Word: mentally
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...social order and strictly enforced laws against homosexuality, imprisoning and even executing those convicted. But as China's economy opened to the world, the authorities' stance softened. A law banning sodomy was dropped in 1997, and in 2001 homosexuality was removed from the country's official list of mental illnesses. "It gets freer every year," says Bernie, a fortysomething who takes a longer perspective. "And every year more and more gays come out of the closet. In Beijing and the big cities, you can see couples walking around the shopping malls holding hands. In the smaller cities, I hear...
Charles Darwin started wrestling with questions like this when he published his 1871 book The Descent of Man. Darwin granted that his readers might doubt that humans evolved from an ancestral ape. "Man differs so greatly in his mental power from all other animals, there must be some error in this conclusion," he wrote. But he argued that the difference between us and other animals was of degree, not of kind. That applied not just to our teeth and toes but also to our morals and minds. And even, he declared, to love...
...best ways to appreciate what it means to be human is to learn about how human abilities came to be. No other species uses full-blown language, for example. But animal communication is surprisingly complex. Primates in particular are able to do a lot of the mental tasks that are essential to grasping language. Regions of the brain once considered language centers have been discovered in monkeys; instead of handling language, they control mouth movements. Geneticists in recent years have found human genes essential to language; it turns out that similar versions of the same genes make communication possible...
...single, divorced or widowed. These sorts of lifestyle changes are known to lower rates of cardiovascular disease, cancer and respiratory diseases. And while you might sometimes gripe that your spouse drives you nuts, just the opposite is true. Married people have lower rates of all types of mental illnesses and suicide. And none of that touches the reduced likelihood of contracting sexually transmitted diseases that comes simply from climbing out of the dating pool...
...nearly two decades, the study found, married men widened the already significant difference in cancer-death incidence between themselves and unmarried men by 25%; married women gained absolutely zero ground over their unmarried peers. Why this subtle somatic sexism? "This is a gross generalization, but women are really the mental- and physical-health housekeepers for a marriage," says psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser of the Ohio State University College of Medicine. "They are often the ones who prod men to go to a doctor or to eat more healthily...