Tag Archives: Brain and Behavior

Brain response to facial expression in autistic individuals and their siblings

ResearchBlogging.orgSiblings of those diagnosed with autism are more than 20 times as likely as members of the general population to also have autism. Some of these siblings also show evidence of autism-like but less marked cognitive and social communication problems. This suggests that autism has either an environmental cause typically found in all siblings during development or childhood or a strong heritable component, but there is not a known genetic link or a well established biological marker. A biological marker other than observed behavioral deficits would be a neurological phenotype such as might be seen in brain imaging.

Spencer et al, working from various units of Cambridge University seem to have identified such a marker.
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How Do You Get Sexual Orientation and Gender in Humans?

Humans appear to have a reasonable amount of diversity in their sexual orientations, in what is often referred to as “gender” and in adult behavior generally. When convenient, people will point to “genes” as the “cause” of any particular subset of th is diversity (or all of it). When convenient, people will point to “culture” as the “cause” of … whatever. The “real” story is more complicated, less clear, and very interesting. And, starting now, I promise to stop using so many “scare” quotes.

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Driving The Patriarchy: Demonic Males, Feminism, and Genetic Determinism

Behaviors are not caused by genes. There is not a gene that causes you to be good, or to be bad, or to be smart, or good at accounting, or to like bananas. There are, however, drives. “Drives” is a nicely vague term that we can all understand the meaning of. Thirst and hunger are drives we can all relate to. In fact, these drives are so basic, consistent and powerful that almost everyone has them, we share almost exact experiences in relation to them, and they can drive (as drives are wont to do) us to do extreme things when they are not met for long periods of time. While eating disorders are common enough and these affect a hunger drive, it is very rare to find a person thirst themselves to death.
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“Monkeys on our backs” by Richard Tokumei will not even make good toilet paper

Richard Tokumei has written a book that is so bad he is ashamed to put his own name on it. “Richard Tokumei” is the pen name of a ‘writer/editor in Southern California [with] degrees in Humanities and Phychology from the University of California Berkeley” and he has produced a book designed to anger everyone who hears of it in order to create needless sensation and thus, sell copies. Which, once people get their hands on, will make rather low quality toilet paper.
Continue reading “Monkeys on our backs” by Richard Tokumei will not even make good toilet paper

How did humans get so smart?

There is no evidence that they did, but abundant evidence that they didn’t. One example of this is found in how business in the US handle the inevitability of future rising costs of energy, and along with this collection of individual behaviors, the way the free market, the most intelligent and powerful of human activities, optimizes our economy.
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Falsehoods: Human Universals

There are human universals. There, I said it. Now give me about a half hour to explain why this is both correct and a Falsehood. But first, some background and definition.
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What is the most important human adaptation?

Human infants require more care than they should, if we form our expectations based on closely related species (apes, and more generally, Old World simian primates). It has been said that humans are born three months early. This is not accurate. It was thought that our body size predicted a 12 month gestation, and some suggested that Neanderthals would have had such, but this research conclusion has been set aside based on new analysis. But it is still true that developmentally, human children do not reach a stage of development that allows some degree of self care for a very long time compared to apes. The actual sequence of development is not directly comparable: It is not the case that after a certain amount of time humans reach a specific stage reached earlier in the lifecycle by Chimpanzees, as the differences are more complicated than that. For the present purposes, we can characterize the human condition for early development like this: Human babies are more helpless in more ways and for longer than comparable ape babies.
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Why do women shop and men hunt?

Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other’s shoes (the gals)?

This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The Pleistocene with today’s behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by “sound” you mean “sounds good unless you listen really hard.”

I list this argument among the falsehoods, but really, this is a category of argument with numerous little sub-arguments, and one about which I could write as many blog posts as I have fingers and toes, which means, at least twenty. (Apparently there was some pentaldactylsim in my ancestry, and I must admit that I’ll never really know what they cut off when I was born, if anything.)

Before going into this discussion I think it is wise, if against my nature, to tell you what the outcome will be: There is not a good argument to be found in the realm of behavioral biology for why American Women shop while their husbands sit on the bench in the mall outside the women’s fashion store fantasizing about a larger TV on which to watch the game. At the same time, there is a good argument to be made that men and women should have different hard wired behavioral proclivities, if there are any hard wired behavioral proclivities in our species. And, I’m afraid, the validity from an individual’s perspective of the various arguments that men and women are genetically programmed to be different (in ways that make biological sense) is normally determined by the background and politics of the observer and not the science. I am trained in behavioral biology, I was taught by the leading sociobiologists, I’ve carried out research in this area, and I was even present, somewhat admiringly, at the very birth of Evolutionary Psychology, in Room 14A in the Peabody Museum at Harvard, in the 1980s. So, if anyone is going to be a supporter of evolutionary psychology, it’s me.

But I’m not. Let me ‘splain….
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Persistent ethnic differences in test performance may be entirely an artifact of the method used to ‘adjust’ the test

ResearchBlogging.orgIt is well established among those who carry out, analyze, and report pre-employment performance testing that slope-based bias in those tests is rare. Why is this important? Look at the following three graphs from a recent study by Aguinis, Culpepper and Pierce (2010):

Continue reading Persistent ethnic differences in test performance may be entirely an artifact of the method used to ‘adjust’ the test

The Touch of the Phantom: When left is right and right is left

ResearchBlogging.orgIf you watch a fake hand standing in for your right hand, and it is touched with a brush while at the same time your left hand, hidden from view, is similarly touched, you feel your right hand being touched. This spooky finding is called “phantom touch” and was reported in a recent issue of PLoS ONE.

i-cc9e17c6a6256480ed10b6bdc63c69b6-rubberhand.jpg

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Women are smarter than men (well, duh!) UPDATED

Note: First Woman Michele Obama confirms my suspicion

Added: Proof

Who is smarter, men or women?


Any college teacher (at least in the social sciences and life sciences) who has ever paid attention to their own stats know that women do better than men in college classes.

OK, women are smarter. But why?

There are all kinds of post hoc explanations given for this like “Girls get better grades because professors are men, nod nod wink wink” and so on. What a load of crap. Women are smarter than men on average, among the smartest people there is no emperical evidence that women are underrepresented, and among the dumbest people in the world …. well, those are mostly guys.

The reasons are obvious and straight forward. The hormones that give some men an evolutionary advantage over some other men also make you stoopid. Any questions? Ask a girl, she’ll explain it to you.

And now, finally (or shall I say, “once again”) there’s proof:

Female students are ahead of men in almost every measure of UK university achievement, according to a report from higher education researchers.

A Higher Education Policy Institute report shows that women are more likely to get places in the top universities and go on to get better grades.

Women also outnumber men in high status subjects, such as law and medicine.

bbc

UPDATE: This interesting piece appeared the other day in the New York Times: Girls Lead in Science Exam, but Not in the United States . A graphic from that piece is now the featured image for this post (above). So there you go.

So, there you go. Comments?

More emotional intelligence = more orgasms

ResearchBlogging.orgAccording to a study just coming out in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, “variations in emotional intelligence–the ability to identify and manage emotions of one’s self and others–are associated with orgasmic frequency during intercourse and masturbation.”

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