary for mere survival of the species.