It's is really truely amazing to watch the social evolution of the paradigm of sociobiology spread. Appropriate too. Even Dan Savage said something about how guys had evolved to want to violently have sex with as many women as possible last month. Suddenly, it's an explination for everything. Which I'm not against. I do it myself. It's quite a lot of fun actually. To look at this new lense through which to view the world: why do we do this and want that and such, why would it have evolved? Those are fun questions to answer. But I still think it's important to see this for what it is: an emerging paradigm. Replacing psychology. Which replaced religion or whatever came before it.
These evolutionary explinations for behaviour simply would not have been acceptable or even spoken a decade ago. I remember some aging scientist made a speach in which he mentioned how thin women were more nervous because they had to always be on the hunt for food. Everone gasped! The university apologized! People smirked at the crazy old man. But today people would think, "Huh, I could see that."
Here is a New York Times article on how people are looking at the evolution of human personalities by studying birds (incidently, they are called "the great tit"). It is funny that they say they've had to do tests to see IF animals have personalities.
Interesting points are pasted below:
"Certain traits tend to go together," Dr. Gosling said. "We find that people who are energetic also tend to be talkative. It needn't be that way, but that's how it tends to be." The flip side is true as well: less energetic people tend to be less talkative."
"Breeding experiments revealed that these traits had a strong genetic basis. Over just four generations, the researchers could produce significantly bolder and shyer birds. "About 50 percent of the variation you find in avian personalities is due to differences in genes," said Dr. Kees van Oers of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany."
"Each year the birds fight for territory where they can feed and breed. Bold birds are more aggressive than shy ones, and that sometimes helps them win territory. But the scientists have found that when bold birds lose, they are slow to recover. They end up at the bottom of the hierarchy, and in many cases just fly away. "They go to other places to try to become No. 1," Dr. Drent said."
"In a survey of 545 people, Dr. Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle in England found that the more extroverted people were, the more sex partners they tended to have had. That might give them an evolutionary edge, but Dr. Nettle found that they were also more likely to wind up in a hospital. "
It is good to see how people pick up an article like this. I am one of the scientists involved and I like the way you discuss things here.
The actual reason I want to comment on your thoughts about "it is funny they had to test whether the birds had personalities". Of course one has to test such things. Personality is still seen as a characteristic of a person (ie a human being). Animals are something completely different (yeh right). Again we (now) can't say it is the same 'thing' we are measuring, but at least we can say the principles are the same. When I have some time I may go through some of the other "thoughts". Trully interesting thoughts! Are you a scientist?
Hi Kees,
Thanks for the comment! Yes, I guess the process of cataloguing the obvious is necessary when applying the scientific method. It just becomes amusing when they are on paper, or the monitor, I guess.
I'm on my way to becoming a scientist I hope. My background is in social theory and gender studies. And currently I'm looking at the way scientific information is communicated to lay people and how they use it. But it's all an attempt to get into studying animal behavior...a slow process from gender studies to animal behavior, but there are many related ideas. It's been interesting so far.
Please feel free to comment on the blog all you want! I love to have the opinions of specialists and I would love to hear yours.
Best,
~ rebecca
Hi Rebecca,
You picked a right point there: communicating information to lay people. For scientists a very difficult part of their job. Some even think it isn't their job. ALthough I feel that scientists shouldn't be driven by societies' opinions, I think we are obliged to communicate what we are doing. Of course some of the information won't reach people in the right way (see the hundreds of weboages siting the article saying thata what we do is either proof that humans shouldn't study animals, or proof that we should study animals more closely; pick your pick).
ok, keep up the track towards animal behaviour, since that is the reflection of the real world (i guess)
cheers,,
Kees
Posted by: Kees at March 17, 2005 07:12 PM