Around the web: belated mother's day edition

Apologies for the re-post, it was the only way to save the post and comments with the correct tags after the Blogger meltdown the other day!

I've been accumulating a lot of mother-y links lately, thought I would share. First two Mother's Day columns that remind us that we shouldn't just put Mom on a pedestal and give her some chocolate one day a year, but think in a more systematic way about the oppression of women and children worldwide. Read this one by Esther Cepeda, and this one by Nicholas Kristof.

Fertility

Women see Georgia O'Keefe art as erotic around ovulation. I'm not sure this really qualifies as evolutionary psychology, or needs that framework to understand that libido is higher near ovulation, which would increase the chances one would find erotic art extra erotic at that time.

Birth

Chimps give birth like humans. Very cool. I guess we didn't notice until now because they are so solitary when they birth?

Cesarean sections are a major factor in maternal death. I don't like how this article seems to blame the mother, given the way interventions seem to shunt many women towards C-sections whether they want one or not. But there are certainly many factors to consider in this issue, including the mother's past health and the kinds of protocols used at the location where she is giving birth.

Cutting the cord too soon. This is an interesting piece in Time about the timing of cord clamping and its impact on respiratory issues in infants. Many birth centers and hospitals are advocating for a later time to clamp the cord for this and other reasons.

Mothering of all kinds

Hope for teenage mothers. This was a great story about a great program to help teen mothers have more success in school and beyond.

The amount of time a woman breastfeeds is related to her race and income. Not surprising, given that lactation support services are probably harder to come by, and that women who must earn an income can't necessarily afford to go without pay for twelve weeks (that is the minimum maternity leave we get in the US, based on the Family Medical Leave Act, and most places give only that minimum). Even those women who do manage to get into a rhythm with breastfeeding lose it when they return to work, not just because of those short twelve weeks, but because few employers have workplaces set up for pumping.

Amy Poehler's acceptance speech at the Time 100. She discusses the many other women (dare I say allomothers?) who support her as she raises her children and has a career. I may have teared up a little. Okay, I shut my office door and cried.

What measles vaccine refusal really costs. This is something parents should care about.

A hilarious account from a father about all the things you need to worry about -- and expect to be judged upon -- when having a child.

Finally, while this went around the interwebs when Dr. Isis wrote it the first time, re-read her AGORA post about why it's all right to not be your mother.

Miscellaneous ladybusiness

The enduring gender gap in pay. Sigh.

Michele Bachelet should be everyone's hero, if what I read in this story is any indication.

We can no longer escape the reality that BPAs (and other associated bisphenols, which unfortunately are what are being replaced in plastics that claim to be BPA-free) are endocrine disruptors that have negative consequences for health. Well, unless you're Coca Cola. Then you are going to put your fingers in your ears and go "lalala!"

A lovely post on feminist reactions to street harassment. Another, very powerful read: kill me or leave me alone.

An important read about the use of language in journalistic storytelling, and the sexist way the New York Times originally covered the brutal gang rape of a little girl.

Historic STD posters. Were some sexist? Of course. But it only makes me want one for my office more, if for its ironic value.

Around the web: put attention where it needs to be put

Yesterday I submitted a book chapter and a journal manuscript. I have two substantial blog posts I'm working on, but neither will be ready for this week. However, I have been slowly accumulating Posts of Awesome that I'd like to share. I want to highlight people, writing, and topics that need and deserve more attention in the science blogosphere. I mention a lot of these things on Twitter, but I know a lot of my followers don't use Twitter. So here goes.

Ladybusiness

If you have any interest in pregnancy, labor and birth, I do hope you're reading Science and Sensibility. S&S is a evidence-based blog written by practitioners and scientists, sponsored by Lamaze International. I really like their more technical, informative posts on labor and birth, and today's post on positioning during the second stage of labor is a winner. The writing is always accessible for layfolks, yet still provides great information for scientists and medical folk.

Remember that Wax et al (2010) article showing homebirth had a mortality rate three times higher than a hospital birth (and the sensational Lancet editorial)? A lot of folks came down hard on the article when it first came out, myself included, but two more pieces came out yesterday that call into question the authors' conclusions. The first issue is that there were actual mathematical errors in the data (meaning, the data was probably entered into an excel sheet incorrectly), the second is that they fundamentally did the meta-analysis wrong. Wrong. As in, according to one statistician who had no stake in the story or topic, so wrong as to overlook all its other problems.

A few more spicy tidbits: cosmetic breast surgery is on the rise, and one county in Florida has a 70% cesarean rate. Seventy. Percent. Due to some smart marketing and bad decisions, a treatment to prevent pre-term birth that used to be affordable is now more expensive than gold.

Something a little more fun: older female elephants make better leaders. Here's a video to go with the paper.

Finally, this is sort of ladybusiness, but as Dr. Isis points out, it should really be family (or even just human) business: Why it's alright to not be your mother, a guest post on AGORA.

Queering biology

The reverberations from Jesse Bering's post on homophobia as an adaptation continue. And the responses have been brilliant. I especially love Jeremy Yoder's take over at his blog, Denim and Tweed: An adaptive fairytale with no happy ending.

And then today, DeLene Beeland shared this great post on Twitter: How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time over at Orion Magazine. This is a beautifully-written, thoughtful takedown of the naturalistic fallacy.

Other things to read right now

Danielle Lee has two great pieces worth reading (and I found them both because of Greg Laden): an article on the contribution of Henrietta Lacks, and the Black community, to cell culture, and a profile on Danielle in a natural hair series at Essence.com.

I read this article today by Gina Trapani on her work to make the technical world more friendly to women and other underrepresented or new folks.

An interesting interview and review of the book Consumption, by Kevin Patterson: How western diets are making the world sick.

A piece on Impostor Syndrome at SciAm (behind a paywall). I don't want to pathologize all underrepresented groups in science (because frankly, these feelings make sense in the context of environment, even if it's desirable to move beyond them), but issues around impostor syndrome resonate with me.

The video for the MLK, Jr session from Science Online 2011 is now up. Alberto Roca, Danielle Lee and David Kroll are the fabulous panelists.

Things I wish I didn't have to link to

Our amusement with Charlie Sheen just demonstrates how little we care about violence against women -- especially certain kinds of women. Read The Disposable Woman.

Skepchick Rebecca Watson shares some of her hate mail, and why she doesn't feel like internetting today: Why I deserved to be called an offensive bitch.

Pat Campbell reposted a twelve-year-old manifesto on gender and education that still holds true: The Gender Wars Must Cease.

Some LOLz and some cutes: a section I added because the last three links were so depressing

This first link doesn't exactly bring the LOLz, but is an enjoyable read: Female Science Professor continues her series on Academic Novels.

Some great apes from Zooborns: a two new baby orangs, and baby chimp. They put my maternal instinct into overdrive.

And a LOLcat via Scicurious: I'z in yer papers, messin' wit yer stats.

References

Wax, J., Lucas, F., Lamont, M., Pinette, M., Cartin, A., & Blackstone, J. (2010). Maternal and newborn outcomes in planned home birth vs planned hospital births: a metaanalysis American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology DOI: 10.1016/j.ajog.2010.05.028

Editorial staff (2010). Home birth--proceed with caution. Lancet, 376 (9738) PMID: 20674705

Around the web: sex, birth, brainz

This semester I have decided not to do weekly roundups of links useful to the courses I teach, because last semester it was exhausting to me, and as it turns out only minimally read by my students. However, I continue to bookmark stuff I find interesting, and I have reached such a critical mass that I've decided to share it. Some of what I want to share is focused on the ladybusiness, but I also want to share some links on brainz, and for students.

Let's talk about sex

A few posts have come out recently on sex: who wants it, who gets it, and the sexual health of adolescents. Mark Regnerus writes "Sex is Cheap: Why young men have the upper hand, even when they're failing at life," which I thought was reductive and pretty disparaging to both young men and women. I was surprised at how the author talked only about heterosexual sex (why is this ok? why is this interesting?), and how he shared a single quote for each woman he interviewed, and magically it fit nicely into his own narrative. It seems like the story here is in the choices young women and men are making... so it would make sense to share the more nuanced results of the interviews Regnerus says he conducted. That said, I did learn a few things, the most disheartening related to unwanted sex:

"Finally, as my colleagues and I discovered in our interviews, striking numbers of young women are participating in unwanted sex—either particular acts they dislike or more frequent intercourse than they'd prefer or mimicking porn (being in a dating relationship is correlated to greater acceptance of and use of porn among women)."

Unwanted sex is one of those gray areas where the sex is technically consensual... but one partner doesn't really want to do it. How have we gotten to the point that more young women don't feel it's ok to say no to their partners? I don't think it's because of a poor dating pool as seems to be the working hypothesis of the author, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

To contrast, Yes Means Yes is an anthology edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti that became a blog to continue the conversation on rape culture and female sexual empowerment. In a post on said blog, Gender Differences and Casual Sex: The New Research they look at some of the same material as the post above, as well as a new paper by Terri Conley showing that men and women aren't that different in their perspectives on casual sex as was once thought. The blog contributor, named Thomas, does a great rundown of the study's findings and explains how earlier studies of casual sex -- like the study many of you have likely heard of, where men and women are randomly propositioned in public -- is both unlikely and particularly repulsive to women given rape culture, and therefore sets up a sex difference that a more nuanced study easily demolishes.

Birth and babies

Randi Hutter Epstein, author of Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank, wrote a short but sweet piece on labor inductions in Psychology Today. She shares some of the shortcomings of a medical model that thinks that any labor over thirty seven weeks can be safely induced. This relates to a recent story about a March of Dimes initiative to reduce early inductions, and some hospitals in the Chicago area are taking part.

And, while I wrote this a little while ago, it seems important to link the above to the kerfuffle that arose when a study came out last year claiming that home births were far more dangerous than hospital births, and the editors of the Lancet used the study as a chance to jump up and down on home birth. Given that only half of a percent of women in the US do home births, it makes more sense to use this as an opportunity not to bash home births but have a frank conversation about whether the cascade of interventions guaranteed by stepping into a hospital to give birth leads to a safer delivery for mom and baby.

Next, Scicurious of tag-team blogging fame and general awesomeness, has a real winner. Today, she reviewed cool research on sex roles from the seventies. She shows how our perception of the gender of a baby impacts how we treat it (and how dolls might make better toys than footballs for babies, no matter what).

And then, for your dose of cute (well, cute if you don't mind amniotic sacs and vaginas, which I don't), here are Five Miraculous Animal Births (don't know why they are miraculous, but they are certainly cool).

Brainz

First, Sci has another great post, this time on research on exercise, hippocampus size and memory in the elderly that made me vow to play derby until I need a cane to skate.

You might have seen the recent buzz about PKMZeta, a protein that may aid in strengthening old memories. Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science (check out the spiffy new banner!) has a three-part series on it. I also loved David Dobbs's piece exploring problems in cognitive science: Is Cognitive Science Full of Crap? (Yes. Well, sometimes. Maybe. Except sometimes not and then it's really very cool.) John Hawks also has an interesting piece called Numbers as Cognitive Technology: this post explores how we understand numbers, at a population variation (regarding language), developmental (regarding John's twins, who I imagine to be very cute, with thought bubbles of fingers and toes above their heads) and even comparative (Alex the Parrot!) level.

Then, a more devastating piece that, to me, highlights some of the problems with the medical metaphor of humans as machines: Daniel Lende at Neuroanthropology writes about a New York Times piece about how the field of psychiatry has changed with time.

Oh, and this one was absolutely nothing to do with brainz, but it's written by Dr. Zen of NeuroDojo so I've shoehorned him in here :). Dr. Zen looks at the two peer-reviewed papers to come out after the #arseniclife fiasco and shows how one in particular intentionally miscategorizes the great post-peer review that happened on blogs as "anonymous electronic communications," since in fact the majority of the commenters were using their own names (and even if they weren't, again, there is a big difference between anonymous and pseudonymous). This sounds an awful lot like the response that came out after #aaafail, where, rather than addressing the many critical, thoughtful bloggers, it all got labeled as "outside commentary."

Learning links

First, for graduate students: Mamacademic: How I hack parenthood, grad school, etc. A nice piece on the perils of parenthood, because it is constructive. Then, a related post both on pregnancy style and how to deal with questions around parenting in graduate school. And while this next post isn't directly about grad students, GayProf discusses a disturbing panel he attended where faculty recommended having children in order to achieve work/life balance, a way that was clearly not situated in the context of whether one wants to have children, and who ends up doing most of the work of childrearing. Not to mention, you know, the rampant heterosexism.

But on to the links you actually expected under this heading. Dan Simons, fellow prof here at the University of Illinois and co-author of The Invisible Gorilla, wrote a great piece on study habits and what students think they know versus what they actually know. Read it, then study the way he tells you to! Hint: re-reading the text is not how you learn the material.

Then there is this perspective over at Observations, a Scientific American blog, that posits we should teach kids more about the process of science. How can this translate into better science ed in higher ed as well? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Most of what I do centers on having students do actual studies, or assist in research in my lab, or sometimes propose avenues of research as part of a project. But maybe there are more fun things we can be doing in a classroom setting that would lead to more students understanding the scientific method and the process of science.

I also want to share this great tutorial on how to choose a research project. This is useful for students at all levels... and post-docs and faculty, too.

Your dose of random

Steve Silberman interviews Seth Mnookin regarding his new book The Panic Virus. I've been avidly reading all of Mnookin's press materials and look forward to reading the book, but as always Silberman does an exceptional job so I particularly recommend his post.

This article made the rounds in the twittersphere on how to improve comment sections. I just liked it a lot and found it a great tutorial on fostering online communities.

Then, for my anthropology peeps, an important article on problematizing the thrifty gene, particularly around race and racism. Something to share with your students.

People have been rocking out in the SciAm Guest Blog. Check out this book review of Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit by Valerie Jones.

If you haven't had enough counter-evidence to the idea of science blogs as an echo chamber, check out Colin Schultz's treatment of a recent paper on linking patterns in science blogs versus traditional journalism.

Finally, check out this interactive map on well-being in the US in the New York Times. I found a lot of the patterns really interesting, in terms of what portions of the US lit up when.

[11:26am CST: Edited to add two links for Scicurious, because the links were on my list but then I forgot.]

The women scienceblogging revolution

At least, that's what it feels like to me.

You've commented on my last post, you've written your own posts, you've tweeted and retweeted. You've been insightful, brilliant, and kind. You have been allies to each other. You haven't fed the trolls.

The people of the science blogosphere are good, thoughtful people. If a real conversation about eliminating sexism was going to happen anywhere, in a way that emboldened women and made allies of men, it was going to be here. I think the combination of meeting in person, having those many women-only conversations, having such smart people in the women scienceblogging panel, and bringing the conversation back online, to where we all met in the first place, has been really good for us.

So I want to share two last things. First, I'd like to link to as many posts people have written on this topic as possible. If you don't see your post here, link to it in the comments and I'll put it up here. (I looked at hits in my statcounter to come up with the list, so I could have easily missed yours.)

Second, I am slowly (because it is the start of the semester and I have a million other writing projects far more important for tenure than this blog) writing a post reflecting on the MLK, Jr session I attended at Science Online 2011. I hope that as we continue talking and reflecting on issues of women in the science blogosphere, we broaden the conversation to talk about race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other related identities that are not represented or supported as strongly as they could be.

Posts related to #scio11 or the #scio11 conversation

The biology files: Women who write about science

Observations of a nerd: I've never been very good at hiding

The Intersection: Sex in the Blogosphere

This is Serious Monkey Business: Raison d'etre of the female undergraduate primatology blogger

Almost Diamonds: Hidden Women, Hidden Writers

The Happy Scientist: Just Ask

Fumbling Towards Tenure Track: Self-promotion tour 2011

Neuron Culture: Hey You Men Who Yell "Nice Tits": STFU

Neuron Culture: Guest post (my original post, crossposted)

Blue Lab Coats: Linky linky... blogging and doing science while female

Neuroanthropology: Wednesday Round Up #139 (the post gets a mention here)

Science in the Triangle: Why scientists (should) blog

The Loom Room: Are men who do textiles superheroes or spoilt? (a post about a totally different field, but a commenter brings up our conversation)

Only the Educated are Free: How I cannot fight sexism because I am afraid of men

Neuroanthropology: Women and Science Blogging

Outdoor Science: Why are female science writers invisible?

Scicurious: Where are the female science bloggers?

Neurotypical? On self-promotion

One Small Step: Some thoughts, a poll, and an invitation

Denim and Tweet: We need to hear what we'd rather not

Almost Diamonds: Writers don't spring from Zeus's forehead either

Athene Donald: Unwritten Rules

The Intersection: Rising against the wind

Nature Network: Women in science - where are we now?

Alice Rose Bell: The politics of online science

Thus Spake Zuska: But I want to earn everything all on my own merits! #scio11


Broader posts about gender and scienceblogging: more must-reads

There and (hopefully) back again: Gender and blogging (and everything else)

Purely Anecdotal: The good

The Incubator: A pregnant postdoc in the 21st century

Child's Play: On becoming Birkin and letting go of Gainsbourg

Scicurious: Let's talk about sex in science

Young Female Scientist: Be the visible bitch

The Hermitage: How gaming makes me a better graduate student: gear

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...

More on reproductive choice

Just a quick link I want to share today to Martin Robbins's blog The Lay Scientist over at The Guardian. He has a guest post written by @naomimc that describes, more elegantly than I have, the importance of reproductive choice. Entitled "Where are the women in the 'population control' debate?" her post demonstrates how the conversation around population control, particularly in circles devoted to the ecological impact of human populations, seems to be devoid of women, or at least controlled by men.

One of my favorite passages is here:

The green movement is often, wrongfully, accused of misanthropy. "They care more about trees than people", screech the professional oppositionists. But the obsession with population control by a minority of greens opens them up to very legitimate accusations of authoritarianism, 'classism' (i.e. it's the poor we want to stop having babies) and gender-blindness. It is a paradigm dominated by elite men which spectacularly misses the point and ignores the evidence that actually protecting sexual and reproductive rights and empowering women to control their own fertility results in lower birth rates and importantly, lower death rates.

No one who works in maternal and reproductive health talks of 'population control'. For historical and contemporary reasons it is associated with eugenics, China's one-child policy, forced sterilisation and forced abortion. These morally abhorrent examples might be dismissed as extremes but they are simply the results of a way of thinking about reproduction which is coercive and rejects individual rights as fundamental to public policy. (my emphasis)

Go read the post.

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.