Trivers-Willard
gregladen | August 12, 2013Whitey Bulger has finally been convicted of a small percentage of all the bad things he is said to have done. The Boston Globe has the details.
James J. “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster who rampaged through the city’s underworld for decades before slipping away from authorities and eluding a worldwide manhunt for more than 16 years, was convicted today in federal court of charges that will likely keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
Don't count on that. Whitey has slipped from the clutches of justice several times before. He'll probably make a break for it between…
gregladen | August 22, 2011First of all, I want you to know that I've devoted my life to this blog post so now you have every reason to love it more than any other blog post. Sniff sniff.
Or, could it be that I've been watching too much America's Got Talent (which, clearly, it does not, except that yo-yo guy was pretty good). I mean, seriously, if America's Got Talent then why is there Country Western Music? Anyway, I have noticed this trend of the argument for Not Being Voted Off The Island being that I've Invested Myself Emotionally Beyond Belief and I think that's a bad trend.
Speaking of time, this was one of…
gregladen | February 15, 2011I did not get on the Tiger Hating bandwagon when it was revealed that he had a wife and 19 girlfriends. First, I'm sure they were all having a great time at some point. Second, I can see where his wife would be pissed off but she did marry a golfer after all. What else was she expecting???? Finally, there's like a billion people in this world whose children just died or will soon die of some preventable disease and Tiger Woods, his wife and his girlfriends don't have a problem like that, so boo hoo.
I was unfazed by the big maneno over the car crash. Again, "first world problems" of…
gregladen | July 27, 2009Is the Natural World a valid source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane areas of thought 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 (such as gravity) 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 and following FDA guidelines will not do you in. A naturalistic…
gregladen | June 30, 2009This post was originally titled "Mail Order Brides and Hypergyny." I was prompted to revisit the post because it received a a rather astonishing comment that I chose not to allow, but I did post it on my Facebook page where any attention it would receive would be from the thoughtful people that make up my Facebook community rather than just anybody out there on the Internet. Also, I recently received a complaint from a reader that Scienceblogs.com has been showing a lot of ads for "mail order brides," and this post was originally partly a response to that.
I should also mention that in the…
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 | October 17, 2008The 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 do this. However, I think this may be counterintuitive.
Hinde uses data from 106 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to show that first time mothers produce richer milk when they have sons compared to when they have daughters. She suggests that "[t]…
gregladen | September 29, 2008Human 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 across populations are interesting and, in fact, seem to conform to expectations (in a "we don't' really care about statistical significance" sort of way, for now) regarding human social organization.
Before examining the paper, we should…
gregladen | June 24, 2008Sometimes 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 more rare, it becomes more valuable, and thus parents (mothers, perhaps, usually) bias towards that sex. Then the disparity goes away and thus the differential value goes away.
Of course, the truth is that we don't actually see the 50-50 sex ratio all the time ... many species…
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 | November 20, 2007
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 do this. However, I think this may be counterintuitive.
Hinde uses data from 106 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to show that first time mothers produce richer milk when they have sons compared to when they have daughters. She suggests that "[t]…
gregladen | November 20, 2007How Whitey Bulger Helps Us Learn About Evolution and Biology!
UPDATE: This is a post I wrote a while back about Whitey Bulger, who was to me back in the day just another local celebrity and crime boss, when I was living and working in the Boston area. But now he is in the news all over the place, so I thought you might enjoy this.
Most of you won't know who Whitey Bulger is. He is actually on the FBI's ten most wanted list. He may have been spotted in Italy last Spring, and the FBI is just now asking for assistance from anyone who knows where he might be. (That's not gonna work.)
Whitey was…