kband: bluprnt 4 rvolution

Bird assholes

Anthopomorphization runs wild!

I think it's funny that there was that study of bird personalities a while ago and now they've discovered that there are bird assholes. "In conclusion, it is our observation that the male great grey shrikes are complete assholes."

Just kidding of course! I'm resisting, RESISTING, the urg to bring my morality into the animal kingdom...but it's so hard. Anyway, I wonder if they found any male birds who decided to stay at their nests with their lovely wives and not leave them for younger birds with firmer breasts....

Real diamonds for the mistress...
(From New Scientist)

IT IS not just human males who seduce prospective paramours with expensive gifts while bringing home cheap trinkets for their long-term partners. Some male birds do it too.

Great grey shrikes mate for life and raise offspring each breeding season. But the males also sneak away and mate with other females. To charm both long-term partners and mistresses the males offer gifts of food.

To test whether the males put more effort into their dalliances than their "marriages", Piotr Tryjanowski at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, and Martin Hromada at the University of South Bohemia in Ceské Budejovice, the Czech Republic, recorded gifts made by 22 male shrikes to their partners and mistresses. They found that the average energy content of a gift to a mistress was 75 kilojoules, while gifts given to partners averaged about 19 kilojoules. Males often caught lizards, voles and other birds for their mistresses, which required six times as much effort to catch as the insects that they gave their partners (Animal Behaviour, vol 69, p 529). "It is like a saying in Polish," says Tryjanowski. "Artificial jewellery to the wife and real diamonds for the mistress."

The sexiness of oyseters and clams

From New Scientist:
Oysters may deserve their sexy reputation

FABLED for its power to turn ordinary mortals into sex gods, nothing beats the oyster as the prelude to a night of passion. And no, it's not all hype.

High levels of a chemical that boosts libido have been found in clams, a close relative of the oyster, suggesting that their reputation is not undeserved.

Even their texture is enough to turn some people on. "Oysters are so sensual just in their nature," says Diane Brown, the Los Angeles-based author of The Seduction Cookbook, "They have that slippery, slurpy sensation when you eat them that makes them very seductive."

Raul Mirza at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, and his colleagues compared levels of the amino acid N-methyl-D-aspartate in Mediterranean clams and other animals. Previous studies in animals have shown that the chemical affects sex drive by raising testosterone production. The clams had around double the level found in rat brains, the team told the American Chemical Society's annual meeting in San Diego, California.

People who look like nuns

Remember last week when I said that study on how finger length in males was dubious at best? Well, I'm a complete hypocrite.

This is a study about how religious tendencies are 40% genetic and I couldn't agree more. I grew up around a lot of nuns (long story) and I feel like many nuns just look like nuns. Facially. They have that nun look (even without the habit). Sometimes I meet people who are not nuns but look like nuns, only to find out that they are extremely religious. So I think that certain facial characteristics might correlate to the same genetic factors that make up religious fervor. I'm not sure it's anything specific (thin lips, nose, etc), and I'm well aware that I'm getting a bit carried away here, but its definitely something I noticed well before my emersion within the realm of physiology.

They did the study by looking at twins separated at birth. Those handy separated twins...You know, I've never really been comfortable with the idea of twins, but I guess they are good for certain things...

Fairness and punishment

A neat article from NewScientist on human cooperation. We cooperate with those who are not genetically similar to us and that makes us unique in the world. Old theories suggested that we cooperate because it makes things better for both parties even when they are enemies, like the prisoner's dilemma. But they also talk about how people only want to cooperate when things are deemed "fair."

I was a grade school Phys. Ed. teacher for a summer and, let me tell you, children spend pretty much their entire time playing games, trying to cheat, and then complaining when other people cheat because things are not fair.

They also discuss how (adult) humans will often act against their self interest in order to cooperate with others, which trashes just about every working theory of capitalist economics...

Part of the article is quite sad, and has unfortunate implications for Bonobos:

"So if many people really are true altruists, as it seems, why haven't greedier, self-seeking competitors wiped them out? One possibility...is that evolution actually is wiping these people out - it just hasn't finished the job yet...humans evolved to cooperate when our ancestors lived in small, isolated groups of hunter-gatherers. In this setting, they learned through repeated interaction with others that cooperation generally pays because it induces other members of the group to return a favour in the future...true altruism is what evolutionary biologists call a "maladaptation". Evolved to respond in a certain way to a given situation, we find it hard to act differently in the changed circumstances of the modern world."

I would like to say "dont worry, it has a happy ending in which cooperation was shown to be advantagous to large groups" but that's only when those who do not cooperate are punished, and those who do not punish are also punished. It's always seemed to me that punishment is so primitive, and I guess there are reasons for it to be.

Sing it Naom!

Noam tells it like it is:

"The New York Times commented that Kerry didn't make any hint about possible government involvement in health care programs because that position has, in their words, "no political support." Well, according to the most recent polls, 80% of the population thinks that the government ought to guarantee health care for everyone, and furthermore regard it as a moral obligation. That tells you something about people's values. But there's "no political support."

Why? Because the pharmaceutical industry is opposed, the financial institutions are opposed, the insurance industry is opposed, so there's "no political support." It doesn't matter if 80% of the population regard it as a moral obligation: That doesn't count as political support. It tells you something about the elite conception. You're supposed to vote for the image they're projecting. That's not surprising really. Just ask yourself, "Who runs the elections?"

The elections are run by the same guys who sell toothpaste."

What else his ring finger says

This NYT article claims that if a man's ring finger is longer than his index finger, he's more physically aggressive. But I honestly have a lot of problems with this sort of study. They interviewed 298 males AND females and *asked* them about their tendancies and then measured their fingers. So it really should say that "males with longer ring fingers tended to think they have more aggressive tendancies."

Plus they say that "a statistically significant number of males" bla bla bla. I just recently learned what this meant. Very little. Don't believe the hype!

Just for the record, my ring finger is the same length as my index finger.

Monkey Sex

I just watched a National Geographic documentary on Gorillas from the 70's, back when National Geographic actually got political. It was really funny though. They had all this footage of when the US and English societies were first exposed to this massive dark ape through pictures and even film from the 1920's. There were numerous horror films and of course King Kong.

If you know anything about gorillas, you know that they don't attack people unless they're being attacked, but all of the older pictures and footage were of course picturing these violent creatures. But what's more is that in most of them, they had the gorilla taking their women to have sex with them. AMAZING! HILLARIOUS! The white man's fear of huge black sex extends into the animal kingdom! They never said it in the documentary but it was obvious from the footage. This is such a pop psychology dissertation waiting to be written, if it hasn't already.

You have to think, 1920, women just got the right to vote. Jazz is luring white women in just about every major city into the heart of black neighborhoods. And suddenly everyone knows about an even BIGGER, even BLACKER creature, and all the movie people can think about is how it will take their white women.

Or who knows, maybe women were like "hmmmm...." You never know.

We give these people guns?

Cops will be cops:

Videotaping people on a rooftop making out rather than the arrest of Critical Mass people below.

*Tasering* a man in front of his and other petrefied children for allegidly stealing salad from Chuckey Cheese.

Social evolution of sociobiology

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. "