Thursday, October 21st 2010
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.
Friday, October 15th 2010
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 students learned about proximate and ultimate causation — the two overarching ethological levels of analysis (within which we also have developmental and mechanistic levels within proximate, and phylogenetic and evolutionary levels within ultimate causation). In addition to a lesson and reading on this topic (including this post by David Sloan Wilson), we applied our thinking by watching the PBS Special Ape Genius, which focuses on a comparative primatological approach to understanding human cognitive ability. If you haven’t seen the film, you really must! It is available for free, albeit in chunks, at the link above.
Today I’d like to share a few blog post links on proximate and ultimate causation, and a few on primate cognition just because they’re fun and relevant to the film. Then of course, I’ll throw in a few other random links that I think you’ll like.
Proximate and ultimate causation
Greg Laden offers a great perspective on proximate and ultimate causation as it relates to same-sex couples in the animal kingdom. It’s a nice link to our earlier work on sexuality.
Patrick Clarkin, a professor at UMass Boston, provides a nice analysis of the proximate/ultimate distinction as it applies to war.
An article in Psychology Today from this summer connects the proximate/ultimate distinction to a reconception of Maslow’s hierarchy. Should be useful for all the psych majors in the class!
Finally, an article you may not first recognize as being about the levels of analysis, but I think nicely demonstrates our need to understand proximate (mechanism) and ultimate (anticipating adaptation when thinking about the future) levels. It is also a nice demonstration of how our understanding of evolutionary theory — particularly regarding ancestry and our ability to build only on whatever raw material our ancestors give us — is important. And then of course it also discusses ape laughter. Fun! (10/18/10 ETA added forgotten link to this paragraph)
Primate cognition and behavior
You may find a few other related posts and articles on primate behavior stimulating. First, not totally related but certainly fun, Ed Yong’s post Bonobo males get sex with help from their mums documents how mothers help make introductions and even fight off competing males to help their sons maximize mating opportunities. Incidentally, Ed also just won one of the 2010 National Academies Communication Awards. This is a big deal not just for Ed, who is an exceptional writer and probably deserves one of every award we can possibly give him, but to the science blogosphere, whose legitimacy is swiftly increasing (despite the occasional curmudgeon — and besides, see a great response and a round-up of other responses here). This is a great thing for science communication and literacy.
Onward. Here is an interesting PLoS ONE article on cognitive differences in chimps and bonobos. You may recognize two author names — Brian Hare and Michael Tomasello — because they were both featured extensively in Ape Genius. Cool stuff!
Random, but really kinda related, links
First, those of you in the Chambana area — Jorge Cham of PhD Comics fame is here! Go see him speak tonight. I feel like such a fangirl.
The two other links I want to share are a bit more directly related to the course. First, Scientific American has an interesting story chronicling our lives “from womb to tomb” — it covers the field of fetal and developmental origins. As we get more into behavioral endocrinology this will come up more, but this kind of research has implications not only for behavior but for health. It’s a pretty new field and we need to tread carefully, but understanding prenatal origins of variation is a very worthy goal.
Second, I thought this post over at Gene Expression on the Human Nature Top 10 was an interesting take on “humaniqueness.” Check out both the post and the comment thread for some interesting thoughts on what constitutes both widely accepted and undervalued aspects of human nature.
That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend!
Thursday, October 7th 2010
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 covered infanticide and sexual coercion, and showed Steven Pinker’s TED talk on the history of human violence as a provocative way to help us think about violence, culture and variation. Because this is a 100-level course, I make more of a point to demonstrate themes or introduce ideas, rather than provide a ton of content that they can look up on their own. But that always means that a lot of interesting stuff ends up omitted from my lectures. I didn’t talk about step-parenting, though I hope to touch on it in a later lecture. I only touched on the Thornhill and Thornhill rape-as-adaptation material (though they did need to watch and be quizzed on a mini-lecture I prepared on it before coming to class).
That said, Tuesday was one of my favorite classes so far, because students really seemed to come prepared to talk, and think, and listen… and remember, this is a class of 700 where, if the iClicker results are an indication, 550 show up regularly. Rather than give them much new content from what they’d already heard in the mini-lecture online, I had them unpack and analyze what they had learned. I was really impressed with their sophistication, and their confidence in questioning some of the basic assumptions of the material.
So bravo to you, Anth 143, for your brave thinking, your willingness to contribute, and your intelligence!
The dark side of behavioral biology
We do nasty stuff to each other. We fight, cheat, lie, threaten, beat up, maim, kill, rape. We raid, colonize, war, oppress. It’s not pretty. Are these essential parts of human nature? Are they challenges we must overcome to be moral? Are they dictated to us by culture?
Of course, you all know by now that most of our behavior is a hot mess of genes times environment interactions. And that many behavioral biologists think that it is problematic to assert that “psychological adaptation underlies all behavior,” as do Thornhill and Thornhill (1992). Adaptation does not necessarily explain ALL behavior, though it helps with a lot. And yet I was very impressed with the parallels some students made in class this week between some elements of the risk factors associated with infanticide in humans and non-human primates.
Here are a few links regarding evolutionary psychology, a field that, to my mind, embodies this notion of psychological adaptations for all behavior, and universals in human behavior that seem divorced from context. First is a jpg of a game for EvoPsych Bingo, second a smart post from Boing Boing on what is wrong with evolutionary psychology. You are welcome to ponder the issue yourself, and you are certainly not required to agree with my criticisms.
Next, an interesting article in Scientific American by John Horgan on problems with seeing our ancestry as fundamentally violent: Quitting the hominid fight club.
For those of you not in my class, check out the readings I had this week: Carl Zimmer’s amazing and probably now classic piece First, Kill the Babies chronicling Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work on infanticide, and then this biography of Hrdy by Claudia Glenn Dowling that offers even more insight into her work.
Other random but useful tidbits
These aren’t really related to this week’s topic, and instead are just links I want to share.
If you ask for it, then I have to let you have it. A slideshow/poetry reading on the meaning of teaching. I wish every student would watch it. via Greg Laden’s Blog
A few cool posts that came out AFTER our week on mating and marriage: Sex, Evolution and the Case of the Missing Polygamists by Eric Michael Johnson, and Choosing Mates: Do we really want who we say we want? over at the Lay Scientist.
Advice from graduate students to college students — you know, the people that you interact with the most, do most of the hidden labor like grade your papers, and probably know you best.
And finally, my favoritest article this week, a speech entitled What are you going to do with that? over at the Chronicle for Higher Education. Please read it, read the whole thing, then bookmark it, then spend some time figuring out what excites you about life and how you will avoid becoming a boring forty year old (if you’re over forty, how you’ll avoid becoming a boring whatever-age-you’ll-be-in-five-years).
Reference
Thornhill, R, & Thornhill, NW (1992). The evolutionary psychology of men’s coercive sexuality Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, 363-421
