Category: Science

Athletes will be the first to be genetically engineered. Suspicions have already been raised about the 14 and 15 year old record-breaking track stars from China. He-Man mice have been created in the lab. All this makes me blase about drug doping and the recent banning by the FDA of a previously difficult to detect steroid. Indeed, I look forward to seeing the new superathletes in action. Imagine the possibilities in all fields of human endeavour. The new concertos written for 12 fingered pianists will be glorious.

This knack for calmly sailing through the rigors of parenting is no accident, however. Mothers have cooler heads and better coping skills than nonmothers.
It’s all part of the “maternal brain,” according to Craig Kinsley, a psychologist with the University of Richmond. He has presented his findings in the journal Physiology and Behavior this month.
“Reproduction shapes and alters a female’s brain in significant ways,” he said yesterday.
Essentially, the motherly mind does not tend to dwell on fear or confusion in the face of adversity or challenge.

The experiment was done with rats:

He based the conclusions on four years of research with female rats who had, well, their little paws full. Mr. Kinsley and his research team found that veteran mother rats were less stressed by a series of lab challenges than females who had never faced a litter of needy babies.
The rats were placed in an open space as well as inside clear plastic tubing in bright light – hair-raising environments for a rat, according to Mr. Kinsley. The researchers found that the momma rats methodically and fearlessly explored the unknown territories, looking for a way out.
The nonmothers froze up or moved with great caution.
In the aftermath, the mother rat’s brains showed less activation of the amydaglia, an area that regulates fear.
“Pregnancy and offspring create a more adaptive brain, one that’s generally less susceptible to fear and stress,” Mr. Kinsley said.

Nor does the effect seem to vanish:

“But what’s most intriguing is that this seems to be a long-lasting effect which persists throughout life,” he added. “It is not temporary.”

Here is Kinsley’s home page. Here is his claim that pregnancy makes women smarter, in addition to calmer.

My take: I can cite one data point, my mother, in favor of the hypothesis.

Tired of sitting at endless red lights? Frustrated by lights that turn from green to red too quickly, trapping you in traffic?

Now anyone can breeze through congested intersections just like the police, thanks to a $300 dashboard device that changes traffic lights from red to green, making nasty commutes a thing of the past and leaving other drivers open-mouthed at your ability to manipulate traffic.

But what if everyone had one?

Fire engines, of course, have been using these devices for some time now, but they appear to be spreading more generally. Here is the full story, courtesy of www.geekpress.com.

The bottom line: “The potential for chaos is enormous,” Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel said.

Dealers have promised to sell only to police and the proper authorities, but there appear to be no laws against the devices.

The most dangerous month for accidents is August, which is twenty percent riskier than the average month, presumably because people spend more time outdoors then and more time vacationing. You are most likely to drown in July, most likely to be shot in November, and most likely to fall to your death in December. Could that latter figure be driven by Christmas-time depressives committing suicide?

From The World’s Most Dangerous Places.

“About 60 percent of the women said they would prefer to have sex with a cad when considering a brief affair,” said Daniel Kruger, a social psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), the world’s largest academic social science survey and research organization.

…the findings imply that the dad versus cad distinction is intuitive to women and remains a key element of contemporary mating strategies. Women’s preference for cads for short-term relationships supports what evolutionary psychologists call the “sexy son hypothesis,” Kruger said. Even though cads aren’t good bets to stick around and help raise children, the genes that make men successful cads will be passed along to their sons, who will increase their mothers’ eventual reproductive success by providing numerous grandchildren.

That being said, few women want their daughter to marry a cad:

…the distinction between dads and cads is intuitive enough that women showed a strong preference for dads [the contrasting male category, defined as caring, nurturing types] as potential sons-in-law. Only 13 percent of the women said they would prefer to see an imagined 25-year-old daughter engaged to a cad. “A cad would be less likely to provide paternal support for offspring,” Kruger said, “which means that a daughter might turn to the maternal family for help. That could adversely impact the grandmother’s overall reproductive success.”

Here is Kruger’s home page. Here is a link to the journal Human Nature, which lists the article as forthcoming. Here is the home page of co-author Maryanne Fisher.

My take: I can’t get my hands on the original paper. But the explanation, as offered, leaves a gap. It shows that a “cads equilibrium” is stable, once in place. But why are the sons of cads, themselves cads presumably, seen as sexy? One woman may want a cad, if she knows that other women will (later) want her son. But where does the female preference for cads, viewed more generally, come from?

…if a panhandler asks for 17 cents or 37 cents, will he collect more donations than if he asks for 25 cents? Answer: He will receive about 60 percent more.

Here is another study…Students, acting as fundraisers, went door-to-door asking for donations. At half the houses they added one sentence to their spiel: “Even a penny would help.” Did this have any effect? Answer: It nearly doubled donations.

…Is it better to a) lecture students that they should be neat and tidy, or b) compliment them for being neat and tidy. Answer: In this study, the lecture method was useless, while method “b” led to a three-fold increase in the collection of litter.”

From a forthcoming review by J. Scott Armstrong, here is the whole review, it covers a book The Age of Propaganda, by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson.

Here is another bit on persuasion, from Nalebuff and Ayres:

In 1990, H. Wesley Perkins, a professor at Hobart and William Smith College, discovered that most students think that they drink less than the average – and thus increase their consumption to be more like others. When the true drinking data is publicized, and students discover that few of their peers have more than five drinks at a party, peer pressure to binge is greatly reduced. The results were so successful in reducing heavy drinking that this approach has been employed throughout the California state university system and beyond. Rather than telling students to “Just say no,” it is more effective to say, “Just be like most everybody else.”

McCloskey and Klamer tell us that “One Quarter of GDP is Persuasion.”

Both teenagers and adults misjudge how much they pour into glasses. They will pour more into short wide glasses than into tall slender glasses, but perceive the opposite to be true. The delusion of shape even influences experienced bartenders, though to a lesser degree, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has found.

Click here for the full story.

I agree with Alex (see immediately below) that adverse selection need not undo genetic insurance of some kind.

He doesn’t mention abortion, but I view genetic insurance as a possible substitute for abortion. Say you are a young Catholic couple, and you know that you would not abort a Down’s child, even if you detected the abnormality before birth. You also would know that caring for such a child would involve a greater than average financial burden. Might you not buy insurance against this contingency? (Of course many couples simply abort.) Furthermore, couples might buy the insurance when they marry, or at least before they conceive, it would not be hard to make “not being pregnant” as a prerequisite for buying the insurance, if secret genetic tests on the embryo were a huge problem.

The Downs example raises the question of why such insurance does not exist today. More generally, Robert Shiller raises the question of why we do not have more insurance markets than we observe. I don’t think there is a single correct answer. Sometimes I think people simply do not want to face the possibility of encountering certain kinds of difficult events, and buying insurance, in their eyes, admits that possibility into their lives. This obstacle, to me, appears contingent rather than necessary, so I can imagine greater scope for insurance markets in the future. Many financial markets are in any case of recent origin, so why should the growth of markets stop at our current selection?

I took my kids to see the dinosaurs in the Smithsonian yesterday. As I was wandering around, I came across a surprising exhibit on the ice age that noted the following:

Initiation of glacial conditions may be triggered by surprisingly rapid climate changes. Therefore, the minor global cooling trend of recent decades…is being carefully watched and studied. Already the effects on food production are severe in many parts of the world….We are now in a relatively warm period (“interglacial”) following one of several major glacial periods. It is not certain when the present interglacial period will end but…imagine the impact of another full scale glacial advance like that just a few thousand years ago!

Clearly, the Smithsonian needs to update some of its exhibits but when they do so I hope they note that the “scientific consensus” on global climate change has been much more variable than the climate.

On Taiwan, abortions have skewed the island’s demographics to the point that only two girls are born for every three boys.

For the full story, along with a Darwinian analysis, read here.