Around the web: cognitive sex differences

The "Around the Web" series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. Last semester I taught Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

Ah, cognitive sex differences. Here we often find a mix of explanations for why we don't need to try to achieve equity in the sciences, or for why women are simply less interested in the sciences. There are plenty of examples trotted out of men's superiority in spatial ability, and the few where women are sometimes found to be superior put women on a pedestal without gaining her any real power or advantage in society (look at lovely woman, so able to verbally communicate that it makes her a good mommy and wife!).

This year has been a good year to critically evaluate cognitive sex differences, thanks to Cordelia Fine's book Delusions of Gender and the many spaces online that have reviewed her book. I have yet to read it and it didn't turn up under the Christmas tree, so I'll be buying it for myself. The reviews have me very excited.

So, I'll start there, then work my way through the other cool stuff that's been covered this year.

Delusions of Gender

Slate reviews the book and interviews Fine. Here is one of my favorite quotes from her:

We look around in our society, and we want to explain whatever state of sex inequality we have. It's more comfortable to attribute it to some internal difference between men and women than the idea that there must be something very unjust about our society. As long as there has been brain science there have been misguided explanations and justification for sex and inequality — that women's skulls are the wrong shape, that their brain is too small, that their head is too unspecialized. It was once very cutting-edge to put a brain on a scale, and now we have cutting-edge research that is genuinely sophisticated and exciting, but we're still very much at the beginning of our journey of understanding of how our brain creates the mind.

New Scientist also has a review in CultureLab. This article also reviews Jordan-Young's Brainstorm, which looks like a similarly excellent book on the topic of sex differences. It is published with Harvard University Press rather than a press that tends to attract a wider audience, so maybe that's why Fine's book has received more attention.

Katherine Bouton reviews the article in the New York Times. The last line was my favorite: "It’s really not just a few steps from looking longer at moving objects to aptitude in math, from gazing at faces to mind reading."

This Language Log post refers to the Bouton one and makes some interesting parallels between the Connellan et al (2001) article Fine dismantles and the Hauser misconduct case. I love teaching the Connellan et al (2001) article, and have been for many years -- it's such a great example of reductionist wording, flawed methodology, and incorrect conclusions off the authors' own evidence. I have used it in particular in introductory writing courses, as a way to show students they can be critical thinkers, since they quickly pick up on most of the paper's errors.

The Language Log post already dismantled the flawed methodology. I just want to briefly mention the flawed conclusions off the results they get. Remember, Connellan et al are using Connellan's face, and a mobile comprised of a broken up photo of her face, as the two objects the infants are gazing at. Staring at Connellan implies a preference for faces and eventual social superiority, where preference for the mobile implies a preference for physical-mechanical objects.

Below, I've reproduced Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1. Number (and percent) of neonates falling into each perference [sic] category
	Face preference	Mobile preference	No preference
Males (n = 44)	11 (25.0%)	19 (43.2%)	14 (31.8%)
Females (n = 58)	21 (36.2%)	10 (17.2%	27 (46.6%)

Table 2. Mean percent looking times (and standard deviation) for each stimulus
	Face	Mobile
Males (n = 44)	45.6 (23.5)	51.9 (23.3)
Females (n = 58)	49.4 (20.8)	40.6 (25.0)

Let's pretend for a minute that there were not significant methodological concerns and just look at the data. What I notice are a few things. First, females primarily exhibit NO preference, not facial preference. If half my subjects exhibited no preference, I'd probably have to say the methods and stimuli were flawed. Males might have a slight mobile preference, but even if that were statistically significant, I'm not sure there is a lot of biological meaning to 19 vs 11 individuals' preferences. Further, they mention that their statistical significance derives entirely from the greater male preference for the mobile (not a greater female preference for the face), yet their conclusions indicate female superiority in social cognition skills.

Table 2 is perhaps more damning. First, the difference in percent looking time is not really different between any of the four groups (male/face, male/mobile; female/face, female/mobile). This becomes more obvious when you consider the standard deviations. Again, it is important to place statistical significance in the context of biological usefulness. Do these few seconds' difference in looking time tell us something, or not? My bet is on the latter.

Other delightful bits

Coverage of Fine's book wasn't the only time I got to read about cognitive sex differences, prejudice, and social conditioning. Most of the posts and articles I link to this section should provide very strong evidence for social conditioning playing a primary role in cognitive and behavioral sex differences. I am quite sure there are some genetic and/or biological differences between the sexes; however, I am unconvinced that they would amount to much of anything if we didn't seize upon them and nurture them from birth. Further, meta-analyses of cognitive sex difference studies have found very small effect sizes, which means that overall, even when differences are found in empirical studies, those differences are tiny (Hyde 2005).

Check out Greg Laden's great post: Why do women shop and men hunt? He does a nice job criticizing the idea of some sort of universal Pleistocene environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), which already does a lot to undermine arguments that humans have evolved certain sex-specific behaviors over the last few million years due to foraging in the savannah. He also discusses the huge amount of variation in social structure among modern humans, which helps us understand why this idea that there is essential male and female behavior is flawed.

Here's a neat Time Magazine article on pink toys. It discusses the Pink Stinks campaign, which I follow on Twitter.

This article discusses the damage that can be done to a woman's cognitive ability when she is objectified. I know I have trouble thinking when I receive comments on my physical appearance in my student evaluations, and the few times this has been done to me professionally by colleagues.

Related to this, Communicate Science discusses a study that had male and female actors give scripted 10-minute physics lectures and then had real physics students give evaluations (the students thought they were lecturers). The males received higher evaluations overall -- when broken down by student gender, the female students gave slightly higher evals to the female lecturers, but the male students gave MUCH higher evals to the male lecturers. This is the sort of study that keeps me up at night, thinking about going up for tenure as a female scientist.

More on physics teaching: Ed Yong writes about a writing exercise that helps reinforce students' values and their sense of self, which then appears to close the gender gap in physics assessment. I had my students do this assignment on the last day of class as a way to help them with their finals (though we only did it for about 2 minutes -- I encouraged them to do more at home). A really neat piece!

Pharyngula is a blog I read often, and was one of the first science blogs I ever read, but I don't think PZ's work has ever made it into one of my Around the Web posts. However, this post, "Attention, perversely assertive women! You are abnormal!" really resonated with me. He covers a recent news story about using dexamethasone to pre-treat normal girl fetuses (and those with the legitimate genetic disorder CAH) to prevent masculine preferences and behaviors.

Next, an article in the New York Times Business Section on why more women aren't the boss. There are some interesting thoughts shared on mentorship and risk-taking behaviors.

The always-brilliant Jennifer Ouelette discusses the idea that "boyz will be boyz" in her post that dismantles the idea that female science teachers are feminizing science classes and increasing the dropout rate for boys.

Finally, I don't know how to introduce this piece, "The Rise of Enlightened Sexism" by Susan Douglas up at On the Issues, except to say: read it. Read it now.

Random interesting tidbits

I had intended to finish this post in time for the end of 2010. I had wanted to send you in the direction of some pretty pictures as a way to close out the year, so let this be some eye candy to start you off well for 2011. Myrmecos (who I feel privileged to know in person through his fantabulous wife) offers up "The Best of Myrmecos 2010." I will be honest here and say that, before this blog, I had close to zero appreciation for insects and mostly thought of ways to keep them out of my house and office, or kill them if they came in. I pay a lot more attention to them now, and wish I knew more.

And, Jerry Coyne put together some images from National Geographic that I liked from the 2010 contest.

Happy new year to all!

References

Connellan, J. (2000). Sex differences in human neonatal social perception Infant Behavior and Development, 23 (1), 113-118 DOI: 10.1016/S0163-6383(00)00032-1

Hyde, J. (2005). The Gender Similarities Hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60 (6), 581-592 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581

Around the web: female behavior

The "Around the Web" series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

The second to last Around the Web of the semester covers female behavior. Because testosterone and aggression are sexy, there is a lot more popular coverage of it. Further, when I do find popular science coverage of topics that relate to female behavior, a lot of it relates to the menstrual cycle and mate preference. That stuff is interesting, but there is a lot more to female behavior than when we feel like having sex, and who we choose when we are ovulating or not. The other issue I often find interesting about the study of female behavioral endocrinology versus male behavioral endocrinology is that, for all the jokes made about men being driven by their hormones, most people work pretty hard to provide a nuanced perspective on the relationship between testosterone and aggression. Perhaps people have arrived more recently at the study of women, but I don't always notice the same nuance when looking at menstrual cycle research.

So, I have a handful of links for you today that try to cover some of the other material. I think I've picked some of the best posts for you, ones that do their best to have a reasoned, thoughtful perspective.

Emily Anthes of Wonderland has an interesting post on impulse shopping and rewards; she discusses an article that found women in the luteal phase had a higher rate of impulse buys compared to those in the follicular phase. She also refers to an article she wrote in Scientific American MIND covering these issues more broadly. Both are worth a read.

Next, a few posts about women's behavior and hormonal contraceptives - specifically because a student in class asked me to cover it. This is an increasingly important field of study as 1) we still don't seem to understand the pharmacokinetics of women as well as men and 2) more women, and younger and younger women, are getting on the pill every day. To give you a sense of the pervasiveness of hormonal contraceptives, I'll start you out with this OB quote: "Really? Without any regulators?" This demonstrates that hormonal contraceptives are no longer just for, you know, contraception, but for "regulating" the cycle. Why the cycle needs to be regulated is a topic for another day.

Then, Scicurious does an excellent job providing her perspective on a research finding that recently received a bit of attention. Scientific American wrote about an article that found that women's brains who were on hormonal contraceptives were different than those who were not. Since women with spontaneous (that's without contraceptives) cycles and hormonal contraceptives cycles have very different hormone profiles, this shouldn't be surprising. We don't even know if it should be cause for concern. Either way, it's interesting, and I think Scicurious's take on it brings the frenzy down a notch, and assesses the validity of the study's claims.

As always, where would I be without Ed Yong and Not Exactly Rocket Science? He cogently reviews all the articles I wish I had the time to read (where do you find the time again, Ed?). In fact, I used information from two of his blog posts in the lecture I provided on this topic: his post on the oxytocin receptor gene and cultural responses to social stress, and the one on the "dark side" of oxytocin that discusses how oxytocin enhances favorable and unfavorable perceptions of mothers' parenting styles.

Random links

Just a couple of random links for you today. First, Ed Yong (I know, again! I can't help it!) helps us curb our holiday eating with his post on mental exercises that can curb food cravings.

Next, a new article by Gettler and McKenna that covers the biology of breastfeeding and co-sleeping practices in humans. A great article for those new to this topic. (hat tip AAPA Bandit)

Then, an interesting perspective on "patient refusal" being a contraindication in the use of epidurals during labor over at Unnecesarean.

Finally, a post about beauty in the birth room over at Science & Sensibility (quickly becoming a favorite blog of mine), which constructively criticizes a Boston Globe article about women who want to look beautiful while in labor.

The last Around the Web of 2010 will cover cognitive sex differences, and it will be a doozy. Thanks to Cordelia Fine's book, it's a good year for discussions on this topic!

Around the web: stress and social disparities

The "Around the Web" series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

On the week we learned about stress and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, we didn't just talk about Type A personalities or parachute jumping. Instead, I tried to apply our understanding of how acute and chronic stress impact the body by examining social disparities and racism. This led to all of us being confronted with some very harsh statistics about the health of people of color in this country and the long-term effects of systemic oppression, and powerful narratives about internalized oppression in first and second-generation immigrants.

I wanted to augment that lecture with some links on social disparities and racism. I have a TON of links for this topic, so enjoy!

Check my what?

First, some primers to help us contextualize social disparity and conversations about it. One of my favorites is "Check my what?" On privilege and what we can do about it. This is a post that does get updated from time to time, and it defines privilege, and instructs the reader how to identify one's own privilege, accept it, and from that point of acceptance, move towards actions and attitudes that are pro-equality. I like this because of the way it implicitly explains the uselessness of the seemingly pro-equality stance of "not seeing color."

A slightly more humorous, but still important, primer, is called Derailing for Dummies. I hope a reading of this primer will help people communicate respectfully around oppression.

Context matters

I also wanted to share a few posts about Western perspectives on mental health, because of the time we spent in class on immigration. Aspects of immigration and acculturation are stressful, and cultural contexts strongly influence behavior. Another issue to consider is whether Western perspectives on mental health overpathologize context-dependent behaviors (that is, doing things that make sense in context and are occurring in context, like a toddler tantrum, or grieving after losing a loved one). Take a look at these links: Will anyone be normal? discusses the overpathologization issue I just mentioned; Westerners vs. the World: we are the WEIRD ones brings population variation in behavior to light; and a related story interviewing Ethan Watters, Going Mad the American Way.

The science of oppression

In addition to the material we learned in lecture on race and immigration, I wanted to add some other good sources. Science of oppression I is a great primer from Racialicious. Scicurious also has a great researchblogging post on inflammatory responses to stress, particularly as they relate to social rejection. She reviews a particular paper that links immune health to neural sensitivity to social rejection (meaning, those demonstrating the most sensitivity to social rejection also had an increase in inflammatory markers), which is interesting since it demonstrates a relationship between the immune system and psychosocial stress.

This Jonah Lehrer article in Wired follows up on the Sapolsky article we read about stress vaccines. I also like this story (well, press release) from ScienceDaily on how stress relates to one's coping method. I imagine this is also linked, in some ways, to the study Scicurious discussed on neural sensitivity. It seems as though if we can change some of our coping and sensitivity behaviors, we can probably alter the degree to which stress negatively impacts our health. I also wanted to link to this special edition of Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that was exclusively on "The Biology of Disadvantage." Really great articles in there. Finally, this post at Language Log critically analyzes some of the ways in which we misunderstand and essentialize disadvantage. An important read.

Random, unrelated, but always interesting, stuff

Patrick Clarkin has a great post on Evolutionary Aesthetics -- basically, the idea that our concept of beauty is context-dependent in more ways than we may realize. I found it inspiring and insightful.

Here's a weird story about mercury exposure and how it changes the sexual behavior of the ibis. See how flexible sexuality can be?

This is a piece I really enjoyed on the ways in which current journalism practices don't get at the subtlety and complexity of science. It refers back to a kerfuffle earlier this year when Martin Robbins of the Lay Scientist wrote a very funny satire piece called This is a news website article about a scientific paper.

Finally, while it's a bit belated, a nice Thanksgiving post by Krystal D'Costa over at Anthropology in Practice.

Around the web: male behavior

The "Around the Web" series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

This week I broadly introduced the field of behavioral endocrinology, and focused on male behavioral endocrinology as a way to apply it. Of course a week on male behavior can't go without Robert Sapolsky's essay The Trouble with Testosterone, and students wrote some very thoughtful posts reflecting on that reading. Next time we'll cover stress, and the week after that female behavioral endocrinology.

This week, though, it's all about the testosterone. I spent a fair bit of time in lecture trying to parse out what the relationship between hormones and behavior really is: 1) the relationship goes both ways, meaning behavior impacts hormone levels at least as much as hormones impact behavior, and 2) hormones rarely make anyone do anything, but in some cases they can increase your willingness. It's as though the hormone opens the door to a particular behavior, but doesn't push you through.

Also, the last week of the course covers cognitive sex differences (or not), so you will notice an absence of that type of material here. Don't worry, you can do mental rotation tests in a few weeks!

Aggression

I wanted to link to several stories about testosterone and aggression from the mainstream media. Testosterone and aggression relationships have been covered, with at least some degree of complexity, the New York Times and TIME. The New York Times article is of course by Natalie Angier, a rather wonderful science writer who wrote Woman: an Intimate Geography.

I also found two other links: this student paper on testosterone and aggression from Bryn Mawr. I hope work like this shows my students the kinds of sophisticated thinking they are also capable of, and starts some fun conversations. This one from the website About Gender also has a thoughtful take on this often-exaggerated relationship.

Business sense?

This press release (at least, I think that's what it is) suggests that male CEOs with higher testosterone concentrations are more likely to drop deals or attempt hostile takeovers. The whole piece struck me as odd, in its phrasing, and in the fact that an article on hormones was accepted in a journal called Management Science. So I decided to look up the article on which the press release is based (Levi et al 2010).

It's a mess, and here's why: THEY DON'T ACTUALLY MEASURE TESTOSTERONE CONCENTRATIONS. They use age as a proxy for testosterone, saying that testosterone is higher in young men, and because younger men do these more reckless behaviors, it is because of Teh Evul Testosterone. Further, as far as I can tell, the way they use age as a variable is that you are "young" if you are under forty five years old, and "old" if you are over that age. Age significantly impacts testosterone, but the amount of variation unrelated to age is also considerable. And when it is so easy to measure testosterone -- we're talking about getting someone to spit for you a handful of times -- it seems silly to use a proxy so far removed as to be almost meaningless. It also ignores the many other factors related to age that might make someone reckless, like brain development and experience.

Et cetera

Greg Laden has a short, tongue-in-cheek blog post about Testosterone and Humor: he reviews a rather earnest article by a dermatologist who hypothesizes that humor develops from aggressive behavior (that, perhaps, it is a kind of verbal aggression?). Go read the weirdness.

Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science has two interesting posts on testosterone. In Prejudice vs. Biology I think Ed does a marvelous job demonstrating what I was trying to explain above: testosterone and other hormones might open the door to a behavior, but you (or you and your pre-conceived notions of hormones) are the one who decides whether to walk through. His other post looks at a study of the differential effects of testosterone and estrogen on economic decisions in postmenopausal women and found... nothing. I loved that this study actually looked at women, not men. The authors of the study even go so far as to suggest that some of the results that have found correlations between hormones and economic behavior are a result of publication bias. Go, go on and read!

Your dose of random

A lot of posts and articles have caught my eye recently. I'll share some this time and maybe save a few for my next Around the Web.

Ever wonder how to get more young people to be more responsible about their reproductive health? Perhaps we need to understand the adolescent brain better to come up with more targeted campaigns.

The Shadow Scholar is a rather disturbing read by a pseudonymous writer for hire who helps college students cheat. Related to this (in my mind), is the story of how students lack basic research skills. On a more positive note, some perspective on why being hardworking (and, you know, not cheating) is more important than being smart.

Related to the last Around the Web on sexual differentiation and variation, this post by sex-positive Alice Dreger answers a young girl's question who is worried that her clitoris is too big.

Finally, though we've already covered parenting, I wanted to share with you this neat story about adoption in sea lions. Read the story. Revel in the cute babies.

Next time I'll write about stress and social disparities.

Reference

Levi, Maurice, Li, Kai, & Zhang, Feng (2010). Deal or no deal: hormones and the mergers and acquisitions game Management Science, 56 (9), 1462-1483

Around the web: sexual differentiation and identity

The "Around the Web" series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

This week I taught my students about sexual differentiation in humans. We also watched the PBS special Sex: Unknown. This film documents the botched circumcision, gender reassignment surgery, social and hormonal conditioning, then later gender reversal of Bruce, turned Brenda, turned David. They also interview David's mother, Anne Fausto-Sterling, a few scientists (to set up a sense of "controversy") and a transgender man. Overall I think it's a very well done, devastatingly sad film.

One of the things I always take away from this film when I watch it is how malleable gender is, and how gender is something that is up to the individual who supposedly possesses it, not parents or doctors. I think my students got the second message, but not the first. They found David's story -- an XY male who was gender reassigned due to the botched circumcision, but that gender reassignment ultimately failed -- as confirmation that sex is not malleable, and that it's binary. We had a hard time defining gender and sex and making sure to parse them out. And despite what we learned in the film, about the large number of people born with genitalia that is not obviously male or female (more than those born with cystic fibrosis and Down's syndrome combined), most thought there are only two sexes.

While I think sex is more determined, in some obvious and very interesting ways, compared to gender, I have a feeling that sex is still more malleable than we would like to admit. We have so much interesting comparative evidence in other animals of hormonal organizational effects that are not permanent. So, while the majority of people likely are male or female, I think the awareness the intersex movement brings, for us to acknowledge more variation rather than bin people into two categories, is an important one.

Sex determination, sex and gender identity

First, from Ed Yong: Sex runs hot and cold (look, even the amazing Ed Yong conflates sex and gender! It's ok, we all do it sometimes). Here is some of that comparative evidence I mentioned -- environmental stimuli impacting sex determination in jacky dragons. A very cool read. Also check out the comments; one of them contains a useful citation.

I also found a few others in Discover Magazine: Of Mice and Men is interesting, as it chronicles the importance of pheromones in sex determination and sex behavior in mice. This bleeds over, at least a little, into our class's next topic of behavioral endocrinology. Transsexual brains also looks at sex identity, by examining the brains of transgender folk. They found differences between transgender and not-transgender male brains in parts of the brain that are probably determined in utero.

Related to this story was another in Scientific American Mind. I had a hard time finding a link that would allow you to read the full text, but this one should work. The article is called the Third Gender, and similar to the previous link, it looks at transgendered folks as a way to think about sex and gender differently and flexibly. An interesting read.

Next, the basic story of sexual differentiation often implies that male factors are needed to produce males, whereas females are just produced so long as there are no male factors around. Not so fast! Rather than seeing female sex determination as a passive process, this article suggests a more active role. This complicates the story, but that is rarely a bad thing!

Finally, a rather sad story, but one I thought worth sharing regarding our conversation on sex and gender: Afghan Boys are Prized, so Girls Live the Part. This is a New York Times story about families in Afghanistan dressing their daughters as sons in order to improve their status. Once the girls hit puberty, they generally have to go back to being girls, but for those years that they dress as boys they enjoy all the privileges of being male. You need to read this story.

Nothing random to share in this Around the Web, but I'm saving a few good ones for the next post. You should just read what I've linked here!

Around the web: altruism and parenting

The "Around the Web" series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

Last week (because I'm a week behind on these!) we looked at altruism and cooperation, behaviors that appear to operate against the selfish behavior we often assume is necessary for reproductive success. From there we also explored parenting, where individuals often go to great lengths to care for their offspring, but also sometimes consider trade-offs between current and future reproductive opportunities.

Prisoner's Dilemma

In lecture, the TAs modeled the Prisoner's Dilemma (click the link if you're unfamiliar with it) with candy prizes rather than jail time, and then I held a student tournament. Normally the Prisoner's Dilemma is set up something like this:

	Cooperates	Defects
Cooperates	6 months | 6 months	0 years | 10 years
Defects	10 years | 0 years	3 years | 3 years

It was loads of fun, but interestingly, the way I set up the game seemed to lead to cheating being the best strategy. I just couldn't get any of them to brave cooperating, save one pair who were close friends. This is likely because the punishment for cheating wasn't strong enough, and/or the reward for cooperating wasn't great enough. I set it up like this:

	Cooperates	Defects
Cooperates	3 candies | 3 candies	0 candies | 5 candies
Defects	5 candies | 0 candies	1 candy | 1 candy

If "both defect" was set up so that students would LOSE candy from their stash, perhaps it would have turned out differently. I also think this game is very different when it feels like the stakes are about winning (candy) rather than losing (jail time). Either way, it was a great way to learn about and understand the conditions under which reciprocal altruism could evolve.

If you'd like to play around with the game yourself, there are a few online Prisoner's Dilemma games: here is one of them.

Altruism and cooperation

Two cool PLoS papers just happened to come out on cooperation in the last few weeks. Cooperation under indirect reciprocity and imitative trust by Saavedra et al looks at human behavior. They examine conditions under which reciproal altruism can evolve even when interactions aren't iterated -- that is, when people don't encounter each other that often, but still act altruistically towards each other.

Chadefaux and Helbing look at different variables that may promote cooperation, in How wealth accumulation can promote cooperation. They use the Prisoner's Dilemma model, but add a twist: players can accumulate wealth, and are able to invest their wealth in later interactions. Under these conditions, cooperative strategies dominated (unlike in my class exercise, where the temptation to defect was too strong!).

We discussed kin selection as one of the factors that promotes altruistic and cooperative behaviors among individuals. Recently some heavy hitters from within evolutionary biology have dusted off the ole' group selection vs. kin selection argument, and you can read more here: Kin Selection Dead?

A wonderful bridge between these two topics (which is the reason I taught them together) can be found in this post at the old Neuroanthropology digs: Evolution of altruism: kin selection or affect hunger?

Parenting

The above link should give you a sense of why I covered parenting in the same lecture we did the Prisoner's Dilemma. Parenting is incredibly costly, and while there is a reproductive benefit, the mental and physiological strain is substantial. Some days the cons seem to outweigh the pros. Yet many, if not most, people eventually become parents. Are we driven by an innate desire to pass on our genes? Are we mindless drones of culture, which sometimes seems to value parenting, and even implies it is inevitable and necessary?

One thing seems pretty certain: in the human lineage, if we didn't invest in our children and parent them heavily, they would not survive. Kids are dependent on the help of others through adulthood. This isn't just because of the transition in industrial cultures to have to go to school for long periods of time before getting a job: many individuals don't master the skills necessary for survival in foraging societies until they are in their thirties or forties.

Parenting isn't purely altruistic, because of the fact that we are usually related to our children. And there are significant rewards to having children. But some psychological studies suggest parents aren't actually all that happy. Psychologist Dan Gilbert also offers his perspective.

Perhaps it is true that we outweigh moments of extreme, overpowering love, like the day this summer that my daughter Joan, for no reason at all, stopped what she was doing and felt compelled to hug me and whisper in my ear, over and over "I love you Mommy, I love you Mommy," compared to my Tuesday evening this week when, after we voted, she decided to have an all-out temper tantrum at the voting site, and for the whole walk home. It seems like we need to think about how we measure happiness, then, before we simply decide that parents are not happy (or that non-parents are not happy).

A few last good links on parenting. Greg Laden's great series of Falsehoods contains this one: A baby is not the biological offspring of its adoptive mother. Puts the kin selection concept of parenting into perspective. I also want to recommend a few websites: the blog parenthropology, and the site Parenting Science (which my students will recognize, as they had a reading from it for this week).

Then there is also the website for Aware Parenting, a type of parenting that I like and use with my child -- check out the articles. Parent Effectiveness Training and Playful Parenting are other resources that I have found useful, particularly in my darker moments when I feel stuck. Last, some perspectives on the Mommy Wars to help you think about how and why parents (particularly from industrialized populations) can be so judgmental of each other.

Random this week

Not too much to share this week. Neil deGrasse Tyson's speech earlier this year on how Learning is Empowerment. And, two TED talks that are marginally related to this week's concepts: The hidden influence of social networks and On the tribes we lead.

Speaking of altruism, have you checked out my DONORS CHOOSE GIVING PAGE? Imagine the massive effect a few minutes, and five dollars of your day, can have...

Around the web: childhood

The "Around the Web" series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

This week I spent some time on things like Meaney's mice and cross-fostering experiments, as well as 2D:4D digit ratios and prenatal hormone concentrations, as a way to get at how our development impacts behavior. I also discussed some of the main hypotheses regarding why childhood evolved in humans, since it's a unique life stage. And as always, I'll throw in a few random links at the end that I just think you should be reading.

Meaney's mice

Michael Meaney isn't just known for his cross-fostering experiments (like those described in Crabbe and Phillips 2003); they are part of a broader research program to understand stress and behavior. Here are a few stories about his other work, which is also relevant to this week's material.

Here's an interesting article from the Dana Foundation on recent advances in the genetics of psychiatric disorders. If you scroll your way down, however (or just CTRL-F "Meaney," to make it easy), the author reviews two interesting pieces of research from Meaney's lab on both rodents and humans, and the impact of poor care in childhood. I hadn't read anything on the human work before -- his lab group looked at the brains of suicide victims with and without known histories of child abuse, and found notable differences. Sad, but important work.

The other link also covers Meaney's rodent work. In both cases, they describe work that shows how stress is modulated in rodents who were groomed and licked by their mothers. It seems as though positive, caring behaviors have a positive impact on the stress response.

What do your fingers say about you?

We talked about digit ratios and prenatal hormones this week. I showed my class some good evidence, and I showed some graphs that looked like someone drew a regression line through a sneeze. I found a blog that weirds me out a little bit -- someone actually has a blog just about digit ratios. And of course, the reviews of the literature are that digit! ratios! tell us! about! our! kids! There's no point to parenting, because your child's digit ratios tell you what they'll be like when they grow up!

I actually think the prenatal hormone material is compelling in a lot of ways, and I know some really great scholars in the area. I'm just not crazy about every article I've happened to read on it (of course, can't we say that about all fields?). But who knows, maybe we'll repeat some of these experiments soon and have it confirmed that men with higher androgen digit ratios are better at trading in the stock market.

Where I tend to get a touch queasy is under those occasional conditions where an author tries to take this proximate level analysis -- an understanding of the impact of prenatal androgen exposure -- and pull it up into the ultimate level -- essential differences between women and men. When we get to that part of the semester, I have a link round-up that will put these other Around the Webs to shame.

The evolution of childhood

I only found one link on this, and it is a summary of some paleo evidence for when childhood may have evolved in our lineage. Fossil evidence was found of a 160,000 year old child with growth patterns that suggest it grew the way modern children grow.

Variation in childhood

First, a brief interview with Mel Konner about his recent book, The Evolution of Childhood (it sounds great! I would also recommend Meredith Small's Our Babies, Ourselves). Then there's also a nice post over at Neuroanthropology's old digs on a recent special issue of Anthropology News -- they have direct pdf links to some very interesting articles. Finally, and this is related to something we only touched on in lecture but I'll give us some time to discuss next week -- check out this table of child well-being in rich countries (click on the table to embiggen, and the link under it for the full report). Might come as a surprise to see where the US ranks...

Your weekly dose of random

A lot of fun stuff this week for the college-aged. If you don't read Female Science Professor, you should: she has an interesting blog post about the professor's side of the story when a study says "I couldn't come to class yesterday. Did I miss anything important?" See also this poem, and the post's comments.

Also, if you're a college student and don't follow the Cronk of Higher Education, you're missing some funny stuff. This week: Campus Reels as Freshman Discovers She is Not Best Friends With Roommate.

Next, a press release about an article showing better student performance with peer learning. This is why you all should be attending Undergraduate Mentor Office Hours!

Finally, what Around the Web post goes without linking to Ed Yong at least once? Here's his take on research on strongly held beliefs: When in doubt shout -- why shaking someone's beliefs turns them into stronger advocates. As usual it's an elegant and lively explanation of some very interesting research. And in the face of lots of pseudoscience, mistrust of science, and low science literacy, our understanding of how and why these things happen is very important.

Around the web: levels of analysis

The "Around the Web" series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

This week students learned about proximate and ultimate causation -- the two overarching ethological levels of analysis (within which we also have developmental and mechanistic levels within proximate, and phylogenetic and evolutionary levels within ultimate causation). In addition to a lesson and reading on this topic (including this post by David Sloan Wilson), we applied our thinking by watching the PBS Special Ape Genius, which focuses on a comparative primatological approach to understanding human cognitive ability. If you haven't seen the film, you really must! It is available for free, albeit in chunks, at the link above.

Today I'd like to share a few blog post links on proximate and ultimate causation, and a few on primate cognition just because they're fun and relevant to the film. Then of course, I'll throw in a few other random links that I think you'll like.

Proximate and ultimate causation

Greg Laden offers a great perspective on proximate and ultimate causation as it relates to same-sex couples in the animal kingdom. It's a nice link to our earlier work on sexuality.

Patrick Clarkin, a professor at UMass Boston, provides a nice analysis of the proximate/ultimate distinction as it applies to war.

An article in Psychology Today from this summer connects the proximate/ultimate distinction to a reconception of Maslow's hierarchy. Should be useful for all the psych majors in the class!

Finally, an article you may not first recognize as being about the levels of analysis, but I think nicely demonstrates our need to understand proximate (mechanism) and ultimate (anticipating adaptation when thinking about the future) levels. It is also a nice demonstration of how our understanding of evolutionary theory -- particularly regarding ancestry and our ability to build only on whatever raw material our ancestors give us -- is important. And then of course it also discusses ape laughter. Fun! (10/18/10 ETA added forgotten link to this paragraph)

Primate cognition and behavior

You may find a few other related posts and articles on primate behavior stimulating. First, not totally related but certainly fun, Ed Yong's post Bonobo males get sex with help from their mums documents how mothers help make introductions and even fight off competing males to help their sons maximize mating opportunities. Incidentally, Ed also just won one of the 2010 National Academies Communication Awards. This is a big deal not just for Ed, who is an exceptional writer and probably deserves one of every award we can possibly give him, but to the science blogosphere, whose legitimacy is swiftly increasing (despite the occasional curmudgeon -- and besides, see a great response and a round-up of other responses here). This is a great thing for science communication and literacy.

Onward. Here is an interesting PLoS ONE article on cognitive differences in chimps and bonobos. You may recognize two author names -- Brian Hare and Michael Tomasello -- because they were both featured extensively in Ape Genius. Cool stuff!

Random, but really kinda related, links

First, those of you in the Chambana area -- Jorge Cham of PhD Comics fame is here! Go see him speak tonight. I feel like such a fangirl.

The two other links I want to share are a bit more directly related to the course. First, Scientific American has an interesting story chronicling our lives "from womb to tomb" -- it covers the field of fetal and developmental origins. As we get more into behavioral endocrinology this will come up more, but this kind of research has implications not only for behavior but for health. It's a pretty new field and we need to tread carefully, but understanding prenatal origins of variation is a very worthy goal.

Second, I thought this post over at Gene Expression on the Human Nature Top 10 was an interesting take on "humaniqueness." Check out both the post and the comment thread for some interesting thoughts on what constitutes both widely accepted and undervalued aspects of human nature.

That's it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Around the web: the dark side of behavioral biology

The "Around the Web" series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

This week I covered infanticide and sexual coercion, and showed Steven Pinker's TED talk on the history of human violence as a provocative way to help us think about violence, culture and variation. Because this is a 100-level course, I make more of a point to demonstrate themes or introduce ideas, rather than provide a ton of content that they can look up on their own. But that always means that a lot of interesting stuff ends up omitted from my lectures. I didn't talk about step-parenting, though I hope to touch on it in a later lecture. I only touched on the Thornhill and Thornhill rape-as-adaptation material (though they did need to watch and be quizzed on a mini-lecture I prepared on it before coming to class).

That said, Tuesday was one of my favorite classes so far, because students really seemed to come prepared to talk, and think, and listen... and remember, this is a class of 700 where, if the iClicker results are an indication, 550 show up regularly. Rather than give them much new content from what they'd already heard in the mini-lecture online, I had them unpack and analyze what they had learned. I was really impressed with their sophistication, and their confidence in questioning some of the basic assumptions of the material.

So bravo to you, Anth 143, for your brave thinking, your willingness to contribute, and your intelligence!

The dark side of behavioral biology

We do nasty stuff to each other. We fight, cheat, lie, threaten, beat up, maim, kill, rape. We raid, colonize, war, oppress. It's not pretty. Are these essential parts of human nature? Are they challenges we must overcome to be moral? Are they dictated to us by culture?

Of course, you all know by now that most of our behavior is a hot mess of genes times environment interactions. And that many behavioral biologists think that it is problematic to assert that "psychological adaptation underlies all behavior," as do Thornhill and Thornhill (1992). Adaptation does not necessarily explain ALL behavior, though it helps with a lot. And yet I was very impressed with the parallels some students made in class this week between some elements of the risk factors associated with infanticide in humans and non-human primates.

Here are a few links regarding evolutionary psychology, a field that, to my mind, embodies this notion of psychological adaptations for all behavior, and universals in human behavior that seem divorced from context. First is a jpg of a game for EvoPsych Bingo, second a smart post from Boing Boing on what is wrong with evolutionary psychology. You are welcome to ponder the issue yourself, and you are certainly not required to agree with my criticisms.

Next, an interesting article in Scientific American by John Horgan on problems with seeing our ancestry as fundamentally violent: Quitting the hominid fight club.

For those of you not in my class, check out the readings I had this week: Carl Zimmer's amazing and probably now classic piece First, Kill the Babies chronicling Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's work on infanticide, and then this biography of Hrdy by Claudia Glenn Dowling that offers even more insight into her work.

Other random but useful tidbits

These aren't really related to this week's topic, and instead are just links I want to share.

If you ask for it, then I have to let you have it. A slideshow/poetry reading on the meaning of teaching. I wish every student would watch it. via Greg Laden's Blog

A few cool posts that came out AFTER our week on mating and marriage: Sex, Evolution and the Case of the Missing Polygamists by Eric Michael Johnson, and Choosing Mates: Do we really want who we say we want? over at the Lay Scientist.

Advice from graduate students to college students -- you know, the people that you interact with the most, do most of the hidden labor like grade your papers, and probably know you best.

And finally, my favoritest article this week, a speech entitled What are you going to do with that? over at the Chronicle for Higher Education. Please read it, read the whole thing, then bookmark it, then spend some time figuring out what excites you about life and how you will avoid becoming a boring forty year old (if you're over forty, how you'll avoid becoming a boring whatever-age-you'll-be-in-five-years).

Reference

Thornhill, R, & Thornhill, NW (1992). The evolutionary psychology of men's coercive sexuality Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, 363-421

My IVF story: pregnancy

A few things have made me decide to tell my conception, pregnancy and birth stories, and provide some broader context, on my blog. Of course one thing is the CNN.com story that came out on Monday. Then I was struck by how the criticisms being launched by opponents of IVF – to me personally on the CNN.com story’s comments, and broadly in the media coming off of Edwards’ Nobel Prize win – are so overtly sexist and are so related to the way I frame my research. And, earlier this semester I also had a student leave me a note in my Question Box. (The Question Box is a box I leave out for students to submit anonymous questions. Sometimes serious, sometimes ranting, often clever, it’s an interesting part of Anth 143.) This student asked whether my understanding of reproduction, as someone who studies it, affected how I viewed pregnancy and childbirth when I went through it myself.

So this post chronicles how I got to be pregnant. Later posts will discuss my pregnancy, my childbirth, and how sexism and the pathologization of women’s bodies are damaging and incorrect.

The beginning of my family

Brendan and I met in college, at Nerd School. I knew Brendan had had leukemia just a few years before, and I remember thinking that it made him calmer, more mature. I valued his thinking above the other young men I knew. Thankfully, he felt the same way about me. It took us six or seven months to start dating, and a few months after that for me to discover he was infertile. I just asked him one night, he told me he was, and that was that.

I remember feeling as though the chance to have children was slipping away, because of who I had fallen in love with. I remember seeing how Brendan turned inward a bit, in that moment, I think expecting rejection from me. He talked about how much he wanted to be a dad one day, and I thought, I fucking hate cancer. And then I figured, science will take care of this by the time we actually want kids. Either that or we’ll adopt. So I tried not to think about it. And of course, over several years, we fell more in love, and we got engaged, and we got married.

Over this period, we were both going to graduate school. I was doing dissertation fieldwork in Poland until two weeks before we got married. After a year of lab work (undiluted spit and piss stink more than you might expect) and I was in the writing stage, I moved back up to Cambridge and, for the first time since we started dating, we lived together.

Brendan, being a year ahead, finished his doctorate before me and went on to an amazing post-doc position at Children’s Hospital. I was a lecturer at Yale, and then preceptor faculty in the Harvard Expository Writing Program while finishing my dissertation. But while writing in coffee shops and libraries, I found myself intensely, painfully jealous of pregnant women. I wanted to hold little babies and smell their hair. So I started talking to Brendan about it, and it was something he wanted too. He looked into his healthcare, and it was amazing. In vitro fertilization would be totally covered. Totally covered. As in, cough up the occasional co-pay and you can try to have a baby. It made me feel almost like a normal person.

Going for it

We made an appointment with a fertility specialist. We figured it made sense to try while I was young and not a limiting factor, seeing as we already had one in Brendan. Poor Brendan had to submit to a number of tests, because it was decided that there was a very, very small chance that maybe there were some sperm in there somewhere. There weren’t, but let’s say he found out the hard way. Then there was a chance that Brendan had a single vial stored somewhere that was taken between chemo treatments. Chances were nothing was alive inside it, but our doctor was excited by this news and recommended we try IVF to see if we could use this sample.

Then it was time to figure out a backup plan. Neither of us wanted to use a stranger’s sperm. So then it was a matter of deciding who to ask.

Of course, privately, years ago, we had already discussed Brendan’s youngest brother. You see, his middle brother was his bone marrow donor when he had leukemia. We always felt it would be fitting to have his other brother be our sperm donor. But how the heck do you ask someone to be your sperm donor, especially a twenty two year old someone who, understandably, doesn’t exactly have babymaking on his mind?

We needn’t have worried. We called, we chatted, we nervously explained, and Brendan’s brother was beside himself with delight. I suspect he had always been disappointed to be the brother who wasn’t a bone marrow match. As a fifth grader with his oldest brother battling cancer and his middle brother getting holes punctured in his hip to donate bone marrow, he got his class to sit down and make paper cranes. They didn’t quite get to one thousand, but they got close.

With Plans A and B all set in terms of the sperm, it was time to figure out the eggs (I’ll spare you what turned out to be insane details scheduling and timing Brendan’s brother’s trip to coincide with my treatment). I had to undergo a battery of tests including a hysterosalpingogram and vials and vials of blood to make sure I was fertile and wasn’t harboring any nasty diseases or genetic proclivities to nasty diseases. Brendan and I also had to go to a therapy session. I felt like all my spare time went to phone calls and doctors’ waiting rooms. I understood why I had to go through it all, but resented what I had to go through when other people could just have sex and get pregnant. Once we were cleared, we couldn’t even get started with the stimulation protocol, because we had to be fit into the embryologist’s schedule: they don’t want too many embryos to watch at one time. As rational as all this was, it was hard to feel rational when I wanted to move forward.

IVF in accord with our lifestyle and environment

Our doctor was exceptional. She was hopeful in a measured way, she listened well, she was not condescending, and she appreciated the fact that I was a scholar in women’s reproduction and had a few opinions of my own. We discussed going for a very mild protocol to avoid hyperstimulation, because a higher dose would be unnecessary for someone like me: healthy, young, athletic, fecund. I said I would rather have this all not work then feel like I was so desperate to have a baby that I would risk my or my child’s health.

So we went for a lower dose. Birth control pills, then little needles in my leg, more appointments to count follicles and measure my endometrial thickness, a perfectly timed hCG shot to mature my eggs.

Fourteen eggs were aspirated in an outpatient procedure. Brendan’s sample was thawed. The sample was essentially empty. Brendan’s brother’s sample was used. My heart broke just a tiny bit when I was told that part. But then I remember thinking to myself, rather fiercely, of the incredibly strong baby that will come out of all this, and call Brendan Daddy, and how the bonds of our family would knit even closer in the wonderful blend of genes and environment that would be our child.

We risked a five day protocol before blastocyst transfer. In IVF, the most typical protocols are to transfer a three day embryo, or a five day blastocyst, back into the mother. The three day was more common in the past, but you risk the mother’s endometrium not really being receptive yet. The five day transfer would mean a few more risky days of being cultured in vitro, but a greater chance of there being an alignment with the receptivity of the endometrium. The other decision we had to make was whether to transfer more than one blastocyst. Continuing with our decision to not take risks with my or potentially a baby’s health, we wanted to reduce the chance for having multiples, so we opted for a single embryo transfer.

These were a panicked few days, waiting for the embryos to culture, hoping some would actually be left by the time we got to the fifth day. I had trouble maintaining a rational perspective, that the way we were doing this was best. But we got there. We went in for our outpatient procedure to have the embryo transferred to my body. I had to take a Valium and drink an enormous glass of water: the Valium was actually more to keep my muscles, including the muscle of my uterus, from contracting, and the water was to get my bladder as full as possible to make it easier to image my uterus using abdominal ultrasound while they implanted the embryo.

Our "textbook" blastocyst.

The ultrasound and embryo transfer were excruciating, not because it was painful, but because I needed to pee so badly that I wanted to scream. You try drinking an enormous glass of water and then have someone pressing an abdominal transducer down on your bladder while someone else is making you stay still while they put an embryo in you. Then, continue to lie still there for a while before you can get up and pee.

The second the doctors left the room, I turned to Brendan and burst into tears. At least for that moment, I was pregnant. There was a blastocyst inside me, and I was so absolutely happy and terrified that I could barely contain myself. We grinned at each other like fools, clutching our picture of our “textbook perfect blastocyst” and when I finally got to go to the bathroom I hoped that I wasn’t flushing anything else down the toilet.

A new beginning

A week later while on a family vacation in Maine, I was exhausted all the time, wanting to go to sleep early, and writing it off as wishful thinking or aftereffects of the stimulation protocol. We still had another week before our official pregnancy test. So of course on the drive home from vacation Brendan and I went to the store and bought three.

The first one came up immediately and unequivocally positive.

We had our official test soon after, and it told us what we already knew. I fell to the floor of our apartment as the nurse on the phone, accustomed to such a reaction, waited for me to stop crying.

I was pregnant.



* * *
Tomorrow, I go all meta on my pregnancy.

Around the web: sexuality

The "Around the Web" series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

This week I have been trying to finish up two large writing projects: a new IRB and a manuscript draft. So posting has been light. I also admit to having a little trouble figuring out whether to foreground this particular Around the Web post with some of my own thoughts about this topic. I've decided to risk it.

I have two main thoughts I want to offer, one on each half of the lecture I gave Tuesday; these comments will ground the links I'm sharing.

Honest signaling and mate preferences

Due to time constraints, I didn't feel I could go into much detail about my unease about this particular field of research. Much of the work done on human mate preferences is quite good, especially the work that either links the preferences to fecundity/fertility (i.e., Jasienska et al 2004), or to actual reproductive success (i.e., Apicella et al 2007). What worries me when I teach this material in a large, introductory setting is that, despite any caveats I may offer about the research, students often walk away from lecture thinking that all women like strong, masculine men who are good hunters, and all men like young, feminine women with big birthing hips. This is simply not true. You can look at the assortment of who marries who and find a lot more variation, and that's because there is so much variation in mating strategy. Perhaps if someone gives you a range of faces and asks you which you prefer you choose one in line with honest signals for immune health or fertility. But do you have sex with this person or enter into a long-term relationship with this person? Not necessarily, because honest signals of health are only ONE of many factors you consider when choosing a mate. Cultural conditioning, humor, kindness, proximity, religion, political leanings... these are all issues that confound choice purely for good genes. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

In fact, an interesting article just came out that shows how some traits in preferred versus actual mates are similar, and how some are different. Definitely worth a read!

Dr. Petra Boynton, sexpert, therapist, blogger, and all-around cool person, has a wonderful blog relevant to this week's topic. I'll send you over with one of my favorite posts, but check out the whole site: ten tips for successful dating.

I also have to pass on an article sent to me by a student (hooray, I love when students send me stuff!). I'm very glad Davis Shannon sent me this article about body versus face preferences in men looking for one night stands. Of course, the style of the story is pretty offensive. I was also pretty appalled at the quote from the lead author. But in addition to exposing you all to a new study on this topic, it exposes you to an example of very bad science reporting. I think this is very useful to students learning to filter good information from bad.

Finally, in an example of GOOD science journalism, I give you several selections from Not Exactly Rocket Science: one on male bowerbirds influencing mate choice in nestmaking, and one that is only barely related to this week's topic, on masturbating squirrels. You heard me right. Go read it, it's great.

Sexuality

I had a rather devastating interaction with a student after class this week. This student approached me and asked me why I thought there was such a thing as homophobia. The student explained that a group of male students behind him/her were making offensive jokes during my portion of the lecture on homosexuality and were dismissive of the idea that there is a spectrum of human sexual preference that is quite normal and reflected in behaviors we see in the animal kingdom. Both the student, and I, were very upset by this, and I didn't have a particularly good answer.

Oppressive behaviors of one group of people towards another are not new. But I find it especially disappointing when I hear of my own students behaving in this way, especially when I have invested so much in creating lectures with active learning components that give them space to think critically. Like I said, I have no good answers, except to have zero tolerance for such behavior if I am ever in earshot. Perhaps if more people understood that, for some people in our society, it is a huge personal risk to simply express who you love, and those of us who have a more socially-condoned sexual preference can never quite understand the toll this can take on a human being.

Of course, it may be an additional condolence to find out that those individuals who are most homophobic are most likely to have hidden gay urges. No, I didn't make that up. It's SCIENCE!

And for every story of teachers suspended for assigning articles on gay animals or assistant attorney generals using internet bullying tactics on gay students, there are stories of LGBT-inclusive immigration legislation or UN efforts to end laws that discriminate against homosexuals.

References

Apicella, C., Feinberg, D., & Marlowe, F. (2007). Voice pitch predicts reproductive success in male hunter-gatherers Biology Letters, 3 (6), 682-684 DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2007.0410

Jasienska, G., Ziomkiewicz, A., Ellison, P., Lipson, S., & Thune, I. (2004). Large breasts and narrow waists indicate high reproductive potential in women Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 271 (1545), 1213-1217 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2004.2712

Around the web: evolution!

The "Around the Web" series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

This is a good week for Around the Web. There are myriad resources on the internet, as well as just some great writing, regarding evolutionary theory and the forces of evolution. I have a few more lectures for you, a few websites that provide good primers on science and evolution, some interesting blog posts... even a web comic. So here we go.

Resources on evolution

Professor Stephen Stearns never disappoints with his online lectures at Academic Earth. Check out these on the nature of evolution, natural selection, genetic drift, and how selection changes the genetic makeup of a population.

Another wonderful video resource comes from a Discover Magazine contest on how to explain evolution in two minutes or less. Greg Laden posts the winner and runner up here. Short and sweet!

But perhaps you prefer to read to learn, rather than watch. Here is a great set of lecture notes by Bora Zivkovic for his BIO101 class that teaches evolution, from genes to species.

Maybe you want to forego watching videos or reading anything, and would rather look at a single web comic. Well then, here is one often-misunderstood aspect of evolution, very clearly demystified!

Edited to add: Robert Luhn at NCSE emailed to kindly point out I left out two great resources... one being, of course NCSE, and the other being Understanding Evolution, at Berkeley. Thanks Robert!

Blog posts on evolution, the media and scientific literacy

While I have tons of posts on evolution, I thought it would be interesting this time to highlight some recent ones that discuss how the media talks about Darwin and evolution.

At The Guardian, Adam Rutherford wrote an article entitled "Beyond a 'Darwin was wrong' headline: The media love to give undue coverage to flimsy attacks on evolutionary science. And leave others to clean up the mess." In it, he writes about why heavy coverage of a rather problematic book by non-evolutionary biologists Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini entitled "What Darwin Got Wrong" is problematic.

Rutherford quickly clears up two issues for his readers:

Of course, there are plenty of things that Darwin got wrong. That is the nature of science, and indeed good scientists love to be wrong. It means that the theory will subsequently be refined to be more right. Darwin knew, as does every subsequent evolutionary biologist, that natural selection is the major, but not the only contributing factor to evolution.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini seem oblivious to this. They base their whole argument on either misunderstanding what real evolutionary biologists think, or by simply ignoring it. They describe processes in evolution that are easy to understand and are part of evolutionary theory, and quote them as a means to knock down that exact same theory. Repeating and enhancing these brainwrongs so elegantly, as Burkeman does [a journalist Rutherford criticizes for giving attention to the book with the Darwin was wrong headline], simply makes matters worse.

First: in science, we expect people to be wrong all the time, and for lots of things that we once believed to turn out to not be true. Evolutionary theory doesn't fall into this category because it has been so robustly supported in so many studies, over so many decades, that even we skeptical scientists are now quite happy with it. Second, a critical reading of this book is necessary by those who seek to cover it.

Ed Yong weighed in on a similar issue when he covered a journal article on phylogeny in his post Do new discoveries rewrite evolutionary history? There, Yong discussed the phenomena of scientists and the media shouting from the rooftops that the history of some lineage has been rewritten because of a new phylogenetic analysis or new fossil finding. He reviews an article by Tarver et al in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Series B that looked at claims of "rewriting" evolutionary history in the reconfiguration of catarrhine (apes and old world monkeys) and dinosaur phylogenies when new discoveries are made. Go have a look, it's very interesting!

Finally, this post isn't directly about evolution but I think describes the problems in how we define scientific literacy very nicely. Alice Bell wrote this lovely post The Myth of Scientific Literacy, and to me, this post links to those about how to communicate science, particularly evolution, because of what we think our students know, and what they actually know and believe, when they arrive in college classrooms.

Women sciencebloggers, exposure, and my path to blogging

If you have been following this story, or follow me on Twitter, you probably saw something interesting happen last week when Wired announced their line-up of new sciencebloggers: of the five, only one is a woman. This led to a lot of Twitter activity (largely me, Ed Yong, Alex Wild, Christine Ottery, Jenny Rohn, Bora Zivkovic, Dave Munger, and Martin Robbins, but others in this conversation feel free to mention it and link yourself in the comments) and two important blog posts and comment threads -- a graph of women's representation in five major scienceblogging networks by Jenny Rohn and a list compiled of women sciencebloggers on Twitter using the hashtag #wsb by Martin Robbins (again, if there are more blogposts I'm missing, feel free to link in the comments).

Following this, Dave Munger began doing some of his own research on women in science, women in researchblogging, and women in scienceblog networks. His column on this issue appears today in Seed Magazine. It features a recent article by Anne Jefferson and colleagues about women geobloggers that I feel is relevant to my own blog story below, and Morgan Jackson has done an analysis of entymology bloggers that is also worth a read.

My story

This issue of women in the academic blogosphere, and specifically the science blogosphere, is close to my heart for a number of reasons. As Dave mentions in his column (I was interviewed for it), I have been hanging around the academic blogosphere for a long time, since early grad school, and have been reading and writing blogs since my junior year in college (that's about eleven years, if you're counting). At first, I read academic blogs by women. They were all pseudonymous, and there were regular flare-ups about who was a serious blogger or not based on whether they dared to use their real name. Many pseudonymous women wrote beautiful posts about what it means for them to reveal their thinking in a safe space, to make connections to other women when they feel isolated in their institutions, to give and receive true mentoring online when they weren't getting it in real life. Writing pseudonymously often seemed a way to be able to write about sexism without fear of being seen as a less serious scholar (because serious scholars can always rise above sexism since academia is a well-functioning meritocracy, right?), and without fear of personal attacks (though being outed was still occasionally a concern).

Anyway, after a while I realized that there was this thing called scienceblogging, where people didn't just write about their lives in academia or issues in the institution of higher education (two very important topics that I still read regularly), but also about the science they do.

And that's where all the men were. (There were some pseudonymous men, but also men blogging under their real name in a higher proportion, in the neighborhood of academic blogs I originally read.)

I found scienceblogs about denialism, about pseudoscience, medicine, anti-woo, evolution, atheism, science and religion, politics and science. I found researchblogging that cited specific sources. I found shouting matches. I also found lots of cool, sweet, nice, interesting people. And even though the tone was very different, and I often felt as though I had to shoulder my way in, I was hooked. A space where I could talk about science!

But I worried that authors of papers would hate me forever if I said anything bad online about their publications. I worried about employers firing me if they didn't like what I had to say. I worried about being attacked if I ever revealed experiences I have had over the years with sexism, or observed regarding racism. So I still didn't do it for a while. I had no idea if blogging under my real name would be safe or not.

Teaching and blogging

A few things happened that made me decide to do it even if there were consequences. Once I became a tenure-track professor, and specifically an instructor of Anth 143, a life science gen ed here at the University of Illinois, I noticed that my students sometimes came in with a smaller skill set on how to understand science than I expected. Many did not know how to read or interpret graphs or tables, at all. Many were unfamiliar with the scientific method. And many both hated science and were petrified of it. Mind you, these are very intelligent, fun, bright, attentive students looking to do well in class. It's not that they couldn't handle the material. It's not that they were not smart. Instead, they often described very specific experiences where someone had told them they weren't good at science, or described the pace of their classes as overwhelming, or even had very early experiences where they were encouraged to pursue fields other than science. Many of these students were women and people of color.

I redesigned my classes to teach more fundamentals on the scientific method and evolution. I did more testing and assessment on graph-reading. I incorporated active learning and more interaction-rich online learning into the course. But I also wanted to make science more accessible and fun, just to show students its potential. I find learning new things in my field and across science disciplines incredibly exciting, and I love reading good science writing. I love the tangents my mind wanders towards after linking something I'm doing in my research with teaching or a blog post I've read. And I wanted to see if I could do anything to foster that excitement in my students and a broader lay audience, at least in the topics where I have expertise and personal interest.

I tentatively started to blog at my lab website in May of 2009. I wrote about topics that I found interesting, specifically around women's reproductive functioning, and how anthropological interpretations of data and symptoms are very different than those of medical doctors. However, I worried that my own voice would overshadow the lab space, so in August of 2010 I created this blog, Context and Variation (you can read the about page for what it all means). Here, I have been trying to do some of my usual writing on women's health and reproductive functioning, as well as link round-ups that would be useful for new readers of scienceblogs, as well as for my Anth 143 students. I hope to get up the nerve to write about science more outside of my field of expertise in the coming months.

I have found it very difficult to figure out how to encourage more people to comment here, but also difficult to figure out how to promote my blog and increase my exposure. I would like to increase the number of blog posts I can submit to ResearchBlogs, but those kind of posts seriously eat into manuscript and grant writing time. Posts where I write about my life would be easier and faster to write, but then I risk being taken less seriously. In my interview with Dave Munger, we briefly touched on the ways in which men are more likely to be able to talk about their home lives at work without being targeted for attacks on whether they are serious about their work. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to be evasive or not share information about their private lives. These are of course generalizations, and there are negative consequences for this sexism for men too (like men who are committed to co-parenting and raising their children being called just "babysitters" of their own children). And while personal posts always seem to generate more comments, science content posts seem to get the most respect as serious scholarship.

Thus women sciencebloggers, who, if my experience is generalizable, may first join the academic blogosphere for community and to contradict their isolation. They may find that if they use their real names they are suddenly censoring themselves in what they can write about (or at least, this is what I find about myself). I often wonder if the way we unintentionally create scienceblog hierarchies -- blogs about science above blogs about the life or process of science (and controversial topics or those where attacks of the author are common getting a lot more attention as well) -- is part of what keeps fewer women blogging, and those women who do blog from gaining much exposure.

Exposing more readers to women sciencebloggers: one solution

Christine, Jenny and I discussed on Twitter whether it made sense to create a women-only scienceblog network. I was hesitant to create a network that was women-only, because, as I tweeted, "I'd rather fight to play in th big kid sandbox rather than create my own, and help other women within it."

Still, I felt compelled to do something. And Christine several times made the point that we can't just complain, that we should come up with a solution. I am pretty sure it was Bora who first had the idea to aggregate women sciencebloggers, but I cannot find the tweet. So, knowing absolutely nothing about how to aggregate blogs, I went to the two posts over at scienceblogging.org to learn how. I cloned the FieldOfScience Yahoo Pipe first. Once the list got to be of a certain size (over seventy or so) the Pipe seemed to stop working and wouldn't save my work. So then I tried Xfruits. Turns out you can't aggregate more than thirty RSS feeds there either. So then I turned to Friendfeed, and thankfully Bora helped me figure out how to use it with a few comments in the Friendfeed stream and Twitter comments.

So currently there is a public Women Sciencebloggers Friendfeed group that you can subscribe to. Right now anyone can comment and add to the feed. Eventually I am going to make it a standard feed and see if I can convince a few other people (Jenny? Christine?) to help me be admins.

There are still some kinks with the Friendfeed. Some of the links that seemed to work in Yahoo Pipes are not working in Friendfeed. And again, now that the list is large, I am getting a lot of timeouts and errors. I am having trouble always important the feeds of group blogs correctly so that only the female bloggers are featured. So you may occasionally read a man in the feed (horrors!), or you may find your blog that was listed on Martin's #wsb list not yet in the feed. This is why having one of you volunteer to help me would be fantastic.

But not to fear. For now, I have come up with a relatively simple mechanism for you to tell me what blogs to add: you can email womenscienceblogs@gmail.com. Make sure you provide the link, but also if it is a multi-authored blog the names of the women bloggers. I will not be able to update all that often, given the tenure-track job, teaching 700 students, raising a toddler and playing roller derby thing. But at least you have a place to remind me of women scienceblogs that need to be added to the friendfeed. And that means they will eventually make it in.

Once I'm comfortable that I have done the aggregating correctly, I'll submit this to scienceblogging.org in the hopes that they will feature it on their site. If you have other ideas to promote this feed and promote women sciencebloggers, however, I want to hear it in the comments!