Today I Learned...

Another interesting point for Perv is that individual men tend to have much narrower sexualities than individual women. This fits with my personal observations: women are more like to be bisexual, more like to switch in a BDSM sense, less likely to have a true paraphilia (something they cannot become aroused or orgasm without. As opposed to a kink, which is a non-standard sexual interest that someone enjoys but does not require for every sexual encounter). Of course, it's impossible to determine the extent of cultural influence from observation alone, but Perv introduces some animal evidence that males fixate to a narrower range of targets.

You might think that supports the idea that it's genetic, but it doesn't. The experiment in question swapped baby goats and sheep with each other, and observed the sexual behavior of the adoptees. Males of both species pursued females of their adoptive species, females remained receptive to both (book didn't mention the behavior of females adopted by the same biological species and I can't find the cite). Male goats do not have a sheep-fucking gene. What this actually shows is not that courtship targets are inborn, but learned from the environment, and that males narrow down their target in the time between birth and puberty in a way females do not.

This offers a really satisfying explanation for the range of human male sexual behavior. Most obviously, the wide range in beauty standards between cultures but narrow range within cultures, and in what an individual man finds attractive. Young male brains have the capacity to learn from the culture what is most advantageous to impregnate, and work with that, but have a hard time shifting targets later in life. It works for non-reproductive sex too: Pederasty will never result in a pregnancy, but if sex with young boys is correlated with gaining resources that will aid in reproduction (e.g. status in Ancient Greece), and the relevant section of the brain is taught that while young, it will find the idea exciting.

So once again, the answer to the question "what are humans programmed to do?" is "be astoundingly adaptive to local conditions."

Since leaving tiny ninjas, I've been teaching biology at a school for sick children and their siblings. The school is really there as a support system and to keep their brains busy, which is good, because the biology program is in terrible shape. I didn't get a textbook until this week, and it is terrible. There is no curriculum, and I'm completely unqualified to teach a real biology class. But I am reasonably qualified to show two kids things I find interesting and show them how to follow up on their own interests. It took me four weeks, but I finally got them to ask questions so I could start opening their minds to the wonders of science.

Unfortunately, what they want to know about is the genetics of racial differences.

They're asking innocently. They used the same tone when asking about the biology of zodiac signs, whether their red hair meant they were angrier, and if the doppelgangers from Vampire Diaries could actually exist. But it puts me in a tricky position. There is a lot of horrible psuedoscience used to support racism, and I don't want to lend credence to it. On the other hand, I don't want to teach them that questions with potentially unpleasant answers shouldn't be asked. Some day they may be doing medical research. Back on the first hand, stereotype threat is a real problem and truth is not an ultimately defense when it is involved. Also, I would like to not get in trouble.

What I told them at the time was: most people talking about genetic differences between races are evil and also bad at science (bonus: they're young enough I can shock them by swearing!), there are often substantial differences between small populations, but two distinct Asian populations look as different from each other as they do from a European population. I threw in a bit about how the classic racial categories just are not biologically true, but maybe not enough. For homework I assigned them articles on sickle cell anemia and lactose tolerance, on the theory that malaria and pastoralism are neutral ways to talk about differences in environment applying selective pressure. I dream of ultimately finding one of those racist fact sheets and eviscerating it with them, which would be both anti-racism and pro-science, but we are not there yet.

The problem is that a neutral reporting of the facts is not enough here. There's reasonably good statistical evidence that Ashkenazi Jews are slightly smarter than Europeans from the same geographic areas. There's super interesting speculation as to why*, and I have in fact discussed that speculation is detail with a very socially conscious Jewish friend. But if all I tell the kids is "Jewish people are smarter", I risk reinforcing some really horrible stereotypes. Luckily, the story of the selective pressure is intimately tied up with persecution and bigotry, so it's easy to bring up. If I talk about rice farming selecting for mathematical aptitude or poor hygiene in Europe selecting for a better work ethic, relative to south Asia, I risk reinforcing some really horrible stereotypes. But the things that would counter those stereotypes are outside the scope of a biology class.

It'd probably be much the same if we cover reproduction (not guaranteed- kids are only here for a few months and I'm letting them choose the topics). In a world where kids learn all about enthusiastic consent and masturbation and queer sexuality, I could teach them the biology of reproduction and move on. In the current world, teaching reproduction reinforces the undeserved primacy of straight, cis, PIV sex.** But I don't thing I can assign What You Really, Really Want as part of biology class.

I'm open to suggestions here, on both the meta issue and on specific examples I can explore with them.


*Short version: the risk of spontaneous attacks by Christians rewarded medieval Jews for keeping forms of wealth that were easy to travel with and hard to seize. Farm land was the opposite of this. Gold was pretty good. Intelligence was perfect.

**I have a BA in biology and the only time I ever heard vaginal wetness discussed in college was a psychology class, where they explained that arousal experiments were done primary on men because they were easier to measure.

So in the past month, HIV and its cousins* have**:

1. Cured Leukemia
2. Made kittens glow in the dark

I only intellectually understand how terrifying AIDS was in the 80s, when it appeared to kill you in months and no one knew what it was. I grew up in a time when it was dangerous, but known- there's a test for it, and treatment that can extend your life. I'm getting the feeling that 200, or maybe even 100, years from now, people will view HIV as a tremendous gift that is the basis of immortality and six pack abs. And they'll read about the 80s and kind of get it intellectually, but not really, the way I don't understand fear of bacterial illness. Until their immortality shot mutates and kills them horribly, just like antibiotic-resistant bacteria are going to kill us.


*by which I mean, heavily modified viral particles based on HIV and its feline equivalent

**by which I mean, in the past month, I have heard about the following things that happened some time ago.

I'm sure everyone has seen the NYT article on decision fatigue and how it relates to blood glucose levels. Some people (i.e., my dad) misinterpreted it as "people make bad decisions when they're hungry", but I think the truer statement is "risk taking depletes a pool that can be refilled by food." We don't actually know whether the judges have a reasonably good function for determining whether people will re-offend, and simply require them to meet a higher threshold as they get hungrier, or if they stop being able to accurately judge prisoners, in which case keeping them in prison is the more conservative thing but not necessarily the wrong thing, depending on how we weight the rights of good prison

Around the same time, I'm reading another book on hoarding, which talks about a constellation of related traits that seem correlated with hoarding: perfectionism, indecisiveness, fear of making mistakes, fear of losing information, fear of loss (of stuff), fear of loss (of memory)**, inability to prioritize. All of which seem like they could stem from more rapid decision fatigue, be it because hoarders have fewer reserves or find each decision more taxing.

Apparently I don't have anywhere to go with this, but I still thought it was interesting.


*I would love to see a long term study of the recidivism rate of people paroled at various times during the day, and the prison behavior of people denied over the same distribution.

**This is really interesting. Despite doing no worse than non-hoarders on memory tests, hoarders are disproportionately likely to be afraid they'll forget things, and to leave things out as a physical reminder. That's why some hoarders have piles of stuff out in the open, but empty filing cabinets.

Did you know that heritable, as in h^2, the scientific measure of heritability, has a very little in common with what we would think of as genetic determinism? Heritability is simply the measure of how much offspring resemble their parents, relative to the range in the population. Not even how predictive a parent's trait value is for their offspring, just how similar they are.

This has a bunch of weird consequences. For example, in the Netherlands, skin tone has a higher heritability value in the winter, because in the summer young people tan more and it destroys the correlation between their tone and their parents'. Even more counter intuitive, sex has a heritability value of 0, because everyone has a parent of each sex.* Number of arms at birth is barely heritable, in that there are certain heritable defects that make you more prone to having less than two arms, but they're so rare they barely create a range for us to consider.

Also, and this is important, heritability is only valid in the environment it is measured. A given trait is more heritable when the environment is more consistent. So when you see adoption studies saying parenting doesn't matter that much, what they mean is that across the variations in parenting seen in families that adoption agencies found worthy, parenting style doesn't matter much.

*This absolutely has to be true as a consequence of how sex is defined biologically, regardless of the gender identity of either parent.

59 Seconds continues to commit the two major sins of happiness research: Confusing The Number Circles On The Form With Genuine Long Term Happiness, and Telling Stories. Let's tackle the stories first. There is at least one study, and possibly many (can't check, I'm listening to it on CD), showing that when people discuss a frustrating event with friends they leave the same or less happy, but when they write down the event they feel better afterwards. Technically the only facts are the exact numbers that came out of each study, but let's assume it's been replicated enough that we can call writing=feel better, talking=feel worse a fact. We can't, for a lot of reasons, but I can't get distracted by that right now. Because even if that were true, the researchers explanation for it- "talking just reminds people of things, writing makes them form a narrative"- is completely unfounded. To test that, you'd have to look at things like "what if we tell people to just complain when they write?", "what if we tell people to tell their friends stories?", "what if they read the helpful diary entry to a friend?" Until then, the explanation is just a story.

And then there's the second sin, which I'm going to expand into a a general "extrapolaing from a distorted view of a single moment in time to all of eternity." My other book right now is Crucial Conversations. It doesn't have any scientific citations, but it is the only book on interpersonal skills I have ever found at all useful*, and that's even better. Technically, Crucial Conversations is telling the same story telling sin I accuse 59 seconds of, but it doesn't bother me because 1. it's not claiming to discuss specific studies, just trends, and 2. I can absolutely see how the stories they are true about my life and the corrections they suggest will make my life better. So I guess 59 Second's sin isn't telling stories, it's telling useless stories.

I apologize for using the word "story" in both the metadiscussion and the specific discussion, because it's rapidly going to stop looking like a word. But soldiering on: one of the brilliant points in Crucial Conversations is that when we have an interaction with someone that goes poorly, we tell ourselves a story about why it happened. The fact is that the coworker excluded you from a conversation, the story is that he's doing it deliberately to cut you out because you're a woman. You could just as easily tell a story that he'd heard you were nervous and wanted to help you, or is a nervous talker and feels like shit now. You have to watch the stories you tell very carefully***, or you'll act inappropriately to the situation. But we tell these stories because in the short term, they make us feel better. SO it seems entirely plausible to me that people feel better immediately after writing down a negative event, because they've now got the fairy tale written, staring them, but that this locks them into repeating the same mistake over again.

59 Seconds briefly rallied by providing scientific justification for a story I believe: the Getting Things Done Philosophy, in which storing information in your brain is anathema because it uses valuable mental ram, and you should do everything in your power to break things into loops you can offload onto storage and close as quickly as possible, because unclosed loops = occupied RAM = more stress + lowered productivity. Apparently the whole mental RAM thing is totally true: you do hold certain information and intentions in your brain until the whole project is finished, and then quickly wipe them. But Wiseman goes in the exact opposite direction for GTD on this: he suggests that procrastinators lie to themselves and say they'll work on a project for "just a few minutes", counting on the fact that once they start they won't be able to stop until they're done. That seems like a great plan. The first time. But it seems like over time it would increase your resistance to starting anything. But Wiseman doesn't know that because he hasn't looked past the first attempt

*this sounds like damning with faint praise, but I'm actually finding it extremely interesting and expect it to be extremely useful when I have a chance to put it into practice.**

**I've had this rant building for a while. I didn't share it because I'm trying not to rant but... screw it. I've basically given up on anything with "for introverts" in the title because they're inevitably written by extroverts. Now, extroverts are not bad people. Some of my best friends are extroverts. And I'm willing to concede that their extroversion makes them more successful at particular things and/or happier at life in general. But, and extroverted authors listen up because this is the critical point, just like you can't make pessimists happier by forcing them to pretend to be optimists, you can't make introverts happier by making them pretend to be extroverts. My goal is not to be more like you, it's to make being me easier. Being you just seems exhausting.

***Wow, this is getting all circular. I only just noticed that this is exactly the Sin of Story Telling I described in the first paragraph.

I'm really, really skeptical of happiness research in general and 59 Seconds in specific, because the author doesn't seem to distinguishing between "true internal happiness" and "the number we circle on the form." But he did just say something interesting: when coping with a recent misfortune, bitching to friends appears to be at best neutral at making you feel better,* but writing it down is genuinely helpful. The hypothesis he presents with no supporting evidence is that writing leads people to form narratives about their problems, while complaining just makes them thinking about it to no useful purpose. As a person who spends a lot of time trying to form narratives about everything, I find this fits nicely with my preexisting biases.

And speaking of barely related factoids I've been looking for an excuse to use: did you know that in Russian, "to have a story with" means to be in love with? I like that.


*at least in the timescale measured. In things like this and the pillow punching study, I don't think they're successfully distinguishing between letting a problem go and suppressing it.

Sex at Dawn has been a shining example of why one should withhold criticism until one has read the book question. I may be jinxing the hell out of it by writing this halfway through. Anyway, it's by no means perfect, but it's not nearly as stupid as Dan Savage made it sound. It appears Savage may have selectively read and promoted the parts of the book that agreed with his existing worldview while disregarding nuance. I know, I was shocked too. One of the authors went along with it in web and podcast interviews, but if my choices were "selectively emphasize and overextrapolate from certain parts of my book, huge amounts of media coverage" or "stick to the exact truth as written, no media coverage", I would probably say what the columnist with an agenda wanted to hear as well.

Which is not to say the book is entirely correct, either. It's a little hard for me to judge because this is related to what I studied at college, so there's an abundance of things they've simplified that I know more about (or simply don't know much about- the authors are a psychiatrist and a psychologist, and it's clear their knowledge of biology doesn't extend past apes, birds, and prairie voles, the species that come up most in pop evopsych). And a few things where I know they're not outright lying, but where the evidence either doesn't support or in toto runs directly counter to the point they're trying to make.* And a few more things that I don't know much about but don't pass the smell test: they heavily imply that because jealousy is considered shameful in certain societies, no one feels it. And it killed my inner biologist to see them cite societies where a woman's brother is a primary caretaker (in place of the genetic father) as evidence that genetic relatedness as unimportant.**

This is perhaps typical of the minor strain of exotification running through the book. For a book that's about calling modern sexuality stupid, and takes pains to criticize anthropologists who constantly phrase their analysis of cultures as arising from the choices of men, it seems weird to see sentences like "During [Darwin's] circumnavigation of the glove on the Beagle, the young naturalist appears never to have gone ashore in search of the sexual and sensual pleasures pursued by many seafaring men of that era.", which appears to me to be treating the native women like especially awesome vending machines. Not to mention all the times they talk about rituals and protocols designed to combat jealousy that appear to boil down to "you have no right to say no," but don't actually say that outright.

The truth is, I went into this book with my mind made up: humans are capable of a wide variety of behaviors, and they adapt those behaviors to the circumstances. Either they do it consciously, or the ones people who naturally do the now-advantageous thing have more babies.*** The evolution of sexual possessiveness in response to the emergence of the importance of property isn't humans being stupid, it's fascinating. And there's still room for the book I really want, which is an exploration of how different resource distributions lead to different bonding and parenting concepts.

*They state it's a widely accepted fact that Homo erectus lived in single-male, multi-female harems, like gorillas. I can't prove they're wrong because very few cave man pre-nups survived into the present day, but I can mention that, to the best of our knowledge, H. erectus does not display the sexual size dimorphism typical of harem-keeping species.

They're not so great at anthropology either: they conflate partible paternity- the belief that a baby can have more than one father- with the more specific belief that babies are made of accumulated sperm. I have the distinct feeling that if I knew more anthropology I'd be less impressed with the book.

**Biology primer: caring for your sister's children, rather than your non-exclusive sexual partner's children, is a sign that you do care (in an evolutionary sense) about how genetically close you are to the children you're investing in, seeing as you're choosing to save your resources for children you know you're related to.

***In brief: in small tribes where resources are held nearly-in-common, it's not a big deal if you don't know if a kid is yours, or if you fall out of favor with your kid's father, because it doesn't change the transfer of resources from father to child much.