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I cannot agree. I saw no adequate establishment that marriage has to mean one person sacrifice for another. What if the couple have common interest, common goal and they can afford one or several full time maids to deal with the trivial parts of daily life? 1+1>2, such examples are too many. And what do you mean by entropy here? How have you formed your theory system (not just grabbing a term from chemistry and/or information theory)? Family does bring people happiness if people meet right people for them.
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It is true that not all marriages involve sacrifice but the scenario indicated by you is extremely rare. Statistically speaking, this can be ignored as outlier. Please think about these questions: how many families in the US have the luxury to afford full time maids? Do you think a family income at $120,000 per year would be enough to afford a full time maid to deal with their daily living? Just a reminder: only about 2% US population have above that income. In addition, the “right people” in your comments happens only in a fairy land.

In modern society, everybody has his/her interest. However, the current mainstream performance of marriage is not solely based on interest, but more likely based on romantic love. Romance will likely wane surprisingly quickly. Furthermore, marriage involves not only pursuing personal goals for the couple, but also raising children. If you think adding children will add happiness to the family, you are wrong. As a matter of fact, about 70% (?) American families believe that raising children is a burden, rather than a pleasure. The divorce rate peaks just a couple years after the marriage, or in other words, at the time when their children are still young.

In traditional marriages, women are unfortunately trapped in their marriages. Taking care of husband, raising children, and mentally supporting their husbands are main tasks. However, after a couple years they are left with deeply wounded hearts. Even without divorce, the depression rate is higher among married women than men. Is this a coincidence, I don’t think so. Do wives sacrifice their goals? Sure. They can finish their college education, find decent jobs, and thus support themselves. In Sweden where the government takes a large part of family responsibilities (e.g., government sponsored child care, a long paid maternal leave, free health care from beginning till the end of life), half of kids are born out of wedlock. It is simply due to the fact that there is no need of family to raise a child.

Your example of family in which the couple has common interests and in which kids are raised by others (by either maids or government) indeed reflects my point of view: future family will be based only on common interest including love. If the interest does not exist any more, family will be easily dissolved. The concept of marriage is probably not in the traditional sense. However, till now this is still a utopian view.

In addition, it is of interest itself to point out that in social science, we always deal with general population, which allows outliers. One counter-example won’t invalid a social theory. It may provoke more thoughts though.
In terms of entropy or whatsoever, it just happened that my brain randomly associated that word with my marriage theory. It is a little flavor to attract readers’ eyes. Did it work?

In this week’s Time magazine, there is one conclusion that many people, in particular those happily married people may find it disturbing. Marriage will not increase your happiness. The general assumption is that those who get married start at a higher happy level than those remain single, and after a bliss of joy land at the same level as before.

Although this may surprise many people, I found this conclusion is way too conservative. My cursory observations, facilitated by my solid scientific training on cause-effect analysis :-), lead me to infer that marriage actually decreases people’s happiness. Here are my reasons.

In the US, the divorce rate is about 49%. Many couples get divorced before or at their middle age, which correspond to the maximum of about 20 years of marriage. We should agree that people get married voluntarily, and most, if not all, expect marriage to have a happy ending—happily thereafter. Unfortunately, at the time of divorce, the happiness is definitely at a much lower point than before marriage. Therefore, for almost 50% of American people, the future of marriage is gloomy.

Another bit of evidence is that about 22% of women, 50% men have extramarital affairs, based polls conducted by national opinion survey. For these people, certainly their marriage are not satisfied, at least for the sex part. As we all know, sex is one key component of human happiness.

People may say that another half American people do have their marriage lasting till the end of their life. Well, there is another evidence to show that even within the ever lasting marriage, marriage itself does not make you happier. We can assume that they do love each other (if not, there is no happiness at all in their marriage). But love means sacrificing, mutually supporting the spouses. We know that sacrifice requires you giving up something. Giving up something unlikely gives you happiness. The point is that in a married couple, somebody always sacrifices something, or at best obtains a delayed gratification, mostly derived from the other part of family. This mathematically cancels out the happiness in the whole family. So when you ask the couple whether they feel happier after marriage than before, one may say “yes”, while the other, reluctantly, may say “probably”. This is why in the survey mentioned in Time magazine, which surveyed married couple comparing those singles, it only reported almost no increase of happiness.

Now here is the catch: if marriage make you no more happy than before, why almost all people get married and remarried after their divorce? This can be easily explained by the benefit of marriage. First you have a constant support from your spouse financially, spiritually, and physically after marriage. As human beings are vulnerable, you always need somebody to take care of you. Furthermore, when one gets used to have someone taking care of miscellaneous daily life, married people lose their independency after getting married. The inertness of marriage lead people keep on getting married, in particularly for men who can’t abstain sex for long.

Now if you account all the above, mathematically, the average of American people will certainly expect a decrease of happiness after they get married. A sad reality all of us have to confront.

Before leaving this topic, I would like to spend a couple words on the origin of family, and the social function of family. In the beginning of society, the tribe is the family. People live together, gather foods together and share their foods among them, and most importantly fighting enemies together. With the accumulation of property and the growth of tribe, smaller group can make a living all by themselves. However, they may still need to live in the same location to share the nature resource and defend themselves together. With the development of economics, smaller and smaller groups were formed, and eventually a family containing one man and several women together with a couple children were formed. Furthermore, the competition among families also appeared. With the growth of family, people have to grab more resource to nurture their family.

Family is the smallest societal functional unit. Although individuals can make their own decision in modern society, married people have to make decision based on the balance of individual interests and family objectives. A society contains most stable families does provide a stable society. However, family inherently inhibits personal interests. To see this, suppose one person in a family keep on pursuing his/her goals, the other person is very likely sacrifice him/herself. Although the dominant person may be more likely to succeed with the support of family than he/she does it alone, as a society, it reduces the diversity of interests, i.e., the entropy decreases.

It is of interesting that divorce can be viewed as a way of promoting mutation in the society. Old family dissolves, new family forms. A dynamic society is more likely to provide a momentum for the advance of society. This also increases entropy, which fits the law of entropy.

It is also arguably important to consider the biological meaning of family. Family reflects a balance of the desire of spreading genes (by both men and women) and the competition among human beings. The societal norms ensure that most people will have chance to spread genes by controlling the size of families, protect their genes by forming families, and prevent overspreading genes by tightening family bond. The reasons why men have a dominant role in society reside on the fact that males are generally physically stronger, and easier to spread genes than female. Evolution just happened to make this gender difference.

It can envision that in the future, family will disappear. Modern society relies more and more on intellectual capability, and females are equally cabled as males are. Females will rise up to a level that males have enjoyed for thousands of years. At that time, only interest bond exists, no more traditional family.

Americans are obsessed in self-esteem and self-improvement. Benjamin Franklin, the witty founding father, had tried to improve himself continuously throughout his life. For example, in his seventies, he still listed ten things to improve his morality. Surely he later admitted that not all of them had achieved success, but he concluded that it helped in many ways (A recommended book is “Benjamin Franklin, an American life”).

Don’t get me wrong, obsessing in self-improvement is a highly appraised virtue. Studies have shown that those who continuously revamp themselves eventually become winners. There is also a whole branch of psychology studying this issue. Dr. Abraham Maslow pioneered the humanity research which brought the concept of hierarchy of needs to the mainstream of psychology. Many publications, for both researcher and laymen, have flooded the market. Self-improvement books are confirmed money cows.

The aim of self-improvement is to make you feel success. i.e., to answer the question “are you happy with your life?” To accommodate people’s forever pursuing happiness, this week’s Time magazine (www.time.com) featured its cover story on happiness. It assessed happiness from many angles, including marriage, religion, money, and also how to improve one’s happiness.

First of all, to improve your happiness, you must know whether you are happier than other people. Time magazine generously provided a five-component questionnaire to let you test yourself (http://www.time.com/time/2005/happiness/graphics/quiz.html). Surprisingly, the questionnaire seems to me inadequate, if not wrong. It significantly biased towards old, established people.

For example, the first question: “in most ways, my life is close to ideal.” This is absurd. For many young people who are still in school or just start their jobs, it is never ideal. The second question: “the condition of my life is excellent”. Well this again sounds stupid. For many young people living in crapped apartments and working in crowd office cubicles, it can hardly say the condition of life is excellent. The third one is a universal question (and freqently appeared in many surveys): “I am satisfied with my life”. Well, for an ambitious young man, he never satisfied with his life. There are always more things to do.

The fourth question is interesting: “so far I have gotten the most important things I want in my life”. Am I retired? It seems to me I have at least ten most important things in the near future, let alone the whole life. The fifth question is religiously questionable: “if I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing”. Well, in Christianity, all of us either go to heaven or go to hell, no one can return the earth for another circle of life. I think in Buddhism, good people can reborn in the human form (not necessary the same one as before), while bad people may become pig or even slug after a prolonged torture in hell. In terms of this, it is more attractive to believe in Buddhism than to stick with Christian. Anywhere, for me, I would change almost everything if there is a chance of reborn. To sum up, I unfortunately fell into the category of extreme unhappiness, or at most slight unhappiness. What a miserable life I have!

Another interesting survey showed that by recording daily lives of 900 Texas women, the five most joyful events were: sex, socializing, relaxing, praying or meditating, and eating. The taking care of children was considered as one of the most negative events, together with housework. Oops, something wrong with people’s family responsibility? Well, to me, this is exactly what happens in life. Everybody talks about the love of having children and working in house care stuff, but almost all the time you will hear the complain of bugging children and tiresome housework. It is certainly not as joyful as having sex and relaxation. This also points out the potential crisis of traditional family structure. Housewives spend most of their time on taking care of children, doing chores, and driving around the town for kids’ extra-curriculum training. They are constantly in negative situations. Solution? Having more sex with your wife! Incidently, this is also the 2005 new year recommendation in US News magazine. Check it out: www.usnews.com.

To fix this apparent contradiction of the question about “taking care of kids”, the Time reporters provided another array of results showing that “having children” is among the most happiest things in people’s lives. The authors correctly pointed out that the difference in the general impression and the daily survey is that the daily events are transitory. It seems to me that for some events, daily suffering won’t counteract the overall joy. It is amazing that for some events, for example marriage, it is daily conflictions that eventually lead to a final breakup. Those divorced couples often complain “I can’t stand him/her any more”.

More thoughts to come.

This little book (Cantor’s dilemma) came to my attention ironically not because of its well celebrated English version, but because of the new Chinese translation, which bore a new name (The prisoner of the Nobel Prize). Anyway, I spent a whole evening enthusiastically (at the beginning) perusing it (the English version), but was left with more or less joy.

Many people in Amazon.com have praised this little book presumably without any reservation. I would also first congratulate the author’s great effort to write a novel on research ethics, and in particular for the psychoanalysis of scientists. However, in terms of literature and science, I would say this book is not worth much attentions.

The plot in this novel was too simple. A serious professor had a brilliant idea (which is flawed based on biology, by the way), two worked experiments (probably), and a Nobel prize, but suffered by unverified experiments due to suspicious manipulations by his postdoc. It surprised me that he won the prize within a year. This oversimplified the reality. If the professor didn’t publish the details of his experiments and the experiments couldn’t be replicated in other labs (officially), it is impossible to get the Nobel prize, let alone within a year. It would be better that the professor didn’t get the Nobel prize and was constantly suffered from unverified experiments, rumors of data fabrication, and science politics. The deft handling of these crisis may be more interesting for future academic seekers.

One of the key components in this book is about research ethics. We have heard many rumors about research ethics. This book talked about a similar situation occurred in the Noble Laurel David Baltimore’s lab, in which a postdoc was involved in some manipulations of data. I like the author’s way of presentation: hinted but never gave a definite answer whether the postdoc did something wrong with the experiment or not.

In terms of science ethics, I would like to suggest people reviewing one of the most horrible studies in modern history: the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. This study was initiated by the United States Public Health Service, together with the Tuskegee Institute in 1932. The study recruited 399 black men diagnosed with syphilis in Macon County, Alabama to determine the effects of untreated syphilis. The study lasted until 1970, way after the discovery of penicillin in 1943, which is the most effective drug to treat syphilis. Unfortunately, these black men, with the highest education at 7th grade, were only treated by aspirin and an iron supplement. It was till mass media caught this horror that halted this experiments. By then, many had died of the complications of syphilis.

Although the book spent quite some length talking about trust, responsibility, authorship , lab rules, and in particular the peer pressure and jealousy, advisor seeking, tenure system, and gender discrimination, the author barely scratched the surface of publishing process, grant application and management, and other important research activities. It is possible that the author’s intended readers are most likely undergraduates or beginning graduates. However, beginning graduates are eager to know how these research activities are like so that they can decide whether they want to seek academic jobs or not. Advisors are often reluctant to talk about these issues with new graduate students.

The depicting of female scholars in this novel was also too optimistic. That a fresh female chemistry PhD could get an assistant professorship in Harvard, Cal tech, and Wisconsin is amazing, if not shocking.

The author also devoted some pages on sex, especially on teacher-student type of sex. I am not sure why he blended sex with science in this book but it did add some vintages in it.

In terms of writing skills, the author seemed to have adopted a film making style. However, sometimes background events cut into the flow of story too abruptly. Furthermore, the author lacked the ability to write juicy words when he was describing romantic events. His view of sex and romance was also old fashioned.

I think the ending is the worst part of this novel. As we all know, academic people are good at insinuating things. A famous professor will never write a blunt insulting letter to another professor. I guess the author tried to give solutions to all problems left in the novel instead of giving some hints. This reflects his lack of confidence to his readers, which are at least college students ( I doubt that a not well prepared high school student can understand many concepts discussed in his book).

In summary, if you don’t know much about scientists, this book will give you a good kick start. If you are a graduate student who talk with your advisors very often, this book may be too simple to you. If you are a seasoned researcher, it is probably wiser to use your time on other amusements.