Vive la Difference

There’s an excellent journal out there which collects the reults of improbable research. This particular story doesn’t belong there at all: it belongs in one about believable research. Another way of putting this might be that the result is blindingly obvious to anyone who knows anything at all about sex.

So, using various cleverly constructed experiements the researchers tried to work out whether being flirted with by those apparently available made men and women react differently. The answer was yes.

Men who were flirted with seemed to have less connection with their own pre-existing relationship. They were less likely to forgive a transgression by their partner for example.

However, women, when flirted with, were more likely to forgive their man such mistakes: evidence that they became more committed to their relationship the more temptation was put in their path.

We can all make up a number of possible explanations for this behavior. The traditional evolutionary one, that men are more likely to be interested in spreading it around than women are. Or perhaps a slightly subtler version of the same thing: that men are indeed more likely to wander and the refusal to forgive trifling mistakes was a method of building up the excuse bank, the justifications for why he might be right to stray.

However, my own theory is a great deal less complex and accords much better with my own experience of the world. Men are easily pleased creatures so the risks of switching from one woman to another, from one sequential monogamous relationship to another are fairly low. Finding a decent man is however a rather more difficult prospect….this might be because of the quality of men in general or it might be because women are a little pickier, this makes no difference to the logic here….thus women once they’ve got someone Mr. Half-Right are reluctant to give him up for what they know the average quality of the others in the available pool is.

If you like, for men there are indeed many more fish in the sea while for women there’s only a few with the requisite piscine qualities and an awful lot of pond life floating around them.

This might not be the most amazing discovery ever you know: men and women have (in general) different attitudes to one night stands.

Many women are left unhappy in the aftermath of casual sexual encounters, a survey has revealed.

Just under half of women who answered the internet poll, published in the journal “Human Nature”, said they felt it had been a bad idea.

Four out of five men, in contrast, said they were happy with a brief fling.

That’s not a finding that would shock the proverbial maiden aunt, I’m sure. That men and women will have different attitudes to casuaal sex is pretty much insisted upon by the main evolutionary theories: that given the investment that women have to make into childbearing as opposed to the minimal involvement that a man can have, we’d expect women to a great deal more picky about their partners and how well they know them before getting down to the old rumpy pumpy.

One report on this rather missed the distinction:

Eighty per cent of men enjoy casual sex because it satisfies their prehistoric instinct to breed.

Erm, no. Men and women feel exactly the same instinct to breed: that’s something that’s inherent in being human for we are all, after all, descended from those who did breed. The point is that the method of having the next generation makes much greater demands upon women that it does upon men (in the purely physical sense that is: child support laws have rather changed the equation in the modern world). There are also many fewer chances for women to breed than men: in theory a man can have hundreds of children while the upper bound for a woman is somewhere between ten and twenty (with exceptions, of course).

So we expect women to be much more choosy about who they have children with: and while we’ve now got decent contraception, there’s still a great deal of hard wiring from those hundreds of thousands of years when we didn’t.

The academic leading the research said it showed that there was no evolutionary advantage for women in one night stands.

That’s the correct interpretation: there is an advantage for men and not one for women. Thus the different feelings aabout such sexual encounters.

An interesting little finding:

Scientists investigating human sexuality have found that the brains of homosexuals have structural and functional differences from those of “straight” people.

Lesbians appear to have a lower proportion of grey matter in their brains than straight women, giving their brains a more “male-like” structure.

The brains of gay men appear to have structural similarities to those of heterosexual women. They also exhibit the same powerful response as straight women to the sex hormones released in male sweat.

The research comes amid growing interest in how variations in brain structure are linked to human behaviour.

This of course speaks directly to the theory behind our own EQSQ personality tests. We are, essentially, making the same assumption. That there’s a spectrum of brain types, from systemizing to empathic, and that these map pretty well to the stereotypes of male and female. Any individual, whether XX or XY, can have the “male” or “female” brain but as a matter of probability we find more XYs with the male and XXes with the female.

We also think that the mechanism by which said male or female brains are produced is the exposure to testosterone by the fetus while in the amniotic fluid. We don’t of course know whether this finding about sexuality has the same cause or not.

In fact, we don’t as yet know whether those two sets of brain differences are indeed the same or not: certainly, there’s no research as yet to even hint at the idea that male empathizers, or female systemizers, are more or less likely to be either gay or heterosexual.

Be interesting to find out though, eh?

Here’s something you might think it was unlikely you would ever see:

‘Not tonight, Joséphine.’ Napoleon Bonaparte’s lacklustre response to the bedtime blandishments of his wife is being repeated every evening in bedrooms across the country. Men are simply going off sex, according to the UK’s largest firm of relationship counsellors.

Relate, which provides counselling, sex therapy and relationship education, said there had been a 40 per cent increase in male clients admitting that, despite being physically able to have sex, they can’t be bothered.

No, it’s not because they can’t have sex, it’s because they’re not really worried about it. Even more, it’s not because they don’t want to have sex with their wives (a regrettable state of affairs to be sure, but not one that has been all that unusual in history) but would like to do so with women perhaps unobtainable. No, it’s just the whole idea of sex simply isn’t all that fascinating any more.

Who would have thought of that happening?

Various possible explanations are offered and the one I find funniest is the idea that as women know more about what they want these days, or perhaps it’s rather that they’re a great deal more vocal in letting on what they want, thus men find it all too much of a strain. That makes us sound even more wimpish than just not being interested really.

However, there is one explanation which we can reject entirely:

Professor Cary Cooper, president of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, agreed. ‘Men have less social support and, as a generalisation, are less emotionally intelligent than women and have not traditionally been encouraged to share their feelings,’ he said.

Cooper, who is professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University, also blamed Britain’s culture of long working hours. ‘Britain’s work culture has gone from 9 to 5 to extremely long hours, which makes for a very stressful life,’ he said. ‘Stress can be cumulative, which means eventually people can find it impossible to switch off and relax.’

I agree, as a thesis, it sounds plausible. The stresses and strains of modern life, long working hours culture, yadda, yadda.

The only unfortunate thing is, male working hours have been declining for at least a century, both paid work outside the home and unpaid work in it. So the stress associated with work has also been declining: so sad, isn’t it, when a beautiful theory gets destroyed by an inconvenient fact?

This is an interesting little right brain test. So interesting in fact that I still haven’t found the man after about 15 minutes of looking at the picture.

Have a look here for the picture and the rules.

To be honest with you, I’m not even sure that there is a man in the picture: either that or I have no right side brain at all.

Anyone mind if I stick with our own EQSQ personality tests? They are at least based on science: and I can do them too, which always helps.

It’s always amused me how fashions change: they all too often seem to come right around again to the starting point, even if the justifications have changed.

One example might be the breast feeding of babies. Once it was no longer necessary, with the invention of decent artificial milks, there was a huge swing away from it: now the advice is that one should indeed breast feed, it’s both good for the baby and the mother (the latter as a prophylactic against breast cancer is the latest word).

The same often happens in economics, although that’s more to do with the fact that the questions there never change, just the answers.

The latest reversal seems to be over single or mixed sex education. Time was when it was the logical assumption of all right on people that boys and girls should be educated together. This was an obvious part of creating gender equality, that they should be treated the same and raised and educated the same way. This appears to be changing:

Boys at primary school perform ’significantly’ better in English tests if they are taught in classes with fewer girls, a new study claims.

Research from Bristol University, which used data from every state school in England, found that as the proportion of girls rose, the results achieved by their male classmates fell. Steven Proud, who carried out the work, concluded it ‘might be beneficial for boys to be educated in single-sex classes’ in English.

He argued that girls tended to be ahead of boys in English, and so were more likely to answer questions, raise their hands and behave confidently in lessons. Boys studying alongside a large number of girls find it easier to ‘hide in the background’.

It would be very interesting to see if the same results were found in reverse in math classes. For in the above example it’s the girls’ greater facility at verbal communication which makes them more confident and thus pushes the boys into the background. As we know from our EQSQ tests, the flip side of that greater proficiency with language for girls is the greater math ability of the boys.

So in mixed math classes, do the boys dominate and push the girls into the background?

One other thing that we need to note, which is that it is only averages for boys and girls here: it’s not a definition, that girls are better than boys at language, rather, a probability. An individual can be anywhere on the spectrum, we just expect to see more girls at one end, more boys at the other.

Which leads us to an interesting possibility. That instead of arguing for single (or even mixed) sex classes, the actual argument should be in favour of teaching single ability classes rather than mixed. We’ll always find some girls who excel at maths (that is, using Simon Baron Cohen’s description of such a talent being a signifier of a “male type” brain) just as we’ll always find those boys who excell at language (similarly, “female type” brain). Those who excel at a specific subject should be taught alongside those others who also do. Those who are rather more duffers at a subject, as the above research shows, do better when taught with similar duffers.

So we might in fact take this research as showing that mixed ability classes are a bad idea rather than the point the researchers think they have found, which is that mixed sex classes are the problem.

However, even if this is the truth, I wouldn’t expect it to change very much: the idea of setting, of placing the bright with the bright, the talented in one subject with others who share the same talent is, at present at least, so deeply unfashionable that it’s difficult to see things revolving back on this point.

Apropos nothing very much, just really liked this blog post. From a woman with Asperger’s making sense of life:

Grounded in heart. That is often an aspergerian asset, a self-defense from squandering our lives in larger realms we cannot fathom. Contrary to the NY Times article – and my own life experience — I suspect there are numerous aspie women whose marriages succeed and therefore, their minds are never labeled. They are just appreciated by their families. They are honored as leaders in small groups. They produce and educate professionally accomplished sons.

No, I suspect that universal screening for aspies and other learning differences would yield a more complex picture of aspergerian women than this article held forth. Love is really the only thing that triumphs over this syndrome, and some of it has been romantic love. And it has been bestowed on us. Likewise, I cannot believe there have not been successful aspie women in unheralded careers. In fact, I consider it likely that many of the “behind every successful man” women – the ones who consistently find themselves training a succession of hot young male bosses – are aspies who deserve a lot more credit.

Worth noting:

Love is really the only thing that triumphs over this…

That is true, and wonderfully so, of so many things we encounter in this vale of tears.

Here’s an interesting little thing. In fast moving markets, it seems to be those with the most testosterone who actually make the money from trading.

Money doesn’t make the world go round: it’s testosterone. The more that traders have, the richer they’ll become - up to a point.

John Coates, who used to manage a trading floor at Deutsche Bank on Wall Street but is now at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, and Professor Joe Herbert, a neuroscientist, set out to study the brains of City traders to discover what makes them tick.

They measured levels of testosterone and cortisol (a stress hormone) in 17 traders at a City of London bank for eight consecutive business days. They found that those traders with higher testosterone levels in the morning were most likely to make money on the day’s trading. One trader hit a six-day “winning streak” during which he made more than double his daily profit. During that time his testosterone levels went up 74%.

Now no, this isn’t an unalloyed good: too much testosterone leads to too much risk taking and that’s a great way to lose money in markets. There’s also the point made that it isn’t just a higher starting point of testosterone levels that causes it. There’s also a feedback, in that success increases those levels.

However, as far as we are interested here, it tells us something useful about employment in the financial industry. While overall it may indeed be an equal opportunities world, it might not be in every nook and cranny of it. If surging testosterone levels are what lead to trading success (as opposed to purely being results of it) then we might find that women don’t get an even break here, for biological rather than merely societal reasons.

An excellent post here enabling you to tell if you’re an “altie”. That is, a believer in alternative theories about health and medicine and such matters.

Now it is true that alternative explanations for things have been correct: just because everyone disagrees does not make at theory untrue, for science is not a democracy. Perhaps the most notable change in my lifetime hs been continental drift. First proposed in the 1950s, the idea that the continents float aroud the world was dismissed as ravings. By the time of my birth, early 1960s, it was still strictly for the fringe. By the time I was doing school exams in geography, it was the accepted mainstream explanation of how the world worked.

But that list:

YOU JUST MIGHT BE AN ALTIE IF…

1. If you believe that doctors, scientists, and the pharmaceutical companies conspire to suppress your favorite “alternative medicine” modality, you just might be an altie.
2. If you like to claim that science is a religion, you might be an altie (or at the very least a creationist).
3. If you accept without questioning vague and/or poorly documented anecdotes and testimonials as sufficient evidence for you that an “alternative” therapy can produce remarkable results “curing” cancer, heart disease, autism, Alzheimers, heart disease, etc., but routinely brutally nitpick and then dismiss well-designed randomized, double-blinded Phase III clinical studies for conventional medicine, you just might be an altie.
4. If you believe that liver “flushes” actually cause gallstones to be “flushed” from your gallbladder and remove “toxins” from your liver, you just might be an altie. (Actually, if you believe that liver “flushes” do anything except give you exceptionally stinky diarrhea, you are almost certainly an altie.)
5. If you believe that dichloroacetate is not cancer chemotherapy because it is a “compound” or because it is not a product of big pharma, there’s only an outside chance that you’re not an altie.

There’s 170 of these little ideas as well.

I take it that believing in a few of these is OK, if a little odd. Believe in more than half of them and you’re a woo woo, believe in them all and you must be Deepak Chopra.

This post by Orac is rather fun in the way that he excoriates the stupidity of some of those claiming that vaccines cause autism. Jenny McCarthy comes under quite serious attack.

No real comment to make about it other than the fact that it shows quite how strongly some people can be mislead, how they can believe in things almost beyond all reason.

This is from Anthony Cox and it’s another example of quite how barmy people have become over the issue.

Question
I have a 7 week old baby boy who has “the jitters” on and off in his legs. I am told by the hospital and health visitor that this is normal and due to his immature CNS still developing. I was initially worried it might be related to epilepsy as the paed doctor who examined him after birth hinted at this. Anyone know if vaccines can be more dangerous for a 2 month old with “jitters”?

Answer
Not sure, but vaccines can be dangerous for babies without jitters. My advice would be to not to vaccinate at all, or at the very least wait to until the baby is much older. 8 weeks is just far too soon to start injecting toxic cocktails directly into an infant’s blood.

Given that we’ve not found out how to cure any viral disease (no, seriously, not one, ever. We can treat the symptoms of some of them, but that’s it.) as yet, vaccination is one of the glories of modern medicine. We wiped out smallpox entirely with them, polio is now not known in the Western Hemisphere and the other diseases, at least until the recent scares, were all on a continuous downward slope of incidence.

How did we get to this point where people simply don’t believe in science any more? Don’t people understand that measles still causes up to 900,000 deaths a year globally?