Behavioral Biology
Category archives for Behavioral Biology
Marta’s (good) questions, … fur
Posted by Greg Laden on February 24, 2009 Why did humans evolve hairlessness? Hair (fur) protects mammals from heat and cold, what would be the benefit from losing this asset? I think the most commonly held theory is that fur works on quadrupeds, but once you stand upright, it is less effective, and less fur works better. For later time periods, clothing works…
Marta’s (good) questions, … continued
Posted by Greg Laden on February 24, 2009 Why did the evolution of a large brain happen only once (among mammals, and in particular, primates?) Larger brains have evolved a number of times. It seems that there has been a trend over several tens of millions of years of evolution of larger brains in various clades, such as carnivores and primates. There is…
Marta’s (good) questions, Greg’s (oft’ lame) answers: Bonobos?
Posted by Greg Laden on February 23, 2009 My student, Marta, exploded the other day. She was sitting there in class two weeks ago and exploded. She does not know that I know this, but I noticed it happen. Since she was sitting, as usual, in the front row, and it was all in her face, the other students did not see it…
Race, Gender, IQ and Nature
Posted by Greg Laden on February 18, 2009 Nature, the publishing group, not the Mother, has taken Darwin’s 200th as an opportunity to play the race card (which always sells copy) and went ahead and published two opposing views on this question: “Should scientists study race and IQ? The answers are Yes, argued by Stephen Cici and Wendy Williams of the Dept of…
Great Moments in Human Evolution: The Invention of Chipped Stone Tools
Posted by Greg Laden on February 12, 2009 Or not. Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record…
I’m a little worried
Posted by Greg Laden on January 23, 2009 The following is a proof developed by a number of economists at Harvard. It is a proof of the inability of women to understand technologically complex problems, math, engineering, that sort of thing. it is claimed that it almost always works. Now, I’m not saying that Larry Summers was party to this proof, or even…
The natural basis for gender inequality
Posted by Greg Laden on December 31, 2008 Naturalism is a potential source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane decisions such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast.1 When it comes to airplanes, you’d better be a servant to the rules of nature or the airplane will go splat. When it comes to…
When Kissing Cousins get to Third Base
Posted by Greg Laden on December 23, 2008 It has long been known that incest is not as bad as you think. Anti-cousin marriage laws are like prohibition laws and blue laws. They arise from a Christian conservative movement that swept Western Civilization from the late 18th century through the 19th century, up to about the time of the repeal of Prohibition. Sure,…
Shocking: Don’t trust your fellow human!
Posted by Greg Laden on December 23, 2008 This is from a news report of a paper I’ve not yet seen: More than two-thirds of volunteers in the research study had to be stopped from administering 150 volt shocks of electricity, despite hearing a person’s cries of pain, professor Jerry M. Burger concluded in a study published in the January issue of the…
Dominance and Affiliation Mediate Despotism in a Social Primate
Posted by Greg Laden on December 6, 2008 Individual animals that live and and forage in groups may not always benefit from a particular move (to or from a foraging site) in the same way as other individuals in the group. Therefore, there must be some kind of negotiation among the critters. Theoretical work almost always seem to show that consensus based group…
Topi or not Topi …
Posted by Greg Laden on October 27, 2008 Go to any bar and you’ll see a lot of males standing and sitting around not mating. I’ll bet you would have guessed that the reason they are not mating is that no females will mate with them for one reason or another. But there is the distinct possibility that they are very inconspicuously resisting…
Snow, Loons, Eagles, Otters bloody with fish
Posted by Greg Laden on October 26, 2008 The lake is icy-green and in the distance almost blends into the sky through a fast moving fog bank. The bald eagles (a pair and one offspring) are up to something in the back, one of them making swings over the bay and then back into the yard where they are vocalizing quite a bit.…
Study Suggests Increased Rate of Human Adaptive Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on October 24, 2008 There is a new paper, just coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that explores the idea that humans have undergone an increased rate of evolution over the last several tens of thousands of years. By an increased rate of evolution, the authors mean an increased rate of adaptive change in the…
Macaque Mothers Favor Their Sons
Posted by Greg Laden on October 17, 2008 The Trivers Willard Hypothesis predicts that under certain conditions, individuals will bias their investment in offspring differently depending on the sex of the offspring. It is believed that this can be as extreme as infanticide or as subtle as providing different amounts of breast milk. A new study by Katherine Hinde finds that macaques may…
Cultural Evolution from Mosquitos to Worm Grunting
Posted by Greg Laden on October 13, 2008 A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like…
Effective Polygyny in Humans: Turns out it is for real
Posted by Greg Laden on September 29, 2008 Human societies tend to be at least a little polygynous. This finding, recently reported in PLoS genetics, does not surprise us but is nonetheless important. This important in two ways: 1) This study uncovers numerical details of human genetic variation that are necessary to understand change across populations and over time; and 2) the variation…
Precarious Pettiness of Sexual Politics In the Blogosphere: An uppity response to the perspicacious Dr. Isis and an appeal to get serious about sexual aggression and exploitation
Posted by Greg Laden on September 11, 2008 Dr. Isis the Scientist at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, has written an open letter to our sister, Zuska, regarding (in part) the exchanges between my Sbling and myself. Dr. Isis points out that she has had a long term academic interests in breasts, which is primarily political and pragmatic as it turns…
The Male Boob Gaze
Posted by Greg Laden on September 10, 2008 The Sexy Hawt Bodies discussion is back, and Zuska is in full iconic form, hypocrisies included. Well, maybe hypocrisy is too strong a word. Let’s just say bending the truth when not really necessary to make her point, and shutting out allies and reasonable voices by being, well, sexist. Zuska: I puke on your shoes.…
What I had for brunch: A Trip to Bitch Lake
Posted by Greg Laden on August 25, 2008 They say Lake Itasca is the source of the Mississippi. This is why there is a big state park surrounding the lake, a park that preserves some beautiful old forest despite the best efforts of 19th century lumberjacks to cut it down. Amanda next to the tallest white pine tree in Minnesota I’ve been to…
The Magpie in the Mirror
Posted by Greg Laden on August 20, 2008 A typical adult human recognizes that the image one sees in a mirror is oneself. We do not know how much training a mirror-naive adult requires to do this, but we think very little. When a typical adult macaque (a species of monkey) looks in the mirror, it sees another monkey. Typical adult male macaques…
Helen Fisher: The brain in love
Posted by Greg Laden on August 17, 2008 A Portrait of The Brain by Adam Zeman
Posted by Greg Laden on August 15, 2008 Published by Yale University Press A Portrait of the Brain by Adam Zeman is a new book describing how the brain works (and does not work) in something of an Oliver Sack’s experiential manner, but with a twist. Zeman is a Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Nerology at the Pininsula Medical School. A Portrait of…
The Evolution of Imprinting
Posted by Greg Laden on July 23, 2008 The phrase “genomic imprinting” has come to refer the turning off of a gene (a particular instance of a gene on a particular chromosome duplicated across the cells in a body) so that the gene is not expressed at all, with the turning off of the gene not caused in the body in question, but…
Delay of childbirth and cesarean section: There may be a link.
Posted by Greg Laden on June 30, 2008 A study just out in PLoS Medicine suggests that an increasing trend of delaying childbirth is associated wiht a rising rate of the use of cesarean delivery. The explanation appears to be impared uterine function. From the editor’s summary: Though it was not studied here, the researchers hypothesize that impaired uterine contractility may be a…
Morning Sickness is an Adaptation, not a … Sickness
Posted by Greg Laden on June 28, 2008 There is new information from an older idea (from about 2000) by Paul Sherman and colleagues. The idea underlying this research is simple: Symptoms of illnesses may be adaptive. Indeed, this may be true to the extent that we should not call certain things illnesses. Like “morning sickness.” Broadly speaking, there are two different kinds…
Sex Ratio Bias in India
Posted by Greg Laden on June 24, 2008 Sometimes boys are worth more, sometimes girls are worth more. In an evolutionary sense. Or, more correctly, the value of a certain sex … as an offspring … can be measured in fitness terms. Fisher noted this and hypothesized this was the explanation for the 50-50 sex ratio we usually see. As one sex becomes…
Female Coders Do It With Consideration
Posted by Greg Laden on June 17, 2008 Check it out: Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres-and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers-insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code-those strings of instructions that result in nifty…
The Phalarope: Not just another polyandrous bird…
Posted by Greg Laden on May 17, 2008 MIT researchers found that phalaropes depend on a surface interaction known as contact angle hysteresis to propel drops of water containing prey upward to their throats. Photo by Robert Lewis The Phalarope starts out as an interesting bird because of its “reversed” sex-role mating behavior. For at least some species of Phalarope, females dominate males,…
Lyrebird … or should we say “liar bird”
Posted by Greg Laden on April 19, 2008 That was the lyre bird. This is the liar bird:
Be nice to me or I might not talk to you. Or worse, maybe I will talk to you…
Posted by Greg Laden on April 9, 2008 Recently published research shows that individual humans will be nicer (more altruistic) when there is the possibility that the recipient of an act can respond verbally. The paper, “Anticipated verbal feedback induces altruistic behavior” is published in Evolution and Human Behavior for March.
, which is now available for the 
