Well, as a bald question that of course is silly. Anorexia (by ten to one something that women suffer from) itself leads to infertility so of course it can’t be directly inheritable. However, there are other forms of inheritance, and there’s one in particular that has only in recent decades begun to get the attention it deserves: what happens in the womb.

Strictly speaking of course we shouldn’t call this “inheritance”, because if we do we’re going to get all caught up in genes and Darwin and that’s not what we mean. But we also shouldn’t really call it an environmental influence, because then we’ll get all caught up with pollution scares and the like. Now there are such environmental/pollution factors upon development in the womb, alcohol and thalidomide being perhaps the two most famous. But we’re not talking about that either: rather, upon the influence of naturally occuring hormones on future development. Take this:

“Sex hormones in the womb could be a cause of the eating disorder anorexia, a study has found. The suspicion is that oestrogen may be overproduced by some mothers, affecting the baby’s brain and making it susceptible to the eating disorder.

Psychiatrists investigating the cause of the illness did so by studying records of thousands of Swedish twins, held in a database. They found, not unexpectedly, that the risk of developing anorexia was higher in girl twins than in boy twins. Anorexia is far commoner in girls than in boys.

But an exception to the pattern arose in the case of twins of different sexes. Boys who shared the womb with girl twins were found to be ten times more likely to develop the disorder in later life.”

The thing that interests me here is that the same method is posited as an explanation for the male and female brain types which are discussed in our EQSQ personality tests up at the top there. Except that it’s not oestrogen, one of the female sex hormones, which is thought to be responsible, rather the male one, testosterone.

There’s also a much larger point to be made: that the old nature v. nuture debate really is two bald men fighting over a comb. No, we’re not exclusively the product of our genes, nor are we entirely molded by our society or environment. Genes give us capabilities to be sure, and our environment can prompt the expression or not of them. But most important of all to this story is that our environment is not just society, it’s also the whole development process, including that in the womb.

After yesterday’s post on the Refrigerator Mother theory of autism I came across this post by James D. Miller (someone I should point out I know in vague internet kind of way: we’ve both written for the same website in the past) which gives us another insight into the very concept of the refrigerator mother theory of autism causation.

In fact, if I’m to be honest, I really ought to have worked it out on my own. Let’s start with our basic theory here. There’s  spectrum of brain types, from female (or empathic) through balanced to male (or systemizing). Whether a man or a woman has a male or female (or balanced) brain is a matter of probability, not certainty (and our EQSQ personality tests above can help you to place yourself on that spectrum). Simon Baron Cohen’s theory of autism is that it is an expression of an extreme type of the male brain. He goes further and points to the current rise in the incidence of autism as being a result of the fact that more systemizers are marrying each other. Called assortative mating, this is as a result of the sexual integration of the workforce: as women are now working as engineers, software developers and scientists (all systemizing occupations) more are meeting similar systemizers and choosing them as mates. That male brain tendency is therefore being selected for and the result is more cases of the extreme male brain.

OK: so what is it that Miller spotted that I should have? Well, the refrigerator mother thesis insisted that mothers of the autistic were emotionally detatched from their children. But if we think that autism is a result of systemizing (ie, not empathizing) behaviour being maximised in the next generation, then of course this is what we would expect to see, isn’t it?

But it’s not the behaviour of such mothers (or fathers) that creates the autism, but their genes which create both their own behaviour and the autism.

One of the more vile things done to the parents of autistic children is the insistence by some charlatans that they have caused the condition themselves. Some (total cads and bounders) say it is vaccines, or mercury in them, which cause the condition. A largely forgotten theory was the one that mothers created autism by not being emotionally open themselves, or by not showing enough love for their child. An offshoot of Quackwatch shows how mistaken this idea was here.

It isn’t just that we know that there’s a genetic component to autism now (if not genetics being the only component) as a result of the explanations by Simon Baron Cohen (just to recap this. There’s a spectrum of brain types, from empathizing to systemizing, known as the female and male brain types. Autism is an expression of the extreme male brain and the EQSQ personality tests you can see at the top of the page are based on this research and will help you place yourself on that spectrum.) and others.

Even the original progenitors of the refrigerator mother theory seem not to have considered two points. One is that many of the mothers studied had other children who were not autistic. Unless they think that such mothers were picking and choosing amongst their children in a particularly vile manner (something which they were not claiming) then their argument rather fails: because the behaviour of a mother that caused autism in one child should do so in another, correct?

The other point was that the observed emotional coldness probably worked the other way: as autistic children are unresponsive to the conventional displays of love and maternal care, they trigger fewer such displays. It is autism that created the perceived coolness, not the other way around.

Yes, it’s that time of year, there’s nothing going on for the papers to report so they’ve got all sorts of seasonal guff filling the pages. How to feed the entire family with holly, decorating with turkey, that sort of stuff. However, occasionally someone has something interesting to say, like this piece about how to keep New Year resolutions.

The pledge with the most chance of success was to “enjoy life more”, probably because it is so vague and subjective, according to Prof Wiseman.

He developed advice on how to do better because the participants were asked to try one of four different methods.

Prof Wiseman analysed the data to find out what more could be done to improve the low success rate of most resolutions.

Well, yes, I suppose that particular idea would work well: choose something easy to achieve and it’ll be easy to achieve. However, such snarking aside the good professor has indeed come up with something which will be of interest to us here. He tells us that men and women should be rather different in how they try to hold themselves to reaching their goal.

For men the best way is for us vainglorious creatures to say that we’re doing it to reach a specific goal. Dropping those extra 20 pounds, for example, should be seen as a way of getting the babes. Trite as this might seem it does indeed work: you can get most men to do most things if they think that there’s sex at the end of it.

For women the advice is a little different. Rather than thinking about the loss of those 20 pounds as a way to get men, the goal should be announced. To friends and to family. This creates a support network for the person striving. Further, a failure (that midnight session with the Haagen Daz) should not be seen as a irretrievable error but as simply a setback, one that can be surmounted by returning to the fray the next day.

I’ve pondered this in the light of our EQSQ personality tests and our insistence that some male and female attributes lie on a spectrum, with it being only a probability that a man or a woman is at either end. And I think I’m correct in thinking that we’re not really talking about the same things here. The professor’s suggestions aren’t based upon anything innate to the individual (like systemizing or empathizing) but rather to the way that we are socialised. Thus success in such matters for women is based, not on an appeal to empathy, or even to any sexual (or gender) differences, but rather that in our society those groups of family and friends are indeed here many women find their motivations.

Desmond Morris is a well known (for a certain value of “well”) writer on us human beings and how we ended up being like we are. He wrote “The Naked Ape” which was really the first popularization of evolutionary psychology: that our mental structure is shaped by evolution just as much as our physical one is. There’s not really many people left who don’t agree with this idea: the question is how much? Anyway, he’s got a new book out and he takes these ideas quite a bit further:

Feminists could take this two ways. The upside is that Morris thinks women should run more or less everything. “We’d be much better off if women ran most of the organisations,” he says. “If women ran the political world rather than men, for instance. I don’t think men are suited to politics. Women are much more suited because they are genetically more cautious and are not going to make stupid mistakes.” The downside, feminism-wise, is that Morris thinks that men, because of their natural risk-taking, will always be better inventors and artists.

Interestingly, there’s been some similar research done in political economy recently. It’s been noted that government has become much larger since women have had the vote. And that this expansion of government has happened at different times in different countries: but then so did votes for women happen at different times and the two seem linked. The thinking here is that women are more concerned about security (as in the idea that what they look for in a man is the ability to support the children) and a larger government, with more redistribution of income, can provide more of that security.

Another way of describing the same thing would be that redistribution, from rich to poor, appeals to that empathic part of womens’ characters, something we know they have more of than men (on average!) from our EQSQ personality tests.

“For every one great woman artist, there are 100 men,” says Morris. “There are more male geniuses than female geniuses, and there are more male idiots than female idiots. If you’re a human female, you can’t afford to be a risk-taker and you can’t afford to be a dimwit. You have to be in between those two extremes.” Man’s artistic dominance, he argues, cannot be explained by opportunity or social conditioning. Over the whole of evolution, women have produced more art than men - in the form of decorated pottery and clothing - but they have tended to produce traditional art. It is men who have flouted the rules and produced most of the great, mould-breaking art.

That’s rather like the comments that got Larry Summers into so much trouble. The thing is, that it does seem to be true: but only on average. And averages are all very well but they’re a very broad brush approach. As we learn more, are able to tease out more about what makes human beings tick, we find that while there are indeed differences between the averages of this or that race, or sex, sexuality or grouping, we also find that variation within these groups is greater than the differences between the averages.

We thus end up with two things (both of which are true about our personality tests as above):

1) We can predict a probability that an individual shares the characteristics of the group, but only a probability.

2) Such probabilities can be tested, so we shouldn’t use group membership to decide how we would treat or evaluate a single person: we should test and find out.

Thus, while there may be more male than female geniuses, that doesn’t mean that we will not find a female genius, and as and when we do, we should treat her as a genius. Just as we should a systemizer a systemizer, whether male or female.

Things have certainly changed since I was involved in the computer games industry (yes, really, I am credited as being the producer of one successful release). Twenty years ago it was all about how much graphics could we fit into the computer of the time: now it seems to be about psychology as well. Here’s a fascinating little post (for an admittedly odd meaning of “fascinating”) about what’s being worked on for the next generation of games.

What the developers are looking for is authenticity, believability, in the actions of the characters. Currently, much of this is done using live actors and video capture: no one has quite built engines which will react to the actions of other characters believably just yet.

Now where this touches on our concerns here is that what the developers actually want is to build software that will have empathy: if one character frowns, or yawns, then the other characters in the game should react appropriately. In effect, they want to teach the computer models empathy, almost for them to pass an empathic (as opposed to intelligence) Turing Test.

And yes, in modelling human behaviour so as to be able to describe it in code, they are using the basic theories of Simon Baron Cohen, he of our EQSQ personality tests. I was most taken with this piece of advice:

Give your characters a simple model of the emotional status of others to make them seem less autistic when making decisions.

That’s really a rather good description of both empathy and autism there, isn’t it? The ability to divine the emotional status of others is generally agreed to be what autists lack and the ability to both recognise and react properly to them is empathy.

But it’s amazing how these things go, isn’t it? Research orginally intended to discover the underlying causes (and thus possible treatments for) of autism is leading to more realistic computer games.

It’s been some deades now since Gary Becker, the Nobel Laureate, wrote a research paper in which he compared wives and prostitutes: that didn’t go down all that well in some circles, so such economic research is a little less umm, agressive, shall we say now. This article is discussing something that many don’t really want to think about: that we marry not for love so much as in order to get the best deal we can.

For, if there is that special someone just for us out there, then a shortage or an excess of either men or women would make no difference to the number marrying, would it? Also, there would be no difference in the socio-economic status of the men who did marry.

But when we actually look at who does marry we see that there are great differences, both in the numbers who marry and in their socio-economic status: although this is heavily skewed towards men (there is some truth in the idea that men marry for looks and women for more economic reasons it appears). When there are more men than women around then it is only the higher status males who get married. When there are more women than men, the women seem to accept that they’re not going to get as good a bargain and thus settle for a male of lower economic status than they would have.

Now all of this is interesting I think, but not for the detail of the way this marriage market works. Rather, I think the basic point that there is such a market needs to be highlighted. Whatever it is that we actually tell ourselves and each other about romantic love, it appears that when we do make decisions about marriage they’re on calculations of an entirely rational kind. Or, as I rather like to point out, you can ignore economics but economics isn’t going to ignore you: even in your choice of a mate.

The Volokh Conspiracy is a blog nominally aimed at legal scholars: that is, when it isn’t discussing just about anything that its authors want to, it’s about the law and the academic and theoretical applications of it. Thankfully, they don’t limit themselves to such questions, as this series of posts (try here and here) is most interesting. They’re talking about our own favourite subject, the differences between men and women. More, they’re talking about the psychological differences and in this specific case, the differences that make men or women better suited for combat roles.

Now, yes, they do discuss the physiological differences which mean that almost all women won’t be suitable for front-line infantry service (as most men aren’t) but a large part of the effort is expended in pointing out that men and women differ psychologically, and that thus only one of the sexes should be considered for certain roles.

The thing that I find interesting about the psychological side of the argument is that they rely upon the averages of men and women: women are assumed to be empathic, men to be systemizing. Now these assumptions are true, on average, as we know.

Empathy also has negative effects, as it not only engenders a reluctance to kill but is also associated with greater guilt for having killed.

OK, that’s not something that you want in a combat soldier. And this next also makes sense:

Because of the overlap between the sexes, arguably combat personnel should be selected on the basis of these traits rather than using sex as a proxy. However, unlike strength, which can be easily and cheaply screened for, future courage under fire cannot be readily measured. A consistent theme in the combat-behavior literature is that one never knows who is going to be an effective soldier until the shooting starts, and the identity of the good fighters often turns out to be a surprise.

Because individualized predictions of combat performance are not a practical way to select personnel, at least on a wholesale basis, proxies such as sex are more necessary when it comes to predicting whether one has what it takes psychologically to be effective in combat than they are for strength.

Ah, but, you see, we do in fact have simple and reasonable tests for empathy. Our own EQSQ personality tests. There’s nothing wrong with the logic being used: that there are certain attributes we want in combat soldiers, that these are hard to measure, so we should go with proxy measurements which are about as good as we’re going to get.

Except, of course, when we have measuring methods, newly devised, which make that difficult measurement easy (or perhaps easier is more correct).

There’s new information on what should you study? It’s not world changing, I agree, because the most basic point about what you should study is what interests you. That isn’t changed by new information, unless that information comes from you.

It’s also true that you might want to be guided in what you study by our EQSQ personality tests. No, we don’t, just like no one else does, think they are definitive: they are rather simply indicative. That is, information to add to your decision process, not the be all and end all of it.

The new information is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has now released their estimations of how wages and employment are going to change in the years to come. We do have to take this with a pinch of salt, because prediction, especially about the future, is difficult. On the other side, this is the best projection we have, the one from the Federal Government. One of the Wall Street Journal bloggers gives us the essentials here.

But what they say are the ten different careers that will see the largest employment and wages growth are here. The lowest, here. And, as a way of thinking about your future training requirements and job opportunities, here’s the list of those careers with the most job openings: both because of growth in the sector and because of retirements of those who already do them.

The thing that I take from these predictions is that I can see the gender pay gap continuing to shrink. The careers in great demand are those with either a customer service interface, or caring for another, while those declining are the more systemizing professions, as opposed to the empathic.

Essentially, as the economy moves away from “making things” to “providing services”, those stereotypically female attributes are going to become more valuable, and so wages for deploying them will rise.

Heather Kuzmich made it to the last five in “America’s Next Top Model”. Now fascinating as that information is, Heather Kuzmich isn’t, at least you wouldn’t have thought so, the sort of person we feature on this blog. Wannabe 21 year old models aren’t are they?

However, Kuzmich has Asperger’s Syndrome, which very much is part of the subject of this blog. Just to explain briefly, the point is that humans are spread along a spectrum of brain types (and our EQSQ personality tests can tell you where you are on that spectrum) and Asperger’s is a form of the extreme male brain. As the various articles about Kuzmich make clear, while there might be differences in how someone with Aspie’s deals with social situations, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have high intelligence (or can potentially have such).

With Asperger’s there’s a definite desire to say that they are differently abled (and not in that dreadful PC manner that dwarfs are, for example, “differently heighted”) rather than dis-abled. From the New York Times, this about Heather Kuzmich rather makes the point I think:

Aspies, as people with the condition like to call themselves, often have normal or above-average intelligence, but they have trouble making friends and lack the intuitive ability to gauge social situations. They fail to make eye contact and often exhibit a single-minded fixation that can be both bizarre and brilliant.

OK, that’s the downside we might think:

But while Heather’s odd mannerisms separate her from her roommates, those same traits translate as on-the-edge high fashion in her modeling sessions. In interviews on camera, she often glances to the side, unable to hold eye contact. But Ms. Banks, the ’60s-era model Twiggy and the fashion photographer Nigel Barker, who all appear on the show, marvel at Heather’s ability to connect with the camera.

One of the theories (and the one we ascribe to here) about autism and Asperger’s is that this extreme form of the male brain is down to an excessive (perhaps greater than normal is a better phrase) interest in systems and things, rather than the more common interest in people and their emotions. Kuzmich’s connection with the camera would seem to be consistent with that, wouldn’t it?