An Island of Colorblindness

I don't spend much time thinking about what life would be like if I couldn't see the difference between cyan, turquoise, indigo, cerulean, and azure or even between red and green, but after watching Oliver Sacks documentary "An Island of Colorblindness" I have a whole new appreciation for being a trichromat. The documentary chronicles the rare condition of achromatopsia that affects many of the residents of Pingelap, an atoll in the South Pacific. People with the condition see entirely in shades of gray.


Achromatopsia is caused by a genetic mutation that results in the complete or partial absence of cones, the retinal cells that translate photons of light into color with a bit of help from the brain. Light doesn't have any color to it all; color is a construction of our visual system. For the people with achromatopsia on Pingelap, vision that is dominated by rods instead of cones presents its own set of challenges. They have poor visual acuity and sunlight is very painful. They look down virtually all of the time during the day, squint, and blink a lot.

Now that sort of photophobia was actually something I could empathize with; I've experienced that fairly often and acutely so after a brush with something called microcystic edema. I had extreme sensitivity to light, couldn't see to read unless I held the pages about 5 inches from my face, and saw huge rainbow halo around lights. It was awful - there was no treatment, no correction for my vision available - but fortunately it cleared up on its own and hasn't appeared since. Phew. I also stopped wearing contact lenses.

That's probably the last time I thought seriously about vision until I took a graduate level class on vision. I've thought about it a lot since then too. As a psychology professor it's an occupational requirement. And as a primatologist I've read a paper or two about the evolution of color vision among primates. Some species of monkeys are dichromats - they have only two kinds of cones and see much like what most people think of when the term colorblind comes up. Scientists believe the ability to distinguish red from green helped newly evolving diurnal monkeys spot edible leaves and fruit better in the daytime. Previously, monkeys had been nocturnal and ate insects and tree sap. Monkeys who could distinguish colors in the daytime could exploit new niches. They thrived. As a dabbler in art, I appreciate matching and mixing colors for the most pleasing aesthetic effect. But, I take for granted the ability to actually see in color.

Los colores son mi vida is the motto of my impressively talented and successful mother-in-law who weaves multi-colored palettes of yarn into beautiful fabrics. My husband weaves too. They have an entire vocabulary of color terms that never fails to impress me when I eavesdrop on their plans for "warping the loom." I might look at a selection of threads and call them purple while they toss around terms like plum, violet, lavender, eggplant and more. While watching the story of the Pingelapese I was struck by how totally unnecessary such an advanced linguistic library would be for them.

Science of the Mind

I'm always on the lookout for cool stuff to use in intro psych classes, my primates class, or in a new line of research. Here's a random selection of stuff I've found lately.
Be sure to read the five star story!

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Neuroscientist Ramachandran on his theory of the evolution of consciousness. I really liked his reference to lemurs.

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The BBC is airing a new show "Chimps Are People Too," a documentary with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Kanzi, the bonobo famous for his language and Pac-Man playing skills. As far as I can tell, having not yet seen the show, it's about pointing out the similarities between humans and non-human apes that reveal qualities of "personhood." Granting them special status as "people" would of course entail a major change in how laboratory research is done, not to mention keeping them on display in zoos. This is the goal of the Great Ape Project.

*****
My dissertation committee cheerleader has been getting a lot of press for her newly published article on cryptic ovulation. The popular press headline floating around reads: "Fertile women dress to impress, U.S. study finds." It's classic evolutionary psychology stuff. Ethologist Karl Grammer discovered about ten years ago that women who are ovulating show more flesh at singles bars. Haselton found the same thing happened for college students who were asked to show up at her lab two different times to participate in a research project. When the women arrived during the time they were ovulating and most likely to become pregnant if they had sexual intercourse, they wore more revealing clothing, flashier jewelry, and more trendy clothes.


This fits with the idea that although humans don't overtly advertise when they are ovulating (as some primates - chimps, bonobos, baboons - do with giant pink ano-genital skin swellings), they still send cryptic signals that they are fertile. The science reporting in the press releases and interviews is rather dismal. "Another non-winner for science writing skill" says my scientifically astute journalist husband. He's also heard me lecture on this subject before! I'd like to see these articles get into why this is significant and worth talking about on a theoretical level.

See, knowing that a species overtly advertises ovulation tells us about that species' ancestral social organization.

Fewer than 10% of female primates overtly advertise when they are most likely to conceive. This information is very valuable for males because they can use it to avoid wasting time and energy courting a female who is not likely to become pregnant. What's really interesting is that solitary primates (like orangutans) do not have the visible swellings that are so pronounced for chimps and baboons. Monogamous species don't overtly advertise fertility either. You would think that being solitary would raise the stakes for males. Ditto for monogamous males. If they know when their mate is most fertile, they can guard her when she is and prevent other males from inseminating her. Monogamous and solitary species should overtly advertise, but they don't.

When we survey the primate species that have overt advertisements of ovulation, we see they tend to live in multi-male, multi-female social groups in which females mate with multiple males more or less indiscriminately. A female chimp typical mates with nearly every adult male in her group when she sports the equivalent of the human female's short skirt, plunging neckline top and flashy jewelry. In other words, the general rule of thumb is that cryptic ovulation (the subtle changes in appearance that Haselton found) are associated with species that have relatively monogamous females. Species in which females flaunt their fertility tend to be composed of Nelly Furtado-style promiscuous girls.

Thus, based on this evidence for cryptic ovulation among humans, we can infer that our ancestors may have evolved in groups that tended to be composed of one male with a female or group of females who tended to be relatively monogamous with him. Other lines of evidence from comparative anatomy (testicle size and penis length) suggests instead that our ancestors probably lived in groups with a significant amount of male-male competition over females and female promiscuity to drive males to evolve relatively large testicles (more sperm) who could then win paternity at the level of sperm competition.

My own guess, and that is all it is, albeit a professinal one (!) is that human ancestors tended to be monogamous but did cheat opportunistically and regularly. Having totally concealed ovulation means that a male never knows when to guard the female, so he has to be present all of the time, thus we get pairbonding. If ovulation is slightly noticeable, a woman might use her subtle signals to achieve an extra-pair courtship, a secret lover if you will.

Is that so hard to work into a story?

***
Male and female voices are processed differently by the brain which suggests that perhaps male and female brains have different ways of working out dominance differences based on voice. One reader commented, "It looks like the team stumbled on a key to the mechanism that works out dominance in the male status hierarchy." This is related to a study I reported on back in August about female preference for deeper, more dominant/masculine male voices. It's a great post, definitely worth a read if you want to learn more about evolutionary psychology! In a nutshell, that study provided evidence that male voices have been sexually selected to be deeper. The study I just found provides evidence that these differences might show up at the level if neuroanatomy, an important link between evolutionary theory and actual behavior. Another study "Men Act Like Dogs to Show Dominance" identified that men unconsciously lower their voices when talking to someone they think is less dominant. In essence, whoever has the lower pitched voice signals dominance.

My undergraduate thesis explored dominance displays through eye contact. I should blog about that some time... I think it's better than my MA thesis. Hell, it might be better designed than my dissertation. All of my college friends (who are probably the only ones still reading this lengthy post) remember well my knack for writing dissertations in college. We all thought it was just a joke, but it turns out there was a healthy portion of truth to it.

Anyhow, I have been toying with the idea of launching a new research project once I finish my dissertation. I'd like to explore human female vocal dominance. The authors of these studies imply that it's not worth it to study modulation of female pitch in social contexts because women have not been sexually selected to have higher pitched voices. That may be, but I think these *guys* who published those studies might buy into the old theory that women don't have dominance hierarchies and that status differentials are irrelevant to women. Well, I am here to say that is bull. It may only be my personal experience, but I am intensely aware of female dominance plays. I really want to do the study I have planned out in my head. I should sit down and write it all down. It's so simple. I just need a way to measure pitch changes during a conversation ...

CRIKEY! My laptop has a battery reading that says 0%
Woah, that's a first.
Problem solved.

Coming soon: Island of the Colorblind by neurologist Oliver Sacks. This is easily one of the coolest videos I have seen for use in intro psych! I was totally captivated by it. I base some of my story of cones and color vision and acuity and sensitivity to light on a character from the movie K-Pax, a science fiction story in which Kevin Spacey plays an alien from a low-light planet who has a hard time on earth because the bright light hurts his eyes. The first time I taught intro psych FIVE years ago (!) the movie had just come out. Now, no one recognizes it so I need a new hook. In walks Oliver Sacks and his story of an equatorial island populated by people who are completely colorblind. They are the real life version of the K-Pax character who I thought was completely fictional. The students really enjoyed this video - it had frequent drug references. I highly recommend it. And, I see used copies of the Sacks book are available for less than 2 dollars from Amazon.

iPod to TV connection

I can't get videos to play on my TV through my video iPod. I have the dock, the cable (S-video), the TV set to the right "channel" and all the cords hooked up properly. I have even changed the settings on my iPod under "video settings" so the TV setting is ON, yet no picture shows up - only sound.

So, rather than watching a purchased video on the TV like we had hoped, my dear sweet husband and I watched it on his outdated desktop. The video card probably isn't top of the line so the video feed was a little choppy. We reduced the screen size to about 5 by 3 inches and set the background screen image to black. It was okay - small and still a little choppy, plus the seats were less than ideal. Our office chairs - IKEA garden furniture that we bought because we thought we'd actually use our deck in the back to play Scrabble during the long summers here. Instead we used the table as a table in our living room and the chairs became office chairs.

I'd like to figure out how to make the iPod -TV connection work so that next time, if there is one, we'll be able to watch missed TV episodes on the bigger screen from the comfort of the couch cushions. We don't do the whole Tivo thing. The list of television shows we indulge in is short - Grey's Anatomy, Lost, 24, and Desperate Housewives. Recently we happened to stubble on a new one that we both really like - Heroes, "an epic drama that chronicles the lives of ordinary people who discover they possess extraordinary abilities." We missed the second episode. Hopefully we won't miss any others, but if so, watching them on my laptop wouldn't be so bad. We should have downloaded the episode on it instead of the desktop, but we weren't thinking we'd have to actually watch it on that. We figured we could hook my VIDEO iPod up to the TV, but alas, that didn't work out. What is the problem???

I'd sure like to know how to make the iPod images appear on the TV.

Anyhow, NBC offers free downloads of the Heroes episodes after they air but I haven't been able to get them to download on my Mac. Maybe it's the browser? We gave up and bought episode two from iTunes for two bucks. And then it wouldn't play on the TV. Grrrrr.

The episode was great.

There's a cheerleader who kills herself over and over to prove she's indestructible, two brothers who can fly, a guy who has psychic powers, a guy who can paint the future, and another one who can alter the space-time continuum. Heroes is one of the four shows on TV that holds our attention for the full episode. I have to admit to doing other things while watching DH, but Heroes is so captivating I would never want to sneak a quick read of an Economist article.

Lost was always the same way, but I have to say that I was a little disappointed by the first episode of season three. The highlight was Sawyer finally figuring out how to get the treat dispenser in his cage to work. It was easy for the psychologist in me to imagine him inside one of Thorndike's puzzle boxes, tripping levers and pushing pedals randomly and then intelligently to get the reward. The speed of problem solving is often equated with intelligence and Sawyer's mental alacrity has been the subject of a few snippets on the show here and there, so when the Others henchman came by to condescendingly say the bears figured it out far faster, it was a classic Lost moment. There weren't enough of thoe, but I'm sure they'll come. It has been my favorite show on TV for the last two years. Sawyer's probably my favorite character. Charming, sexy smart-ass bad boy with a brain... sounds like someone I know :-)

Heroes is a lot like Lost. There's mystery, interesting characters who find connections, and an element of science that makes it a thinking show. This house's favorite Heroes character right now is Hiro, the Japanese office worker who can bend the space-time continuum. He's a lovable geek who likes comic books and Star Trek. He's also so exuberantly confident in his abilities and his coworker friend is in such joyful disbelief that the play between the two buddies is a pleasure to watch.

Plus, he's got a great costume, as all super heroes should. In the first two episodes he wore a totally awesome sweater exactly like the one that my dear sweet husband scored at Urban Outfitters on our trip to Seattle over spring break. The sweater cost too much but it was on a serious sale and was like nothing we had ever seen before. (He looks far too cute in it.) We were both surprised to see his sweater on TV.

Weight Regulation

One of the things I try to get across to students in my intro psych class during our unit on motivation and hunger is why people have so much trouble losing weight and then keeping it off for good. Millions of people struggle with this problem but wind up choosing a strategy that doesn't work. A typical diet involves restricting calories, which at first blush seems like the right thing to do. Pounds disappear one after another. Some may even reach their target weight but then put almost all of the weight back on despite following the same diet.

Why does this happen?

The answer lies in how our bodies are designed. Humans evolved in an environment that was very different from the one we now enjoy. The easy access Americans have to fatty, salty, and sweet calorie rich food is completely novel. Our ancestors probably had to travel long distances to acquire the nutrients they needed to survive, let alone thrive. What was available may not have been particularly nutritious or filling. Tubers, nuts, and fruit were staple items - meat a rare delicacy. Famines may have been a regular problem. Those who could slow down their metabolism in response to famine could conserve the fat and muscle they had stored and wait out the "lean times." Our bodies aren't prepared to deal with regular indulgences that we have access to now.

When a dieter consistently restricts calories over a period of time, the person loses weight but also winds up signaling the brain (the hypothalamus) that s/he is in the midst of famine conditions. The brain responds adaptively by slowing metabolism down. If the person eats the same amount, s/he will start gain weight again as the body "saves up." Restricting calories even more will exacerbate the problem and create new ones (malnutrition).

In order to keep the unwanted weight off, the body's "set point" has to be changed. The set point is the genetically determined weight the person tends to have when s/he isn't dieting, overeating or engaging in an exercise program. That set weight point depends on the person's metabolism and this is what has to change in order for the person to permanently keep lost weight off. Metabolism depends on how responsive the hypothalamus is to the various signals that it receives from the body and the concentration of 'hunger hormones' such as leptin, neuropeptide Y, ghrelin, and orexin circulating in the bloodstream.

You can think of the hypothalamus as a thermostat for hunger regulation. Reduced food intake = slow down metabolism. Increased food intake = rev up metabolism. Because the human body evolved in an environment that saw recurrent famines, it is far easier for us to slow our metabolism down than to speed it up. When a dieter loses weight but then starts to gain it all back, that's because the body is doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

So, the real question is how to speed up one's metabolism and permanently reset the body's set point.

One way to try to do this is to get more exercise. Unfortunately, doing this while also cutting calories, releases a whole new wave of metabolic changes that are designed to put the weight right back on! For example, research from the NIH suggests that when a person loses weight and exercises more, thereby creating an energy deficit, ghrelin (an appetite stimulant) kicks into high gear.

That raises the question of whether it's even possible to permanently change a person's set point.

Split Brain

Last night's episode of Grey's Anatomy depicted a patient who underwent a "corpus callosotomy" and then was unable to identify his wife, baby, and a simple object in the room (a cup placed in front of him).

This didn't jive with my understanding of the effects of the procedure, also called a "split brain" operation in psychology. It's a topic that gets brought up in intro psych classes because severing the corpus callosum (a bundle of neurons that connexts the two hemispheres of the brain) produces very interesting side effects that stem from the lack of coordination between the two halves of the brain. It provides a neat case study for understanding how the hemispheres work and also showcases the concept of lateralization - the idea that some functions (such as language) are "specialized" and carried out on one side of the brain.

As the show correctly implied, a split brain procedure is done to treat severe seizures. Cutting the nerve bundle limits the spread of the seizure to the whole brain and greatly reduces the severity of the tremors. It can be done in two stages - the first cutting only the front two thirds of the fibers, leaving the rest intact so the the hemispheres can still share some information. If the seizures are still problematic, the rest of the fibers can be cut.

A full corpus callosotomy creates some interesting side effects - but not the severe one depicted on the show of not being able to identify anything.

What actually happens is that the "split brain" person cannot say out loud the name of an object that is ONLY presented to the LEFT visual field (if the person is left hemisphere dominant for language). The patient would have to close the right eye completely for this to happen. In laboratory tests, split brains look at objects through a tachistoscope that presents information to only one hemisphere or look at image that is flashed briefly to one side of the visual field.

A left hemisphere language dominant "split brain" who viewed an object (spoon, as in the diagram) with only the left visual field would not be able to identify it because that visual input is received by the right hemisphere which can't communicate with the left hemisphere where speech is generated. The person would recognize the spoon but be unable to say it. If asked to pick up the object with the left hand (which is controled by the right hemisphere, the one that saw the object) out of a collection of objects out of sight, the person would correctly pick up the spoon.

These kinds of effects don't usually cause problems for the person because information comes in through both eyes!!!

That's where Grey's Anatomy only captured half of the story. They dumbed it down considerably and even played up a seriously dumbed down version of the brain lateralization story. "McDreamy" the brain doctor said, in explanation of the patient's side effects, that it will take a while for emotional messages to travel to the other side of the brain where information is processed.... or something like that. I wanted to gag.

Anyhow, if you'd like to learn more about split brains, the study of which won Roger Sperry the Nobel Prize for medicine, check out this cool site:

A split brain game you can play.

One of the things that helps to understand, on a deeper level, why the split brain person experiences these weird side effects is that the eyes are connected to the hemispheres in a really unsual way.


The right half of each eye's retina projects to the right hemosphere (shown in dark grey in the diagram above) while the left half of each retina (white) projects to the left hemisphere. Also, half of the retinal fibers (the nasal halves, closest to your nose) cross over to the other hemisphere at the optic chiasm. This means that the temporal halves (the right side of your right eye and the left side of your left eye) don't cross over at all. Your nasal retinal halves can be completely blocked and you'll still have a full field of view because the temporal halves cover the whole field. If you don't believe me or the diagram, hold three fingers right in front of your nose.

I could deliver an emancipation proclamation of the the evolutionary reasons for this weird set up, but suffice it to say that this arrangement allows us to have excellent depth perception.

It also means that a split brain person only receives information that can be verbally identified by one fourth of the available retinal area - the quarter that projects to the right visual field which is on the left side of the left eye (shown in white in the diagram). Notice those fibers don't cross to the other hemisphere; they are the ONLY fibers that project straight back to the left hemisphere. So, only information presented to the right visual field can be verbally identified.

All of this makes me wonder - is the optic chiasm cut during the corpus callosotomy and if so, does the person lack depth perception?

I assume it is cut because all of the textbooks on the subject present the fancy little images of the right and left visual fields and the projections to the nasal and temporal halves, but the side effects would be the same if the retinal inputs could cross over because the two retinal halves would see the same thing. In that case, the brain could still compute the difference in distance from the right and left eye's inputs and triangulate the distance.

Anyhow, that's probably more than you wanted to know about why I thought Grey's Anatomy flunked last night in the way they presented the split brain patient. It's great - I'm glad they did. Maybe somewhere out there someone taking intro psych watched it and realized the same thing I did and actually asked their psych prof about it later.

Lactose Intolerance

Over the weekend a good friend of mine visited for our college reunion. She's lactose intolerant and likes to enjoy ice cream and other dairy products so she brought lactase pills along with her so she could digest the milk sugar lactose. She was also told by her pediatrician the day after she returned home that she's got to fatten her one year old daughter up. I asked her how she's supposed to do that. Cheese! Makes sense, but she's worried her daughter might be lactose intolerant too. Being fully capable of digesting the stuff myself, the concept of lactose intolerance is not something I spend much time thinking about... until recently.

According to Steve Lewis, a professor of Darwinian medicine, mammals lose the ability to digest milk with age. This might "form a biological mechanism whereby the ties between mother and child are broken so that she can go on and have more offspring and the child can go and have offspring of its own." Symptoms of lactose intolerance include gas, bloating, abdominal cramps and diarrhea result. The NIH estimates that in the U.S. about 15% of people of European descent have it. Half of Latinos, 60-100% of Native Americans, 80% of African Americans, and 90% of Asian Americans are lactose intolerant. The ability to digest milk depends on how heavily a culture depended nutritionally on the milk of their herded animals.

What is really interesting to me from an evolutionary perspective is that lactose intolerance is something all humans should experience yet many don't. Relatively new research has discovered a genetic mutation that gave some adult humans the ability to digest lactose. This occurred sometime in the last 5,000-10,000 years and coincides with the origin of pastoralism in Europe.

This finding poses challenges to evolutionary theories about human behavioral adaptations (such as males' preference for mating with nubile women) that are thought to take hundreds of thousands of years longer to develop in a population. EPs can't go back in time to determine what kind of ecological conditions human ancestors lived in at the time we were evolving these adaptations (the so-called "environment of evolutionary adaptedness"), so most EPs infer what kind of behavioral adaptations would have been most adaptive for our ancestors by examining the ecological conditions of extant human hunter-gatherers. They assume the living conditions are essentially the same and that not enough time has passed for new adaptations to take hold, so if it would be adaptive for hunter-gatherers now it was probably adaptive in the past too. Obviously trouble arises when new evidence suggests that humans can evolve faster than expected. If a gene for making lactase well into adulthood can take hold in the last 10,000 years it is also possible that a gene for constructing hypothalamic-visual cortex connections in the brain that fire maximally for men viewing nubile young women could take hold that fast too. I seriously doubt that there was ever a time when the average man was turned on by the sight of a pre-pubescent or wrinkled old woman. It wouldn't make much sense for successful reproduction.

However, there are other adaptations that are more controversial and could conceivably be a product of relatively recent changes. The female orgasm, the desire for men to have more sex partners than women, sexual jealousy, monogamy, etc.

The discovery that lactose is newly digestible does NOT mean evolutionary psychology is a rotten paradigm, as some would have it (David Buller), but it does mean that care needs to be taken when hypothesizing adaptations that assume nothing has changed within the last 10,000 years.

As for my friend's daughter, she should be able to digest cheese just fine. Lactose intolerance doesn't set in until later in life and is a recessive trait, so if her dad can still digest lactose, she should be able to later in life too.

Impossible Things

This week's introductory psychology class introduced students to a magician's take on optical illusions. His name is Jerry Andrus and a little googling found that he makes appearances every so often in Corvalis, OR. Besides introducing young people to the wonders of the Monte Hall problem and a rotating spiral illusion, he constructed an impossible box that I think is very neat.

It's very similar to the Penrose triangle illusion. A larger than life one can be seen in Australia (see the photo to the right). There's also one located on the campus of Willamette University in Salem, OR. No Photoshopping tricks are involved. Just arrange the elements the right way and take the photo from the perfect vantage point. If you've got the time, it is possible to create a desk sized impossible triangle out of cardboard.

The Ames room is another neat optical illusion that plays on the way our sensory system processes depth. The two girls are identical twins yet one appears much larger. The diagram below shows how the room is constructed. If you have time, a desk sized one could be made. Two pennies could take the place of the girls.

What's really weird is that a couple of psychologists found that when women view their spouse inside an Ames room, they perceive less size distortion than when viewing a stranger! This effect didn't occur for men viewing their wives though, and the degree of distortion perceived was inversely related to how much love and trust each woman felt for her husband.

This shadow illusion is fun. When looking at the shaded squares it is difficult to believe they are actually the same color as the "darker" unshaded squares in the checkerboard.

Can you believe these two tables are exactly the same size?

Project Completion!!

I succeeded in getting a lavender seed to germinate! It's doing well in a styrofoam cup that I cut the top off and punched a hole in the bottom to promote drainage. I also have a cup full of snapdragon seedlings and one with an unidentifiable seedling that I think will become one of the "dollar weed plants" I wrote about earlier. Now that I know I can germinate seeds and keep them alive I'll wait until spring to start the others. I'm very excited about the lavender - it's a different species than the mature one I have growing in the back yard. The snapdragons will be wonderful too; I have seeds for a variety of flower colors - deep burgundy, pink, white, orange with yelllow, pink with white, and pink with yellow. The front yard sprouted a yellow snapdragon two weeks ago. I didn't plant it. Its origin remained a mystery until I noticed my neighbor three houses down had a small patch of them. I think it's impressive that a tiny seed can be blown that far and actually take root. I'll collect its seeds soon so I'll have yet another color to add to my library for spring germination. The scrawny yellowish brown plant in the stryofoam is an african violet that my book said could be rooted from a cutting so I'm trying that experiment too.

The photo also shows my seedlings and a pod from a trumpet vine. A stand of them grows a few blocks from our house so I pulled off a few pods one day. They're ripening in the kitchen. They produce fast growing vines with pretty orange flowers that attract hummingbirds. The other photo on the right shows a couple of the other plants I'm trying to "root" from cuttings. The twigs are wisteria cuttings. My gardening book and the internet suggested that cuttings from a parent plant will grow roots if the fresh cutting is dipped in "rooting hormone" and then sunk into soil or vermiculite. I followed the directions so we'll see in about a month whether it worked. If so, the cuttings can be grown inside until spring and then transplanted. Wisteria produces flowers off the previous season's buds so I made sure to take cuttings with visible new buds. Cuttings are supposedly the quickest way to propagate a wisteria that will actually flower in the spring. I have seed pods too but the gardening gurus say that route will take at least a decade before the plant blooms.

I also finally bumped off my sewing project! Since we moved in I have made curtains for every room of our house except one. I finished the bedroom curtains a while ago and finally used the excess fabric to make matching pillows and shams for the bed. The shams were intended to be just like the kind of thing you might see in a Pottery Barn catalog. I didn't follow a pattern for any of this stuff, so the shams look a little odd. I had to stuff the black border to make it look decent - they were supposed to be two dimensional flaps ringing the pilllow but they looked b.a.d. when I turned the finished product inside out to take a look. I cried so hard from the laughter when I saw them. They really looked terrible. I showed them to my very understanding husband who laughed at how hard I was laughing at myself and my Frankenstein pillow shams. To solve the problem, I just stuffed the flaps with a little batting. They look much, much better now. I should have taken a photo of the shams before the fix. I like how the other pillows turned out too.

The photo to the left shows some cloth baskets I made to store odd and ends like my glasses and whatever book or magazine I might want to read before going to sleep. Like the pillows, the concept comes straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog. I didn't like the colors or the price they offered so I used the left over curtain/pillow fabric to make them. They will hang off of wood dowels on the wall next to the bed and window. I didn't follow a pattern for these either; I just winged it based on the image I saw in the catalogue (see right). The hardest part was making sure the stiches matched up on the sides and top. It became a carpentry project and even a plumbing project in the sense that for some of the pinning I couldn't see what I was doing. I had to feel around for the previous seam to judge the distance from the black border to the bottom of the bag. I figure I'll cut a rectangular piece of cardboard for the bottom to keep it stiff and tidy. It should look something like the picture to the side (the Pottery Barn version).

Last but not least I discovered a really cool line of stuffed animals (birds) that produce the song of the bird they represent when squeezed. The National Audubon Society produces them in conjuction with the Wild Republic company that makes a few of the monkeys I have. The stuffed monkeys bear a close similarity to the actual species they represent; the bird line is even more impressive. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology provided the song recordings. These bird toys strike me as an excellent way to train a child's ear so s/he'll be able to recognize the calls out in the field. It was difficult to choose which one to get so I purchased two with the neatest songs: the purple martin and the wood thrush, neither of which is on my 'life list.' The pamphlets stapled to their wings provides a biographical sketch of the species (in English and French) and shows its North American range. It also illustrates a few of the other species that can be collected. I think they're really neat. I found out the purple martin is called l'hirondelle noire (black martin) in French. The wood thrush is la grive des bois. Now that I think of it, I have seen the purple martin - many years ago near the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in south Florida. The photo shows the scissor tailed flycatcher the company makes. Perhaps Wild Republic can team up with the University of Wisconsin Primate Library to make voices for their line of monkeys. Now that would really be cool!

Looking Good!

I've got a lot of things to celebrate this morning - they are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things - but nevertheless comment worthy!

First off, the TSA finally lifted its assinine ban on toiletries and cosmetics. Given that I've got at least 4 plane flights scheduled in the next nine months (far more than usual!) AND I am proud to have never checked any luggage on any flight (see my clever packing advice for avoiding checked luggage here), I am really relieved that I don't have to buy a suitcase just so that I can check through three items.

Second, my data collection is going very well. I am so close to having all of the participants I need. In the last 9 days, I had seven more cells fill up and now I only need about 50 more men to participate. Whooo hooo! My research also got approved for use at Cal Poly so that should hopefully generate the responses I need to be done.

Finally, I bumped off part of my sewing project and am well on my way to being totally finished with it. My sweet Guy With Gills will soon here me say "Yes!!!" to his nearly daily querries about whether he can pack up and move the sewing machine off the dining room table. We've got guests coming this weekend (my ten year college reunion!) so that provides the extra motivation I need to finish it.

Oh yeah - one last thing - I have decided to give the two second authors guys a go thanks to all of your helpful comments. It is better to have pubs than none at all.

Random Animal News

Battle of the Hermaphrodites

Anybody who's ever mused that the world would be better if men got pregnant needs to talk to Nico Michiels. And so does anybody who's asked-or sung-"Why can't a woman be more like a man?" Michiels has seen that world, or at least a version of it, and he's even got pictures to show. It's not pretty, he says.
Many snails, slugs, and worms are so-called internally fertilizing, simultaneous hermaphrodites. In any encounter, such creatures can deliver sperm, receive it for fertilizing eggs internally, or do both.
Michiels, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, offers the striking example of hermaphroditic polyclad flatworms called Pseudobiceros bedfordi.

When two of these small, speckled sea worms meet to mate, there's no taking turns. Each worm, 2 to 6 centimeters long, wields its pair of side-by-side penises like a weapon. One worm tries to fertilize the other by ejaculating anywhere on its partner's body, splashing it with sperm in a cocktail that dissolves flesh. After the brew eats a hole through the skin, the sperm work their way through various tissues until they reach the eggs.

... Read more!


Elephant Crop Raids Foiled by Chili Peppers, Africa Project Finds

Conflicts between farmers and elephants have long been widespread in Africa, where pachyderms nightly destroy crops, raid grain houses, and sometimes kill people.

Now farmers are fighting back with an unlikely weapon: chili peppers.

Read more.
It makes sense to harness the power of the principles of behaviorism.



Humpback Whale Calls Are Love Songs, Biologist Suggests

Even among whales, it seems, the best singers get the girls.

Joshua Smith, a doctoral student at the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia, has spent three migration seasons collecting the songs of humpback whales.

Read more.

Flying sex pest silences the crickets

What do you do when your only means of attracting members of the opposite sex also puts your life in jeopardy? For field crickets on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, shutting up seems to work.

According to a new study, rapid evolution in the Kauain population of the oceanic field cricket Teleogryllus oceanicus has rendered nine-tenths of the males there incapable of producing their iconic night-time call. The genetic mutation, which changes the shape of the male's wing to make it silent, means the crickets are better adapted to avoid a deadly parasite.

The finding dumbfounded biologist Marlene Zuk, at the University of California in Riverside, US, who first thought the dwindling population of crickets she was studying had gone extinct when she no longer heard their calls.

"If you're a cricket and you're a male, your life is defined by calling," Zuk explains. "How are you going to find a female, and once you do, how are you going to get her to mate with you without your call?"

Read more.

PhD Student Rant #2

Grrrr. I feel academically isolated and in a hopeless situation.

Why am I academically isolated? My contract ran out at the college I taught at last year and it was not renewed. Not a surprise there - I don't have a terminal degree. I didn't take a job elsewhere because I still need to finish my dissertation and I love living in this town where my husband makes enough to support us. We live very comfortably in our own house with nearly everything we need in walking distance. We are also virtually equidistant between our families. This means the quality of life is very good. So, it just didn't make sense to take another visiting position. So, I am working on my dissertation from a university that is on the other coast. It may as well be in Timbuktu. I can't have regular meetings with my advisor. Access to researchers to try to get something collaborative going is challenging. If I want to launch a new research project, I will have to do it online because I have zero access to lab space unless my alma mater and former employer grows some new generosity streak. With some finagling and sweet talking (begging) maybe they would work something out with me.

Why do I feel hopeless? In a nutshell, I have a great teaching CV. I taught at two excellent small liberal arts colleges while still ABD - something that virtually no one does which makes me special. My student evaluations range from average to outstanding depending on the class. But, I have a virtually non-existent research CV. I have given talks and poster presentations, involved students in my research - even got three of them into conferences to present our collaborative work, but I don't have a publication yet. Without that, I won't be competitive in academia.

My strategy of contacting people I'd like to work with hasn't really panned out.

One, who is on my committee and who is well established in my field (a student of the founder of my field), doesn't have time for me outside of reading my dissertation when it's completed. She offered to read and comment on a complete manuscript of my MA research but then when I emailed it to her she wrote back and said that she is about to take over as one of the editors of a journal (the one I would like to publish my research in) and doesn't have time.

The second - who is also in my field, is less well known, and is a student of my advisor, wants to rewrite my MA research and submit it to a less prestigious journal. This seemed like a good idea until I realized that it's possible he may be credited with the idea. A second author on my paper could be perceived as having done 50% of the work when really he did 5% (or less!) So, I'm just skeptical of turning my original idea and work over to someone else who could then get substantially more credit than he deserves. My work really is original; it's not another example of derivative work with a 'new' twist. Maybe I will end up going with this option in order to just get it published. I'm just not there yet because I don't think I've tried hard enough to turn it over to someone else. I have left this door open though, and have asked to be brought in on a project he's working on if I go that route.

My third strategy is to find someone outside of my immediate field who is more mainstream and also recognizable to collaborate with on a line of research that is different from my MA and PhD work. I really need to branch out. I have some ideas for other research - some of which requires equipment I don't have (!) - and could start it up on my own in isolation, but I really need to work with more established people to make sure I don't take wrong turns, screw up the design, or fail in the publication process. I would like someone to walk me through the whole publication process and serve as an advisor in that capacity. My own advisor has not done that. She writes textbooks and is near retirement. Nevertheless, when I asked her to provide comments on my manuscript before I send it out to a journal, she wrote back and said that she is focusing on her textbook and starting new collaborative research with other people and just doesn't have the time. She could have said that she's been as helpful as she can be already and that I should ask someone within my field who has more expertise on the topic to provide comments. I would have understood that but instead I got the blow-off from my advisor who then sent me into a tizzy of thinking she will not be helpful when it comes to my dissertation. So... I had a meeting with my real mentor who pointed out it's in my PhD granting institution's best interests to make sure I get the degree. She told me her dissertation (at the same place) was a total mess and she still passed, so there's always hope. I walked away feeling better about that. I will get those three little letters, but without publications I won't be able to do anything with them.

A while back I wrote to a recognizable researcher in a field that's mine but more mainstream, i.e. social psych rather than EP. After several email exchanges clarifying what our roles in this collaboration would be I ferreted out that he wants me to conceive the idea, conduct the research, analyze it, and write it up. Then he would re-write it and we could publish it together. I could bounce ideas off of him but his role would be minimal. Yet, he'd be second author. Again, I'd do all of the important work, but he'd get substantially more credit than he's earned.

This morning my wonderful husband, who's been with me all along bouncing ideas and troubleshooting and enforcing breaks that I'd otherwise not take, listened to my latest rant and offered that it sounds like this guy "wants to wave his dick over it & slap his name on it."

So now what do I do?

Do I turn over my ideas to someone else who may get me published? Do I start up a new project in which I do all the hard work and hope the guy works with me throughout so I don't screw it up and is still around to get it published in the end? Can I do this at the same time I am working on my dissertation? Do I sya thanks but no thanks to these two guys and look for someone else who is willing to do more of the work? Or is this the best I can hope for? Is this normal in academia?

Dancing With the Stars

Okay, I'll admit it - occasionally I indulge in some guilty pleasures like watching the show Dancing With the Stars and of course, I have some commentary on it from the vantage point of evolutionary psychology. The show, for those who don't know, centers on several "celebrities" who get paired with a professional ballroom dancer to learn and then perform dances like the mambo, two step, and tango in front of a panel of professional judges. Each week brings two new dances and a rejection for those who don't measure up. The audience gets to weigh in on the decision. The show became so insanely popular last year that it was brought back for a second season.

Last year in my Evolution of Human Mating class a student asked about why her boyfriend refuses to dance with her. She wanted him to take ballroom dance lessons with her. Perhaps there are millions of women who are now asking this same question and hoards of men shrugging their shoulders at the thought. But why? Because it's prissy is not a good enough reason. The men really are sexy when they dance. And we all know what dance is a metaphor for. It's insanely sexual at its core - a sexual display served up for our consumption or rejection. So why won't the average guy get on board?

The information conveyed through dance reveals a guy's fitness and most just don't measure up. The article "Dance reveals symmetry especially in young men" in Nature 2005 presents evidence that men who are rated by women as the best dancers are also more symmetrical. The right and left sides of their faces and bodies more perfectly match. In nature, symmetry is associated with greater reproductive success for numerous species, including humans. Thus, dance isn't just for fun; it reveals hidden messages about an individual's fitness - messages men may want to keep hidden.

The Dance Symmetry Project website describes the neat study methodology (they used image capture technology with body mounted light sensors), presents video of symmetrical and less symmetrical dancers, and has a link to the Nature podcast. This study counts as one of many that I think is so cool I wish I had done it!

Why symmetry is associated with dance is still a bit of a mystery. One theory holds that symmetrical organisms are more metabolically efficient and that translates into greater coordination and stamina. This would also explain why a sample of gifted track athletes were more symmetrical than less successful athletes. A quick google search revealed that in the professional running world, symmetry of stride is a major goal and source of concern if it isn't. By studying runners on a treadmill or wear patterns on shoes, physical trainers can figure out how to improve stride and reduce injuries.

Just how important symmetry is to athletic ability and the chances of wooing a mate is open to debate. Hundreds of articles have been published on the subject but one meta-analysis by A. Palmer showed a publication bias so it's hard for some to take studies like the Dance Symmetry Project seriously. Palmer's website even calls most of the neat studies from EP we discussed in my EHM class "follies." That includes the dance study project.

It's annoying. If we looked at any field of inquiry I think we'd find publication bias. Does this negate the conclusions of studies that are published? Perhaps EP gets singled out for special criticism because people don't like its political implications. People regularly get bent out of shape about discoveries that we humans function under the same rules as the rest of the animal kingdom.

Humans like watching presumably symmetrical stars dancing just like blue-footed booby birds presumably derive some pleasure from watching the fancy footwork of other boobies. Both are examples of courtship rituals backed by sound evolutionary theory and evidence.

Inside Skinner's Box

The history of psychology is peppered with prominent psychologists who have experimented on their own kids. Freud psychoanalyzed his daughter Anna and Jean Piaget mapped out his theory of cognitive development by studying his own children, but the psychologist who really takes the cake for bizarre parenting is B.F. Skinner.

Following up with E. L. Thorndike's "puzzle boxes" (shown above) that showed cats could fairly quickly learn how to operate a tricky lever to release themselves from a box, Skinner put together a similar device that's now known as the Skinner box. Inside is a lever for mice to press or a backlit button for pigeons to peck in order to get chow from a food hopper. To properly motivate them, they are usually starved to 80% of their pre-training weight. The task I had in "Rat Lab" during college was to get the pigeon to peck the button - something that is actually pretty tricky to do. You've got to trip the hopper at just the right moment so you reinforce just the right behavior, otherwise you'll end up with a dancing, spinning, or head bobbing bird instead of one who diligently does the task at hand.

Many times while training Katy (and while providing therapy to a young boy with autism during college) I have been glad to have had the training in operant conditioning that my college professor "Skinner" provided. The paradigm makes a lot of sense and is intuitive to apply. It's also easy to screw up if not done carefully. Think of all those parents who wind up rewarding their kids for exactly the behavior they're trying to extinguish. Whining at the grocery store is a classic example. My sister and I worked it on my mom all the time while growing up. We'd be up late talking and carrying on and she'd yell from the next room something about being quiet and going to sleep. We'd keep it up until she told us she'd take us to get DQ Blizzards the next day. What's crazy is that she actually followed through just often enough to make it rewarding for us to deliberately stay up making noise.

Skinner believed in his theory so much that he applied it to his infant daughter Deborah. He constructed a box for her to live in complete with climate control (temperature and humidity), air filtration, and a bottom linen feed so that if she soiled her space it could be easily changed with a turn of a crank. The Air Crib, as he called it, was nothing more than a giant Skinner box. Time magazine wrote about it in 1971; you can read the full story here. This story has since become part of intro psych classroom legend with variations saying alternately that his daughter grew up to be severely depressed or a psychologist like her dad.

Skinner also worked for a while for the government - he drew up plans for a pigeon guided missile. Imagine that. Skinner's plan scored mention in a Richard Dawkins commentary on Sept 11 in the Guardian, "Religion's Misguided Missiles." It's a good, short read. His plan never got realized but the techniques he devised now get put to use training rats to sniff out land mines. It's a much cheaper and efficient solution than employing dogs or humans to do it. The BBC has a story on this cool rat lab research.

The Ring of Fire

I'm not at all familiar with Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" franchise, but if his opinion piece on the mysterious silence of the gun-loving right wing in the wake of the latest absurd changes to airline security is any indication, it's great stuff.

In other news a Portland, OR ER nurse strangled and killed an intruder with her bare hands (!) who was actually a hit-man her estranged husband hired to kill her. She has left this message on her answering machine in response to the oodles of people who've tried to call her: "I am not able to answer all the calls that I've received. I'm being comforted by your concern and your support. I want you to know that our lives are all at risk for random acts, but more likely random acts of love will come your way than random acts of violence." Did I mention she also weighs 260 pounds? That might have had more than a little something to do with her success.

That's impressive. So, too, is the size of the lava dome atop the crater of Mount St. Helens. It's reported to be 1,300 feet tall and the size of the Empire State Building, which for me conjures up memories of climbing through now-aptly named Ape Cave, a lava tube. The volcanoes that can be seen from the Willamette Valley are awesome - that is - when they are actually visible! Mt. Hood is likable for its Fuji-esque shape & symmetry and its spectacular albeit irregular appearance at exactly the place along the Columbia Gorge highway that corresponds to the teeny tiny sign alerting passersby to its presence. I've never fully appreciated the beauty of Mt. Rainier until recently when I saw it closer up at the national park that bears its name. Too many tourists! Just like the Matterhorn in Switzerland... which is surprisingly reminiscent of Mt. Rainier National Park.

Social & Economic Equality Should Trump Diversity

Due to my tremendous progress toward meeting my dissertation goals, I had 4 issues of the local newspaper to catch up on this morning. It's pretty much required reading in my household. The local paper keeps me in the loop about what's going on around town and continually reinforces my conclusion that good jobs are scarce here and that the housing market has already priced out most people.

My source for national and international news lies elsewhere. Lately I've been reading the Economist. I used to buy it off of the newstand when I desired, but recently realized that its short article format is a better fit for me. I can pick it up whenever, wherever and never lose my place like I did with The Atlantic, Harpers, and The New Yorker. I have stacks of those with good intentions of at least reading the featured articles. I still love The Atlantic's "Primary Sources" but now that it seems to have been cut down to one page from a double page spread, it may lose out to Harpers, whose Index I love.

Anyhow, every once in a while the "national" news scene in the local paper ignites some spark. This one follows on the heels of a recent experience I had of attending the welcome get-together of Working Class Whit(e)man College (WCWC), a group of self-identified first-generation and/or working class students and faculty formed to make life easier for those students who struggled to get into Whiteman in the first place and who have to work harder to succeed here than the advantaged students who make up the majority of the college (and faculty) population. The perennial issues involve financial aid, work study that is actually helpful academically and financially (Whiteman's idea of work study while I was a student was to have the poor kids scrub the dishes at the dining hall for the rich kids - a humiliating, demoralizing & academically pointless "work study" for minimal compensation), and of course social equality. The turn out was horribly weak compared to last year's. Perhaps the invitation failed to fully communicate the value and necessity of the group. Maybe the new crop all had Core papers to turn in the next day (which is NO excuse) or maybe the College paid lip service to diversity yet again by failing to attract and admit highly qualified WCWCs. Who knows.

In my opinion, the college pays lip service to the diversity that matters most now (socioeconomic),** the form of diversity that really matters according to Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune, whose opinion piece I read this morning in the local paper, which incidentally published an editorial about how WA & OR higher education is unaffordable to middle class students (let alone working class kids like the WCWCs). Page presents statistics that counter the widely held notion that the face of poverty in this country looks young, inner city, and black offering, "While poor whites outnumber poor blacks, poverty has taken on a black face in the public mind." He quotes Walter Michaels' new book The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, "The truth is, there weren't too many rich black people left behind when everybody who could get out of New Orleans did so." Page finished by adding that the most compelling part of Michael's book for him is Michael's descriptions of the vanishing American dream.

Harper's presented these figures in its Sept. 2006 Index (from a CBS newspoll):
Percentage of Americans in 1983 who thought it was "possible to start out poor in this country... and become rich": 57
Percentage who think this today: 80
Percentage of US income in 1983 and today, respectively, that went to the top 1 percent of earners: 9, 16

So, the American dream really is a dream - one that grows ever more elusive to realize.

When I applied to Whiteman, I saw it as the ticket out of the economic depression I was probably heading for had I stayed in state and attended a more affordable university. That was never an option in my mind, nor was not going to college. I wanted out of my blue collar work your ass off for squat background. I thought I wanted to become a medical doctor because they're rich and must therefore have a good quality of life. My years at Whiteman changed my priorities.

In the years after graduating from Whiteman I found myself unable to get a decent job (one that required some intelligent skills and paid enough to make the monthly payments on my student loans back to Whiteman). When I couldn't find that, I felt like I would have been better off had I attended a cheaper state school. Later I decided that more education was the way to go, so I applied to the one graduate school that fit my career goals and also provided the equivalent of a full-ride scholarship with pay. Only later did I realize that some aspects of the grad school "work study" were very much like washing dishes (for my TA one year I was required to make ubiquitous xerox copies - an almost completely worthless experience, and that's being generous).

Now I am back at Whiteman in a different capacity, months away from a PhD, and definitely no longer identifiable as anything but advantaged. Last year I made more money than anyone in my family ever has and my quality of life is pretty darn amazing. Despite the 80 hour work week, the life of a college professor is in many ways like having a life on Easy Street. I've never been so happy to work for the equivalent of 8 bucks an hour.

But, I don't know if that's the life I'll be able to enjoy. I just hope I will be able to find intellectually fulfilling work that pays enough to pay off my student loans and allows me to give something back to the community while enjoying a good quality of life with my little family.

I don't want to be $$$ wealthy if it means people will think I am a better person simply because I have a lot of money, a big house, a plasma TV, and an expensive car. If Whiteman students come away with a moral lesson from their "Experience," I hope it's the notion that having money doesn't make you an inherently better person. I wonder how pervasive that sentiment is and how hard it is for non-WCWC students to unlearn.

** The college must pay lip service to socioeconomic diversity at some level because it needs the rich students' parents to subsidize the education of the poor kids (all 8 of them). I don't know how many there actually are, but the college has a decent endowment, so if it could just get its heart in the right place it could and should (!) provide all WCWC students a TRUE full-ride scholarship.

The Gift of Language

One of the benefits of sticking around the college (and specifically sitting in on a colleague's class) even though I'm not teaching this semester, is that I still get to have engaging conversations with bright students. These conversations truly are gifts. Oh man, it also reminds me of what I miss out on by not teaching. Well, I'll be back into it soon enough! That's what I remind myself in moments of doubt.

This morning's conversation evolved from a simple comment at the end of class about how a video of Washoe, a sign language trained chimp, which was shown in a different class was not as impressive as the one I showed in class last year. Here I had to negotiate the murky territory of being this student's prof last year, sitting in a class as a 'student' with him, and hearing comments about my colleague and how he should have used some other (better) video.

First, I asked the student to defend his statement that the video I had shown was in fact more impressive. I simply responded, "Oh yeah? What part?" To which he gave a typical student response, "Oh uh, mmmm, the whole thing." He conveyed his enthusiasm for the video nonverbally.

We then proceeded to have a wonderful conversation that brought up some core issues in the evolution of thought on language evolution. I was even able to impart a bit of information that he found utterly fascinating. It was all so very rewarding, and just what I needed. I'm finally beginning to understand what Henry Gleitman meant when he told me "Research is your bread; Teaching is the cake."

I shared with this student that for me, what excited me the most was the scene where Sue (Savage-Rumbaugh) cooks alongside Kanzi in a kitchen. He follows her spoken directions to rinse off a knife, turn on the burner, and other actions involved in preparing a meal with such seemlessness that it appears he must for certain understand language. I added - "BUT my scientific mind remains critical off this. They could have gone through these motions so many times and be so well rehearsed that all Sue does is add labels to his actions."

I don't really believe this because I have seen the results of many double blind tests that show definitively that Kanzi understands spoken language, can produce language with lexigrams, and shows evidence of understanding syntax. He can tell the difference between "Pour the water into the Coke" and "Pour the Coke into the water" for example. But I wanted the student to think critically about the possibility that Kanzi has been conditioned to do what he does. Incidentally, the topic for the intro psych class was classical conditioning so we had a perfect prime for our discussion.

"Couldn't we say then that human language is learned conditioned associations?" He asked.

"Oh yes, indeed! You've just hit on one of the great debates of psychology," I said. "B.F. Skinner proposed that very idea in his book Verbal Behavior."

So then is it all learning? he ponders aloud. "Well that is the age-old debate," I added.

At this point we transitioned into a conversation about how one system of communication (human language, chimp gestures, dog signals, squirrels squeaks, etc) is not inherently superior to another and that really they all exist because they solved some problem or conferred advantages. I asked him to consider what language does for us that chimps miss out on - the ability to share information, talk about what's not present, and plan ahead. This gives us a tremendous advantage and may explain why humans took the evolutionary trajectory they did rather than go the direction chimps did.

Here the student asked a terrific question: "But why did we develop language and not chimps when it's so beneficial?" He adds, "And why does Kanzi have what he has; what does that say about bonobos?"

I told him that Steven Pinker writes about this and his theory of language evolution in his book The Language Instinct. Pinker proposes that Language is the product of a freak genetic mutational accident. I even called it a gift.

At this point my student, who is now trying to wrap his head around the idea, asks or comments on something that prompts me to say:

"Ah! But yes there is - it's the FOXP2 gene."

I told him about how deficiencies in this area of genetic code are associated with deficiencies in language that mimic Broca's aphasia, a condition remarkable for the utter lack of patients' ability to produce syntactically correct sentences. They produce pure gibberish.

"Woah! Really?" he exclaims. "So we really are biochemical machines." He must have been picturing Descartes. "I already was already heading there but now I'm there!" (or something like that) he mutters as he walks off in the direction of the science building...

Students like him make my day.

If you'd like to read some of my other thoughts on language and apes, click here.

From Phrenology to Modules

Mapping the mind's black box.

The history of psychology is a relatively short but varied one, replete with many wrong turns. One of these is phrenology, the art and sometimes science of reading personality from bumps and recesses on a person's skull. Invented by Franz Gall, phrenology's heyday expired near the end of the 19th century. The basic idea held that the brain was an organ like no other, for contained within its black box were several suborgans, each with a different function. Running with the idea that the size of an organ tells us something about its usefulness for the organism, Gall reasoned that we could deduce the relative importance of each suborgan for each person based on the imprint it made on the head. For a more complete picture of phrenology, check out this excellent online phrenology resource from the British Library.

Like many wrongheaded ideas in psychology, phrenology has become like what astrology is to astronomy today. Neuroscience has come a long way since then, but we can still see vestiges of Gall's idea in the ideas from two founders of Evolutionary Psychology: Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

First, more on Gall's organs.
He proposed 27 of them, listed below. The final 8 he thought were unique to humans but the rest we share with other animals.

1. The instinct of reproduction (located in the cerebellum)

2. The love of one's offspring

3. Affection; friendship

4. The instinct of self-defense; courage; the tendency to get into fights. The carnivorous instinct; the tendency to murder

5. Guile; acuteness; cleverness

6. The feeling of property; the instinct of stocking up on food (in animals); covetousness; the tendency to steal

7. Pride; arrogance; haughtiness; love of authority; loftiness

8. Vanity; ambition; love of glory (a quality "beneficent for the individual and for society")

9. Circumspection; forethought

10. The memory of things; the memory of facts; educability; perfectibility

11. The sense of places; of space proportions

12. The memory of people; the sense of people

13. The memory of words

14. The sense of language; of speech

15. The sense of colors

16. The sense of sounds; the gift of music

17. The sense of connectedness between numbers

18. The sense of mechanics, of construction; the talent for architecture. 20. Comparative sagacity

19. The sense of metaphysics

20. The sense of satire; the sense of witticism

21. The poetical talent

22. Kindness; benevolence; gentleness; compassion; sensitivity; moral sense

23. The faculty to imitate; the mimic

24. The organ of religion

25. The firmness of purpose; constancy; perseverance; obstinacy.

What's really fascinating and what nicely captures the evolution of thought on thought, is that Cosmides and Tooby's recent theory (1990s) builds on a century's old idea. C & T posit that humans have mental modules (number unknown) that have been forged over evolutionary time because each solves a specific problem our ancestors faced. This idea runs counter to the prevailing notion, the one argued by S. J. Gould, that our brain is a general problem solving device not a domain-specific one.

In the grand developmental scheme of psychology, EP is practically prenatal so there's been a lot of theory, some great emblematic research published, and vanishingly few bona fide modules proposed, let alone confirmed.

That said, here's my list of some proposed modules mapped onto Gall's organs (in parentheses):

1) Selecting, Attracting & Reproducing with a Mate
(reproduction - located in the cerebellum)

~ Fieldnote: Studied by David Buss & others. This module, like all of those proposed, incorporates many, many parts of the brain, including the cerebellum (especially if you agree with Geoffrey Miller that dancing is part of the courtship repertoire of our species). This is the sexiest line of EP research, and the most fun!

2) Differential Parental Solicitude
(love of one's offspring)

~ Fieldnote: Studied by Robert Trivers & others. Bob stands out as one of the great evolutionary biology All-Stars; he gave us the theories of parental investment and reciprocal altruism that so many theories of evolutionary psychology depend on. It can help explain sibling rivalry among other things.

3) Forming, Maintaining, and Breaking Alliances / Networking
(affection; friendship)

~ Fieldnote: Studied by Trivers, Dawkins, Dunbar, et al. Sandwiched between this and number one sits my little line of inquiry.

4) Self-Defense / Aggression toward Others
(self-defense; courage; fights, murder, carnivorous instinct)

~ Fieldnote: Studied by Buss. Note his The Murderer Next Door.

5) Intelligent Problem Solving: Making Tools & Being Machiavellian
(Guile; acuteness; cleverness)

~ Fieldnote: This one was difficult to name. We could talk about modules for tool making & use, for social cunning, for creativity, etc. But I'll point you to Cosmides and Tooby's most celebrated: the cheater detection module.

6) Selfishness
(feeling of property; covetousness; tendency to steal)

~ Fieldnote: Dawkins The Selfish Gene has much more to say about this.

7) Self-Esteem
(Pride; arrogance; haughtiness; love of authority; loftiness)

~ Fieldnote: EPs posit that self-esteem is an organism's measure of how well it thinks it's solving survival and reproductive problems. Lost your job and haven't found one for months? You feel depressed / low self-worth because you have failed at several major problems - feeding & sheltering yourself & your dependents. You've probably also suffered a loss in your social position and ability to attract or retain a mate. States of temporary low self-esteem and depression send you the signal that what you're doing isn't working & that you'd better try something new.

**
In the interest of brevity, I'll fast-forward to the rest of the most interesting modules:
14) Language Acquisition Device
(language; of speech)

~ Fieldnote: The LAD was first proposed by Noam Chomsky and later elaborated on by Steven Pinker. The central idea holds that through a freak accident of nature humans have acquired universal grammar and the necessary brain architecture that allows any human, given the right stimulation (exposure to language) at the right time (before @ age 7), to produce sentences that obey rules of syntax. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is but one example.

23) Capacity to Imitate
(faculty to imitate; mimic)

~ Fieldnote: "Monkey see, monkey do" is not an entirely correct designation for our tailed primate relatives. Monkeys don't really imitate each other. Instead, the emulate each other. Monkeys, and indeed most nonhuman apes, get the general idea about how to do something by observing another (e.g. to solve a problem), but when it comes time for them to do it on their own, they nearly always go through some trail and error before stumbling on the same solution. This is one area where humans (at a certain age) surpass even the brightest of nonhuman apes. We humans are able to duplicate actions the first time we are shown, within reason of course: I've seen swimmers do flip turns but I'd bet my imitation would look downright sloppy. Humans learn by trial and error too, so when I say we have a greater capacity for imitation, I mean we can copy some actions perfectly that other apes cannot and that we may need fewer trial & error steps to achieve perfection.

24) Religion: Product of Consciousness of Our Own Mortality
(organ of religion)

~ Fieldnote: EPs propose that the little accident of nature that gave us consciousness also made us aware of our own mortality and that led us to invent religion as a way of assuaging the grim news. This is a line of thought I would like to know more about - when hell freezes over.
No seriously, I am not as familiar with this particular theory and research as I should be. There is a ton of it - see here. Perhaps this is a decent place to start: Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion by Lee Kirkpatrick. Or maybe I'll see what a book already on my shelf has to say: Philosophy in the Flesh.

Cosmides and Tooby's idea of modules and my brief map of a few of them here should convince you that:

a) Evolutionary Psychology could come to be viewed as just as thoroughly wrong-headed as Gall's phrenology

OR

b) With sufficient modification and elaboration, the descent of Gall's organs into C & T's modules will come to be viewed as the predominant paradigm in Psychology.

For that to happen, EP must incorporate findings from neuroscience into its theory of the modular mind. What I want to see is the identification of specific neurotransmitter pathways that activate/deactivate given specific sensory inputs and also the articulation of "filters" for stimuli or sensitivity thresholds so that we can explain individual differences in behavior. These have to be shown to be genetically constructed at some level but also subject to developmental and experiential modification.

Basically, any all-encompassing theory of human nature must also explain why there are individual differences in behavior.

5 Years Ago Today

... I was teaching my first course in psychology (intro) and taking the teaching practicum. It was a glorious day weather-wise. Now that I am taking my first intro class in lets' see - - 14 years(!) I have gained some new perspective.

One:
It was okay 5 years ago to still use an overhead and write on the chalk board. Indeed, that was the only choice I had. When I taught intro at Whitman last year I had the option of using the much maligned Powerpoint in one class but not the other. Argh. So, I chose the path of leats resistance and TIME and stuck with my previous format. BIG mistake. See, students had changed in the 4 years that had gone by since 911-01. They had grown to expect powerpoint. They were not the students of my generation who were comfortable listening to a great lecture with few visuals. They expected, and arguably, needed something more akin to their multimedia-iPod-cameraphone-TMing lives.

((Side note: my clever pup just scored the end of a banana I had set down to start typing by licking the bottom of my foot and then my back. Yet another example of preferential sharing to those who groom!)).

My class stunk (it did, I know it; I'm not happy with it, and I'm motivated to fix it) because I failed to fully appreciate that none of the students sitting in my class were the student I was when I took the same class 14 years previously.

And TWO:
Since 911-01, students have changed. And, I need to adapt my methods to better meet their needs and expectations. So, I have decided I will revamp my intro class to fit the powerpoint multimedia format. I started that halfway through the semester so now I just have to go back and finish the front half. See, I did sense this last year and I did make time to do it. I even found a way to get PPT into my non-PPT equipped room :-)

Of Cuttings and Tennis

While watching the men duke it out over in Flushing Meadows, NY I have acquired the info I need on growing wisteria and gardenia from cuttings. Now that tennis is dominated by big servers, it just doesn't hold my attention as much, plus I like to mutlitask.

The cuttings: It sounds pretty straightforward. Cut about 6-12 inches of the end of a softwood brach/stem just below a leaf note, come home, dip in rooting hormone, stick in moistened soil, set in bright indirect light, wait 40-100 days. Last weekend I purchased the rooting hormone I will need from a local company. After tennis (it may be a 5 setter!) we'll walk the babes over to make the cutting.

I think I will take the following advice (ingenious use of a plastic coke bottle!!) to make a gardenia cutting:
"I use clear soda bottles. I cut the bottles in half about three inches from the bottom, poke drain holes in the bottom ribs with an ice pick. Put about two inches of mix in the bottom part, insert the cutting with the bottom set of leaves stripped off, and a cut made just below the lowest node. Put the top of the bottle back on the bottom by gently squeezing the top of the bottom part. You now have a mini greenhouse. You can see when the roots have grown by looking thru the clear plastic. Put in abright spot, but don't let the sun shine on them, because it will bake the cutting. You might devise a way to hang them under a tree near the branches so the sun doesn't hit them. In about three weeks you will see roots, it helps if the weather is hot, in the ninties."

The man with gills has returned home from his fun across campus and is now being greated by Mad Bomber Ears. Maybe I can get him to hit the courts with me later... give his darn streptococcal inflammation condition a rest!

I love tennis. I really dearly do. My grandpa taught me to play. He's won a few tournaments in his day, many of them as a "senior citizen." It is a game that can be played lifelong if one has good joints (knees, ankles, elbows). If not, swimming it is! Anyhow, GillMan and I pontificated in our usual completely agreeing fashion that Federer and Hingis in their prime are simply amazing. The make the game look effortless, like topnotch ballet. Angled shots, precision placement, stamina to run down almost anything with ease... their only weakness is retun of serve. Reminds me of trying to play my grandpa - even when he was OLD and I was a healthy young teenager I just could not return his serve. But, if he served a soft one, or a fake-o sidearmed one, I was all over it! He hasn't played for a while; it's sad. I know he has his reasons, but I think he should get off it and get back into it. Next time I visit I'll have to remember to bring my racket and shoes and not accept anything but a visit with him down memory lane.

I'll try not to hold his "You'll never be a good tennis player because you're too short" comment against him. At least I had the sense to call him on it (I usually just roll my eyes covertly and let it ride). I pointed out that Hingis is my size. I might have seen his eyes roll back in their sockets but I was too proud of myself to notice.

Roddick's hanging on by sheer power of will here in the bottom of the 4th set...

... some things just refuse to die, like twigs stuck in soil that blossom into fine plants.