Hormones

Saunas and longevity: Another example of putting the preclinical cart before the horse

oracknows — Fri, 17 Mar 2017 05:00:23 +0000

Saunas and longevity: Another example of putting the preclinical cart before the horse

Among quacks, epigenetics is the new quantum theory.

I know I've said that before, but it's worth saying again in response to a new quack I've just discovered, courtesy of an article in The Daily ~~Mail~~ Fail by one Dr. Sara Gottfried pimping her books and health empire, From taking a sauna to drinking pinot noir, a fascinating book by a hormone doctor reveals how to... switch off your bad genes and live longer.

Epigenetics. She's talking about epigenetics. Of course, she keeps using that word. I do not think it means what she thinks it means. Indeed, if what's in this article is a taste of what's in her book Younger: The Breakthrough Programme To Reset Our Genes And Reverse Ageing, it looks as though we have another misguided doc who thinks that epigenetics means that wishing makes it so and that we can easily "reprogram our genes" with whatever woo they are selling. In fact, it turns out that this article is an excerpt from that very book, which means that, yes, presumably this is a taste of what's in the book, designed (of course) to sell it and published by The Fail because, well, it's the sort of sciencey-sounding tripe they love, a bunch of extrapolation and misinterpretation of preclinical and very early clinical evidence, all gussied up with "epigenetics" and how saunas (and other things) can "reset your genes" to make you live longer. I'll get to the saunas in a moment. First, let's take a look at Dr. Gottfried.

Oddly enough, I had never heard of Sara Gottfried before, but it didn't take long to find her website, where she bills herself as "Dr. Sara Gottfried, MD." Now, whenever I see a doctor using both "Dr." before and "MD" after her name, I can't help but think that she's really trying too hard to impress, because, really, you only need to use one or the other, not both, to communicate to people that you're a physician. (I also can't help but think of the title of this movie.) Then I read her bio on her website, and—hoo, boy—is this woman full of herself. She describes herself as having been the 4 “F’s” – frazzled, frumpy, fat, and "you can imagine the fourth 'F.'" But don't worry about it. She fixed herself and turned her fix into The Gottfried Protocol. I don't know about you, but whenever I see a doctor naming a treatment protocol after herself, I'm just dying to deflate the ego, particularly when she says without clinical trial evidence that it's "worked gloriously well on the 10,000+ people I’ve seen in the past 10 years."

What she describes in her protocol sounds very much like the epitome of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" in that it rebrands simple, uncontroversial interventions as somehow being "alternative" or, in Gottfried's case, revolutionary. Interventions such as eating healthy food, spending quality time with her husband and making time for her best friend, and hanging out with her daughters become the "Gottfried protocol." Of course, there's more to it than that. (Isn't there always?) Gottfried slathers on a bit of the quack's favorite gambit of telling each patient she's unique and individual:

I’m a gynecologist, but I don’t treat problems. I don’t even treat symptoms: I specialize in root cause analysis because I know – and evidence shows – that the greatest health transformations are triggered when you address the root cause, not the signs.

Rather than treating problems or symptoms, I treat people. I treat women. I see women – and what I see every day is that each woman is a special snowflake. Sometimes I prescribe supplements that fill nutritional gaps that you might have. Sometimes I prescribe an iPhone app that helps you connect to your heart. Sometimes I prescribe botanical therapies with a very low risk profile. Sometimes I prescribe bio-identical hormones. Many times I prescribe all of the above. With every patient I see, I consider her unique context, physiology and preferences…and then invent a treatment plan to promote maximum health and happiness. It’s not one method fits all. It’s not fix-’em-up-and-send-’em-home. It’s a mission.

My mission at The Gottfried Institute – and in life – is to help women feel sexy, vital and balanced from their cells to their souls.

You know, the term "special snowflake" is usually used to make fun of people who think they are so special and unique that the universe should cater to them. This is the first time I've actually seen an alternative medicine doc actually use the term unironically to describe her patients. But it fits! Maybe she's inadvertently saying something about what she does and who her patients are without realizing it. In any case, this is the same sort of patter that alternative medicine docs of all stripes, be they homeopaths, naturopaths, "functional medicine" followers and their touting of the "biochemical individuality" of each patient, or practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM)use to lure the marks in. You're special! You're an individual! I cater to you and develop a treatment plan based on your special snowflakeness!

It turns out that Younger isn't the first book by Gottfried. (Of course it isn't.) She's also written The Hormone Cure: Reclaim Balance, Sleep and Sex Drive; Lose Weight; Feel Focused, Vital, and Energized Naturally with the Gottfried Protocol and (of course!) The Hormone Reset Diet: Heal Your Metabolism to Lose Up to 15 Pounds in 21 Days. I've noticed that "hormone balancing" is a favorite dubious treatment plan. Indeed, whenever you hear a doc like Gottfried say "hormone balancing," substitute the word "humor" for "hormone," and you'll be closer to the truth. What's really going on here is the appeal to "balance" in pseudoscientific medicine, in which the reason you don't feel good or are sick is that something in your body is "out of balance." TCM, based as it is on ancient Eastern religious beliefs more than any sort of science, is based on the same idea, that something "out of balance" in your body causes disease, be it dampness/dryness, heat/cold, etc. Add a little functional medicine, in which many hormone levels are checked, thus virtually guaranteeing that one or more "abnormalities" will be found to "treat," and that's what we're looking at here. If you don't believe me, consider that Gottfried likes to use terms like "biohacking my hormones" to describe her "journey" to wellness.

If you have any doubt how dubious what Gottlieb is selling is, simply consider this. She uncritically advocates "detoxification":

Detox is nutrient rehab. Detoxing means cleaning out the body, removing toxins, clearing out your jammed hormone receptors, and resetting key hormones. Most simply, detox is a tool of functional medicine: remove the obstacles to radical health, and add in the factors that support you. We accumulate junk mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually on a daily basis.

And later:

Heavy metals such as mercury and lead and toxic chemicals can build up in our bodies and cause a number of issues, including increasing our risk to certain diseases and making us resistant to weight loss. We are constantly exposed to these heavy metals and toxic chemicals in our environment: Mercury can get into our bodies by way of fish, particularly large fish and shellfish; medications, such as thiazide diuretics, prescribed for high blood pressure; vaccines, which may contain thimerosal, a mercury compound used as a preservative; and dental fillings.

Furthermore, we can be exposed to lead and other toxic chemicals in our drinking water, as seen by the recent lead poisoning case in Flint, Michigan, and reports by the Natural Resource Defense Council about rocket fuel (perchlorate) and atrazine contamination of our drinking water.2 (Perchlorate is a toxic chemical used in making rocket fuel and explosives, and atrazine is a pesticide and a known endocrine disruptor, meaning it interferes with our hormones, even at extremely low levels.)

Detoxing can help our bodies get rid of the inevitable buildup of heavy metals and toxic chemicals that happens in modern life. It can flip the switch toward healing and repair.

Great. She's parroting antivaccine pseudoscience, too, namely that bit about vaccines and thimerosal, which has been absent from childhood vaccines for 15 years and isn't even in most flu vaccines any more. In any case, as I've pointed out time and time again, whenever you hear a doctor promoting "detox," that doctor is promoting quackery, because "detox" is unnecessary. Basically, it's nothing more than a form of ritual purification gussied up with scientific and pseudoscientific language. Oh, and fear of modernity and, above all, chemicals.

But back to The Fail article, which I've neglected too long as I've wandered off through Dr. Gottlieb's website:

The female body is magnificent, but it doesn’t come with a lifetime warranty or an owner’s manual.

However, as a doctor — a gynaecologist and hormone specialist — I am fascinated by the role that our genes play and the power that we have to change them.

I believe it’s all about finding the genetic switches that control metabolism, weight, disease and ageing and am convinced that by turning your good genes on and your bad genes off, you can prevent ageing no matter how old you are.

This last statement is so ridiculous that I laughed out loud when I read it. (I hope no one around me was disturbed. I am at a medical meeting, and it was between sessions that I was catching up on blog reading.) Nothing prevents aging. Now, eating a healthy diet and exercising, not being overweight, not smoking, and not abusing alcohol, among other things, will help mitigate or slow down the deterioration of the body and prevent the adverse consequences that derive from smoking, drinking, being overweight, and leading a sedentary lifestyle, such as type 2 diabetes, cancer, arthritis, and cardiovascular disease, but your body is still aging and deteriorating in ways that time mandates and can't be prevented. OK, OK, maybe I'm being a bit pedantic, but this is the problem. Gottfried is overselling what can be done and, strictly speaking, nothing prevents aging per se.

This overpromising on aging is all a relatively minor issue compared to what Gottfried starts blathering about later in the article. For example:

Regular sessions in a sauna give the body a shock of heat, which appears to help reset its fine-tuning mechanisms, including DNA.

A sauna activates the longevity gene FOXO3, which turns on genes for stress resilience, production of disease-fighting antioxidants, maintenance of proteins (to keep muscles strong), DNA repair (prevents mutations) and tumour killing.
So using a sauna is handy as we get older because it seems to boost exactly the genes that become less effective with age.

In addition to turning on other important genes, FOXO3 helps you make something called ‘heat-shock proteins’.

These work to ensure proteins in your body are folded like a fitted sheet, not bunched up and wrinkled. Poorly folded proteins clump together and cause damage in the form of furred-up arteries, heart failure and diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Heat-shock proteins also work to counteract ‘oxidative stress’ — the natural rusting process that happens to the body over time. Studies show when you make more FOXO3 (because you are genetically predisposed to do so or because you enjoy a regular session in the sauna), you triple your chance of living to 100. Even if you have a sauna only once every couple of months your heart will benefit.

This is what we in the biz refer to as taking findings in basic science and epidemiology and running with them to the point that you run off of a cliff.

FOXO3 is actually an interesting gene. It encodes the transcription factor forkhead box O-3 (FoxO3). Transcription factors are proteins that bind to specific DNA sequences associated with specific genes in order to turn those genes on or off, so that they make more or less of the proteins that they encode. Indeed, transcription factors are a very common epigenetic mechanism by which gene activity is regulated. If you really want to get into the weeds, you can consider that there are transcription factors and other epigenetic mechanisms that regulate how much FOXO3 is made, which then in turn regulates its target genes. The network goes on and on, both "upstream" and "downstream" of FOXO3, and I'm not even considering other layers of regulation, such as how the FOXO3 protein is modified after it is made.

While looking at Gottfried's claims, I found a rather interesting recent review article about FOXO3 and its affect on longevity, and it's true. FOXO3 regulates processes associated with energy homeostasis, DNA repair, oxidative stress, and other processes. Actually, though, there are more than one FOXO genes, and they are all involved in similar pathways. The article notes that overexpressing (forcing the cells to make a lot more than normal of) FOXO3 in model organisms such as Drosophila (fruit flies), Caenorhabditis elegans (a species of tiny roundworms that are often used in genetic experiments), and mice.

The authors caution, though, that the effect sizes are inconsistent and can be very strain-dependent. For instance, interventions that increase FOXO3, such as calorie deprivation, do not extend the lives of wild mice, and findings in calorie-restricted rhesus monkeys have been inconsistent. The authors further caution that the GenAge database lists over 1,000 genes that have been associated with longevity or ageing in model organisms, including >1,000 in C. elegans and >100 in mice, 51 of the latter being able to extend lifespan but that there is little evidence to date for any of these being involved in human longevity. What is the evidence? The authors describe it:

Because of its actions and strategic position in relation to intracellular pathways, FoxO3 has long been considered to play a pivotal role in the molecular basis of longevity [6]. This led researchers at Kuakini Medical Center in Honolulu to perform a genetic association study of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) spanning the human FoxO3 gene (FOXO3) and flanking DNA in a cohort of American men of Japanese ancestry well characterized for ageing phenotypes. Longevity ‘cases' were men aged over 95 years, and ‘controls' were birth-cohort-matched men of normal lifespan for this population (mean age 78.5 years). This revealed an association of three FOXO3 SNPs with living to extreme old age [20]. Eleven independent studies of populations of diverse ancestry in multiple different countries have now confirmed and extended this finding. A meta-analysis in 2014 of the various studies found that 5 of the FOXO3 SNPs tested retained statistically significant associations with longevity [21]. The strongest association was for the minor allele of the SNP reported originally to exhibit the most robust association, namely, the G allele of rs2802292 in men (odds ratio, 1.54; 95% confidence interval, 1.33-1.67).

SNP stands for "single nucleotide polymorphism" and represents a difference in a single nucleotide. For example, a SNP may replace the nucleotide cytosine (C) with the nucleotide thymine (T) in a certain stretch of DNA. There are estimated to be 10 million SNPs in the human genome and are used as markers of genetic variability. When they are found within a gene, they can indicate a variant of the gene that changes the function of the protein made. Or, when found near a gene or in a regulatory region of a gene, they can affect how much of the gene is made or how the initial RNA transcript made from the gene is spliced to form the final messenger RNA that is translated into protein. In the case of FOXO3:

The various longevity-associated SNPs are located in or near intron 2 of the 125-kb FOXO3 gene [23,24,25]. After performing extensive sequence analyses of coding DNA, the Kuakini team ruled out involvement of coding variants (amino acid differences) as an explanation for the genetic association [25]. To date, the causal SNP(s) and the reason underlying the protective effect of the longevity-associated allele(s) in human longevity remains to be delineated. The Leiden 85-plus study has, nevertheless, found an association of FOXO3 haplotypes with all-cause mortality, stroke and cardiovascular mortality [26]. The rs2802292 TT genotype is, moreover, associated with the rare hamartomatous polyposis syndromes [27]. Research is needed to compare FoxO3 levels in various tissues of long-lived and normal lifespan individuals with TT and GG genotypes. The findings might help inform experiments aimed at identifying factors that could be relevant to the genetic association findings in humans.

Introns are the stretches of DNA between the exons and are what get spliced out when the initial RNA transcript is spliced into its final messenger RNA form. In other words, this is a case where the favorable FOXO3 variants have SNPs that do not affect the sequence of the gene that is actually coded into protein. However, there can be sequences within introns that are binding sites for proteins that regulate gene expression. So it's possible that these SNPs alter the function of the intron in a way that increases FOXO3 expression. The bottom line is, contrary to what Gottfried claims, we don't know, or, as another review puts it, the role of FOXO genes in human longevity is "complex and remains to be fully elucidated." This other review also notes:

To further comprehend how FOXOs affect longevity, it is of high importance to understand how human FOXO sequence variants (namely FOXO3A) affect protein expression, its structure, or transcriptional activity. In order to see how these variants translate into physiological profiles, future investigations should address how these variants affect the level of FOXO proteins and their downstream effectors in serum.

Basically, Gottfried is massively oversimplifying and putting the cart before the horse, as doctors of her ilk, who promote their own protocols without doing the rigorous scientific and clinical research needed to validate them, are wont to do. We don't know that increasing the level of normal FOXO3 will prolong life, and we certainly don't know that saunas will boost its level in any meaningful, longlasting way; that is, if my multiple searches of PubMed and their failure to find any decent studies are any evidence.

I think I know where this linkage could have come from. There was a study in 2015 that looked at sauna use in Finland and found that increased frequency of sauna use was correlated with decreased risk of sudden cardiac death, fatal coronary heart disease, fatal cardiovascular disease, and all-cause mortality. Speculation turned to heat shock proteins and the role of FOXO3, and this was quickly repeated as though it were scientific fact; e.g., here.

If there's one thing that docs like Dr. Gottfried do, it's to take preclinical findings from in vitro and animal experiments and to extrapolate them beyond breaking. Then they write self-help books. It's a far easier way to become famous and make money than actually doing the boring experiments required to confirm a hypothesis. If they can somehow invoke epigenetics, so much the better. "Quantum" medicine is so...1990s.

oracknows Fri, 03/17/2017 - 01:00

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Sometimes I prescribe supplements that fill nutritional gaps that you might have.
Might have? MIGHT have??!

Sometimes I prescribe an iPhone app that helps you connect to your heart. Sometimes I prescribe botanical therapies with a very low risk profile. Sometimes I prescribe bio-identical hormones. Many times I prescribe all of the above.

Ah, a broad-spectrum scammer.

In other news, women who want to remain aesthetically pleasing in their later years would rather go through this bull than just eat well and exercise throughout their lifetime.

So why should a sauna be better than just baking out in the hot desert sun? As it's going to hit 90+ degrees here today, I've never understood why you want to deliberately do this in dry or wet heat conditions in an enclosed room.

At least people that fall for the stupid snake oil of “Dr. Sara Gottfried, MD" do so of their own free will. There still exists that "Heavenly Heat Sauna" company that markets their sauna for children with autism, which I find on par with child abuse along the same lines as giving a child a bleach enema.

There is a way to stop aging. Alas it involves dieing young.

The pharma shill blog doth protest too much.

What about nicotinamide riboside?

Sauna, massage, drinking pinot noir.....
Maybe it's worth trying, before doing boring experiments to know if it really turns off bad genes. After all, if the "bad" genes are not turned off, maybe they are not that bad.

Orac writes,

She describes herself as having been the 4 “F’s” – frazzled, frumpy, fat, and “you can imagine the fourth ‘F.'”

Orac's posts never get old based on a life expectancy of about 48 hour. :-)

In contemplation, I imagined that the fourth "F" was forgotten which this post will soon become.

You do realize, don't you, that I was directly quoting Dr. Gottfried?

What about nicotinamide riboside?

The mitocondrial booster only known to exist in milk and beer. I have felt 'wellness' from it. There was an interesting effect when drinking my fill; I drank much less. Eight brews a day was knocked down to five -- The sixth would make me not feel well. The stuff does seem to rev up metabolism based on not feeling as cold on a winter's day. Putting a little in fermenting grapes/wine seems to make it roil faster. At the very least, the few beers less was good for my waistline.

Ahh well. If I overdo it, a little P-5-P seems to reverse a hangover rapidly. I haven't had the stuff in three years but have been thinking about getting some more. I wish it wasn't so pricey; Although Alibabba sells the it by the kilogram, I want NR and not ground up fluorecent light tubes.

"Sometimes I prescribe an iPhone app that helps you connect to your heart."
But..but...I don't have an iPhone! I'm doomed!

The Fail is a guilty, smarmy little pleasure for me. It's a British tabloid, the queen of the click-baity British tabs, so you pretty much know what you are getting. It's quasi-garbage spiced up by content from a very large network of stringers.

In its defense, though, it is aggressively courting American down-market readers and often features allusions to research that will never appear in our dour, staid mainstream pubs.

One of our colleagues who does some very cutting-edge research is regularly featured in the Fail, so I grit my teeth and try to keep up with the gahrbajj because there may be a few hidden gems in there somewhere.

The Fail's business model is 70% clickbait crap/ 20% legitimate but distorted or grossly misinterpreted news/ 10% utter nonsense. I read it because of the huge worldwide network of stringers it has created to generate massive clicks on relatively obscure content. Just read anything there with extreme discretion and skepticism and recognize that the fundamental business strategy of the Fail is to generate clicks and reader responses.

They see their main ad revenue generator/click sources as ignorant Americans. The Fail is one of the few profitable down-market publications, sustained largely by its online American readers if I understand this correctly, and has a the largest online circulation of any of the British tabs.

What does that say about us as Americans?

It figures. She's based out of California. And I'm amused in her "about" page that she comments parethentically that she has to "bribe her kids to eat" the healthy foods that have made her such a fabulous person.

As for living longer...I agree that genes have a lot to do with it. Pick the right parents, and you CAN live longer...genetics are wonderful (says the 50+ woman who still has 2 living parents in their 80+s)

An interesting feature of quacks like this is that if you go to their websites, you will find:
1. The glamour shot
2. The store
3. The media appearances and "upcoming events"

What you WON'T find is how to make an appointment I think their is an inverse relationship between what quacks claim to do and the amount of actual responsibility they have in treating patients. I suspect if she actually worked in a hospital with sick people, she would be a little more humble about her "detox" protocol.

An interesting feature of quacks like this is that if you go to their websites, you will find:
1. The glamour shot
2. The store
3. The media appearances and "upcoming events"

What you WON'T find is how to make an appointment. I think there is an inverse relationship between what quacks claim to do and the amount of actual responsibility they have in treating patients. I suspect if she actually worked in a hospital with sick people, she would be a little more humble about her "detox" protocol. (typos fixed.)

Wesley,

You should blow your entire paycheck on nicotinamide supplements, if you happen to be a middle-aged mouse.

“Sometimes I prescribe an iPhone app that helps you connect to your heart.”

But..but…I don’t have an iPhone! I’m doomed!

I have an iPhone, but I'm old, and my heart isn't Bluetooth enabled, so I guess were equally 4F'ed.

I'm immediately suspicious of anyone who talking about "root causes" of illness, as if bodies are incapable of having more than one thing not working at a time.

@ Orac (#8),

Your right, again...

Please constructively make a mistake once in awhile in an effort to broaden your audience and amuse your adversaries.

Understand that an occasional plate of respectful insolence is a healthy meal for the Orac-meister.

She fixed herself and turned her fix into The Gottfried Protocol. I don’t know about you, but whenever I see a doctor naming a treatment protocol after herself, I’m just dying to deflate the ego, particularly when she says without clinical trial evidence that it’s “worked gloriously well on the 10,000+ people I’ve seen in the past 10 years.”

I have previously recommended John Baez's Crackpot Index. The index has an entry for exactly this kind of thing:

20 points for naming something after yourself. (E.g., talking about the "The Evans Field Equation" when your name happens to be Evans.)

Some of the entries are specific to physics (Baez is a physicist), but many of them apply to crackpots in general.

So why should a sauna be better than just baking out in the hot desert sun? As it’s going to hit 90+ degrees here today, I’ve never understood why you want to deliberately do this in dry or wet heat conditions in an enclosed room.

If you are in a place with a cold climate like Finland's, a room like that is much more attractive, especially in winter when other bathing methods may not be available. I can imagine preferring a +50 C room to the -30 C outdoors. I can also understand a reluctance to go from a dry +30 C to a wet +50 C.

Welcome to the free market. Properly prescribed FDA approved drugs kill over 100,000 people every year, and yet there's a huge market for them. And 12,000 people die every year from unnecessary surgeries. I hear there's a sucker born every minute. http://www.drug-education.info/documents/iatrogenic.pdf (JAMA 2000 v284(4):483)

Dr. Gottfried has her theories, which may or may not get the desired results. If people think they were ripped off, that's what review sites and word of mouth are for. Time Warner will separate its customers from thousands each year just with the lure of television. Perspective.

Dr. Gottfried has her theories, which may or may not get the desired results. If people think they were ripped off, that’s what review sites and word of mouth are for.

The stupid, it burns.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2017/01/16/next-up-on-the-trump-fda-c…

Review sites and "word-of-mouth" give quacks like Stanislaw Burzynski, Robert O. Young, and Brian Clement. Patients rave about them, even though they are quacks and can't demonstrate in randomized controlled clinical trials that their methods do even as well as, much less better than, conventional treatments.

It's the hypocrisy that burns. What allows doctors who kill 12,000 people every year with unnecessary surgeries to stay in business? Where's the accountability of the FDA for approving drugs that kill more than 100,000 people every year? All that death and false hope, and all your randomized clinical trials did nothing whatsoever to prevent it.

You're a very silly woman who clearly doesn't know what she is talking about, I'm afraid. Given your persistent arrogant trumpeting of your Dunning-Kruger-inspired ignorance over several weeks despite careful attempts by my commentariat to educate you, I see little further reason to hide my irritation any more. :-)

By all means, don't hold back, Orac. :)

Orac, I admire your restraint when the trolls invade.

I have to introduce a new topic, though, that I think has not been recently discussed here. These ad hominem parries would be unnecessary if we had a meaningful mechanism for full disclosure of the insurance and malpractice histories of MDs who go rogue.

In my US state it is almost impossible to track people who are known quacks until the state authorities decide to slap them on the wrist and publish discussion of disciplinary action, which is entirely locked down here.

In my opinion what is needed is total reform of the state boards' authorities to get injunctions against quacks and to WIDELY, CLEARLY publicize accusations and pending actions against them.

Enforcement of bad docs' abuses of their licensing privileges is a joke, and I think a new formal effort by other docs is needed to protect the good guys from the bad guys.

Is the fourth F-*f@cked* or *f@cked up* ( or over)?

At any rate, I usually visit Northern California where spas proliferate like the newly legal weed: there's one called 'Osmosis' in Freestone near the infamous hippie town of Sebastopol.
Ask Draconic: he knows all about Sebastopol.

There is so much of this dreck available.I fear that gullible women looking for a more youthful appearance or downright magic are to blame because they'll pay outrageous prices for nonsense. Of course spas offer reasonable services like massage, sauna, relaxation et al but I would venture that mostly they sell appearance centred treatments.

-btw- I have embarked upon my own 'cure'
which involves
stationary bike riding and an increase in proteins and vegetables.

In other news...

It seems ( unfortunately) that the Nullmacher has not yet been tossed from his non-payng but financially lucrative job at WBAI. He has been cut to 4 days a week.
His Texas Villa offers various spa treatments at 2500 USD per week His websites usually feature photos of his estates where retreats take place. Lots of magic ( i.e. lies and dreck)
there at high prices.

I cater to you and develop a treatment plan based on your special snowflakeness!

Should that be special snowflakiness ?

OOPs!

That DRACONIS.
I wouldn't want to invoke his wrath by misspelling his name.

For your entertainment:

g--gle
garysvitamincloset.com see wellness retreat

-btw- I have embarked upon my own ‘cure’
which involves
stationary bike riding and an increase in proteins and vegetables.

Me too! A cousin recently passed on an exercise bike she doesn't use anymore. It really comes in handy considering we still have a bunch of snow on the ground, grumble grumble.

@ JP:

The bike was not at all smooth but I had someone fix it and *Voila!*
It's like a peloton
( if you know the commercials THIS is your Peloton.. this is your instructor- she's not going to go easy on you.... etc)

#24

Were those deaths from unknown side effects? If they were from KNOWN side effects then what has that to do with the FDA? Remember that side effects are balanced against the desired effects. A one in ten chance of dropping dead to cure a headache....probably not worth it. A one in one thousand chance of your skin falling off to control epilepsy....maybe.

If people think they were ripped off, that’s what review sites and word of mouth are for.

The sort of person that would be able to figure out that Dr. Gottfried was ripping him off is the sort of person who wouldn't visit someone like her in the first place. Marks tend to be reluctant to admit they have been conned.

It's not like a restaurant, where you can form an opinion in real time whether the food is of good quality, the service adequate, etc. You might leave a session with Dr. Gottlieb (or Dr. Burzynski, Robert O. Young, etc.) feeling good, and I imagine most of their patients do (obviously I do not have firsthand experience). It only becomes apparent months or years later that what they are doing isn't actually helping you. If you are one of Dr. Burzynski's patients, you may never get a chance to figure it out; instead your loved ones do after you're dead.

I can't wait for her to make her first infomer...er...appearance on my local public television station.

#24

Were those deaths from unknown side effects?

I wouldn't expect an answer, given that that teh NWOR plainly either (1) hasn't bothered to track down where it actually came from or (2) is simply making shіt up. The answer is that it's a vague estimate for 1975 from a House Subcommittee (pp. 6, 29–36).

Once again, demonstrating your apparent inability or unwillingness to read, since I posted the citation for the study regarding the deaths caused by the conventional medical system you adore. :)

I wish there would be less hostile ad hominem stuff on this blog and more commitment to making political changes that obviate the need for this very useful forum. I am very disappointed to see such abusive and nasty, sarcastic responses because people feel frustrated by constantly having to respond in this way to the failure of our legal system to stop these criminals.

I wish people would stop this arrogant pattern of responses. Your energy would be much better used making sure that these quacks/criminals can be controlled by the law and can be stopped legally. Your intense energy is better invested in trying to create legal reforms to make sure we never have to communicate among ourselves in such a sarcastic way and have the law on our side to stop these dangerous people and companies as soon as they start this malicious nonsense that can harm and kill people.

Please do not squander your energy on blogs, although this one is fantastic. Use your energy to try to stop this threat to public health and get legislation passed that will obviate the need for blogs such as this one.

I think that many of you are just hugely angry that you do not know how to address this enormous problem and vent here rather than trying to resolve this enormous constellation of problem.

Change the laws. Make state board oversight more effective. Get involved so that these cranks and crooks and quacks will face serious consequences for their abuses. It's doable.

"Criminals"? "Dangerous people?" Is there evidence that Dr. Gottfried's supplements, iphone apps, botanical therapies and saunas are dangerous?

I was referring to two studies from Johns Hopkins researchers in 2000 and 2016, showing that the CONVENTIONAL medical system causes 225,000 and 350,000 iatrogenic deaths per year respectively. These studies did not examine deaths from alternative therapies, but rather, FDA approved drugs, unnecessary surgeries, medical error, etc.

These facts are known and are public record, but this is not a good place to troll.

So...posting published research studies on a science blog showing that the conventional medical system is the third leading cause of death in the US is "trolling." But labeling an alternative medical doctor a "criminal" and "dangerous" without any evidence whatsoever to support your contention is...what? "Science"?

I'm familiar with this "study," which was not actually a study at all but a regurgitation of previous studies pooled together simplistically. It's not particularly convincing:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/05/16/do-medical-errors-really-k…

I challenge you to read the whole thing. It's rather long, but it looks at the main "death by medicine" studies in detail.

Seriously. I'm (usually) way ahead of most quacks on these things. And when I'm not way ahead of them they should be careful in asking me to look up studies. They might not like the results when I do.

^ Best guess is that NWOR was just regurgitating Jon "William Thompson has been ejected from the building" Rappoport. It probably hasn't even read its own link.

If you are in a place with a cold climate like Finland’s, a room like that is much more attractive, especially in winter

Also in summer, to keep cool. And to purge one's sins.

"If you are in a place with a cold climate like Finland’s, a room like that is much more attractive, especially in winter"
It sounds great until you realize that the grand finale is running out naked into the snow while your "friends" beat you with birch branches.
For more on what saunas can do for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q967_ye1PEs
(Stick with it, it ought to give you some laughs, or at least a few groans; Garrison Keillor did it better, though.)

#3 "So why should a sauna be better than just baking out in the hot desert sun? As it’s going to hit 90+ degrees here today, I’ve never understood why you want to deliberately do this in dry or wet heat conditions in an enclosed room"

I doubt the temperatures even in the desert reach 80+ degrees Celsius, which is the temperature in a typical sauna, it can get higher of course but not much lower. And yes, Finns do take saunas even in hot climates like in the Sinai Peninsula, the Finnish peace keeping forces built saunas there in the 1950's, just like the soldiers built them at the front during WWII. And the reason why people do this is that having a sauna makes one feel relaxed and refreshed, and even makes the temperature outside feel cooler. There is also something very pleasing to have a proper bath every now and then and scrub the skin clean from dead skin cells and anything else there might be after a hard day's work.

Of course a proper Finnish sauna is never dry like Americans seem to think it should be. I have never understood why Americans want to sit in a luke warm room with their clothes on but in any case that's not a sauna. Most people who try a proper sauna seem to enjoy it but they are rare outside of Finland. And of course Finnish children like it as much as their parents do.

"And to purge one’s sins."

It's the weekend, so it's prime time to venture forth and commit a few sins. Thus will I be prepared should I visit a sauna.

# 3 Chris Hickie

I’ve never understood why you want to deliberately do this in dry or wet heat conditions in an enclosed room.

Have you ever lived in a cold climate? Let's say one where -20C temperatures are common if not the norm? A sauna starts looking awfully good.

A sauna is surprisingly different than being in a hot desert though I am not sure how to describe the difference. BTW I am talking a real sauna, not the anaemic things one finds in gyms or health clubs.

I have lived in a humid desert where we routinely hit 48 or 50 degrees in summer and the experience is nothing like a good sauna.. What's 90? Ah approx 32 in real terms :). Hot but not all that bad. When I was living in a desert, I never really wanted a sauna—strange

IIRC temperatures in a sauna may go over 100 degrees for a few moments at a time though I might be exaggerating. One gets, or seems to get, really clean in a sauna as well.

Combined with a nice ice-covered lake or even swimming pool into which one can jump, through the hole one has carefully chopped in the 20 or 30 cm of ice—ah bliss.

There also usually a social aspect; one does not normally fire up the sauna for yourself. It can be for the whole family, a bunch of workmates after work or some friends invited over for a sauna party.

@ 28 Denice Walter

“It's like a peloton”

Are you sure that's what you mean?

A peloton is a group (mob ) of riders. Note I have never seen the ads so maybe it is. It's just that a single ride a peloton does not make.

The term comes from the French military where it means something like a squad or troop of cavalry. In fact I think the first time it was applied to cyclists was to French cyclist troops during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

BTW a real bike is a lot more comfortable and a lot more fun than one of those ghastly stationarys.

@ 32 JP

What's a little snow as long as you have clear pavement? Studded winter tires can be an excellent investment for the occasional pesky bit of ice.

What’s a little snow as long as you have clear pavement? Studded winter tires can be an excellent investment for the occasional pesky bit of ice.

That's the thing; where I live theres nothing but a highway that goes up the mountain to the north and down the mountain to the south, and the shoulders are completely covered by huge snow banks, the result of snow plows plowing feet of snow off the roads all winter. Who knows when that crap will finally melt.

And I wouldn't feel safe riding along in the middle of the highway. Nor, it seems, would anybody else, since I've never in my life seen anybody do it.

BTW a real bike is a lot more comfortable and a lot more fun than one of those ghastly stationarys.

Oh, I agree, but I need some form of exercise. I've been effectively housebound all winter, except when I spend the day in town (down in the Gorge) when I have a therapist/shrink appointment.

It’s the weekend, so it’s prime time to venture forth and commit a few sins. Thus will I be prepared should I visit a sauna.

Do note Bruce Jay Friedman in this regard.

@ 46 Old Rockin' Dave
Not being Finnish, I've never tried the birch branches but running naked out in the snow is fine. When you leave a hot sauna you are unlikely to feel the cold for probably 30 sec to a minute. Your body just steams in the cold. Walking across ice in one's bare feet and not noticing any cold is an interesting experience.

A good sauna is great but Gotfried's health claims sound mad.

# 50 JP
With that kind of roadway I am totally in agreement with you. My sympathy.

A nice casual ride on a sunny winter's day can be really enjoyable but not on those roads!

I wish people would stop this arrogant pattern of responses. Your energy would be much better used making sure that these quacks/criminals can be controlled by the law and can be stopped legally.

But we can do both. Really we can, just ask our host.

< off-topic >

Just submitted my application to Concordia university for the statistics Bsc.

< /off-topic >
< on-topic >

Such a bachelor degree will give me a very good foundation along with cell bio to go after quacks :)

< /on-topic >

Alain

Not being Finnish

I haven't even started!

@jrkrideau #48: I lived in Connecticut for 6 years and actually enjoyed the cold compared to the solar blast furnace of Arizona, where swimming pools to hot tub temps without heaters. I'm also not a fan of saunas because a self-help quack named James Ray killed 3 people following his damn fool advice in a sweat lodge (like a sauna but grimier) in Sedona, AZ back around 2010. Crap, probably every HSP I have gets activated when I get into my car after work at 5 pm on a hot July day when the car interior is probably 150+ degrees. I have no reason to believe such heat is going to prolong me existence.

...sorry, perhaps a wee bit 'o St. Patty's Day in me postins....

and “you can imagine the fourth ‘F.'”

Fraudulent?

Other adjectives also come to mind, but they're considerably less complimentary.

and “you can imagine the fourth ‘F.’”
FINNISH.

Reading the bio on the linked homepage.
" friend "
!!!!!!!!! Thats some bizarre shit right there as a self described
attribute. I can honestly say ive never seen such a thing before.

"It’s not fix-’em-up-and-send-’em-home."
Er.

Alain (#56) writes,

Just submitted my application to Concordia university for the statistics Bsc. Such a bachelor degree will give me a very good foundation along with cell bio to go after quacks.

MJD says,

Hoping for your success, Alain!

Forget about the quacks, we need you to help the suffering.

Q. In atopic children, what is the calculated number of receptor/antigen interactions required to affect the incidence and prevalence of B-cell degranulation vs. memory B-cell proliferation?

The mechanism of action will provide several important pieces of the puzzle, and therapeutic interventions,for allergy-induced regressive autism.

Keep us updated!

So I plug "allergy-induced regressive autism" (with quotes) into the great Google, and I was presented with 2 pages of results.

The most interesting thing was that not every result was directly related to the work of MJD. For some reason, this page came up, and it took a while to figure out why -
http://bestfrogshirts.xyz/packaging-engineer-i-am-allergic-to-stupidity…

Mike, you've been screaming allergy-induced regressive autism for 6 years now, and the only people who believe such a thing even exists are Dunn and yourself. That should give you a clue.

But you're a loon, so it won't give you a clue, will it?

Johnny writes (#65),

So I plug “allergy-induced regressive autism” (with quotes) into the great Google, and I was presented with 2 pages of results.

Mike, you’ve been screaming allergy-induced regressive autism for 6 years now, and the only people who believe such a thing even exists are Dunn and yourself.

MJD says,

John, I plug "gene-induced regressive autism" (with quotes) into the great Google, and I was presented with ZERO (0) results.

Using your deductive reasoning, genes must not play a role in regressive autism.

@ Orac's minions,

It is clear that Johnny's reasoning skills have come into question.

Please don't treat Johnny like a bleeding pig in a pen. He's so much more than PGpig or Dangerous Bacon in my opinion.

Mike, you’ve been screaming allergy-induced regressive autism for 6 years now, and the only people who believe such a thing even exists are Dunn and yourself. That should give you a clue.

Hell, forget the "allergy-induced". There's no such thing as :regressive autism" to begin with!

Maybe not in The Very Reverend Battleaxe's Book of Knowledge, but I think the eggheads who wrote the DSM-5 outvoted you on that one.

Had to make double sure I closed my quote--didn't notice the opening quote was a colon. The human brain is a marvelous organ, for sure!

# 56 Alain
Congratulations Alain, best of luck there.

TVRBoK, there is a classification of autism that is regressive.

Congratulations Alain, best of luck there.

What jrkrideau said.

... it took a while to figure out why ...

I looked at that t-shirt image and thought, "WTF", only less politely. It seems a total non sequitur - and it is, but under the specific circumstances that makes it really quite perfect, a veritable précis.

jrkrideau and JP,

Thanks you very much. I did a lot of digging and it turned out that I can have full-time benefits from the university while doing a minimum of one course and that include being eligible for scholarship; thus, the goal for me is to do the necessary work to auto-finance my bachelor degree (meaning getting A+ in all my courses). I took a step in that direction in that I will close my Facebook account next week. That is a first step of several intended to put my life back in order.

Alain

Perhaps I should be more precise speaking about A+.

By that, I meant, getting as close to perfect as possible a mark in each course and developing an excellent, deep and as complete as possible understanding of each course undertaken. By past experiences on discussions with professors, it is possible to develop a deep understanding of the course content while having anything except an A+ and some of the time, I did so. The inverse is also possible.

Alain

Chris Hickie, sauna was invented in places where there is no such thing as a 90 C desert day. Spend a winter's week in Finland and you will appreciate the Saturday afternoon family visit to the sauna. Good for the body and for the soul.
And for the record: No, I do not believe the snake oil sellers.

Good luck in your course work,Alan.

Alain writes (#74),

I took a step in that direction in that I will close my Facebook account next week. That is a first step of several intended to put my life back in order.

MJD says,

An excellent plan, although, a daily/weekly dose of RI the science blog is recommended to keep in touch with the real-life politics of medical science.

Hope you agree, Alain.

Yes, the DSM 5 has a category for regressive autism. NOT "allergy induced regressive autism."

Many scientists believe regressive autism is simply autism that was not identified early. Some autistics symptoms are so mild as to nearly escape notice until the increasing demands of normal childhood development make them more obvious.

It's a spectrum after all.

It may very well be there is some sort of degeneration going on with some autistic children. That's being studied. But we know vaccines don't have anything to do with it, and there's no evidence for allergies, either. It really does a disservice to the people doing the actual work on this problem to leap to conclusions with nothing resembling evidence, and make grandiose claims about causation.

Squirrelelite and MJD,

Thanks you very much. Yes, I do intend to have my daily dose of RI along with other blogs (that is using feedly, both the web app and the phone application). I want to cut down on sources of interruptions such as Facebook messenger, LinkedIn (phone app with messenger) and also, another issue with Facebook is that some of the peoples I've met over the years have been nutballs encountered in real life who asked me for "friendship" on Facebook and thus, I'm putting up a barrier to that. After all, most of the peoples on my friend list have families, business or heavy load of works and thus, don't have enough time with 36 hours per day to attend to their chore or mandatory tasks...

Blog reading is bound to stay, but on the schedule I define according to my time available.

Alain

By the way MJD,

Q. In atopic children, what is the calculated number of receptor/antigen interactions required to affect the incidence and prevalence of B-cell degranulation vs. memory B-cell proliferation?

Forget it, I won't answer that question. No.

Alain

Re. Sara @ 39: It was via this blog that I found out that a couple of our state legislators (California) were proposing the bill to do away with belief-based vaccine exemptions for public school students.

I immediately emailed both of the sponsors, my representative, and the governor, brief messages urging them to pass/sign it. A large number of people did likewise after reading about the bill in their preferred news sources.

The bill passed, Gov. Brown signed it into law, and now we have improved immunization rates.

Every little bit helps.

As for "Dr. Sara Gottfried MD" (heh), why do I get the impression she has a ghost-writer helping her write all those books?
.
.
.
.

Heil Pan!

@ jrkrideau:

Of course I know what a 'peloton' is...

I was referring to what I should perhaps designate as *Peloton* (tm) - an outrageously expensive stationary bike system that hooks up to live classes and other riders via the internet. They broadcast endless television commercials about it complete with dramatic recitative about how competitive you can be. All for 2000 USD plus 50 per month

Of course I wouldn't spend my money on stuff like that.

I was assuming that JP knew the commercials and had a laugh.

re bicycles in winter..
one of my gentlemen has a friend from Costa Rica, Jose, who worked long hours in a (semi) posh hotel nearby and used to ride his bicycle on streets and highways even in the snow. You could often see him carrying a tennis racquet as well- he and the Korean players would clean the courts of snow if they were not frozen as well. That's dedication.

Jose has since come up in the world and now has a better job and an actual car.

@ Alain:

Best wishes.

# 84 Denice Walters
Of course I know what a ‘peloton’ is…
Millions would not. Since I don't own a TV I seem to have missed the advertisment.

Jose has since come up in the world and now has a better job and an actual car
Good to hear about the job, pity about the car.

But then I sold my last car about 25-30 years ago and really am not fond of the horrible monsters.

Just to pop back to the OP, can you imagine going to a GYN with some kind of nasty infection and having the doc say that she doesn't treat the symptoms, only the root cause?

Does she prescribe antibiotics when appropriate?

Justatech, never having had that problem; although I've had my feet in the stirrups when they inserted the gold seeds in my prostate. I would inappropriately suggest she proscribe a herbicide that kills roots (seems to be her level of expertise).

I would inappropriately suggest she proscribe a herbicide that kills roots

No, no, no. You either scrub it out the holistic way with pinecones and donkey fat or fork over six bucks for an over-the-counter product.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg3HQcw_TRE

Did someone say "treating the root cause"?
http://oglaf.com/practice/

when they inserted the gold seeds in my prostate
Have they sprouted yet?

HDB, I hoping they sprout and grow. I could then have my own discovery show: Search for the Lost Prostate gold.

Naturally, I linked the wrong clip --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2XgOzjidaY

But then I sold my last car about 25-30 years ago and really am not fond of the horrible monsters.

A little ditty of automotive interest from The Brothers-In-Law from Windsor that may appeal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29A13CKClGk

@ jrkrideau:

Their advert material is available at pelotoncycle.com

"each woman is a special snowflake"

I have never before seen that expression used without irony.
Though perhaps, in this case, I'm assuming too much as well -- and the good doctor is laughing her ass off at her readers?
(Meanwhile, what are men -- undifferentiable lumps of coal?)

"the appeal to 'balance' in pseudoscientific medicine, in which the reason you don’t feel good or are sick is that something in your body is 'out of balance.' "

Credit Where It's Due Dept:
At least she's NOT talking about my favorites of all quackeries: "auras," "vibrations," and "frequencies."
Pity about her case.
When one sees the title "Dr" WITHOUT the "M.D." qualifier, the probability of scamming goes up by at least an order of magnitude.
But this is a salient reminder the the PRESENCE of "M.D." is hardly proof against chicanery.

Either my reading comprehension skillz have mysteriously disappeared, or there's a significant typo here:

"The article notes that overexpressing (forcing the cells to make a lot more than normal of) FOXO3 in model organisms such as Drosophila (fruit flies), Caenorhabditis elegans (a species of tiny roundworms that are often used in genetic experiments), and mice."

Missing predicate?
Shouldn't it be "overexpressing... FOXO3... [does something]"?
And, from the next sentence and paragraph, it seems that the [something] ought to be somewhere along the lines of "appears to be associated with lengthened lifespans"?

"I have previously recommended John Baez’s Crackpot Index. The index has an entry for exactly this kind of thing:
20 points for naming something after yourself."

So is "John Baez's Crackpot Index" sufficient to make John Baez a Crackpot?
And if so, does it invalidate his Index?
But if it does, then does THAT mean...
"Logic is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell BAD."

Meanwhile, what are men. . .?

Not part of the treatment market for an OB-GYN.

Can't wait to see FOX cover their very own gene!

Aging in men: An evolutionary perspective

gregladen — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 09:05:52 +0000

Aging in men: An evolutionary perspective

Many years ago, Mel Konner, Marjorie shostak, and Boyd Eaton wrote "The Paleolithic Prescription: A program of diet and exercise and a design for living." (It is hard to find these days. To find it and related titles on Amazon, look for this book first, and track the PP down via the author name Konner.)

(Added: You can probably get the The Paleolithic Prescription here.)

Richard G. Bribiescas is professor of anthropology and ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, where he also serves as deputy provost for faculty development and diversity. He is the author of Men: Evolutionary and Life History. He lives in Hamden, Connecticut.

That was the first "stone age" diet book. But, it was different from all the others, and the only one worth anything. Mel and Marjorie were two of several individuals, including my advisor and theses readers, Irv Devore and John Yellen, who engaged in the famous Kalahari Project, in which the biology and lifeways of the Ju/'hoansi foragers (aka Bushmen or San) were studied intensively for several years.

The researchers noticed that there were differences in lifeways between these exemplary foragers and industrialized people's of the West that seemed related to health and well being. They were able to link, sometimes definitively, sometimes tentatively, diet and activity levels on one hand and health on the other. Their findings, by the way, were first published in the peer reviewed literature, then turned, by the scientist themselves, into a popular book. (One of the findings eventually led to the understanding that there are different kids of cholesterol, which seem to have very different health related implications.)

My own research with the Efe (Pygmies) of the Ituri Forest, in Zaire, was an indirect offshoot of that early work. I got my PhD at the same institution, Harvard's Anthropology Department that housed much of the Kalahari project, and the Ituri project was started by the same leader, Irv DeVore, via his students. So, the tradition of examining the lifeways of modern day foragers, in part to understand ideal human conditions, and comparing those conditions to western ways continued.

Meanwhile, one of the graduate students at Harvard, Peter Ellison (yes, he is related to that Ellison) had been interested in some work coming out of Harvard Medical school looking at hormones and behavior, especially as related to reproductive biology of human women. Building on that work, Ellison created an entirely new field of study, called "Reproductive Ecology." He finished his PhD and was added to the faculty at the Anthropology department in one of those in between positions (as was I and many others over the years) but Peter became one of the very few such individuals to be eventually offered a tenured position with the most "always hire from outside" institutions ever. And Ellison created the Reproductive Ecology Lab within the biological anthropology wing of Harvard's Department of Anthropology.

And, they studies the heck out of female reproductive ecology. I had the pleasure of working, almost every semester that I was there from late in my PhD cycle through my post-PhD teaching career there, to work with Mary O'Rourke (and others) who were from that lab running an undergraduate tutorial. The tutorial is three or four faculty members each running two or three groups, with about five or six students in each group. These are students majoring in Biological Anthropology, who have already taken a class or two but are on their way into the research labs. The tutorial instructors' job is to turn these young and interested minds into the minds of proto-Anthropologists by carefully examining a different topic each week, looking at a combination of peer reviewed literature and secondary but excellent literature (back in those days, the former was easier to find).

So, I spent a lot of time hanging around with the Reproductive Ecology people (and, by the way, collecting some of their data in Zaire). Every social event had a lot of Repro Eco folks at it, so it was pretty normal for someone to pull out a box of specially prepared test tubes to get every one to provide saliva samples for some study or another. It was not long into the process of developing this subfield that the reproductive ecology of men, simpler but still important, was also taken up by this group, so everyone had an opportunity to spit into the tubes. For example:

Hypothesis: Testosterone in men varies over short time scales (of minutes, hours) during a poker game depending on which cards they are dealt, assuming the samples are not contaminated by ...

... oh, never mind, you get the picture.

Anyway, it was while I was a couple of years into my own graduate career when a young man from California showed up to study anthropology, with a particular interest in Biological Anthropology. It was Richard Bribiescas. Rick and I did not hang around a lot of time, because we were both busy, but we were good friends and broke bread (a euphemism for guzzling beer but there were also tacos and cheeseburgers) quite often.

When Rick got to Harvard, there was already a strong tradition of working to understand modern human problems in the Western world by examining modern human behavior and physiology in a variety of other societies, including foragers.

Many young men and women went to the field from that department, to work in Poland, Borneo, the Amazon, the Congo. Among those, very few attempted to work in the most difficult of conditions, in a rain forest with foragers. Of those who tried most retreated and picked another topic. A few persisted and continued to study this or that thing about one of the few remaining forager group son the planet. That's what I did, with the Efe. That's also what Rick did, with the Ache, of South America.

And, as a result of that, Rick produced a bunch of interesting peer reviewed papers, and eventually, a book that has been out for a while now called Men: Evolutionary and Life History. A number of books had been written about female reproductive ecology, but along the way, rick became the expert on male reproductive ecology, discovering that it is not as simple as one might expect. This book is the result of that achievement.

And now, Rick is an old guy. He must be at least 45. And, as such, he has turned his attention to a new but related topic: How do men age. And, the newly produced book that comes from this research to your book shelf is How Men Age: What Evolution Reveals about Male Health and Mortality

Do not buy or borrow some book on aging written by a web site, a fake MD, or some other charlatan. Read a book on aging (in men) that first appeared many times in the peer reviewed literature, written by Harvard Trained Yale Expert Richard Bribiescas.

Note the subtitle. This is about what evolution reveals about male health and mortality. Having taught along side him many times, and after all those beers, tacos, and cheeseburgers, I can tell you that Rick knows all about evolution, and of course, he is the world's leading expert on male reproductive ecology.

I put the Table of Contents below to give you and idea.

Rick is a great writer, and this book is fun to read.

Do the well known features of male aging have some sort of evolutonary advantage, as has been proposed for females? How much of male aging in the West is a function of our Western lifestyle, or a function of our seemingly extended lifespan? What about the contradiction between what we mere humans think of as "health" or "healthy" and what the cruel and cold process of Darwinian natural selection things about such silly things? What about sex, relationships, monogamy, polygamy, fatherhood and child rearing, in male humans in general, and across the aging process? And our brains, our obscenely large brains, what the heck are they for?

You will enjoy this book, especially if you are a man of a certain age.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments ix
Chapter 1 A Gray Evolutionary Lens 1
Chapter 2 Dead Man’s Curve 17
Chapter 3 Getting a Handle on Love Handles 45
Chapter 4 Older Fathers, Longer Lives 70
Chapter 5 Dear Old Dad 88
Chapter 6 Darwinian Health and Other Contradictions 106
Chapter 7 Older Men and the Future of Human Evolution 133
Notes 145
Index 169

gregladen Mon, 10/24/2016 - 05:05

Tags

Categories

"And now, Rick is an old guy. He must be at least 45."

HA!! Whippersnapper.

"Harvard’s Anthropology Department that hosed much of the Kalahari project" Respectfully suggest that you did not mean "hosed"

Well, they probably did that too... Thanks for the catch!

I, for one, welcome death if there are no USA elections in Heaven.

Dante Alighieri didn't mention anything about elections in Heaven. So, have a good trip.

That sounds like an interesting and important book. I'm ordering it right now. Thanks Greg (and Rick)!
-JP

Yes, indeed. So those who insist on having an Authoritarian Dictator to rule over them are welcome to "take an immediate trip to Heaven" and enjoy the absence of Democracy that their weak, racist, xenophobic, fearful minds crave. Best do so before that pesky election in November...

Jay, I hope you especially enjoy the chapter on Suaboya!

Only one way to really age well...pick the right grandparents!!!

L.Long, before you marry someone to start a family, interview your prospective spouse's great great grandparents.

You can probably get the The Paleolithic Prescription here

(It is hard to find these days. To find it and related titles on Amazon, look for this book first, and track the PP down via the author name Konner.)

I've found eBay to be a good source for books. This one (The Paleolithic Prescription) is available from a good number of sources (in various conditions). Better World Books has it in "good" condition) for $3.97.

It's interesting how interests sometimes dovetail. In high school I did a project on Colin Turnbull's The Forest People (the pygmies of the Ituri Forest.) I had to go to the NY main library to get the text.

Sisi na'agopa!

The palaeolithic prescription seems to have given way to
The Troglodyte Narrative

Well Russell, I have my qualms about narratives, but the fact is that some people only relate to instructive tales told around the campfire. What would you recommend?

Also, BTW, did you check that link?

Russell is trying to create an internet ouroboros.

"our Rob or Ross"
~ Dave Lister

or Russell?

As I wander through my 6th decade on this planet, I wonder. Why do I suddenly need to trim the hair in my ears and nose? Why has my skin coarsened, and my face is deeply incised with lines? Why is my beard and hair graying? And why, though I'm thin and fit and can split wood and climb hills as well as many men half my age, do young women not longer see me as strongly handsome and studly, but as sad and pathetic?

And thus I advance my "Theory of Tertiary Sexual Characteristics". Just as secondary sexual characteristics signal the physical maturity to serve as potential mating partners, Tertiary Sexual Characteristics, the external signs of aging, signal that my DNA is old and broken, and at a glance, potential partners can see I am no longer in the broad pool of likely successful reproductive choices.

I will leave it to someone with more time left for the necessary longitudinal studies to verify this.

Fracked Over for Natural Gas

milhayser — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 12:44:53 +0000

Fracked Over for Natural Gas

Research makes it increasingly clear that along with drilling for oil and mining coal, extracting natural gas from deep underground causes serious damage to the environment and to public health. On The Pump Handle, Kim Krisberg examines the contamination that may result from dumping fracking wastewater into disposal wells, writing "about 1,000 different chemicals are used in the fracking industry, with more than 100 being known or suspected endocrine disruptors." Researchers collected water samples downstream from wells in West Virginia, and after "exposing both female and male mammalian sex hormones to the water, researchers found that the water blocked the hormones’ normal processes." In another study, researchers found "fracking wastewater disposal wells in southern Texas are disproportionately permitted in areas with higher proportions of people of color and people living in poverty." Meanwhile, air pollution around fracking sites may contribute to skin conditions and respiratory disease. While the science surrounding pollution from hydraulic fracturing is far from settled, many fingers point in the same direction: fracking is bad news for communities and for the planet.

At The Nation, Bill McKibben reports that unbeknownst to the EPA, "US methane emissions increased by more than 30 percent" between 2002 and 2014. The culprit? Leaky natural gas infrastructure. Although methane lingers in the atmosphere for less time than carbon dioxide, it traps heat much more efficiently. McKibben says the true extent of methane leaked from fracking means that the rate of greenhouse gas emissions during the Obama administration has been higher than previously estimated, and could actually be increasing. Fracking is also a technology that the U.S. has pushed worldwide, and we can expect to see both its local and planetary effects multiplied many times over. As McKibben concludes, "we need to stop the fracking industry in its tracks, here and abroad."

milhayser Thu, 04/28/2016 - 08:44

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The Uncertain Etiology of PMS and a Link to Infectious Disease

tsmith — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 06:00:00 +0000

The Uncertain Etiology of PMS and a Link to Infectious Disease

Student guest post by Anne Dressler

Ninety percent of menstruating women experience some kind of premenstrual symptoms during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, with 20-30% experiencing moderate to severe symptoms. With an even more severe collection of symptoms, is premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). 3-8% of menstruating women report symptoms severe enough to be considered suffering from PMDD. Yet another designation, premenstrual magnification (PMM), is used to describe women who are symptomatic the entire cycle but have a premenstrual exacerbation of a diagnosed psychiatric, medical, or gynecological condition.

With a large number of wide-ranging symptoms and the difficulty involved in making a diagnosis, it is not surprising that the various theories advanced to explain premenstrual syndrome (PMS) have yet to been proven. One problem is that PMS is a diagnosis of exclusion, meaning there could be a variety of poorly understood conditions responsible for these symptoms. Several theories attribute PMS to fluctuations in sex hormones and neurotransmitters. The observation that symptoms disappear when a women has a menstrual cycle during which she does not ovulate and a corpus luteum is not formed, led to the theory that sex steroids, estrogen and progesterone, produced by the corpus luteum are responsible. In addition, the neurotransmitters serotonin and gamma amino butyric acid (GABA) have been implicated in various pathways. The list of other hormones and their modes of action that are suspected to be involved is long and confusing, making it no wonder that there is still no known etiology.

One distinctly different hypothesis is that PMS is due to a broad set of persistent infectious illnesses that are exacerbated by cyclic changes in immunosuppression due to the fluctuating levels of progesterone and estrogen. In general, there have been studies looking at two major categories of causation- genetic and environmental and have found moderate correlations at the best. Infectious causation has been overlooked for the most part, with almost no empirical support in published literature. I don't think this means there is no value to the theory, simply that it is a very hard one to test. One very convincing article by Doyle et. al explains how this possibility of infectious causation is integrated with the cyclic changes in hormone levels that have been observed and are generally thought to be involved in PMS.

As the article explains, immune function varies across the menstrual cycle. During the luteal phase, cell-mediated immunity is suppressed and humoral immunity is amplified. This appears to be related to higher levels of progesterone that enhances humoral immunity by promoting the development of type 2 helper T cells. In addition, progesterone is involved in suppressing type 1 helper T cells, which is associated with inhibition of natural killer cells and phagocytosis. This leads to less effective control of various fungi, viruses, and intracellular bacteria. Estrogen also seems to suppress cell-mediated immunity. These hormone driven changes to the immune system provide the possibility that persistent infections may be less well controlled during the luteal phase, leading to the symptoms that make up PMS.

Supporting evidence for this theory is a long list of infections, compiled by Doyle et. al, that are normally controlled by cell-mediated immunity but are exacerbated premenstrually. These include, increased proliferation of Candida albicans, increased proliferation of cytomegalovirus in the cervix, increased number of lesions from human herpes simplex virus-1, and exacerbated peptic ulcers from Helicobacter pylori among others. There are also chronic diseases that have infectious causes or are suspected to have infectious causes that are exacerbated premenstrually. A few examples are, Crohn's disease, lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and chronic fatigue syndrome. The pathogens that are suspected causes for these diseases are also controlled by cellular immunity.

Finally, one group performed a double blind, randomized clinical trial to determine the effects of the antibiotic doxycycline on PMS. Compared to the placebo group, individuals taking the antibiotic had significantly decreased symptoms. Subsequently, the placebo group was also given the antibiotic and experienced similar symptom reduction. This reduction in symptoms was steady during a six-month follow-up period. The investigators also found a high percentage of endometrial biopsy cultures positive for Mycoplasma species, Chlamydia trachomatis, and anaerobic bacteria.

This theory seems to be strongly biologically plausible, but lacks any of the other criteria for causality due to the lack of published studies on the topic. It is not in disagreement with the currently accepted idea that sex hormones fluctuate during the menstrual cycle and are involved in symptom manifestation. However, Doyle et. al advance this idea by explaining how it is may not be the direct effects of the hormones, rather a hormone-driven suppression of cellular immunity that could lead to poor control of persistent infections causing symptoms. This is certainly an interesting theory, yet one that would be difficult to study. Practical applications of findings from studies on this subject could be to consider control of PMS symptoms with antibiotics.

References:

Backstrom, T., et al. The Role of Hormones and Hormonal Treatments in Premenstrual Syndrome." CNS drugs 17.5 (2003): 325-42.

Doyle, C., H. A. Ewald, and P. W. Ewald. "Premenstrual Syndrome: An Evolutionary Perspective on its Causes and Treatment." Perspectives in biology and medicine 50.2 (2007): 181-202.

Korzekwa, M. I., and M. Steiner. "Premenstrual Syndromes." Clinical obstetrics and gynecology 40.3 (1997): 564-76.

Pinkerton, J. V., C. J. Guico-Pabia, and H. S. Taylor. "Menstrual Cycle-Related Exacerbation of Disease." American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 202.3 (2010): 221-31.

Silberstein, S. D., and G. R. Merriam. "Physiology of the Menstrual Cycle." Cephalalgia : an international journal of headache 20.3 (2000): 148-54.

Toth, A., et al. "Effect of Doxycycline on Pre-Menstrual Syndrome: A Double-Blind Randomized Clinical Trial." The Journal of international medical research 16.4 (1988): 270-9.

tsmith Mon, 04/26/2010 - 02:00

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General Epidemiology

Infectious causes of chronic disease

Categories

Very fascinating article. I have many questions for the author. Based on the above - might the level of PMS be congruent to the level of immune functioning? It would seem that women who have their surgeries, vaccinations - even begin new medications during the luteal phase may be at risk for more severe side effects/adverse reactions during due to an already suppressed/stressed immune system.

I disagree with the last statement on the use of antibiotics to control PMS - although I understand why the author came to that conclusion. Antibiotics bring their own set of problems. Instead how about supplements that support the immune system and/or balance the neurotransmitters?

Thank you for a great article. I have been on minocin for almost 2 years for "mild" RA, but at 54, my high numbers should correlate to being bedridden by now. My rheumatologist is baffled. As I had to get my primary to order the antibiotic protocol, I want to just yell at him one time and say IT'S AN INFECTION - WHAT DON'T YOU GET? LOL Keep up the good work.

Monday Pets: Biological Evidence That Dog is Man's Best Friend

jgoldman — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 11:00:00 +0000

Monday Pets: Biological Evidence That Dog is Man's Best Friend

The party isn't over yet! Here's another helping of Monday Pets. Enjoy!

Wild Dog crawled into the Cave and laid his head on the Woman's lap... And the Woman said, "His name is not Wild Dog any more, but the First Friend."

--Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling.

Archaeological evidence indicates that dogs were already a part of human society around the end of the Ice Age. Small dog skeletons have been unearthed in human communities as far back as 6- to 12-thousand years ago in Europe, the Middle East, and China. The jawbone of a domestic dog was found in a late Paleolithic grave in Germany, and dated to around 14 thousand years ago. And there is the famous site at Ein Mallaha (Eynan, in Hebrew), in Northern Israel where an elderly human and a 4-5 month old puppy were buried together, 10- to 12-thousand years ago.

Figure 1: From the site at Ein Mallaha. The person's left hand is placed on the body of a 4-5 month old puppy.

Some evidence exists that dogs were the first animals to be domesticated, and until now, humans have only succeeded in domesticating around 20 different animal species. Compared with those other species (such as sheep, goats, pigs, cows, horses, donkeys, and camels), only dogs (and to some extent, cats, though at the risk of alienating readers, I maintain that cats are evil) have established for themselves a social niche within human society. Dogs were not only bred for companionship; some dogs were bred for hunting, guarding, or herding. More recently, dogs have worked as service dogs or drug-sniffing dogs. The question remains: Why do dogs have such apparent psychological effects on humans?

One hypothesis claims that humans develop positive feelings and behaviors towards dogs as a side-effect of a mechanism in place that forms the bond between parents and children. Attachment, or social bonding, is a sort of behavioral regulation system that exists to reduce the risk of harm (e.g. predation) to a young animal.

John Bowlby described two characteristics of the attachment relationship in mammals and birds:
(1) Parents maintain physical proximity to their young (and the young to their parents), and if that proximity is broken, they strive to restore it.
(2) Parents and their young display special behavior towards each other that they would not display towards others of their species. Parent-child relationships are specific, and characterized by individual recognition and differential behavior.

Most studies of dog-human attachment have relied on psychological scales and questionnaires. One group of researchers, however, from Azabu University in Japan, have attempted to provide a biological perspective to this question.

They begin with the assumption that individual recognition is essential for long-term bonds between between individuals. This is not as trivial as it sounds. Human adults are extraordinarily bad at distinguishing among monkey faces, for example, though highly skilled at distinguishing among human faces.

Figure 2: I promise, those monkey faces belong to different individuals.

Previous research showed that dogs are able to discriminate between human beings, and they're able to do it in a multimodal way, combining both visual and auditory stimuli. For example, they tend to look longer at a picture of their owner when it is paired with a recording of their owner's voice than with a stranger's voice. Other research has demonstrated that both human infants and dogs, but not human-reared wolves, behaved differently with strangers than with their owners (or parents). Is there a physiological mechanism that underlies this behavioral pattern?

Under normal resting conditions, the heart rate (HR) shows regular variation in beat-to-beat intervals. This variation is referred to as heart rate variability, or HRV. In dogs, HR increases during periods of increased physical activity (as would be expected), but HRV increased when dogs were playing with their favorite toy. So while HR is a measure of activity, HRV may indicate attention. The ratio of the low frequency part of the HRV pattern to the high frequency part is considered to reflect the activity of the autonomic nervous system.

Seven adult dogs and their owners participated in the study. The dog was put into an enclosure, and then presented with three strangers and their owner. Each of the strangers was of the same sex and of similar appearance to the owners. Each individual (the three strangers and the owner) were present for 4 minutes each, with 3 minute intervals between them. HR and HRV were measured during each stimulus presentation.

They found that HR and HRV decreased significantly between the first stranger and the third stranger, and this was probably due to habituation; the dog became used to seeing strangers. Then, when the owner was presented, HR and HRV both significantly increased.

Figure 3: HR when presented with strangers 1-3, and then the owner (top). HRV when presented with strangers 1-3, and then the owner (bottom).

As you can see, the difference in HR and HRV between strangers 1 and 3 is significant, as are the differences in HR and HRV between stranger 3 and the owner. This means that not only do dogs discriminate between their owners and other humans, but they also display an emotional response towards them (as indicated by the autonomic arousal). So at least one of the criteria for attachment, individual recognition, is fulfilled.

Pretty cool. But there's more.

When a social bond is broken, animals exhibit separation anxiety (I have scratch marks on my door to prove it) and a stress response in the endocrine system is activated. It is important to differentiate this form of attachment-based social bonding from a more general form of social affiliation. When separating monogamous animal pairs, separation anxiety and the endocrine response both occur. But separation of mates in a polygamous species does not elicit the physiological endocrine response.

Oxytocin is a hormone that occurs in the brain, and is important for bonding between mating pairs and between parents and children (Sci has covered oxytocin exhaustively, if you're interested). Increases in oxytocin levels are implicated in infants' memory formation of their caregiver, and in the process of pair-bond formation in monogamous species (like prairie voles). If you give prairie voles a drug that blocks oxytocin just before mating, the pair-bond won't form. Oxytocin given to stressed out animals (humans included) will cause them to relax, and cope with the stress. Oxytocin has even been called "the most important neurotransmitter that is responsible for social bonding." So you might expect oxytocin to figure prominently in the human-dog relationship.

Fifty-five human dog owners participated in this experiment, and all answered a brief questionnaire regarding their relationship with their dogs.
Experimental condition: First the owner pees into a cup. Then they play with their dogs for half an hour. Then they pee into a cup again.
Control condition: First the owner pees into a cup. Then they are made to sit facing a wall, and not interact with their dogs for half an hour. Then they pee into a cup again.

Then the experimental group was split in half on the basis of how long their dogs looked at them while playing. There was a strong correlation between gaze duration and the strength of the relationship, as assessed by the questionnaire.

And guess what? Those in the experimental group who had stronger relationships with their dogs also had more oxytocin in their urine, compared with the other group, who reported weaker relationships with their dogs! So the initial hypothesis, that the human-dog relationship emerges out of a mechanism initially designed to stimulate and maintain the parent-child relationship, may indeed be supported!

The changes in HRV as well as attenuation of oxytocin are both probably related to activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, or HPA, axis (which is involved, among other things, in the stress response).

There's still a lot left to figure out, but this study was a pretty important piece of the puzzle. It provides a clue as to the neural mechanisms that support the relationship between dogs and humans. It may also suggest a physiological mechanism to account for anecdotal reports of health-related benefits following animal interaction, but a lot more research is needed for that. It may also be the case that the attachment system in both humans and dogs share a similar neurophysiological mechanism (via the HPA axis). That may explain why dogs have adapted so easily to human society, and why humans so readily treat dogs as part of the family.

Nagasawa, M., Mogi, K., & Kikusui, T. (2009). Attachment between humans and dogs Japanese Psychological Research, 51 (3), 209-22.1 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5884.2009.00402.x

jgoldman Mon, 04/12/2010 - 07:00

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dog

domestication

Human-Animal Relationship

autonomic nervous system

Categories

You might be interested in an article I wrote for Suite101 a couple of days ago http://zoology.suite101.com/article.cfm/dogs-descended-from-wolves or today's one http://zoology.suite101.com/article.cfm/cats-domestication-breed-geneti…

OK, I'm convinced by a lot of lines of evidence (more than presented here) that dogs and humans have a very close relationship, we've influenced each other's evolution, we're kind of made for each other.

But how are there cat people? How are there people who naturally hate dogs? I've never liked or trusted dogs. Barking - to me - is one of the most hateful sounds I can hear. I like a cute dog (especially if it's quiet), but I'd hate to own one, and I can't stand to hear one. They sound like they're saying "Fuck you!" every time they open their yaps.

Cats may not give a shit about human beings, but they don't offend me that way. What gives? Why do a large fraction of humans hate dogs, if we're so close? It isn't ancestral memory of predation, because wolves are mostly silent. Hell, most predators are silent when they kill you. Hit me with some hypotheses.

I contend that cats were never domesticated, in the sense that dogs & livestock have been. Cats have merely occupied a novel trophic niche through their association with humans. The degree of artificial selection brought to bear on cats is miniscule compared to that of domesticated animals, and largely consists of manipulations of natural color variations that can be maintained due to relaxation of predation risk in association with humans.

A dog's barking is supposed to sound hateful, satan. If it sounded pleasant it would be ignored or at least wouldn't be considered a warning of danger. Same with a baby's crying - the baby wouldn't get the attention it needs if its squalling was pleasant to the adult ear.

Very interesting stuff, and congrats on movin' up in the sci-blogging world! :-)

I'm humored by your comment on cats - I find cats evil too, but only because I'm allergic to the little dander factories. Besides, dogs seem to have so much more personality, and I'm a sucker for emotional-attachment.

@GAS - There are plenty of humans who don't like children either, not just the sound of a baby crying, but even the sounds of kids laughing and playing. The hypotheses for why this is might also apply to why some individuals don't like dogs. Besides, the data discussed here doesn't say that all people will like all dogs, or vice verse, but that dogs and owners that are close have a biological connection similar to that between a child and parent.

I've heard a hypothesis that dogs were what gave us the advantage over the Neanderthals. By allowing dogs to do our sniffing, we were able to allocate more skull space to brains, to do things like outsmarting Neanderthals.

And I'm quite aware of the bonding that occurs between us and our canine companions. I have a Newfie-Lab hybrid underneath my office chair right now. Despite the risk of getting her tail run over, she wants to be as close as possible.

...but that dogs and owners that are close have a biological connection similar to that between a child and parent.

Indeed. The argument is that dogs "hijack" a system that initially evolved for a somewhat different purpose. Not that humans are somehow "wired" to love dogs.

Dr. O is also correct in her observation that just as there is a continuum of how much people respond to certain cues from children, there is similarly a continuum in terms of how people respond to dogs. And that continuum can be characterized biologically.

Oh for Pete's sake. What is it about dog people that makes them all say cats are "evil"? How can a cat be "evil"?

I am an animal person. I have had a half dozen dogs, a half dozen cats, fish, a ferret.

Cats certainly do care about people. The reason they do not *seem* to care as much as dogs is we do not let our dogs run wild. We do cats. The fact that we let our cats roam, allows them to remain mostly independent and autonomous. Dogs are bound to us. Servile. Stray dogs and packs are swept up by by-law enforcement, where cats are not.

So, arguably, a cats affection and love is far more mature and genuine than a dog's dependency based relationship, because it is given freely. If a cat likes you, he/she actually likes you. A dog just grows dependent, like a weak willed human being. They need humans (or a pack). Cats do not.

We admire dogs because they are social animals like us. We admire cats because they are self reliant, like we want to be.

Anyway, the point of this is, in a scientific based blog, it is best to keep personal statements like "cats are evil" out of the articles as it tends to diminish credibility due to an appearance of eroded objectivity, and as can be clearly seen in the comments, detracts from the main point.

"Dr. O is also correct in her observation that just as there is a continuum of how much people respond to certain cues from children, there is similarly a continuum in terms of how people respond to dogs. And that continuum can be characterized biologically." -Jason G. Goldman

And rabbits and doe eyed deer. This is a gross over simplification/generalization.

And rabbits and doe eyed deer. This is a gross over simplification/generalization.

The difference is that dogs are very good at using human signals. They follow human eye gaze; they understand the pointing gesture. This is not a small thing. No other wild-type or domesticated animal (that has been tested) has been able to do these things. The Russian domesticated silver foxes come close, but domesticated dogs still win. Cats moderately succeed on the pointing gesture, but not with eye gaze.

Humans are also extraordinarily sensitive to things like mutual attention and joint eye gaze. The measure that correlated with the increase oxytocin and self-reported relationship quality was eye gaze.

I'm going to anthpomorphize to make this point: dogs seem to take advantage of their owners' sensitivity to eye gaze in order to facilitate the attachment bond.

It is not that "people love dogs." The attachment bond is *bidirectional*. People "love" dogs who exhibit behavioral cues that call the neural/hormonal attachment system into action, the same way that people love babies who exhibit behavioral cues that activate the attachment system.

The hypothesis that emerges from this is: If other animals (goats or bunnies or great white sharks or even robots) learn to perform these behavioral cues (eye gaze, in this example), then that should equally activate the attachment system. It's not the dog, per se, its the behavior that dogs as a species have gotten good at performing.

The other hypothesis (which is supported by this paper) is that individual dogs who are BAD at things like following eye gaze will NOT activate the attachment bond with their owners. This is an over-simplification, though, since nobody has proved a causal relationship, just a correlation.

There may indeed be individual cats (or horses or zebras or koalas) who DO succeed at things like following eye gaze. You would expect, in this case, that they'd indeed activate the attachment system.

Cats have that wonderfully addictive intermittent reinforcement system that seems to work for them. Mamzers.

I like cats but I'll be the first to point out that they are made for killing. They literally can't help it; they have knives for fingers and a bear-trap mouth for a hand. Watching a kitten play with an insect or lizard, just as it would with a flower bud or ball, and inadvertently kill it taught me more about cats than most of the reading I'd done on the subject.

@ #8 someguyouthere

So, arguably, a cat's affection and love is far more mature and genuine than a dog's dependency-based relationship, because it is given freely. If a cat likes you, he/she actually likes you. A dog just grows dependent, like a weak-willed human being. They need humans (or a pack). Cats do not.

I so totally agree with this. I'm a cat person (4 quirky, individual, perfect indoor-only felines at the moment), a dog person when I'm living in a situation that warrants having a dog (room to run, time for walks/exercise, etc.), and a horse person (riding instructor with a string of 27 school horses, with whom I work daily).

I like cats because they aren't obsequious and overly dependent. Sure, they welcome me at the door when I come home, follow me from room to room, alternate their lap-sitting duties, and sleep on the bed with me. But unlike horses and dogs, I can't get them to do this with the judicious use of a treat (I've never known such a non-treat-eating group of cats). I can't bribe a cat the way I can a dog or a horse. I like that!

There's nothing evil about that. Yes, they shed buckets -- so do dogs and horses. Yes, they run around the house at odd hours. Yes, they poop a lot (but I'd far rather clean 4 litter boxes than 4 stalls, or poop-scoop a yard full of dog doo). Yes, they scratch furniture if they don't have alternate scratching surfaces. (All 4 of my cats have claws all around, and I have designated one sacrificial piece of old upholstered furniture for scratching, and I have tons of cat scratchers around. No other furniture suffers. I've also replaced some of my antique hooked rugs with sisal carpets. I'm figure I'm better at adapting to their habits and requirements than vice versa!)

"Cats are evil"? Them's fightin' words, you know. And you don't want to make us crazy cat ladies angry. (You wouldn't like us when, etc.)

Yes, but is the failure of cats to do as well on the pointing and eye gaze tests really because they don't form "bidirectional attachment bond", or is it because those tests are not the *correct* tests to use for cats? Dogs are, as a group, much more social then cats (however domesticated cats are still more social then undomesticated or feral cats). The eye gaze and pointing tests seem more a test for sociality then for a bidirectional bond. IMO cats are just as good as picking up on human action, and interacting with humans, as dogs, they just do it differently.
For example: my cat wanted to interact with me earlier (wanted to lay on my lap and be petted) so he nosed me. Dogs would probably bark or get a favorite toy and drop it in front of their owner - both are much more active and social then what my cat did.

Welcome to Science Blogs! Just added you to my reader...I wanted to study this once upon a time, but science pulled me elsewhere, as it has a tendency to do.

So have you read anything about if the ability to use behavioral cues to the greatest effect varies by breed? My grad seminar just discussed a paper about how many breed-specific traits (well, the focus was on morphological traits, mostly) are a result of allelic variations in tandem repeats. Since they're relatively easily mutatable (reversibly so), they make good targets for breeding (not that the breeder would know that, of course). So I'm curious as to whether the variation in 'bonding behavior' is greater between individuals that between breeds.

"It is not that "people love dogs." The attachment bond is *bidirectional*. People "love" dogs who exhibit behavioral cues that call the neural/hormonal attachment system into action, the same way that people love babies who exhibit behavioral cues that activate the attachment system."

Actually, my cats do a lot of eye contact. The "sleepy eyes" thing they do is pretty sweet. Conversely, the cat who does the most staring has a really impassive face that amuses or creeps out my girlfriend by different turns. The cats seem to like me the most by a wide margin, which annoys her to no end. Guess I should've encouraged her to feed them occasionally years ago. Now I am the King of All Cats.

So yes, cats are evil. And that is why they rule.

@darchole

I'm not sure that's data-based. I mean, my dog noses me for attention or puts her paw on my leg; my roommate's cat yowls loudly. I think the point is that cats' human interactions are fundamentally different from dogs', and perhaps not based on the same easy recognition of social cues that dogs employ.

...for instance, no cat I've ever met seems to realize that I don't like being randomly bitten for no reason.

It would seem that since dogs are hardwired to behave as a social group, the pack, it's transition to our innate human social structure doesn't seem like it's such a stretch. Cats on the other hand, do not form packs, and instead is hardwired to react socially only to its litter mates or mother and so it brings me dead birds, licks my head other stuff it might do to other cats from within its familial structure, and even then, with some restraint usually, and naturally.
The interesting thing with domestic animals is that they dont' seem to develop the instinctual reluctance we see in the adult ancestral animals from which they originated to see others as part of their social unit whether it's a pack, or a litter, or a tribe.

"...for instance, no cat I've ever met seems to realize that I don't like being randomly bitten for no reason"

No, they realize it.

This was another excellent article. Yes, cats are evil little creatures who shamelessly torture and kill anything helpless that catches their eye, but I love my kitty companions as much as my doggy companions and human companions. Many families have drama and cats play an important role in keeping the soap opera kind of drama flowing. Oh, and I think my little neko has succeeded at activating my attachment system as one of the most vocal, playful, and needy cats I've ever known.

Don't want to be part of dog vs. cat war, I think it is the best combination of having one of each, they will stimulate the child - parent style bond (dogs) and cats will secure oxitocins flow on rainy, winter evenings when dog comes back from the walk to dirty to cuddle :)

Just read your first two entries and here's my suggestion: more stats!

I realize you're linking to research that has clearly stated statistical information, but the more you point out the actual measured effects from research in your article instead of using more qualitative statements, the less "MY DOG DOESN'T DO THAT!" responses you're going to get. A lot of developed animal behaviors exist because they add a few percentage points to the likelyhood of survival and reproduction to certain members of the species, but people tend to like statments like "dogs do x because of y" and unless you make it more explicit, that's what people are going to hear.

For instance, I was going to respond about cats and gazing because my cats do it all the time (indoor cats, that seems to make a difference), then I realized that probably lots of cats do it all the time, they just score lower as a group than dogs. Avoiding statements like "dogs do this, cats do this" is good because they're inadequate descriptors (like a comedian doing the "black people are all like 'this', white people are all like 'this'" routine). Anyways, I like the tone of the blog and I like the topic, I'll be coming back for more.

I think that the whole cat v dog thing is due to how long the human species has had domesticated dogs as opposed to cats, as well as how the "job" of cats was to operate independently.

While even people who do not like dogs are aware of basic dog behavior (i.e. wagging tail=happy), even people who have owned cats their entire lives can be greatly ignorant of the rules of cat behavior, interaction and body-language.

Example: the entire "my cat can randomly freak out and bite me when I pet it" thing. My cats never do that. I read umpteen cat-behavior books before I got my kittens; I learned that cats have very tiny body language signs that they think are loud and clear but that humans can miss entirely. If one of my cats presents me with a tummy to scratch, I am careful to watch for the tiniest sign that the cat has had enough of that rather than go past my cats comfort level and end up with claws and teeth wrapped around my wrist.

Beyond the extreme subtlety of cat body language, a lot of cat language is the opposite of Dog body language or is just flat out confusing. You should never approach a cat when it's tail is wagging; it is NOT a happy cat! Cats can purr when they are happy, but they also purr to self-comfort when they are injured or sick (and likely to lash out).

To me, Dogs are something that Humanity has been living with for so long that we instinctively understand their body language to a certain extent. We don't have that natural affinity with cats, but we can learn to understand them if we try.

My point was more that the formation of a bidirectional bond is based on many different behaviors, which also manifests differently in different species, and in different individuals. Just because one species typically does poorly at certain tests does not mean they don't form bonds with people.

Layman's Breakdown
Dogs = Unconditional Love
Cats = Unconditional Indifference

i love my cats and my dogs. but cats aren't 'independent'. they're just too stupid to interact with a human on anything but the most basic level.

cats have also definitely been domesticated to some extent. they had to be wild once, right? have you ever tried to cuddle a bobcat? it's surprisingly painful. or so i've heard.

Haha! Good stuff. I obviously favor cats, but I admit they are stupid as heck and have violently uncivilized instincts. BTW, I think the "random" biting of some cats isn't a matter of "going past the comfort level" as it is from some kind of freaky S&M thing. In my experience, cats who are enjoying petting too much will turn around and bite you because of that enjoyment. Not all cats though, just about 40% of the ones I've known. Not that I get bit (I see it coming), because I'm also a good read of cat behavior. My apartment has cat psychology all over it. I never leave something small by the edge of a surface unless I'm OK with it being knocked over, for one example.
Cats cats cats! OK, I am getting off-topic. Adios.

In the playing-with-your-dog experiment, the control condition should have been playing with someone else's dog, not staring at a blank wall. Otherwise, it could be that playing with any animal increases your oxytocin. Or that any kind of playing does. Or any kind of activity. Or that staring at a blank wall reduces oxytocin from basal levels...

In the playing-with-your-dog experiment, the control condition should have been playing with someone else's dog, not staring at a blank wall.

I agree, this makes sense. Maybe they're doing that study now. That might be the logical next step.

We got our first family dog in July, because the kids are old enough and naturally wanted a real pet. Unfortunately, the cat we had for several years is pretty anti-social. But she solved the rodent problem. I sort of liked dogs. But damn if I'm not smitten with this dog! I wondered why I almost feel bonded to a mammal I never breast-fed.
The article mentioned a combination of visual and auditory recognition, but what about smell? I thought dogs relied as heavily on that as humans do on sight. Maybe it would be more difficult to humans to evaluate.
My sweet Golden Retriever/Border Collie shelter mutt has since turned me into a dog-lover!

I love my dog and she seems to worship me but I am also convinced that she is really a furry cuckoo engaging in an extremely sophisticated brood parasitism.

Stray dogs and packs are swept up by by-law enforcement

Not where I live. Here in OKC, I haven't seen a patrolling animal control vehicle in nearly a decade. Budget shortfalls and what-not. Not that I know it to be truth, but a coworker of mine that does a lot of work with her local animal shelter has told me that they will take your contact information and bill you, should you request an animal be picked up. And we have lots of strays. On the east-side of the city, you can barely go a block w/out seeing at least one stray pit bull.

That being said, I am a dog and cat person, though I like dogs much better, owning 1 dog (lab/newfie mix) and 0 cats. I grew up with cats and find them affectionate enough, but they lack any usefulness, outside of the stress release of petting them. Dogs, because of their "obsequiousness", can almost seem an extension of the human mind and body with minimal training.

Also, cats poop inside the home as a matter of course. They walk in their own excrement, then go plodding over counter-tops, couches and bed-sheets. While they are certainly less than evil, this fact alone makes for an irreconcilable difference between cat ownership and an objectively hygienic living space.

Every cell in a chicken has its own male or female identity

edyong — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:40:22 +0000

Every cell in a chicken has its own male or female identity

The animal on the right is no ordinary chicken. Its right half looks like a hen but its left half (with a larger wattle, bigger breast, whiter colour and leg spur) is that of a cockerel. The bird is a 'gynandromorph', a rare sexual chimera. Thanks to three of these oddities, Debiao Zhao and Derek McBride from the University of Edinburgh have discovered a truly amazing secret about these most familiar of birds - every single cell in a chicken's body is either male or female. Each one has its own sexual identity. It seems that becoming male or female is a very different process for birds than it is for mammals.

In mammals, it's a question of testicles, ovaries and the hormones they produce. Embryos live in sexual limbo until the sex organs (gonads) start to develop. This all depends on a sexual dictator called SRY, a gene found on the Y chromosome. If it's present, the indifferent gonads go down a male route; if not, they take a female one. The sex organs then secrete a flush of hormones that trigger changes in the rest of the body. The sex chromosomes are only relevant in the cells of the gonads.

But the gynandomorphs show that something very different happens in birds. Birds have Z and W chromosomes; males are ZZ and females are ZW. Zhao and McBride used glow-in-the-dark molecules that stick to the two chromosomes to show that the gynandromorphs do indeed have a mix of ZZ and ZW cells. However, they aren't split neatly down the middle. Their entire bodies are suffused with a mix of both types, although the male half has more ZZ cells and the female half has more ZW ones.

Even though the three chickens were both male and female, one of them only had a testicle on one side, the second only had an ovary on one side, and the third had a strange hybrid organ that was part testis and part ovary. These malformed organs pumped the same soup of hormones throughout the birds' bodies but, clearly, each side responded differently.

Zhao and McBride started to suspect that each cell has its very own sexual identity, and that this individuality exists from the chicken's first days of embryonic life. They proved that by transplanting cells from embryonic sex organs from one animal to another. All the transplants produced a glowing green protein so Zhao and McBride could track their whereabouts, and those of their daughters.

If they were shoved into the midst of other cells of the same sex, they were integrated into the developing sex organs. But if they were placed amid cells of the opposite sex, they became ostracised. In mammals (say, a mouse), an XX cell can become a working part of the testes just as an XY cell can become a working part of the ovaries. But birds cannot be cajoled into switching sides. Male and female cells clearly retain their identity even if they're exiled into new surroundings.

As an exception that proved the rule, Zhao and McBride did manage to create an embryo with hybrid "ovo-testis" sexual organs, by transplanting a lot of female cells into a male embryo. The female cells could respond to signals from their new male home telling them to make sexual tissues. But they responded according to their own internal program, producing female structures and deploying female-specific enzymes.

Zhao and McBride think that right from the first few days of development, a battle of molecules in every cell sets their sexual identities. Depending on whether they're ZZ or ZW, the cells activate a sex-specific cadre of genes. For example, a gene called FAF (female-associated factor; no jokes from British readers please) is strongly activated throughout a female embryo less than a day after fertilisation. Meanwhile, male embryos have 10 times the level of an RNA molecule called mir-2954 than their female peers.

At this early stage, the activity of these genes means that a bird embryo is already male or female, even though no sexual organs have developed. The genes then set the genitals down the appropriate developmental path. These organs pump out hormones that certainly influence the rest of the animal, but unlike in mammals, they don't wield any true power. They are just figureheads; there is no equivalent of the mammalian SRY gene, no sexual dictator giving orders.

A similar process might even operate in some mammals. In the wallaby, a marsupial, the SRY gene is active throughout the entire embryo before the point where the sexual organs form, and some of these organs like the breasts and scrotum develop without the influence of sex hormones. Who knows whether other groups of back-boned animals, like fish or reptiles, do something similar?

The fact that something as seemingly straightforward as being male or female could be so complicated in an animal as familiar as a chicken tells us just how much wonder there is left to uncover in the natural world.

UPDATE: This diagram explains the differences between the chicken and mammal systems. The "genital ridge" is the embryonic tissue that the gonads develop from. Note that in mammals, it is sexually neutral until the SRY gene turns it into ovaries or testes - at that point, hormones set the individual's body (its 'phenotype') as male or female. In chickens, the cells of the body (the 'soma') are already male or female long before this happens. The development of the genital ridge into ovaries or testes (which may or may not be influenced by the DMRT1 gene), and the hormone soup that's produced afterwards, don't really change things that much.

Reference: Zhao, D., McBride, D., Nandi, S., McQueen, H., McGrew, M., Hocking, P., Lewis, P., Sang, H., & Clinton, M. (2010). Somatic sex identity is cell autonomous in the chicken Nature, 464 (7286), 237-242 DOI: 10.1038/nature08852

More on sex determination:

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edyong Wed, 03/10/2010 - 07:40

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You can tell which half of the illustration is female because of the long eyelashes.
Now that's serious science!

Wait, they are saying each cell has a sex identity even in normal, non-chimearic chicken? Like....brain cells are a mix in every single chicken in the world? I need that paper!

How is this different from certain human intersex conditions? People who have a mosaic of male and female chromosomes in different tissues of their body aren't exactly common, but aren't unheard of, either. Does that occur by a different process?

"In mammals (say, a mouse), an XX cell can become a working part of the testes just as an XY cell can become a working part of the ovaries."

(Clearly I should have read more carefully. Sorry. Spent too much time looking at the photo of the annoyed-looking chicken!)

Well this makes the whole gender-swapping issue in Jurassic Park more interesting than I thought. I wonder if dinosaurs shared the same trait?

"We deny them that." It's funny that the Jurassic Parkours filled out their dinosaurian genetic lacunae with frog genes instead of chicken genes, and odd that I didn't notice at the time that it was funny.

Bora - my understanding (and it's quite a complicated paper) is that in a normal chicken, all cells still have their own sexual identity, but things are more straightforward because they're (virtually) all female or all male. If there are rogue cells of the opposite gender, they wouldn't be obvious because they wouldn't make much contribution to seuxally relevant organs - just like the male cells in the female half of the gynandromorph are essentially silent and vice versa.

@Nathan

by the time the movie came out, i'd actually read in the literature about cases of sex reversal in chickens. i figured that they left in the frog because it was what crichton used in the book (i don't know why he chose frogs specifically, other than the the fact that sex change in frogs -- especially Xenopus, i think? -- was much better known, and he needed a plot device).

Yes, Crichton needed (or thought he needed) a plot device and was ignorant of chickens' versatility. Still, from the standpoint of the lab techs in the movie, unaware of their True Purpose in life (as are we all) choosing frogs as a library of handy ornithodiran genes is as weird as cannibalizing spare parts for your Firebird from a Cessna when a Camaro is sitting right there.

The plot device, by the way, has no more purpose in the movie than to add texture. The book probably could have been better without it, too.

On the topic of chickens and dinosaurs, about a year ago I read a great book, How To Build A Dinosaur, by Jack Horner, in which he argues that by altering the expression of genes during embryonic development, it is probably possible to create a "chikenosaurus" - a chicken with many traits akin to those of its Cretaceous non-avian theropod ancestors, and the overall outward appearance of a non-avian dinosaur. I don't know if any good evo-devo lab has taken up his challenge.

I don't know about evo-devo labs, but the brilliant webcomic Ask Dr. Eldritch did it. (In the end, of course, Terror Lisa escapes.) Start at http://askdreldritch.com/comic566.html . If you read only one, 580 is a good choice.

Hi, I'm a new reader and I know this isn't much, but thank you for taking the time to write such wonderfully informative articles :)

Ed -- I heard this story on NPR in the US today but I read it on your blog yesterday. WOOT! You beat the popular press! Congratulations! You made this non-scientist feel for a few moments as if she was 'in the know' already!

Sounds like a very complex paper and I'm not sure I understand. Wish I knew more about ZW genetics. Still, holy crap that is a good picture! I may have to borrow it for my blog, if that's ok.

Folks, I get that the paper is complicated, so I've updated it with a diagram at the bottom (taken from the paper) that hopefully explains the differences between mammals and chickens a bit more clearly.

Ed - thanks a lot for the excellent representation / explanation of our work - I couldn't have done better myself (seriously - I've tried).

Who knows whether other groups of back-boned animals, like fish or reptiles, do something similar?

I guess people who have looked?
All extant crocodilians have temperature sex determination uncomplicated even by different genes, let alone chromosomes. So do most turtles (and some lizards--it's probably the ancestral state for amniotes). Not sure about crocs, but in turtles the normal temperature effects are readily reversible via application of hormones.
Of course, you can find a fish that does anything you can think of.
My guess is therefore that this cell-level determination is a feature of birds alone.

"For example, a gene called FAF (female-associated factor; no jokes from British readers please)"

Oh come on. Enlighten the rest of us. My best guess from Google is that this has something to do with player celibacy during the World Cup.

Am I right?

Prejudice vs. biology - testosterone makes people more selfish, but only if they think it does

edyong — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:00:31 +0000

Prejudice vs. biology - testosterone makes people more selfish, but only if they think it does

What do you think a group of women would do if they were given a dose of testosterone before playing a game? Our folk wisdom tells us that they would probably become more aggressive, selfish or antisocial. Well, that's true... but only if they think they've been given testosterone.

If they don't know whether they've been given testosterone or placebo, the hormone actually has the opposite effect to the one most people would expect - it promotes fair play. The belligerent behaviour stereotypically linked to testosterone only surfaces if people think they've been given hormone, whether they receive a placebo or not. So strong are the negative connotations linked to testosterone that they can actually overwhelm and reverse the hormone's actual biological effects.

If ever a hormone was the subject of clichÃ©s and stereotypes, it is testosterone. In pop culture, it has become synonymous with masculinity, although women are subject to its influence too. Injections of testosterone can make lab rats more aggressive, and this link is widely applied to humans. The media portrays "testosterone-charged" people as sex-crazed and financially flippant and the apparent link with violence is so pervasive that the use of steroids has even been used as a legal defence in a US court.

Christoph Eisenegger from the University of Zurich tested this folk wisdom by enrolling 60 women in a double-blind randomised controlled trial. They were randomly given either a 0.5 milligram drop of testosterone or a placebo. He only recruited women because previous research shows exactly how much testosterone you need to have an effect, and how long it takes to do so. We don't know that for men.

The women couldn't have known which substance they were given, but Eisenegger asked them to guess anyway. Their answers confirmed that they couldn't tell the difference between the two drops. But they would also confirm something more startling by the trial's end.

Each woman was paired with a partner (from another group of 60) and played an "Ultimatum game" for a pot of ten Swiss francs. One woman, the "proposer", decided how to allocate it and her partner, "the responder" could choose to accept or refuse the offer. If she accepts, the money is split as suggested and if she refuses, both players go empty-handed. The fairest split would be an equal one but from the responder's point of view, any money would be better than nothing. The game rarely plays out like that though - so disgusted are humans with unfairness that responders tend to reject low offers, sacrificing their own meagre gains to spite their proposers.

Overall, Eisenegger found that women under the influence of testosterone actually offered more money to their partners than those who received the placebo. The effect was statistically significant and it's exactly the opposite of the selfish, risk-taking, antagonistic behaviour that stereotypes would have us predict.

Those behaviours only surfaced if women thought they had been given testosterone. Those women made lower offers than their peers who believed they had tasted a placebo, regardless of which drop they had been given. The amazing thing is that this negative 'imagined' effect actually outweighed the positive 'real' one. On average, a drop of testosterone increased a proposer's offer by 0.6 units, but belief in the hormone's effects reduced the offer by 0.9 units.

The difference between these values is not statistically significant, so we can't conclude that the negative effect outweighs the positive one, but the two are certainly comparable. Either way, it is a staggering result. It implies that the biological effect of a behaviour-altering hormone can be masked, if not reversed, by what we think it does. It's somewhat similar to the nocebo effect, where people experience unwanted side effects from a drug because they believe that such effects will happen.

How can we explain these results? Certainly, Eisenegger accounted for the volunteers' levels of testosterone before the experiment, as well as their levels of cortisol (a stress hormone), their mood and their feelings of anxiety, anger, calmness or wakefulness. None of these factors affected his results.

It's possible that people who are naturally inclined towards selfish, aggressive or dominant behaviour would find it easier to rationalise their actions if they felt that they were under the spell of testosterone. However, these personality traits weren't any more common among the recruits who thought they were given testosterone than those who thought they had a placebo.

Instead, Eisenegger suggests that testosterone's negative stereotype provided some of the women with a licence to misbehave. Their beliefs relieved them from the responsibility of making socially acceptable offers because they thought they would be driven to make greedy ones.

At first, this work seems to contradict the results from earlier studies, which suggest that high testosterone levels are linked with risk-taking, selfishness and aggression. But these studies can't tell us whether the former causes the latter. Indeed, another randomised trial that I've blogged about before found that doses of testosterone didn't affect a woman's selflessness, trust, trustworthiness, fairness or attitude to risk. This study also used an Ultimatum game but it only analysed the behaviour of the responder rather than the proposer.

The alternative hypothesis says that testosterone plays a much subtler role in shaping our social lives. When our social status is challenged, testosterone drives us to increase our standing; how we do that depends on the situation. Traders might take bigger financial risks, while prisoners might have a dust-up. Eisenegger thinks that this is the right explanation, and his results support his view. In his experiment, women who received testosterone would be more inclined towards acts that boosted their social status, and the best way of doing that was to make a fair offer.

The message from this study is clear, and Eisenegger sums it up best himself:

"Whereas other animals may be predominantly under the influence of biological factors such as hormones, biology seems to exert less control over human behaviour. Our findings also teach an important methodological lesson for future studies: it is crucial to control for subjects' beliefs because the [effect of a pure substance] may be otherwise under- or overestimated."

Reference: Nature doi:10.1038/nature08711

More on hormones and placebo:

edyong Tue, 12/08/2009 - 06:00

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I get the idea that the testosterone was administered orally. Is this the case? According to my physician you cannot effectively administer testosterone orally.

Jim- what does your physician mean by "effectively"?
Technically, it was administered "sublingually" (under the tongue). See "Time course of effects of testosterone administration on sexual
arousal in women." to read up on the method citation.

I've clarified the bits about staistical significance above because some people on Boing Boing didn't understand. The increase in fair behaviour in women given testosterone was significant. The increase in selfish behaviour in women who thought they had been given testosterone was significant. The difference between these two effects was not significant.

This means that you can't really say whether the negative effect outweighs the positive one, but at the very least, they're matched.

We were thinking of a pill that one swallows. I suppose under the tongue would work. I'm on androgel which I rub on my skin.

How would one design an experiment to take into account this effect? One could do as they have here, and ask participants what they think they're getting, and then account for that in the final analysis. But what if the subjects don't know what it is they're getting, or don't "know" what the effect of it should be?

I guess it'd only be relevant where the effects being measured are quite small, (one would hope!) but that could still throw a lot of marginal results into (further) doubt.

Well if they don't know what the effect should be, it wouldn't be a problem. But yes, you're right about the marginal results.

Great post. It reminds me of that study in which a group of people were given a non-alcoholic beverage but they were told it was alcohol, and they got drunk anyway.

I think this kind of bias is probably important specifically in studies where social inhibition is a factor.

Hi, I am the original boingboing anon commenter about statistical significance. Thanks for the clarification! I thought your article was very interesting.

I didn't read carefully enough and I just assumed "The difference between these values is not statistically significant" referred to the womens' behavior before and after the testosterone drops, rather than the difference in increases as you clarified.

I was tired and skimming after a day of writing SAS code. :)

I also wrote about this study (here. The problem with their conclusions about belief is that belief wasn't manipulated in any way, and to make matters worse it was measured after the Ultimatum Game.

Maybe women who, for whatever reason, behaved selfishly, were more likely to think, in retrospect, that this meant they had taken testosterone. Or maybe women who tended to think they were on testosterone were also more selfish.

I grew up in an extended family which included a lot of girls. I had an aunt who seemed to jump to the conclusions similar to those stereotypically associated with testosterone. We get along fine today, none the less you still gave me a much Merrier Christmas. Thank you.

I got infuriated once watching a science special on intersex/transgender people, one of the therapists said that testosterone and estrogen really do exactly what people think they do; and she knew because of what the people reported when they took it. I wondered how the reactions would change with a study like this, so I was really glad to read about this. Thanks!

Briana: You made the post I was going to! :-) The studies about just how much our expectations affect the results of alcohol use are almost scary.

I have read some addiction researchers talk about self-handicapping as an important explanation for substance use (and abuse) - using drugs to adjust society's and even your own judgements about your behaviour. I wonder if steroids are also used like that.

This is just speculation, of course, but I have often thought that for some types of criminals, it's an advantage to be seen by your peers as a dangerous, unpredictable sociopath - even if you really aren't. There are social "chicken" games going on in gangs. Wouldn't steroids be a great tool for this, provided both they and their peers believed it had that effect?

That's right. Belief is a powerful agent in that if you believed something to be true and feel it in every level of your being then it will manifest. Therefore if women were given testosterone before a game and they believe they will be aggressive and selfish, then they will.

Hormones are a real turn-on for velvet bellies!

cwilcox — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:18:00 +0000

Hormones are a real turn-on for velvet bellies!

Living in a world of sunshine and electricity, we tend to take light for granted. Heck, we complain when clouds diminish our bright sunny rays. But dip just beneath the surface of the ocean and light becomes a rare commodity. More than half of the light that penetrates the ocean surface is absorbed in the first three feet. As you go deeper, different colors disappear. Red is the first to go, followed by yellow and green, until you're truly immersed in murky blue. At about 200 m deep, there is so little light that plants cannot survive, as there isn't enough light energy to power photosynthesis. Drop down again to 850 m and you no longer see any light because our eyes aren't sensitive enough to detect the trace that trickles down. Dive another 150 m down to 1000 m deep and you enter the aphotic zone, where even the most sensitive eyes no longer see the sun.

It is in these dark depths that many creatures have adapted to produce their own light. Called bioluminescence, this biologically created light plays a big role in the lives of deep-sea creatures, being involved in everything from camouflage and signaling to hunting. While only a handful of organisms above the murky depths have bioluminescent capabilities, it's estimated that 90% of deep-sea marine life produce light in one form or another. This plethora of glowing organisms have given deep sea biologists plenty to study.

All the fish so far studied use nerves to somehow turn on and off their chemical lights. Nerves provide an excellent means of control as they can be fired quickly and selectively, allowing for rapid and precise responses. But new research into one particular species of deep sea fish, called the velvet-belly lantern shark, has found that it uses hormones instead to turn on and off it's bright display. This alternate route suggests that bioluminescence has evolved multiple times, a process called convergent evolution.

The velvet belly lantern shark (or simply velvet belly), Etmopterus spinax, is a fairly small member of the dogfish family and is one of the most common sharks in the deep northeastern Atlantic. It tends to hang out somewhere around 500 m deep, where there is still a trace of visible light from above. If it's name didn't give it away, the velvet belly lantern shark is capable of bioluminescence, and lights up its belly to camouflage its shape when viewed from below, a process called countershading. While it's not fished for profit, large numbers are caught as bycatch in other deepwater commercial fisheries, and the intense fishing pressure throughout it faces its range does worry conservationists who recognize that like other sharks, its slow reproductive rate make it highly susceptible to overfishing.

The researchers first thought to investigate hormones in this species because the shark's bioluminescent cells, called photophores, weren't hooked up to a complex nerve system like in many other bioluminescent fish species. They decided to test if nerves controlled the shark's light-producing cells by injecting neurotransmitters, such as adrenaline and GABA, into the skin and measuring the light produced with a luminometer. None of the neurotransmitters tests were able to stimulate the skin to glow. If the photophores not linked to nerves, the scientists thought, they must be being triggered by some other mechanism. So they began investigating the possibility of hormonal controls.

Indeed, they found that three hormones control this species bioluminescence on and off switches: melatonin, prolactin and alpha-MSH. Melatonin is well known in humans for controlling sleep regulation. But when skin patches of lantern sharks were exposed to the hormone, they lit up for several hours. Similarly, exposure to prolactin also led to light production, though the glow was brighter lasted only about an hour. Alpha-MSH, the researchers found, did the exact opposite - when skin was exposed to it before the other two chemicals, the lights stayed off.

Evolutionarily, it makes sense that this little shark would control its skin lumination with hormones. While in bony fish, skin color is controlled by nerves, the cartilaginous fish (including sharks, skates and rays) control their skin pigmentation with hormones. It is thought that nerve control of skin pigmentation is a later evolutionary development, occurring after the split between cartilaginous and bony fish. While hormonal regulation doesn't allow for as rapid or precise a response as nerve triggering does, it does work well, and using a hormone that already is triggered by darkness like melatonin makes perfect sense.

This drastically different mechanism of turning on and off bioluminescence suggests that sharks and other fish evolved the ability to produce light separately. It's likely that the same evolutionary pressure to produce light - the dark depths of the sea - led both groups of organisms to evolve mechanisms of glowing. The researchers believe that further investigation into other light-producing sharks will find that they, too, use hormones to control their bioluminescence.

Studies like this one show that we still have much to learn about these glowing creatures that live so far below the ocean's surface. The more we explore these depths, the more we learn about the fascinating organisms that survive these cold, deep waters and how they live in a world without light.

Claes, J., & Mallefet, J. (2009). Hormonal control of luminescence from lantern shark (Etmopterus spinax) photophores Journal of Experimental Biology, 212 (22), 3684-3692 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.034363

cwilcox Mon, 11/09/2009 - 03:18

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Deep Ocean

Hormones

Lantern Shark

Women to stop liking Sean Connery?

cwilcox — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:55:00 +0000

Women to stop liking Sean Connery?

Boyish good looks -
the next generation of sexy?

Men like Mike Rowe on the outs?

I couldn't help but notice that a new study has come out about the behavioral effects of hormonal contraception. It's all over the science news sites. With titles ranging from the conservative "Pill May Change Attraction" to the bolder "Taking the pill for past 40 years 'has put women off masculine men'"and "The pill 'gives women a taste for boyish men like Zac Efron'," this new publication has swept the media outlets by storm. This idea that birth control might have behavioral side effects isn't new, even I've mentioned this before, as a side note on another study's findings. But the strong tone and conclusions in this review paper seem to have caught the media's attention, causing Grizzly Adams impersonators everywhere to fear that they're soon to be cast out of their lovers' bedrooms in favor of DiCaprio-esque alternatives.

Calm down, manly men. It's just like how the media always starts raving about how scientists have found a "missing link" every time there's a new fossil species identified - mention sex or relationships in a paper, and it's bound to get noticed. And just like the constant "missing link" hype, the whirlwhind response to this paper is unfounded and ridiculous.

Don't get me wrong - I love a good paper about behavior and hormones. But a non-systematic review paper has a lot of holes in it, and this one is no exception.

In the paper, the authors state that "there is emerging evidence that the use of the pill by women can disrupt: (i) the variation in mate preferences across their menstrual cycle; (ii) their attractiveness to men; and (iii) their ability to compete with normally cycling women for access to mates" and that there are "consequences of pill-induced choice of otherwise less-preferred partners for relationship satisfaction, durability and, ultimately, reproductive outcomes."

Let me start by explaining the paper's premise. It's somewhat established scientifically that certain traits that women find attractive - like "manliness" - can vary over the menstrual cycle. When a woman is most fertile, she's more strongly attracted to more masculine men. There's some suggestion that this is because while she may not be able to marry the sexiest, most genetically spectacular man alive, she can sleep with him behind her mate's back when she's highly fertile and get a genetically fantastic kid while still keeping the loser hubby around to take care of him. In turn, scientists have shown that women are sexiest to men when they're most fertile - the theory being that if men sleep with a woman when she is most likely to get pregnant, then they're most likely to pass on their genes. All of these shifts in attractiveness are completely unconscious, so we don't know that we're changing how we see each other over a monthly cycle.

The Culprit?

Hormonal birth controls change the hormones in a woman's cycle. They convince her body that she's pregnant, thus preventing her from going through ovulation-induced changes into that 'high fertility' state. Logically following, this change in hormones might shift how she views men and how men view her, because she's never entering that body phase where all this change in attraction occurs.

Then, the paper's authors conclude, it's likely that the women taking the pill are shifting society's opinion of men, steering towards less masculinity. They're changing the rules, making feminine men more attractive and thus more likely to mate, which they say could have drastic consequences. Since manly men are supposed to contain the 'better' genes, a shift in mate choice could have reproductive repercussions. As one of the co-authors, Dr Virpi Lumma, is quoted as saying: "The ultimate outstanding evolutionary question concerns whether the use of oral contraceptives when making mating decisions can have long-term consequences on the ability of couples to reproduce."

Even on the small scale, they warn that birth control might be dooming relationships, because women are likely to be off birth control before a relationship, then meet someone, and go on it. Beforehand, the women had 'high fertility' attractions, but after, their tastes change. Even if it's not dooming the masses, it could be a major contributing factor to the rising divorce rate and general relationship woes.

It sounds very logical, but there are gaping holes that the journalists and even the study authors completely ignore.

Firstly, it's important to point out that this is a non-systemic review. A non-systemic review is one that doesn't describe the methods used to choose the papers which are included in it. The authors say that 75% of the studies performed in the past decade support their conclusions. But how did they choose the 72 studies included in their review? How exhaustive was their search? Without explaining these methods, it's entirely possible that the review is biased, focusing on research which supports the writers' preformed conclusion.

Small, non-random samples aren't fit
mathematically to be expanded to populations

But even assuming that the choices were comprehensive when it comes to the literature, there are flaws in those, too. Most of these studies have incredibly low, non-random sample sizes (i.e. <100 college students who want extra credit in their psych class). When talking about large-scale changes which affect populations, such small sizes that aren't randomly selected are poor choices. After all, would you say that the overall political views of the country are the same as the population of one town in Texas? The larger the extrapolation of the data, the larger and more random the sampled set needs to be to be statistically relevant.

Furthermore, when comparing women who are on the pill to those who are not, the treatment group the women are in isn't double blind or random. The two groups are self selected - aka women who are on the pill already versus those that aren't. There is no control, no group that takes a placebo or, at least, goes from not taking the pill to taking it (with one exception - kind of. I'll explain in a minute). No clinical studies into side effects - like those done on various pharmaceuticals - would be tolerated without these kinds of controls.

It goes back to the underlying scientific question of the chicken or the egg. It's possible that taking birth control affects one's mate preferences. It's also possible that those with certain mate preferences are more interested in taking birth control, particularly those interested in the pill over other contraceptive methods like condoms. The studies examined in this review lack the power and structure to determine the difference. After all, studies have shown that there are differences in contraceptive use between political, religious, and age groups. Is it not entirely likely that underlying factor might stimulate a woman to be attracted to 'boyish' men and take birth control, like her religious preferences? The only study covered in the review which did, at least, compare women before and after taking the pill, did not randomly select women for each group. The women elected to take the pill or not, which means it does not rule out all of these issues.

Furthermore, among their logical conclusions, the authors suggest that taking the pill after starting a relationship may affect relationship satisfaction because a woman might change her mind about what she finds attractive. Call me a scientist, but can I have some data? This one ought to be easy to look at! Why speculate so broadly without any kind of data to back it up?

The authors do note that their conclusions are 'speculative,' but it seems the mainstream media has overlooked this portion of the paper. The majority of their conclusions are evolutionary speculations, not scientifically supported theories. And there is danger in trying to see everything from an evolutionary perspective. Evolution is a complex combination of selection, random change, and genetic shifts.

Don't panic, Jackie.
Your rugged good looks won't
keep women from wanting you

Not everything in the world has a concrete, easy to understand and logical reason for why it came out that way. There are jumps and changes that are under little to no selection at all, and the evolutionary 'reasons' for even those traits that are under natural or sexual selection can be hard to decipher.

While this paper is good discussion fodder, it's conclusions and theories should be taken with a very large grain of salt. The science in it is very interesting, however, it's hardly conclusive, and as journalists and reporters of science we need to be more careful in how we talk about science to the public. I'm fairly certain that rugged, manly men still can make women swoon, and that we're not all genetically doomed from birth control (I'm even more positive of this while looking for images for this post, and flipping through pages and pages of Hugh Jackman).

Now, the potential genetic doom of the fish and aquatic creatures who are getting dosed with high levels of these hormones from untreated sewage runoff, that's a different story... for a different day.

Alexandra Alvergne, & Virpi Lummaa (2009). Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans? Trends in Ecology and Evolution : 10.1016/j.tree.2009.08.003

cwilcox Thu, 10/08/2009 - 04:55

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It really is in your nature

cwilcox — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 06:57:00 +0000

It really is in your nature

Rarely will you see a scientist get more riled up than when thrust into a debate of Nature versus Nurture. While the cliche term covers a lot of different aspects of science, the basic debate centers around exactly how much of who we are lies in our genes. A new study in the Journal of Biopsychiatry gives the edge to Dawkins & Co. They found that boys with behavioral problems actually have different levels of the stress hormone cortisol than normal ones - so they can blame their genes, not their parent's upbringing, for their out-of-control antics.

Cortisol, a stress hormone, is generally released when a person gets upset or anxious. The daily patterns of cortisol production were similar in delinquent and control volunteers. When control subjects played a stressful game, however, their cortisol levels rose 48%, while the levels of cortisol in the boys with conduct disorder dropped by 30%. The researchers, based at the University of Cambridge, suggest that this huge difference may be because the delinquent youths are so used to provocative and stressful encounters that they no longer respond by producing the "restraining" hormone cortisol. "They are behaving as though there's no stress at all," says lead researcher Graeme Fairchild.

In psychology, there is an assumed difference between children with early-onset problems, starting around age five, and those who start acting out at later ages. The ones that act out young are thought to have a 'biological problem,' whereas the teen troublemakers are responding to peer pressure or familial upbringing. But in this study, it didn't matter when the onset of behavior occurred. They found no difference between early and late blooming disorders: both group's cortisol levels fell the same way â a biological rather than peer-led response, suggesting that there isn't as much difference in the two groups as previously thought.

"It could be that the same latent trait exists in both groups," says Fairchild. These findings may lead to the discovery of biological markers in infants that identify those most likely to develop conduct disorders at any age, allowing parents to be better equipped to deal with their behavior later on before it degenerates into lying, stealing, violence, and general apathy for well being of others. Or the research could lead to new treatments to bring cortisol levels closer to normal, curbing bad behavior chemically.

Either way, it seems that Nature has scored a point in a field, psychiatry, where Nurture has tended to dominate- at least until the next study is published.

** UPDATE: Study Finds Gene May Indicate Likelihood To End Up In Wrong Crowd **
New study out of FSU correlates a specific gene mutation with hanging out in 'bad' crowds. The gist of the research, published in the September issue of the Journal of Genetic Psychology, is that boys with high-risk families who also have a specific allele (called the '10-repeat allele' of the dopamine transporter gene (DAT1)) are more likely to hang out with delinquent peers than those in high-risk families who do not. Interestingly, those without the gene and all in low-risk families do not correlate with poor choice of friends, showing that the environment also plays a role.

Kevin Beaver, the lead investigator, explains, "As a result, we now have genuine empirical evidence that the social and family environment in an adolescent's life can either exacerbate or blunt genetic effects...Perhaps the 10-repeat allele is triggered by constant stress or the general lack of support, whereas in low-risk households, the variation might remain inactive...Or it's possible that the 10-repeat allele increases an adolescent boy's attraction to delinquent peers regardless of family type, but parents from low-risk families are simply better able to monitor and control such genetic tendencies."

Soon enough there just may be a genetic test for 'risk of adverse behavior as a teenager.' Crazy, huh?

cwilcox Tue, 09/30/2008 - 02:57

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Hormones

Nature versus Nurture