I like science. Sure, it has many practical consequences. For example, I much prefer to send RSVPs for upcoming events by email rather than pony express. But I also like science for another reason: as entertainment. Being exposed to new findings is exciting. It’s not unlike intellectual travel. I get to see things I’ve never seen before. So to speak. Science . . . I can feel jumps sparking over the relative canyons of my neuronal synapses right now.
In the spirit of travel, let’s take a brief cruise this very minute. Shall we?
First stop: The Origin of Morality
Where does our moral sense come from? Good question. Many argue “from religion.” But this can’t be, for psychological studies and anthropological research has shown that people without religion have morals and behave as morally as those with. Even other primates and some animals show a rudimentary moral sense. A new study suggests that the capacity for a “moral faculty” evolved out of more mundane forms of cognition and emotion.
Specifically -
Scientists at Harvard University have found that humans can make difficult moral decisions using the same brain circuits as those used in more mundane choices related to money and food. [source]
Who gets the last piece of pizza? It seems how that question is answered might tell us a lot about where morality comes from.
Second Stop: A Transient Gender Difference
In a new paper in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, we find — hold onto your hats now — Study suggests boys and girls not as different as previously thought
Say it ain’t so! (Being facetious here.) Thinking of females as large, living Barbi-s, males as large, living G.I. Joes, just got a bit more antiquated.
Here’s the surprise -
Although girls tend to hang out in smaller, more intimate groups than boys, this difference vanishes by the time children reach the eighth grade.
So some gender differences are a mere flash-in-the-years? Could be.
Final Stop: A Less-Explored Dark Side to Vitamins
Okay, this destination could be a bit of a bummer for some. Like visiting a war memorial. Only what could be said to have been slain here is the hope of easy, natural health improvement — without drawbacks and dangers — provided by . . . vitamins. Vitamins? Doesn’t the very world have pure and uplifting connotations only? How could vitamins be bad?
Truth is, any substance that can influence our biology in good ways can also have side-effects or even outright detrimental influences under certain conditions or in a specific individual/population.
One such case gets spelled out with this headline: Vitamin A increases the presence of the HIV virus in breast milk.
Oh darn. That’s not good. Clearly spelling out the danger we’ve got this lead paragraph -
Vitamin A and beta-carotene supplements are unsafe for HIV-positive women who breastfeed because they may boost the excretion of HIV in breast milk—thereby increasing the chances of transmitting the infection to the child, a pair of new studies suggest.
And there you have it. Brief intellectual travels completed. I like to think that besides providing entertainment, such travels also bring an increased understanding of the world. Which has lasting benefits.
It has occurred to me that the Bible god could not have dictated His book to the Eskimos*, for it says nothing of seal and caribou. Rather than the Canaanites and Hittites, the extreme-northern Americans of the time battled bitter cold and the occasional polar bear. While heat appears in the King James Version of the Bible 241 times; there are only 17 uses of cold; A search for lion yields 141 hits, polar bear, not one.
Speaking of bears, the Bible god grants humankind dominion over all the animals. In the case of the grizzly, it’s a good thing humans invented weaponry, because without spears at minimum, the grizzly would have dominion over us relatively puny, sometimes knee-knocking Homo sapiens. Quoting Genesis to lions and tigers and bears doesn’t seem to impress them. Oh my.
Many characters in the Bible owned slaves. As far as I know, that’s not part of Eskimo culture. In the ancient Middle East one class of men had dominion over another. And they were not condemned for it. Perform a bit of a white-wash and call them servants if that makes you feel better. It was the way of their world. Men of the Bible god owned and sold other men, women, and children.
Didn’t the god of these people, this entity from a higher world, hold a higher standard? Did the Bible, in fact, get it wrong, and those who no longer hold one race above another now have it right? Throughout the ages the Bible has been used to commend and later condemn a whole platoon of motley behaviors.
Fortunately, human social conscience has evolved and is evolving. In some cases the pulpit may have helped to spread the word. But as frequently, and maybe more frequently, preachers have been behind the curve of recognizing an expanding circle of rights.
Forget about gay marriage — some churches still do not grant full respect and rights to women. Many religious authorities continue to assert, in words often left unsaid, that women deserve the status of “household assistants” and not that of complete equals to men. Aren’t women as worthy of standing behind an altar as they are kneeling before it? If not, why not?
Outdated reasoning. Although size and might may have “made right” in the human animal’s distant past — in times of the origination of religious sentiments that persist today — this is far from an essential truth. Power, however, is all today’s men have over women. That and undeservedly revered documents such as the Bible.
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*The indigenous peoples of near-polar regions, including the Yupik, Inuit, and Aleut. [Wiki info]
New research into male infidelity has produced an intriguing finding that comes with a big but. (Pun intended, not delivered.)
In Men more likely to cheat if they are economically dependent on their female partners we learn -
[M]en who were completely dependent on their female partner’s income were five times more likely to cheat than men who contributed an equal amount of money to the partnership.
An interesting statistical correlation. Yet in the very next sentence we run smack into a huge but . . .
The relationship between economic dependence and infidelity disappeared when age, education level, income, religious attendance, and relationship satisfaction were taken into account.
Yowza. The touted relationship between economic dependence and infidelity disappeared when other variables were controlled for! So it may be only superficially true that the two are related.
About those other variables, study author Christin Munsch said this -
“One or more of these variables is impacting the relationship.”
Which one? Unknown at this point.
Unfornately, many readers don’t get into the “fine print” of the actual body of an article. They like to stick to the big font headline for their info. And that’s a problem. I can already hear the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the actual scientific findings already . . . groan.
The research did yield these other noteworthy findings -
An average of approximately 3.8% of male partners and 1.4% of female partners cheated in any given year during the six-year period studied.
That’s a lot less than I would have expected. Interesting
Ironically, men who make significantly more than their female partners were also more likely to cheat.
Again, is money/income truly the issue here, or only superficially so?
The study also found that women who were financially dependent on their male partners were less likely to cheat than women who made the same as or more than their male partners.
These study results are certainly thought-provoking. As a critical thinker, however, I’d refrain from buying into elaborate speculations as to why the results were as they were. There are just too many buts involved.
Why is “cheating” so prevalent? Is it because we animals are simply rotten to the core? Is it a by-product of some other adaptive trait or behavior? Or can infidelity itself be adaptive?
New research asserts that sexual infidelity of the straying-female variety may in fact be adaptive. At least for birds.
The study has shown that these extra-pair fertilisations can result in a higher diversity of specific genes which detect disease and trigger an immune response in offspring. As a consequence, the offspring survive longer probably as a result of having greater resistance to a wider range of diseases.
Hmm. Genetic diversity is a good thing. And for quite some time now it has been affirmed that sexual reproduction itself has the essential advantage of helping the individuals in a population stay one step ahead of parasites and viruses, etc. So the above makes sense. But does it hold true for humans?
There is a problem with making a direct comparison of birds to humans by way of this one study, however. Among the birds studied, warblers on a small island, “This extra pair fertility was found to be common – accounting for 40 per cent of offspring.” So questions arise. Certainly, 40 percent of human offspring are not the result of female infidelity. Even the 10 percent level bandied about for many years has been thrown into question. It is more likely in the 2 to 3% range. And then there is the “small island” element. Do warblers on large continents show different infidelity rates? What about humans and small islands?
The question remains an important one. Why do human beings stray? Of course, there may be many reasons why. But I strongly suspect that there is an underlying genetic predisposition to do so. A predisposition that becomes manifest in certain people in under certain conditions.
As a scientific thinker, I have a hard time considering infidelity to be a sin, an ultimately bad thing. Of course, as a social creature I can easily condole those affected by it, and frown upon perpetrators of it. But I mostly just want to understand.
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Source: Eurekalert, Birds may increase their offspring’s survival through infidelity
Groan. I must be intellectually fatigued this morning. So I’ll turn the critical thinking over to you. Anything about this announcement of a new science finding strike you as . . . semi-lame or worse?
Title -
First Concrete Evidence That Women Are Better Multitaskers Than Men
Lead paragraph -
Professor Keith Laws at the University’s School of Psychology looked at multitasking in 50 male and 50 female undergraduates and found that although the sexes performed equally when they multitasked on simple maths and map reading tasks, women far excelled men when it came to planning how to search for a lost key, with 70 per cent of women performing better than their average male counterparts.
There you go. Have at it.
[Update/analysis below the fold.]
I love science. First, because I love to learn and understand how things work. Second, because I love puzzles, and at the frontline of every new finding there is a new puzzle, or three, to contemplate. Third, because I like intellectual surprises. Hey, I wasn’t expecting that!
Science is frequently portrayed as the sterile act of collecting data to “prove”/support (test, really) already held ideas. Hmm. Variable A seems to be linked to B, let’s find out. Yet scientists frequently bump into variables of the C, D and even Q sort. Hey, what is that doing here?! Oh, yes, science involves quite a bit of head scratching.
Consider some recent research described this way [all emphases mine]:
In a longitudinal study of recovery patterns of children affected by Katrina, researchers at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center and the St. Bernard Parish Public Schools looked at 400 mostly White elementary- and high-school-aged children (from ages 9 to 18) between 2005 and 2008. The children lived in a New Orleans school district that was heavily damaged by the hurricane.
In paragraphs about the findings, I encountered a couple “Q” variables: things that caused me to scratch my head and ask questions.
But this work in progress also found that more than a quarter of the children continued to have significant trauma symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression three years later. Children who reported these symptoms were more likely to be younger, female, have seen a mental health professional, and also report family or school problems. They also reported being exposed to more traumas.
That’s a bit of a surprise tucked in there. More symptoms associated with having seen a mental health professional? Why is that? I can think of a few reasons.
Male and female teens who experienced the hurricane showed distinct patterns of behavioral stress as well as gender differences in how they regulated physiological stress, the study found. Specifically, compared to the children who weren’t exposed to Katrina, girls who survived the hurricane were more depressed and boys showed lower levels of aggression and higher levels of confidence. Heightened stress hormonal reactions were likewise associated with depression in girls and confidence in boys.
Huh. Following the stress of the hurricane and living in a devastated region, girls were more depressed. And boys had lower levels of aggression and higher levels of confidence. The girls part is understandable, perhaps predictable. The boys’ increase in confidence . . . now that’s a surprise. And it raises all sorts of questions and possibilities.
And so I am left eagerly awaiting more . . . science.
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Source: Hurricane Katrina’s effects on children: Resilience and gender
