Gender and Sexual Orientation
gregladen | April 28, 2009Gallup has taken on the task of explaining, in ultimate terms, the evolutionarily designed features of the human penis. He works this as an engineering problem from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, which is always a little bit dangerious, but gallup isn't quite the arm waiver that a lot of other EP's are, so he may be doing it right.
Gallup's work is written up an an all-too-sophomoric Scientific American article by Jesse Bering which just barely falls short of explaining this important biological phenomenon in terms of a pair of headlights, a flashlight, and a little red waagon.…
gregladen | March 25, 2009As you know if you read my blog, Trivers Willard is an important theoretical construct which has been tested numerous times. TW works in some species, not in others, and overall, that should be predictable (accroding to TW).
It turns out that finches control the sex of their offspring, and do so in a way that TW would predict, apparently. There is a paper in Science that I'll probably eventually get to writing up for you, and in the mean time, here's a quick news report from Scientific American.
See if you can figure out how Trivers Willard is working here, and why the important…
gregladen | March 6, 2009I'm starting to worry that the last few Friday Weird Science write-ups by Scicurious (who seems, these days, to be the primary blogger at Neurotopia) have been of papers that I happen to have read. Just so you know: Thousands of papers are published per week across the diverse sciences, and although Scicurious tends to deal with life science and I tend to read life science, the chances of this particular harmonic convergence across bloggers regarding papers published over the last decade is statistically almost zero. More likely, Scicurious and I just have similar taste ... or lack thereof…
gregladen | January 23, 2009The 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 in the room at the time. I'm. Not. Saying. That.
Well, he was in the room. Not that that means anything.
Anyway, on to the proof.
Find a female, any available female, and give her the following information:
1: The speed of sound is approximately 720 miles per hour.
2: The speed…
gregladen | December 31, 2008Naturalism 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 breakfast, it has been shown that knowing about our evolutionary history can be a more efficacious guide to good nutrition than the research employed by the FDA, but you can live without this approach. Naturalism works when it comes to behavior too, but there are consequences. You probably…
gregladen | June 17, 2008Check 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 applications and programs-with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.
The code becomes a type of "roadmap" for others who might…
gregladen | 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, forcing them to build nests and to care for the eggs that the females place there after mating. If a female suspects that a male is caring for eggs of another female, she may destroy the eggs and force the male to copulate with her a few…
gregladen | March 24, 2008Significant cultural and physical differences ... the stuff of race and ethnicity ... are prominent when people move across continents or between them. Eventually, the ponderous events of history, which involve occasional foldings in the continuum of human variation, causing apparent patchiness, are offset by the frequent events of human activities, resulting in genetic and cultural admixtures. What colonialism, invasion, and migration do is undone.
A new study out in PLoS Genetics examines this phenomenon for Latin America, with a study of genetic admixture.
From the Author's Summary:…
gregladen | March 21, 2008A new study out of Cornell measures gender balance, or lack thereof, across the 100 largest publicly held companies in New York State. The findings indicate that while about half the workers in these companies are women, less than 15 percent of the board and executive officer positions are held by women.
Figure Caption: Women still comprise less than 15 percent of the total board director and executive officer positions in the 100 largest public companies headquartered in New York state, according to a new study on women leaders in New York published by the Women's Executive Circle of New…
gregladen | March 2, 2008... according to mainstream Christian leaders.
This is about Larry King, who was fatally shot in the head on February 12 in a classroom. Larry was murdered by his classmate, Brandon McInerney. It appears that Brandon shot Larry because Larry was openly gay and a transvestite.
TUIBG notes on his blog that Bishop Fulton Sheen blames the policy of "tolerance" (a word rarely used because if its innate offensiveness by the GLBTA community). Larry was murdered because the community he lived in generally accepted him. Another way of putting it is that Larry was murdered because the community…
gregladen | February 26, 2008Rick Perry, Eagle Scout, has written a book about the boy scouts, defending their homophobic and anti humanist activism.
An Eagle Scout and the father of an Eagle Scout, Perry stresses the importance of Scout values such as being "courteous and kind." (He is fond of phrases like "gosh" and "jiminy cricket.") He has received the Silver Antelope Award for outstanding service to the Scouts.
Asked in a recent interview if being gay was a choice (I presume the interview pegged Perry for gay, otherwise why ask him this question), he replied:
I'm not a social scientist. I can't answer the…
gregladen | February 12, 2008One of the most compelling argument that the story of Noah's Ark is made up is the implausibility of having animals like tigers and lions together with animals like lambs and deer on the same boat for very long. The big carnivores would eventually eat the little cute furry things. The bunnies would be the first to go. But new evidence, shown on the Miracle Pet Show disproves this objection.
So, if it is god's will, or if people just darn try hard enough, anybody and anything can get along with anything and anybody. Put that on an inspirational poster and hang it, I say!
Or is there…
gregladen | January 29, 2008Larry Craig, or as we call him in Minnesota, Happy Feet Larry, stepped in where Michelle Bachmann could not perform, in an overt act of erotic love with the President of the United States, George Bush.
I starting watching the That Big Speech by George Bush just before midway last night. In time to hear him say that he wants to be the first President of the United States to usher in legislation specifically outlawing (rather than simply not funding) several entire areas of scientific research, at the same time doubling funding on research on nuclear power. Oh, and he also wants to be the…
gregladen | January 10, 2008 Why is there no Birth Control Pill for men?
This latest "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question will certainly engender a wide range of responses from the Scienceblogs.com team. Answers may address physiology, endocrinology, pharmacology, economics, and other areas of scientific thinking and practice. The answer I'd like to propose can be summed up in two closely linked words pilfered from the question itself:
Men. Control.
Myriad aspects of life can be understood by recognizing a single critical fact, and the layered, sometimes complex, deeply biological effects of that fact. Males, by…
gregladen | January 3, 2008Daily alcohol use by males has been shown to increase sexual arousal and decrease sexual inhibition.
In Fruit Flies.
The current (Jan 2) issue of PLoS ONE includes a paper by Lee et al exploring thye physiological side of changes in sexual behavior under the influence of alcohol, with an eye towards understanding this process in humans, using an animal model.
Alcohol has a strong causal relationship with sexual arousal and disinhibited sexual behavior in humans; however, the physiological support for this notion is largely lacking and thus a suitable animal model to address this issue is…
gregladen | December 8, 2007Coturnix points out that the following video of Dan Abrams speaking with two women about sex among teenagers is a good example of reporting about a scientific issue mired in a political quagmire.
Keywords and phrases:
Well, what that study actually reveals is...
Well, in a number of cases....
The study said it didn't work. So we need to do more of it to make it work.
I say, if the legislation doesn't work, screw it.