Sex Differences
gregladen | October 12, 2010Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other's shoes (the gals)?
This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the "evolutionary psychology" argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The Pleistocene with today's behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by "sound" you mean "sounds good unless you listen really hard."
I list this argument among the falsehoods, but really, this is a category of argument…
gregladen | February 9, 2010Is chimpanzee food sharing an example of food for sex?
One of the most important transitions in human evolution may have been the incorporation of regular food sharing into the day to day ecology of our species or our ancestors. Although this has been recognized as potentially significant for some time, it was probably the Africanist archaeologist Glynn Isaac who impressed on the academic community the importance of the origins of food sharing as a key evolutionary moment. At that time, food sharing among apes was thought to be very rare, outside of mother-infant dyads. Further research…
gregladen | September 25, 2009You've certainly heard of the ARIS 2008 survey from Trinity College. One of the more interesting aspects of the survey is the demonstration that there is a sex difference in patterns of religions identification. Below I give some links where this has been discussed, but I want to note that in many discussions one of the first things people say ... quite reasonably ... is that the differences seem small and potentially well within the normal sampling error of a survey.
The reason people think that is because they are accustom to survey data in relation to political polling where sample error…
gregladen | September 11, 2009Well, we don't know because the necessary detailed information has not been released. I do not personally know the Caster Semenya story, medically or biologically speaking, but there has been a lot of discussion and apparently wild speculation on this, and I may have a thing or two to help clarify.
If the reports we are hearing are true, Semenya is fairly likely to be an individual with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. This may be wrong. So, I'll tell you a little about AIS and then you can disconnect your knowledge of AIS from Semenya, or connect it up, as appropriate, later on.
It has…
gregladen | July 27, 2009Is the Natural World a valid source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane areas of thought such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast?1 When it comes to airplanes, you'd better be a servant to the rules of nature (such as gravity) or the airplane will go splat. When it comes to breakfast, it has been shown that knowing about our evolutionary history can be a more efficacious guide to good nutrition than the research employed by the FDA, but you can live without this approach and following FDA guidelines will not do you in. A naturalistic…
gregladen | July 21, 2009A three part conversation between two women overheard on the University of Minnesota campus.
Part 1 of conversation:
"So, did you read that obnoxious post that that Isis the Scientist, that Goddess blogger, did and her yelling at ERV and all?"
"Yeah, I did. What a bunch of stupid."
"If you listen to Isis, all you get is 'misogyny this, misogyny that, he touched me, he looked at me, yadayadayada' but if you listen to ERV you get a whole different thing about what working in a lab is like."
"Yeah, I know. S'all stupid shit."
"You work in a lab, right?"
"Yeah."
"You're hot, right?"
"Yes, baby,…
gregladen | June 2, 2009Or to put it more accurately, yet another study seems to show that girls learn from their teachers, parents, and peers that they are not supposed to be good at math. Sterotypes can be fulfilled. Pleas stop doing that, everyone.
Here is some press on this story.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers continue to find evidence that shows there is no innate difference in the math ability of males and females.
"There is a persistent stereotype that girls and women are just not as good at math as boys and men," said UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde. "And the data we have…
gregladen | May 14, 2009Why does a soldier throw himself on a hand grenade to save the lives of a half-dozen unrelated fellow soldiers? Why does someone run into a burning building they happen to be passing to save a child they don't know? From a Darwinian perspective these seem to be enigmatic behaviors that would "select against" such individuals (or more properly, select against the heritable component of this behavior).
There are several possible explanations for this....
...The most important one might be that this sort of behavior doesn't really happen very often. It is so rare that it can be ignored and…
gregladen | May 12, 2009According to a study just coming out in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, "variations in emotional intelligence--the ability to identify and manage emotions of one's self and others--are associated with orgasmic frequency during intercourse and masturbation."
In short, the study found:
Emotional intelligence was not associated with ... age and years of education, nor did we find a significant association between emotional intelligence and potential risk factors for [female orgasmic disorder] FOD such as age, body mass index, physical or sexual abuse, or menopause. We found emotional…
gregladen | May 3, 2009... well, not really, you should not burn any book. But don't just leave this one around for your kids to accidentally read.
Source of book.Hat tip
razib | April 8, 2009Women May Be Sniffing Out Biologically-relevant Information From Underarm Sweat:
Sniffed alone, the underarm odors smelled equally strong to men and women. When fragrance was introduced, only two of 32 scents successfully blocked underarm odor when women were doing the smelling; in contrast, 19 fragrances significantly reduced the strength of underarm odor for men.
...
Not only were women better smellers the men, but male odors were harder to block than female odors. Even though underarm odors from the two sexes didn't differ in how strong they smelled, only
So women have a better sense of…
gregladen | February 25, 2009The male and female human brains are different. Some of the better documented differences are similar to differences seen in other mammals. They are hard to find, very small, and may or may not be of great significance. Obviously, some are very important because they probably relate to such things as the ability ... or lack thereof ... to bear offspring. But this is hardly ever considered in the parodies we see of these differences.
[Repost from Gregladen.com]
You have all seen the sometimes funny, sometimes not cartoon depictions of these differences, for example this one:
Obviously,…
gregladen | February 25, 2009Go to any bar and you'll see a lot of males standing and sitting around not mating. I'll bet you would have guessed that the reason they are not mating is that no females will mate with them for one reason or another. But there is the distinct possibility that they are very inconspicuously resisting mating opportunities. It turns out that males can do this .... avoid mating without conspicuous resistance ... more easily than females. For obvious reasons.
This could be why what has become (inappropriately) known as "reversed sexual aggression" often goes unnoticed, and a recent study of the…
gregladen | February 25, 2009 Why is there no Birth Control Pill for men?
The answer I'd like to propose can be summed up in two closely linked words pilfered from the question itself:
Men. Control.
Myriad aspects of life can be understood by recognizing a single critical fact, and the layered, sometimes complex, deeply biological effects of that fact. Males, by definition, can't have babies.
All mammalian males contribute to the reproductive endeavor, but often this contribution consists of a single cell, one per offspring. True, that cell contains a haploid copy of the male's DNA, the quality of which is…
gregladen | February 24, 2009Is chimpanzee food sharing an example of food for sex?
One of the most important transitions in human evolution may have been the incorporation of regular food sharing into the day to day ecology of our species or our ancestors. Although this has been recognized as potentially significant for some time, it was probably the Africanist archaeologist Glynn Isaac who impressed on the academic community the importance of the origins of food sharing as a key evolutionary moment. At that time, food sharing among apes was thought to be very rare, outside of mother-infant dyads. Further research…
gregladen | February 24, 2009Why did humans evolve hairlessness? Hair (fur) protects mammals from heat and cold, what would be the benefit from losing this asset?
I think the most commonly held theory is that fur works on quadrupeds, but once you stand upright, it is less effective, and less fur works better. For later time periods, clothing works better than fur because it is more adaptable. Consider that whatever fur-based system human ancestors had was based on needs in the tropics where it does not get that cold, so it is not hard to imagine that clothing is much more effective.
Recent studies of body parasites…
gregladen | February 18, 2009Nature, the publishing group, not the Mother, has taken Darwin's 200th as an opportunity to play the race card (which always sells copy) and went ahead and published two opposing views on this question: "Should scientists study race and IQ?
The answers are Yes, argued by Stephen Cici and Wendy Williams of the Dept of Human Development at Cornell, and No, argued by Steven Rose, a neuroscientist at Open University.
I would like to weigh in.
The real answer, as is so often the case, is "You dumbass, what kind of question is that? Think about it further and rephrase the question!"
But I don't…
gregladen | January 23, 2009The following is a proof developed by a number of economists at Harvard. It is a proof of the inability of women to understand technologically complex problems, math, engineering, that sort of thing. it is claimed that it almost always works.
Now, I'm not saying that Larry Summers was party to this proof, or even in the room at the time. I'm. Not. Saying. That.
Well, he was in the room. Not that that means anything.
Anyway, on to the proof.
Find a female, any available female, and give her the following information:
1: The speed of sound is approximately 720 miles per hour.
2: The speed…
gregladen | December 31, 2008Naturalism is a potential source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane decisions such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast.1 When it comes to airplanes, you'd better be a servant to the rules of nature or the airplane will go splat. When it comes to breakfast, it has been shown that knowing about our evolutionary history can be a more efficacious guide to good nutrition than the research employed by the FDA, but you can live without this approach. Naturalism works when it comes to behavior too, but there are consequences. You probably…
gregladen | September 29, 2008Human societies tend to be at least a little polygynous. This finding, recently reported in PLoS genetics, does not surprise us but is nonetheless important. This important in two ways: 1) This study uncovers numerical details of human genetic variation that are necessary to understand change across populations and over time; and 2) the variation across populations are interesting and, in fact, seem to conform to expectations (in a "we don't' really care about statistical significance" sort of way, for now) regarding human social organization.
Before examining the paper, we should…