CulturePlaces

David Brooks Speaks with Daniel Kahneman

2012-01-02T00:18:00.000-08:00

http://fora.tv/2011/11/28/David_Brooks_Speaks_with_Daniel_Kahneman#fullprogram

The link will take you to FORA.tv.

Neuroscience or Neuromania?

2011-12-31T12:05:00.001-08:00

Gender: Why Boys Keep Trucking

2011-11-26T23:57:00.000-08:00

Enlarge Image

Getty Images

Innate fascination with propulsive motion may explain why boys gravitate to toys that move, like trucks.

After watching videos of adults cradling and striking balloons, male but not female 6-to-9-month-olds began to hit balloons more often. This suggests that males have an innate fascination with "propulsive movement," researchers say.

After getting acquainted with a toy balloon, 45 children—too young to label themselves by gender—watched split-screen video clips: On one side, a man or woman cradled a balloon; on the other, the same man or woman hit the balloon.

Boys tended to watch the people striking balloons more than girls did. After watching, they batted their own balloons more than before, while girls didn't change behavior.

There were no sex differences in how children handled the balloons before the videos started and no evidence that the parents of boys had promoted this play style.

If an innate fascination with propulsive motion exists, it may explain why boys gravitate to toys that move, such as trucks, without parental encouragement, researchers said.

"Male More Than Female Infants Imitate Propulsive Motion," Joyce F. Benenson, Robert Tennyson and Richard W. Wrangham, Cognition (November)

The Divided Brain

2011-10-25T13:34:00.001-07:00

http://youtu.be/dFs9WO2B8uI

Evil: Neuroscientists suggest there is no such thing. Are they right?

2011-10-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

SLATE

By Ron Rosenbaum|Posted Friday, Sept. 30, 2011, at 4:24 PM ET

Anders Behring Breivik, suspect in the Oslo killings, leaves the courthouse in a police car

Photo by Jon-Are Berg-Jacobsen/AFP/Getty Images.

Is evil over? Has science finally driven a stake through its dark heart? Or at least emptied the word of useful meaning, reduced the notion of a numinous nonmaterial malevolent force to a glitch in a tangled cluster of neurons, the brain?

Yes, according to many neuroscientists, who are emerging as the new high priests of the secrets of the psyche, explainers of human behavior in general. A phenomenon attested to by a recent torrent of pop-sci brain books with titles like Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Not secret in most of these works is the disdain for metaphysical evil, which is regarded as an antiquated concept that's done more harm than good. They argue that the time has come to replace such metaphysical terms with physical explanations—malfunctions or malformations in the brain.

Of course, people still commit innumerable bad actions, but the idea that people make conscious decisions to hurt or harm is no longer sustainable, say the new brain scientists. For one thing, there is no such thing as "free will" with which to decide to commit evil. (Like evil, free will is an antiquated concept for most.) Autonomous, conscious decision-making itself may well be an illusion. And thus intentional evil is impossible.

Have the new neuroscientists brandishing their fMRIs, the ghostly illuminated etchings of the interior structures of the skull, succeeded where their forebears from disciplines ranging from phrenology to psychoanalysis have failed? Have they pinpointed the hidden anomalies in the amygdala, the dysfunctions in the prefrontal lobes, the electrochemical source of impulses that lead a Jared Loughner, or an Anders Breivik, to commit their murderous acts?

And in reducing evil to a purely neurological glitch or malformation in the wiring of the physical brain, in eliminating the element of freely willed conscious choice, have neuroscientists eliminated as well "moral agency," personal responsibility? Does this "neuromitigation" excuse—"my brain made me do it," as critics of the tendency have called it—mean that no human being really wants to do ill to another? That we are all innocent, Rousseauian beings, some afflicted with defects—"brain bugs" as one new pop-neuroscience book calls them—that cause the behavior formerly known as evil?

Are those who commit acts of cruelty, murder, and torture just victims themselves—of a faulty part in the head that might fall under factory warranty if the brain were a car?

Rest of the article and comments here: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_spectator/2011/09/does_evil_exist_neuroscientists_say_no_.single.html

Fish oil to combat criminal behavior

2011-08-10T00:53:00.000-07:00

Criminal Minds Are Different From Yours, Brain Scans Reveal

by Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer

Date: 04 March 2011

http://www.livescience.com/13083-criminals-brain-neuroscience-ethics.html

The latest neuroscience research is presenting intriguing evidence that the brains of certain kinds of criminals are different from those of the rest of the population.

While these findings could improve our understanding of criminal behavior, they also raise moral quandaries about whether and how society should use this knowledge to combat crime.

The criminal mind

In one recent study, scientists examined 21 people with antisocial personality disorder – a condition that characterizes many convicted criminals. Those with the disorder "typically have no regard for right and wrong. They may often violate the law and the rights of others," according to the Mayo Clinic.

Brain scans of the antisocial people, compared with a control group of individuals without any mental disorders, showed on average an 18-percent reduction in the volume of the brain's middle frontal gyrus, and a 9 percent reduction in the volume of the orbital frontal gyrus – two sections in the brain's frontal lobe.

Another brain study, published in the September 2009 Archives of General Psychiatry, compared 27 psychopaths — people with severe antisocial personality disorder — to 32 non-psychopaths. In the psychopaths, the researchers observed deformations in another part of the brain called the amygdala, with the psychopaths showing a thinning of the outer layer of that region called the cortex and, on average, an 18-percent volume reduction in this part of brain.

"The amygdala is the seat of emotion. Psychopaths lack emotion. They lack empathy, remorse, guilt," said research team member Adrian Raine, chair of the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., last month.

University of Pennsylvania criminologist Adrian Raine
CREDIT: U Penn

View full size image

In addition to brain differences, people who end up beingconvicted for crimes often show behavioral differences compared with the rest of the population. One long-term study that Raine participated in followed 1,795 children born in two towns from ages 3 to 23. The study measured many aspects of these individuals' growth and development, and found that 137 became criminal offenders.

One test on the participants at age 3 measured their response to fear – called fear conditioning – by associating a stimulus, such as a tone, with a punishment like an electric shock, and then measuring people's involuntary physical responses through the skin upon hearing the tone.

In this case, the researchers found a distinct lack of fear conditioning in the 3-year-olds who would later become criminals. These findings were published in the January 2010 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Neurological base of crime

Overall, these studies and many more like them paint a picture of significant biological differences between people who commit serious crimes and people who do not. While not all people with antisocial personality disorder — or even all psychopaths — end up breaking the law, and not all criminals meet the criteria for these disorders, there is a marked correlation.

"There is a neuroscience basis in part to the cause of crime," Raine said.

What's more, as the study of 3-year-olds and other research have shown, many of thesebrain differences can be measured early on in life, long before a person might develop into actual psychopathic tendencies or commit a crime.

Criminologist Nathalie Fontaine of Indiana University studies the tendency toward being callous and unemotional (CU) in children between 7 and 12 years old. Children with these traits have been shown to have a higher risk of becoming psychopaths as adults.

"We're not suggesting that some children are psychopaths, but CU traits can be used to identify a subgroup of children who are at risk," Fontaine said.

Yet her research showed that these traits aren't fixed, and can change in children as they grow. So if psychologists identify children with these risk factors early on, it may not be too late.

"We can still help them," Fontaine said. "We can implement intervention to support and help children and their families, and we should."

These brain scans of psychopaths show a deformation in the amygdala compared to non-psychopaths, from a study by Adrian Raine and colleagues.
CREDIT: Yang et al./Archives of General Psychiatry

View full size image

Neuroscientists' understanding of the plasticity, or flexibility, of the brain called neurogenesis supports the idea that many of these brain differences are not fixed. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

"Brain research is showing us that neurogenesis can occur even into adulthood," said psychologist Patricia Brennan of Emory University in Atlanta. "Biology isn’t destiny. There are many, many places you can intervene along that developmental pathway to change what's happening in these children."

Furthermore, criminal behavior is certainly not a fixed behavior.

Psychologist Dustin Pardini of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center found that about four out of five kids who are delinquents as children do not continue to offend in adulthood.

Pardini has been researching the potential brain differences between people with a past criminal record who have stopped committing crimes, and those who continue criminal behavior. While both groups showed brain differences compared with non-criminals in the study, Pardini and his colleagues uncovered few brain differences between chronic offenders and so-called remitting offenders.

"Both groups showed similar results," Pardini said. "None of these brain regions distinguish chronic and remitting offenders."

Ethical quandaries

Yet even the idea of intervening to help children at risk of becoming criminals is ethically fraught.

"Do we put children in compulsory treatment when we've uncovered the risk factors?" asked Raine. "Well, who decides that? Will the state mandate compulsory residential treatment?"

What if surgical treatment methods are advanced, and there is an option to operate on children or adults with these brain risk factors? Many experts are extremely hesitant to advocate such an invasive and risky brain intervention — especially in children and in individuals who have not yet committed any crime.

Yet psychologists say such solutions are not the only way to intervene.

"You don’t have to do direct brain surgery to change the way the brain functions," Brennan said. "You can do social interventions to change that."

Fontaine's studies, for example, suggest that kids who display callous and unemotional traits don't respond as well to traditional parenting and punishment methods such as time-outs. Instead of punishing bad behavior, programs that emphasize rewarding good behavior with positive reinforcement seem to work better.

Raine and his colleagues are also testing whether children who take supplemental pills of omega-3 fatty acids — also known as fish oil — can show improvement. Because this nutrient is thought to be used in cell growth, neuroscientists suspect it can help brain cells grow larger, increase the size of axons (the part of neurons that conducts electrical impulses), and regulate brain cell function.

"We are brain scanning children before and after treatment with omega-3," Raine said. "We are studying kids to see if it can reduce aggressive behavior and improve impaired brain areas. It's a biological treatment, but it's a relatively benign treatment that most people would accept."

'Slippery slope to Armageddon'

The field of neurocriminology also raises other philosophical quandaries, such as the question of whether revealing the role of brain abnormalities in crime reduces a person's responsibility for his or her own actions.

"Psychopaths know right and wrong cognitively, but don't have a feeling for what's right and wrong," Raine said. "Did they ask to have an amygdala that wasn't as well functioning as other individuals'? Should we be punishing psychopaths as harshly as we do?"

Because the brain of a psychopath is compromised, Raine said, one could argue that they don't have full responsibility for their actions. That — in effect — it's not their fault.

In fact, that reasoning has been argued in a court of law. Raine recounted a case he consulted on, of a man named Herbert Weinstein who had killed his wife. Brain scanssubsequently revealed a large cyst in the frontal cortex of Weinstein's brain, showing that his cognitive abilities were significantly compromised.

The scans were used to strike a plea bargain in which Weinstein's sentence was reduced to only 11 years in prison.

"Imaging was used to reduce his culpability, to reduce his responsibility," Raine said. "Yet is that not a slippery slope to Armageddon where there's no responsibility in society?"

The biology of criminality

2011-08-09T23:56:00.000-07:00

June 12, 2011

Criminal Minds

Adrian Raine thinks brain scans can identify children who may become killers

Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review

A child in Adrian Raine's lab at the U. of Pennsylvania, wearing a cap with electrodes to measure brain activity.

By Josh Fischman
Philadelphia

Along with several other researchers, he has pioneered the science of neurodevelopmental criminology. In adult offenders, juvenile delinquents, and even younger children, dozens of studies have pointed to brain features that seem to reduce fear, impair decision making, and blunt emotional reactions to others' distress. The studies have also highlighted body reactions that are signs of this pattern and are tied to criminality.

"So if I could tell you, as a parent, that your child has a 75-percent chance of becoming a criminal, wouldn't you want to know and maybe have the chance to do something about it?" asks Raine....
Society has always wondered about "bad seeds," people who seem to be possessed by devils. But what is emerging from this research is a cluster of biological markers that plant the bad seed in the brain. More striking, they appear to predict antisocial behavior even before it happens. Early warnings could avoid a world of hurt, because some of these people are terribly dangerous. . .

When they further divided murderers into those who came from "good" homes and those who came from "bad" homes—those filled with neglect, abuse, and poverty—the first group again showed lower activity in the prefrontal cortex, in particular an area called the orbitofrontal cortex. Raine's interpretation: Genetics and anatomy were more influential on their development than was the way they grew up; the murderers from good homes seemed to be terribly affected by this low-functioning brain region.

And it wasn't just function. Brain form was also impaired, Raine and his coworkers found. A series of studies using magnetic resonance imaging, which reveals structures and shapes, showed that criminals and people who scored high on tests of antisocial disorders had different-looking brains. Both the orbitofrontal region and the amygdala were smaller than normal. And the corpus callosum, the bridge between the brain's two hemispheres that helps them communicate, was abnormally large....

In his current study of Philadelphia children with the slow physical reactivity that has been linked to trouble, some are getting a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids and calcium to see if those protect brain cells, some are getting cognitive-behavioral therapy, and some are getting both to see if trouble can be staved off.

Still, the time is coming, Raine believes, when putting numbers on children will be tempting. If a 75-percent chance of a bad seed isn't high enough, he wonders, what about 80 percent? Or 95? "Look, I have two children, 9-year-old, nonidentical twin boys," he says. "And I'd definitely want to know, especially if there was a treatment that has a chance of success. But I realize not every parent will. We have to start having this conversation now, though, so we understand the risks and the benefits. It's easy to get on your moral high horse about stigma and civil liberties, but are you going to have blood on your hands in the future because you've blocked an approach that could lead to lives being saved?"

"One swallow does not a summer make. But together, this is a message in the sky."

2011-06-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

Genetic Basis for Crime: A New Look

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: June 19, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/arts/genetics-and-crime-at-institute-of-justice-conference.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&hpw=&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1308758092-IQNwF29ZiUhMIcb27VOplg

REPRINTS

It was less than 20 years ago that the National Institutes of Health abruptly withdrew funds for a conference on genetics and crime after outraged complaints that the idea smacked of eugenics. The president of the Association of Black Psychologists at the time declared that such research was in itself “a blatant form of stereotyping and racism.”

The tainted history of using biology to explain criminal behavior has pushed criminologists to reject or ignore genetics and concentrate on social causes: miserable poverty, corrosive addictions, guns. Now that the human genome has been sequenced, and scientists are studying the genetics of areas as varied as alcoholism and party affiliation, criminologists are cautiously returning to the subject. A small cadre of experts is exploring how genes might heighten the risk of committing a crime and whether such a trait can be inherited. Readers' Comments

Share your thoughts.

The turnabout will be evident on Monday at the annualNational Institute of Justice conference in Arlington, Va. On the opening day criminologists from around the country can attend a panel on creating databases for information about DNA and “new genetic markers” that forensic scientists are discovering.

“Throughout the past 30 or 40 years most criminologists couldn’t say the word ‘genetics’ without spitting,” Terrie E. Moffitt, a behavioral scientist at Duke University, said. “Today the most compelling modern theories of crime and violence weave social and biological themes together.”

Researchers estimate that at least 100 studies have shown that genes play a role in crimes. “Very good methodological advances have meant that a wide range of genetic work is being done,” said John H. Laub, the director of the justice institute, who won the Stockholm Prize in Criminology last week. He and others take pains to emphasize, however, that genes are ruled by the environment, which can either mute or aggravate violent impulses. Many people with the same genetic tendency for aggressiveness will never throw a punch, while others without it could be career criminals.

The subject still raises thorny ethical and policy questions. Should a genetic predisposition influence sentencing? Could genetic tests be used to tailor rehabilitation programs to individual criminals? Should adults or children with a biological marker for violence be identified?

Everyone in the field agrees there is no “crime gene.” What most researchers are looking for are inherited traits that are linked to aggression and antisocial behaviors, which may in turn lead to violent crime. Don’t expect anyone to discover how someone’s DNA might identify the next Bernard L. Madoff. ...

One gene that has been linked to violence regulates the production of the monoamine oxidase A enzyme, which controls the amount of serotonin in the brain. People with a version of the gene that produces less of the enzyme tend to be significantly more impulsive and aggressive, but, as Ms. Moffitt and her colleague (and husband) Avshalom Caspi discovered, the effect of the gene is triggered by stressful experiences.

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard whose forthcoming book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” argues that humans have become less violent over the millenniums, suggests that the way to think about genetics and crime is to start with human nature and then look at what causes the switch for a particular trait to be flipped on or off.

“It is not a claim about how John and Bill differ, but about how every male is the same,” he said. Understanding the genetics of violence can “tell you what aspect of the environment you should look at.”

He mentioned one of the biggest risk factors leading to crime: remaining single instead of getting married, a link uncovered by Mr. Laub and Robert J. Sampson, a Harvard sociologist who was a co-winner of the Stockholm Prize. Marriage may serve as a switch that directs male energies toward investing in a family rather than competing with other males, Mr. Pinker said.

Kevin Beaver, an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said genetics may account for, say, half of a person’s aggressive behavior, but that 50 percent comprises hundreds or thousands of genes that express themselves differently depending on the environment.

He has tried to measure which circumstances — having delinquent friends, living in a disadvantaged neighborhood — influence whether a predisposition to violence surfaces. After studying twins and siblings, he came up with an astonishing result: In boys not exposed to the risk factors, genetics played no role in any of their violent behavior. The positive environment had prevented the genetic switches — to use Mr. Pinker’s word — that affect aggression from being turned on. In boys with eight or more risk factors, however, genes explained 80 percent of their violence. Their switches had been flipped.

A rash of new research has focused on self-control as well as callousness and a lack of empathy, traits regularly implicated in the decision to commit a crime. Like other personality traits, these are believed to have environmental and genetic components, although the degree of heritability is debated.

In findings from a long-term study of 1,000 babies born in 1972 in a New Zealand town, Ms. Moffitt and her colleagues recently reported that the less self-control a child displayed at 3 years of age, the more likely he or she was to commit a crime more than 30 years later. Forty-three percent of the children who scored in the lowest fifth on self-control were later convicted of a crime, she said, versus 13 percent of those who scored in the highest fifth.

But a predisposition is not destiny. “Knowing something is inherited does not IN ANY WAY tell us anything about whether changing the environment will improve it,” Ms. Moffitt wrote in an e-mail. “For example, self-control is a lot like height, it varies widely in the human population, and it is highly heritable, but if an effective intervention such as better nutrition is applied to the whole population, then everyone gets taller than the last generation.”

Criminologists and sociologists have been much more skittish about genetic causes of crime than psychologists. In 2008 a survey conducted by John Paul Wright, who heads graduate programs at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Criminal Justice, discovered that “not a single study on the biology-crime link has been published in dissertation form in the last 20 years” from a criminal justice Ph.D. program, aside from two dissertations he had personally overseen (one of which was Mr. Beaver’s). He also noted that the top four journals in the field had scarcely published any biological research in the past two decades.

Mr. Wright said he now thinks “in criminology the tide is turning, especially among younger scholars.”

But recent work has tended to air outside the main criminology forums. Mr. Beaver, for example, published a paper in Biological Psychiatry in February that concluded that adoptees whose biological parents had broken the law “were significantly more likely to be arrested, sentenced to probation, incarcerated, and arrested multiple times when compared with adoptees whose biological parents had not been arrested.”

At the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s meeting in February,Adrian Raine, chairman of the criminology department at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer in the field, presented a paper showing how variations in the parts of a toddler’s brain that regulate emotions — believed to be a product of genes and environment — turned out to be a good predictor of criminal behavior later in life.

Mr. Sampson, who planned to attend the opening day of the justice institute conference, said that “sociology has nothing to fear from genetic research,” but he maintained that the most interesting questions about crime, like why some communities have a higher crime rate than others, are not traceable at all to genetics. “The more sophisticated the genetic research, the more it will show the importance of social context,” he said.

2011-06-22T08:37:00.000-07:00

June 12, 2011

Rule Breaker

When it comes to morality, the philosopher Patricia Churchland refuses to stand on principle

Excerpt: Oxytocin's primary purpose appears to be in solidifying the bond between

mother and infant, but Churchland argues—drawing on the work of biologists—that

there are significant spillover effects: Bonds of empathy lubricated by oxytocin

expand to include, first, more distant kin and then other members of one's in-group.

(Another neurochemical, aregenine vasopressin, plays a related role, as do

endogenous opiates, which reinforce the appeal of cooperation by making it feel good.)

From there, culture and society begin to make their presence felt, shaping larger moral systems: tit-for-tat retaliation helps keep freeloaders and abusers of empathic understanding in line. Adults pass along the rules for acceptable behavior—which is not to say "just" behavior, in any transcendent sense—to their children. Institutional structures arise to enforce norms among strangers within a culture, who can't be expected to automatically trust each other.

Sandy Huffaker for The Chronicle Review

These rules and institutions, crucially, will vary from place to place, and over time. "Some cultures accept infanticide for the disabled or unwanted," she writes, without judgment. "Others consider it morally abhorrent; some consider a mouthful of the killed enemy's flesh a requirement for a courageous warrior, others consider it barbaric."

Hers is a bottom-up, biological story, but, in her telling, it also has implications for ethical theory. Morality turns out to be not a quest for overarching principles but rather a process and practice not very different from negotiating our way through day-to-day social life. Brain scans, she points out, show little to no difference between how the brain works when solving social problems and how it works when solving ethical dilemmas....

Recognizing our continuity with a specific species of animal was a turning point in her thinking about morality, in recognizing that it could be tied to the hard and fast. "It all changed when I learned about the prairie voles," she says—surely not a phrase John Rawls ever uttered.

She told the story at the natural-history museum, in late March. Montane voles and prairie voles are so similar "that naifs like me can't tell them apart," she told a standing-room-only audience (younger and hipper than the museum's usual patrons—the word "neuroscience" these days is like catnip). But prairie voles mate for life, and montane voles do not. Among prairie voles, the males not only share parenting duties, they will even lick and nurture pups that aren't their own. By contrast, male montane voles do not actively parent even their own offspring. What accounts for the difference? Researchers have found that the prairie voles, the sociable ones, have greater numbers of oxytocin receptors in certain regions of the brain. (And prairie voles that have had their oxytocin receptors blocked will not pair-bond.)...

The biologist Sue Carter, now at the University of Illinois at Chicago, did some of the seminal work on voles, but oxytocin research on humans is now extensive as well. In a study of subjects playing a lab-based cooperative game in which the greatest benefits to two players would come if the first (the "investor") gave a significant amount of money to the second (the "trustee"), subjects who had oxytocin sprayed into their noses donated more than twice as often as a control group, giving nearly one-fifth percent more each time....

More: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Biology-of-Ethics/127789/#

Any article by Jonah Lehrer fits in with the theme of this blog

2011-03-01T12:24:00.001-08:00

Latest Articles

Cracking the Lottery Code

Wired, February 2011

A Physicist Solves The City
The New York Times Magazine, December 17, 2010

The Truth Wears Off

The New Yorker, December 13, 2010

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Depression's Upside

The New York Times Magazine, February 2010

The Neuroscience of Screw-Ups

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Why We Travel

McSweeney's, December 2009

The Smartest Mutant

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The Autistic Surfer

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The Truth About Grit

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Boston Globe, April 26, 2009

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Boston Globe, January 2, 2009

Daydream Achiever

Boston Globe, August 31, 2008

A New State of Mind

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University of Maryland School of Medicine Study Identifies Genes Associated with Binge Drinking

2011-03-01T12:19:00.000-08:00

Discovery Could Lead to New Therapies for Alcoholism [and why not the propensity for aggression and criminality ]

BALTIMORE, Feb. 28, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --University of Maryland School of Medicine researchers have identified two genes associated with binge drinking that may open doors to new, more effective treatments for excessive alcohol drinking. The scientists found that manipulating two receptors in the brain, GABA receptors and toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), "caused profound reduction" of binge drinking for two weeks in rodents that had been bred and trained to drink excessively. The study was published online the week of Feb. 28 in the journal theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

The new study found that treatments that manipulate both the GABA receptor and toll-like receptor 4 have the potential to reduce anxiety and control cravings, with little to no risk for addiction, according to lead investigator Harry June, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and pharmacology and experimental therapeutics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine...

Compounds exist that would stimulate the receptors in the same way the scientists did in the study. "It's very likely that, down the road, these compounds could become new therapies for binge drinking," says Dr. June. "These compounds would act like a substitute for alcohol, much like methadone acts as a substitute for heroin. They would help alcoholics stop drinking, giving them relief from their cravings and from the anxiety that they try to alleviate with drinking."

http://www.wineindustryinsight.com/ex_nf.php?url=http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/university-of-maryland-school-of-medicine-study-identifies-genes-associated-with-binge-drinking-117092718.html

Nature vs. Nurture

2011-01-23T09:55:00.000-08:00

Why Rich Parents Don't Matter

by Jonah Lehrer
Wall Street Journal
Janurary 22, 2011

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576090020541379588.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read#articleTabs%3Darticle

How much do the decisions of parents matter? Most parents believe that even the most mundane acts of parenting—from their choice of day care to their policy on videogames—can profoundly influence the success of their children. Kids are like wet clay, in this view, and we are the sculptors.

View Full Image

Getty Images

As wealth increases, adults play a much smaller role in determining the mental ability of their children.

Yet in tests measuring many traits, from intelligence to self-control, the power of the home environment pales in comparison to the power of genes and peer groups. We may think we're sculptors, but the clay is mostly set.

A new paper suggests that both metaphors can be true. Which one is relevant depends, it turns out, on the economic status of families.

For a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia looked at 750 pairs of American twins who were given a test of mental ability at the age of 10 months and then again at the age of 2. By studying the performance of identical versus fraternal twins, the scientists could tease out the relative importance of factors such as genetics and the home environment. Because the infants came from households across the socioeconomic spectrum, it also was possible to see how wealth influenced test scores.

When it came to the mental ability of 10-month-olds, the home environment was the key variable, across every socioeconomic class. But results for the 2-year-olds were dramatically different. In children from poorer households, the choices of parents still mattered. In fact, the researchers estimated that the home environment accounted for approximately 80% of the individual variance in mental ability among poor 2-year-olds. The effect of genetics was negligible.

The opposite pattern appeared in 2-year-olds from wealthy households. For these kids, genetics primarily determined performance, accounting for nearly 50% of all variation in mental ability. (The scientists made this conclusion based on the fact that identical twins performed much more similarly than fraternal twins.) The home environment was a distant second. For parents, the correlation appears to be clear: As wealth increases, the choices of adults play a much smaller role in determining the mental ability of their children.

Children from wealthy households get all the advantages that money can buy, from music lessons to SAT tutors. Although parents might fret over the details of such advantages—is it better to play the piano or the violin?—these details are mostly insignificant, subject to the law of diminishing returns. As the science blogger Razib Kahn notes, "When you remove the environmental variance, the genetic variance remains."

These results capture the stunning developmental inequalities that set in almost immediately, so that even the mental ability of 2-year-olds can be profoundly affected by the socio-economic status of their parents. As a result, their genetic potential is held back.

Though this latest study doesn't speculate about the causes of these class differences, previous research has focused on a panoply of factors, such as the variety of words directed toward the child (more variety leads to higher test scores), the number of books in the home and even the ratio of encouraging remarks to discouraging warnings. By the age of 3, children from wealthier households hear, on average, about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. The ratio is reversed in households on welfare.

Such statistics have led many researchers to highlight the importance of improving the early-childhood environments of poor children. Economists such as James Heckman, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago, have long advocated for increased investments in preschool education, but this latest study suggests that interventions need to begin even earlier. One possible model is the "Baby College" administered by the Harlem Children's Zone, which seeks to equip brand-new parents with better parenting skills.

Eliminating such inequalities in the early years of life would simply create a new kind of inequality, driven by genetics. But such a world would at least let more children come closer to their mental potential, unconstrained by the mistakes or impoverishment of their parents. The greatest luxury we can give our children, it turns out, is the luxury of being the type of parent that doesn't matter at all.

Jewish superiority

2011-01-15T13:46:00.000-08:00

The London Sunday Times

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/columnists/article1009009.ece

November 5, 2003

Russia: hapless victim in heist of the century

In the convulsive aftermath of perestroika, seven cunning men seized economic power

By Amy Chua

from her 2003 book World on Fire

As it turns out, six out of seven of Russia’s wealthiest and, at least until recently, most powerful oligarchs are Jewish. The six Jewish businessmen most frequently called oligarchs are: Roman Abramovich; Pyotr Aven; Boris Berezovsky; Mikhail Fridman; Vladimir Gusinsky; and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The seventh oligarch, the only “full-blooded ethnic Russian”, is Vladimir Potanin.

The height of their influence was reached in 1996 when the Yeltsin Government hung on the verge of political and financial collapse. Already wealthy, the oligarchs collectively put forth the so-called “loans-for-shares” deal — now notorious, but at the time grudgingly endorsed by Western advisers and Russian economists.

Essentially, the oligarchs offered loans and political support to the Government in exchange for majority shares, at a fraction of their potential market value, in the behemoths of the Russian economy, a half-dozen massive enterprises breathtakingly rich in nickel, gold and oil deposits.

Despite the inevitable rumours, these men did not become billionaires through violence or mafiya tactics. Rather, they became billionaires by playing the game more effectively and ruthlessly than anybody else during Russia’s free-for-all transition to capitalism.

Russia’s incipient corporate economy operated in practically a legal vacuum at the time, with no laws prohibiting insider trading or other forms of self-dealing. “Russia has been looted all right,” says Chrystia Freeland, in Sale of the Century, “but the biggest crimes haven’t been clandestine or violent or even, in the strict legal sense, crimes at all. Russia was robbed in broad daylight, by businessmen who broke no laws, assisted by the West ’s best friends in the Kremlin.”....

Khodorkovsky had an advantage over his fellow Jewish oligarchs: he had served in the Communist Youth League and enjoyed the patronage of senior Soviet-era officials. In the late 1980s, when Khodorkovsky ventured into private business with the establishment of Menatep Bank, he had the support and protection of the communist regime.

After 1990, Khodorkovsky served as economic adviser to the Prime Minister. In the early Nineties, Menatep went on a “mass privatisation shopping spree” in which it bought everything from a titanium-magnesium plant to glass and textile factories to food-processing companies.

In 1996, Khodorkovsky emerged from the loans-for-shares deal as the powerful chairman of Yukos, Russia’s second largest oil company, with $170 billion in oil reserves. In addition to Yukos, Khodorkovsky today controls massive mineral and timber interests. In 2002, Forbes named him the richest man in Russia...

[Update: Putin has turned on the Oligarchs. Two are in exile and Khodorkovsky after being jailed in 2003 was convicted last month of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to 17 years in prison]

For one reason or another, in Russia’s nearly anarchic transition to a market economy, Jews rose to the top. Long before most Russians, including the country’s leaders, had any understanding of how markets work, the six Jewish oligarchs mastered the game. These men started with next to nothing. They were not particularly sophisticated. They may have been ruthless, but they were plainly smart entrepreneurs.

More on the intellectual superiority of the Chinese

2011-01-15T13:16:00.001-08:00

Amy Chua Bludgeons Entire Generation of Sensitive Parents, Bless Her

By Charles Murray

January 12, 2011, 8:15 am

Amy Chua is a hoot. Her WSJ op ed about the superiority of Chinese parenting, a take from her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has blogs around the world roaring at a woman who could be so cruel to her children. I was laughing out loud throughout, partly because she clearly was having the time of her life twitting the sensitive helicopter parents who can’t bear the idea that their wonderful child is stressed or criticized in any way whatsoever. I was also laughing because the mother of my first two children was half Thai and all Chinese, and it was all so familiar. The subject heading of the email attaching the Chua article to my elder two daughters was “Bring back memories?” My own archetypal memory is when my eldest daughter, then perhaps eight years old, came home with her first Maryland standardized test scores, showing that she was at the 99th percentile in reading and the 93rd percentile in math. Her mother’s first words—the very first—were “What’s wrong with the math?”

Both children turned out great and love their mother dearly.

To get a little bit serious: large numbers of talented children everywhere would profit from Chua’s approach, and instead are frittering away their gifts—they’re nice kids, not brats, but they are also self-indulgent and inclined to make excuses for themselves. There are also large numbers of children who are not especially talented, but would do a lot better in school if their parents applied the same intense home supplements to their classroom work.

But genes play a big role in whether you can demand that your child get an A in advanced calculus or make first seat in the violin section of the orchestra. With that in mind, let’s contemplate the genes being fed into those Chua children who are doing so well.

Maternal grandfather: EE and computer sciences professor at Berkeley, known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks.

Mother: able to get into Harvard (a much better indicator of her IQ than the magna cum laude in economics that she got there); Executive Editor of the Law Review at Harvard Law School.

Father: Summa cum laude from Princeton and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, now a chaired professor at Yale Law School.

Guess what. Amy Chua has really smart kids. They would be really smart if she had put them up for adoption at birth with the squishiest postmodern parents. They would not have turned out exactly the same under their softer tutelage, but they would probably be getting into Harvard and Princeton as well. Similarly, if Amy Chua had adopted two children at birth who turned out to have measured childhood IQs at the 20th percentile, she would have struggled to get them through high school, no matter how fiercely she battled for them.

Accepting both truths—parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities—seems peculiarly hard for some parents and almost every policy maker to accept.

The superiority of the Chinese demonstrated

2010-12-08T09:09:00.000-08:00

December 7, 2010
Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
By SAM DILLON
The New York Times

With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam....

In math, the Shanghai students performed in a class by themselves, outperforming second-place Singapore, which has been seen as an educational superstar in recent years. The average math scores of American students put them below 30 other countries....

In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries....

In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries....

“This is the first time that we have internationally comparable data on learning outcomes in China,” Mr. Schleicher said. “While that’s important, for me the real significance of these results is that they refute the commonly held hypothesis that China just produces rote learning.”

“Large fractions of these students demonstrate their ability to extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge very creatively in novel situations,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/education/07education.html?src=me&ref=homepage

More on near term evolution

2010-09-22T10:16:00.000-07:00

Full program over on Fora.tv : http://fora.tv/2009/03/26/Professor_Christopher_Dye_Are_Humans_Still_Evolving

Solving the Is/Ought conflict~Morality from Science

2010-09-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

brain size and social contract/communal bonds

2010-09-11T10:30:00.001-07:00

Full program: http://fora.tv/2010/02/18/Robin_Dunbar_How_Many_Friends_Does_One_Person_Need#Is_Monogamy_Linked_to_Brain_Size

Another article on rapid evolution

2010-09-02T22:52:00.000-07:00

August 29, 2010

Fast Evolution

For the 10th-anniversary issue of The Chronicle Review, we asked scholars and illustrators to answer this question: What will be the defining idea of the coming decade, and why?

Jonathan Haidt

The Human Genome Project failed to deliver what it promised—a code book in which we could identify the genes responsible for many diseases. But the reason for this failure is itself a major discovery: The genome is far more dynamic and variable than we thought. Gene activity varies within each person, across the life span, and in response to changing environments. Genes vary at high levels across people, ethnic groups, and eras. This is big news, and I predict that it's going to rock many boats, in many academic departments.

When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, the prevailing view was that evolution was so slow that there could be no meaningful genetic differences among human groups. The genetic "blueprint" was assumed to have been finalized during the Pleistocene era, the two million years during which our ancestors lived as relatively egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Modern humans all draw cards from the same deck, the same population of genes, except for some trivial variations related to adaptations for cold weather (such as lighter skin and smaller noses).

But now that we can examine partial genetic maps from thousands of people around the world, the old view is crumbling. Genetic evolution is not slow, and it certainly did not stop around 50,000 years ago, when people began leaving Africa and filling every continent save Antarctica. In fact, it now appears that the human diaspora greatly increased the pace of genetic change. When people exposed themselves to new climates, pathogens, diets, technologies, and social structures, they exposed their genes to new selection pressures. You don't need 50 millennia to get big changes. Some Russian fox breeders created what was essentially a new species of tame, doglike foxes in just 30 generations.

Over the next 10 years, therefore, we'll be hearing less about the Pleistocene and more about the Holocene—the 12,000 years since the beginning of agriculture. We've accepted findings that some ethnic groups adapted during the Holocene to digest milk as adults or to breathe more easily at high altitudes. But what will happen when findings come in about personality traits? Nearly all traits are heritable, and some traits surely paid off more handsomely in commercial cultures than in agricultural ones, or on peaceful islands than on raid-prone steppes. Such findings will be among the greatest threats to political correctness ever to emerge from the natural sciences.

The good news is that because evolution is so fast we'll stop talking about continentwide "races." We'll be looking at smaller groups that shared sustained selection pressures for dozens of generations or more. Also, the differences across groups are sure to be small when compared with the large variations found within every group. And finally, any recently selected traits were selected because they were strengths in their original contexts, so future talk about genetic variation might be productively assimilated into our current discourse about diversity, rather than forcing us to replay The Bell Curve controversies of the 1990s. But whichever way it goes, we'll be talking about fast evolution for the rest of the decade.

Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.

Adventures in Very Recent Evolution

2010-07-20T22:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html?hpw

Excerpts:
Scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute last month discovered another striking instance of human genetic change. Among Tibetans, they found, a set of genes evolved to cope with low oxygen levelsas recently as 3,000 years ago. This, if confirmed, would be the most recent known instance of human evolution....

Coloring the skin may sound simple, but nature requires at least 25 different genes to synthesize, package and distribute the melanin pigment that darkens the skin and hair. The system then had to be put into reverse when people penetrated the northern latitudes of Europe and Asia and acquired lighter skin, probably to admit more of the sunlight required to synthesize vitamin D.

Several of the 25 skin genes bear strong signatures of natural selection, but natural selection has taken different paths to lighten people’s skin in Europe and in Asia. A special version of the golden gene, so called because it turns zebrafish a rich yellow color, is found in more than 98 percent of Europeans but is very rare in East Asians. In them, a variant version of a gene called DCT may contribute to light skin. Presumably, different mutations were available in each population for natural selection to work on. The fact that the two populations took independent paths toward developing lighter skin suggests that there was not much gene flow between them.

East Asians have several genetic variants that are rare or absent in Europeans and Africans. Their hair has a thicker shaft. A version of a gene called EDAR is a major determinant of thicker hair, which may have evolved as protection against cold, say a team of geneticists led by Ryosuke Kimura of Tokai University School of Medicine in Japan.

One aspect of this pattern is that there seem to be more genes under recent selection in East Asians and Europeans than in Africans, possibly because the people who left Africa were then forced to adapt to different environments. “It’s a reasonable inference that non-Africans were becoming exposed to a wide variety of novel climates,” says Dr. Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute.

The culture of national traits

2010-04-18T20:39:00.000-07:00

Tragic Flaw: Graft Feeds Greek Crisis

Wall Street Journal

April 15, 2010

By MARC US WALKER

ATHENS—Behind the budget crisis roiling Greece lies a riddle: Why does the state spend so lavishly but collect taxes so poorly? Many Greeks say the answer needs only two words: fakelaki and rousfeti.

Fakelaki is the Greek for "little envelopes," the bribes that affect everyone from hospital patients to fishmongers. Rousfeti means expensive political favors, which pervade everything from hiring teachers to property deals with Greek Orthodox monks. Together, these traditions of corruption and cronyism have produced a state that is both bloated and malnourished, and a crisis of confidence that is shaking all of Europe.

A study to be published in coming weeks by the Washington-based Brookings Institution finds that bribery, patronage and other public corruption are major contributors to the country's ballooning debt, depriving the Greek state each year of the equivalent of at least 8% of its gross domestic product, or more than €20 billion (about $27 billion).

"Our basic problem is systemic corruption," Greece's Prime Minister George Papandreou said after he took office late last year, vowing to change a mentality that views the republic as a resource to plunder. He later berated the chief of public prosecutions, saying Greeks believe "there is impunity in this country." The chief prosecutor said that wasn't so.

Greece moved closer to a bailout Thursday, requesting aid talks with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Many investors and economists say aid would buy Greece time, but wouldn't solve its underlying problems.

The Brookings study, which examines the correlation between corruption indicators and fiscal deficits across 40 developed or nearly developed economies, highlights how corruption has hurt public finances in parts of Europe, especially in Greece and Italy, and to a lesser extent in Spain and Portugal.

Greece's budget deficit averaged around 6.5% of GDP over the past five years, including a 13% shortfall last year. If Greece's public sector were as clean and transparent as Sweden's or the Netherlands', the country might have posted budget surpluses over the past decade, the study implies.

"If Greece had better control of corruption—not to Swedish standards, but even at Spain's level—it would have had a smaller budget deficit by 4% of gross domestic product," on average over the past five years, says Daniel Kaufmann, senior fellow at Brookings and the study's author.

Greece places last in the 16-nation euro zone in a ranking by World Bank researchers of how well countries control corruption, and last in the 27-nation European Union, tied with Bulgaria and Romania, in corruption-watchdog group Transparency International's survey of countries' perceived graft.

Last year, 13.5% of Greek households paid a bribe, €1,355 on average, according to a Transparency survey published last month. Ordinary citizens hand out cash-filled envelopes to get driver's licenses, doctor's appointments and building permits, or to reduce their tax bills, according to the organization's Greek chapter.

In the past three years alone, senior politicians have resigned or been investigated over allegations that include taking bribes for awarding contracts, employing illegal workers and selling overpriced bonds to public pension funds.

In 2008 senior government officials were accused of helping a politically connected Greek Orthodox monastery claim ownership of a lake, then swap it for a large portfolio of public land at valuations that favored the monks, but lost over €100 million for taxpayers, according to investigators. The scandal contributed to Greek conservatives' election defeat last fall.

Corruption undermines public finances in myriad ways. Cheating the government, especially on taxes, is widespread. Government-procurement bribery and political patronage bloat government spending. And pervasive petty bribery erodes the state's authority over taxpayers.

"The core of the problem is that we don't have a culture of civic society," says Stavros Katsios, a professor at Greece's Ionian University who specializes in economic crime. "In Greece, complying with the rules is a matter of dishonor. They call you stupid if you follow the rules."

Mr. Papandreou's measures to fight graft include centralizing data on tax collection, speeding up investigations, curtailing public-sector hiring, simplifying the bureaucracy and publishing all spending-related decisions online. Political analysts say the steps are sensible, but don't go far enough. Some warn that public-sector pay cuts could even lead to more bribe-taking.

Mr. Papandreou has railed against corruption in the state health sector, where demands for bribes have put operations out of reach for some Greeks. Stents for heart operations, for example, cost up to five times as much in Greece as in Germany, Mr. Papandreou says, blaming kickbacks that grease procurement in hospitals.

Cases of corruption in public procurement are rarely resolved, thanks to a slow-moving justice system that deters people who have paid bribes from becoming witnesses. Politicians have escaped corruption charges because probes often are held up in parliament until a statute of limitations expires.

In 2007, the government was found to have sold billions of euros in overpriced, complex securities to public pension funds, resulting in large losses at the funds. Shortfalls have to be covered by the government, worsening the budget deficit.

Following a public outcry, a state commission on money laundering probed some of the transactions, concluding that there were "clear indications" of bribery, tax evasion and other wrongdoing by Greek officials.

The public prosecutors' office, however, dismissed the findings because the report was signed only by the head of the money-laundering commission, not by every member. The head of the commission was ousted.

Some bribery cases have come to light because foreign companies' dealings in Greece were investigated abroad.

A U.K. court on Wednesday jailed a former executive of medical-goods supplier DePuy International Ltd., a unit of Johnson & Johnson, for channeling £4.5 million ($7 million) in bribes to Greek surgeons. The bribes helped DePuy win contracts to supply orthopedic goods at prices that were roughly twice the European average, according to the U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office, which noted that Greek taxpayers were the victims. DePuy says it has cooperated with the authorities and that the payments violated company policies.

Investigators elsewhere in Europe discovered in 2006 that German engineering giant Siemens AG was funneling money to Greek officials, triggering a world-wide Siemens scandal. German court records indicate Siemens bribed politicians from both of Greece's major parties, but none have have been prosecuted in Greece. Siemens has admitted that it ran slush funds in dozens of countries.

In Greece, as in other countries, corruption hurts the public finances in many ways, say Brookings's Mr. Kaufmann and other analysts.

A rotten system of tax inspections, helped by an opaque tax code, allows individuals and companies to bribe inspectors and evade taxes. Massive overstaffing in public administration, the result of decades of both major political parties creating unnecessary posts for their supporters, saddles the state with a high wage bill.

Nontransparent public-contracting practices allow bribery and favoritism to flourish, leading to inflated costs. Poor accounting at public entities hides malfeasance, as well as the true state of national finances.

The public perception that everyone's on the take has left many Greeks believing that it's morally acceptable to defraud the public coffers. Mr. Papandreou said last month that many Greeks ask themselves: "If politicians are corrupt, if there is corruption, why should I pay my taxes? I don't know where my money is going."

One-quarter of all taxes owed in Greece aren't paid, says Friedrich Schneider, an economist at Austria's Linz University who studies tax evasion around the world. He estimates that around one-third of that is due to bribery. "You split your tax payment with the tax inspectors, and you get a discount," he says.

A senior government official says some tax offices operate a "4-4-2 system," a reference to soccer tactics. If an individual or company owes €10,000 in taxes, they slip €4,000 to the inspector, keep €4,000, and pay €2,000 to the state.

That helps explain why, in a developed country of 11 million people, only around 15,000 individuals declare an annual income of over €100,000, according to Greece's finance minister.

Tax collection frequently declines sharply in the run-up to elections, partly because politicians try to curry favor with voters by relaxing enforcement, according to a study by two Greek economists.

The increase in last year's projected budget deficit from 6% before October's elections to around 13% a few weeks later can be explained in part by falling tax revenues in the preceding months, says Nikos Christodoulakis, one of the study's authors, who was Greece's finance minister early last decade.

The cost of patronage in the public sector, which many politicians say is pervasive, is harder to quantify.

"If you can employ any of your voters in the public service, you'll do that," said Mr. Papandreou in a recent interview, describing the political culture he's trying to change.

Under Greece's electoral system, voters in each district choose multiple deputies, so candidates compete against party colleagues as well as the opposition.

"Instead of running on their party's policies, they give promises as to what they will do for their voters: 'When I'm in government, I will make sure your daughter gets hired somewhere,'" says Stefanos Manos, a former finance minister.

Hiring to public-administration jobs surged last year as the right-leaning government struggled to restore its popularity in the face of scandals and economic slowdown. In the month before the fall election, the government added 27,000 people to the public payroll. Many had no position to fill, and not even an office to go to, according to finance ministry officials.

Cutting the civil-service rolls will be difficult. Under Greece's constitution, permanent government staffers enjoy guaranteed jobs for life.

"At the moment there is nobody who can tell you how many people work for the Greek public sector," says Diomidis Spinellis, a university professor who joined the government in October, and who is trying to gather that information.

The school system is notoriously bloated. For years, the education ministry hired new teachers even if they weren't needed, says John Panaretos, a cabinet minister tasked with making the government more transparent. Greece's 180,000 teachers give it one of the world's best teacher-student ratios. But numbers can be deceptive, Mr. Panaretos says, noting that about 20,000 teachers are in administration because there are no classrooms for them.

Elsewhere, schools are overstaffed. One small school on a tiny island was found to have 15 physical-education teachers, while another had more teachers than students, Mr. Panaretos says.

Government officials say the health-care system is a hotbed of corrupt procurement. Many hospitals don't use proper accounting, making it hard to supervise purchases, they say.

Partly as a result, public hospitals ran up billions of euros in suppliers' bills they couldn't pay in recent years. The previous government understated those liabilities by more than €5 billion when it gave European authorities an overly optimistic budget forecast last fall, according to the new government, contributing to the massive revision of Greece's deficit after October's election.

Greeks who choose to fight back against corruption can find the going rough. George Theodoridis's family business imports fresh fish from Turkey. He had to pay bribes for years to a government veterinarian, who threatened to deem the fish unfit for import.

When the Theodoridis family wanted to start importing oysters, the vet upped her price, demanding €30,000 for the permit and €2,000 per delivery. "She also told us to buy from specific Turkish companies," Mr. Theodoridis says.

The fish trader complained to the agriculture ministry early last year. He got no action.

In November, Mr. Theodoridis had a stroke of luck. The new deputy agriculture minister, long-time anticorruption activist Michael Karchimakis, took an interest in the case. The vet was fired, convicted and fined.

Mr. Theodoridis says his happy outcome is unusual. His wife works at the agriculture ministry and helped get him access to the right people. "Imagine what it is like for people who don't have connections," he says.

—Alkman Granitsas contributed to this article.

Write to Marcus Walker at marcus.walker@wsj.com

Should We Cure Bad Behavior?

2010-03-18T18:21:00.000-07:00

Tough questions about crime and neuro-rehabilitation

Excerpt:

Brain and genetic research is also beginning to illuminate some of the neurochemical sources of violence. For example, elevated levels of dopamine and norepinephrine are associated with impulsivity and violence. The gene for catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) comes in two varieties, one of which is four times slower in breaking down dopamine and norepinephrine. Studies indicate that people with the slow COMT variation are more prone to violence. Monoamine oxidase-A (MAOA) is another brain enzyme that inactivates dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. It too comes in two versions. A study in New Zealand found that men who carry the low activity version and who had been reared in abusive households are much more likely to commit crimes and be violent. The researchers explicitly noted that "these findings could inform the development of future pharmacological treatments."

http://reason.com/archives/2005/06/01/should-we-cure-bad-behavior

Human culture, an Evolutionary Force

2010-03-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

by Nicholas Wade
New York Times
March 1, 2010

Genes enabling lactose tolerance, which probably resulted in more surviving

offspring, were detected in cultures like this Kenyan shepherd’s.

As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.

The force is human culture, broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology. The evidence of its activity is the more surprising because culture has long seemed to play just the opposite role. Biologists have seen it as a shield that protects people from the full force of other selective pressures, since clothes and shelter dull the bite of cold and farming helps build surpluses to ride out famine.

Because of this buffering action, culture was thought to have blunted the rate of human evolution, or even brought it to a halt, in the distant past. Many biologists are now seeing the role of culture in a quite different light.

Although it does shield people from other forces, culture itself seems to be a powerful force of natural selection. People adapt genetically to sustained cultural changes, like new diets. And this interaction works more quickly than other selective forces, “leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution could be the dominant mode of human evolution,” Kevin N. Laland and colleagues wrote in the February issue of Nature Reviews Genetics. Dr. Laland is an evolutionary biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland....

Complete article here

The looming crisis in human genetics

2009-11-29T23:15:00.000-08:00

THE ECONOMIST
Nov 13th 2009
From The World in 2010 print edition
Full article: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14742737

By Geoffrey Miller
University of New Mexico

In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races....

Dozens of papers will report specific genes associated with almost every imaginable trait—intelligence, personality, religiosity, sexuality, longevity, economic risk-taking, consumer preferences, leisure interests and political attitudes. The data are already collected, with DNA samples from large populations already measured for these traits....

When sequencing costs drop within a few years below $1,000 per genome, researchers in Europe, China and India will start huge projects with vast sample sizes, sophisticated bioinformatics, diverse trait measures and detailed family structures. (American bioscience will prove too politically squeamish to fund such studies.) The missing heritability problem will surely be solved sooner or later....

The trouble is, the resequencing data will reveal much more about human evolutionary history and ethnic differences than they will about disease genes. Once enough DNA is analysed around the world, science will have a panoramic view of human genetic variation across races, ethnicities and regions. We will start reconstructing a detailed family tree that links all living humans, discovering many surprises about mis-attributed paternity and covert mating between classes, castes, regions and ethnicities.

We will also identify the many genes that create physical and mental differences across populations, and we will be able to estimate when those genes arose. Some of those differences probably occurred very recently, within recorded history....

If the shift from GWAS to sequencing studies finds evidence of such politically awkward and morally perplexing facts, we can expect the usual range of ideological reactions, including nationalistic retro-racism from conservatives and outraged denial from blank-slate liberals. The few who really understand the genetics will gain a more enlightened, live-and-let-live recognition of the biodiversity within our extraordinary species—including a clearer view of likely comparative advantages between the world’s different economies.

Let’s celebrate human genetic diversity

2009-10-15T00:03:00.000-07:00

By Bruce Lahn
Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago

Lanny Ebenstein
Department of Economics,University of California at Santa Barbara

Nature 461, 726-728 (8 October 2009) | doi:10.1038/461726a; Published online 7 October 2009
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/Lahn.pdf

Science is finding evidence of genetic diversity among groups of people as well as among individuals. This discovery should be embraced, not feared, say Bruce T. Lahn and Lanny Ebenstein.

A growing body of data is revealing the nature of human genetic diversity at increasingly finer resolution. It is now recognized that despite the high degree of genetic similarities that bind humanity together as a species, considerable diversity exists at both individual and group levels (see box, page 728). The biological significance of these variations remains to be explored fully. But enough evidence has come to the fore to warrant the question: what if scientific data ultimately demonstrate that genetically based biological variation exists at non-trivial levels not only among individuals but also among groups? In our view, the scientific community and society at large are ill-prepared for such a possibility. We need a moral response to this question that is robust irrespective of what research uncovers about human diversity. Here, we argue for the moral position that genetic diversity, from within or among groups, should be embraced and celebrated as one of humanity’s chief assets.

The current moral position is a sort of ‘biological egalitarianism’. This dominant position emerged in recent decades largely to correct grave historical injustices, including genocide that were committed with the support of pseudo scientific understandings of group diversity. The racial-hygiene theory promoted by German geneticists Fritz Lenz, Eugene Fischer and others during the Nazi era is one notorious example of such pseudoscience. Biological egalitarianism is the view that no or almost no meaningful genetically based biological differences exist among human groups, with the exception of a few superficial traits such as skin colour. Proponents of this view seem to hope that, by promoting biological sameness, discrimination against groups or individuals will become groundless.

We believe that this position, although well intentioned, is illogical and even dangerous, as it implies that if significant group diversity were established, discrimination might thereby be justified. We reject this position. Equality of opportunity and respect for human dignity should be humankind’s common aspirations, notwithstanding human differences no matter how big or small. We also think that biological egalitarianism may not remain viable in light of the growing body of empirical data.

Many people may acknowledge the possibility of genetic diversity at the group level, but see it as a threat to social cohesion. Some scholars have even called for a halt to research into the topic or sensitive aspects of it, because of potential misuse of the information. Others will ask: if information on group diversity can be misused, why not just focus on individual differences and ignore any group variation? We strongly affirm that society must guard vigilantly against any misuse of genetic information, but we also believe that the best defence is to take a positive attitude towards diversity, including that at the group level. We argue for our position from two perspectives: first, that the understanding of group diversity can benefit research and medicine, and second, that human genetic diversity as a whole, including group diversity, greatly enriches our species.

The Young and the Neuro

2009-10-14T21:38:00.000-07:00

By David Brooks
New York Times
October 12, 2009

...In 2001, an Internet search of the phrase “social cognitive neuroscience” yielded 53 hits. Now you get more than a million on Google. Young scholars have been drawn to this field from psychology, economics, political science and beyond in the hopes that by looking into the brain they can help settle some old arguments about how people interact.

These people study the way biology, in the form of genes, influences behavior. But they’re also trying to understand the complementary process of how social behavior changes biology. Matthew Lieberman of U.C.L.A. is doing research into what happens in the brain when people are persuaded by an argument.

Keely Muscatell, one of his doctoral students, and others presented a study in which they showed people from various social strata some images of menacing faces. People whose parents had low social status exhibited more activation in the amygdala (the busy little part of the brain involved in fear and emotion) than people from high-status families.

Mina Cikara of Princeton and others scanned the brains of Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watched baseball highlights. Neither reacted much to an Orioles-Blue Jays game, but when they saw their own team doing well, brain regions called the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens were activated. This is a look at how tribal dominance struggles get processed inside.....

Jonathan B. Freeman of Tufts and others peered into the reward centers of the brain such as the caudate nucleus. They found that among Americans, that region was likely to be activated by dominant behavior, whereas among Japanese, it was more likely to be activated by subordinate behavior — the same region rewarding different patterns of behavior depending on culture.

All of these studies are baby steps in a long conversation, and young academics are properly circumspect about drawing broad conclusions. But eventually their work could give us a clearer picture of what we mean by fuzzy words like ‘culture.’ It could also fill a hole in our understanding of ourselves. Economists, political scientists and policy makers treat humans as ultrarational creatures because they can’t define and systematize the emotions. This work is getting us closer to that....

Many of the studies presented here concerned the way we divide people by in-group and out-group categories in as little as 170 milliseconds. The anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese brains activate when people see members of their own group endure pain, but they do so at much lower levels when they see members of another group enduring it. These effects may form the basis of prejudice.

But a study by Saaid A. Mendoza and David M. Amodio of New York University showed that if you give people a strategy, such as reminding them to be racially fair, it is possible to counteract those perceptions. People feel disgust toward dehumanized groups, but a study by Claire Hoogendoorn, Elizabeth Phelps and others at N.Y.U. suggests it is possible to lower disgust and the accompanying insula activity through cognitive behavioral therapy.

In other words, consciousness is too slow to see what happens inside, but it is possible to change the lenses through which we unconsciously construe the world.

Since I’m not an academic, I’m free to speculate that this work will someday give us new categories, which will replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’ I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.

The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13brooks.html_r=1&scp=4&sq=david%20brooks&st=cse

Unlearning Stress

2009-08-18T09:05:00.000-07:00

August 18, 2009
BASICS
NEW YORK TIMES
Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop
By NATALIE ANGIER

....[N]ow researchers have discovered that the sensation of being highly stressed can rewire the brain in ways that promote its sinister persistence.

...Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating.

...[R]egions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed...

“Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be the better approach,” Dr. Sousa said. “I call this a vicious circle.”

...Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist who studies stress at Stanford University School of Medicine, said, “This is a great model for understanding why we end up in a rut, and then dig ourselves deeper and deeper into that rut.”

The truth is, Dr. Sapolsky said, “we’re lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren’t working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it’s time to try something new.”

...Happily, the stress-induced changes in behavior and brain appear to be reversible.

...[W]ith only four weeks’ vacation in a supportive setting free of bullies and Tasers, the formerly stressed rats looked just like the controls, able to innovate, discriminate and lay off the bar. Atrophied synaptic connections in the decisive regions of the prefrontal cortex resprouted, while the overgrown dendritic vines of the habit-prone sensorimotor striatum retreated.

...In humans, though, the brain can think too much, extracting phantom threats from every staff meeting or high school dance, and over time the constant hyperactivation of the stress response can unbalance the entire feedback loop. Reactions that are desirable in limited, targeted quantities become hazardous in promiscuous excess. You need a spike in blood pressure if you’re going to run, to speedily deliver oxygen to your muscles. But chronically elevated blood pressure is a source of multiple medical miseries.

Why should the stressed brain be prone to habit formation? Perhaps to help shunt as many behaviors as possible over to automatic pilot, the better to focus on the crisis at hand. Yet habits can become ruts, and as the novelist Ellen Glasgow observed, “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”

Personality Decided At Birth, Say Scientists

2009-04-15T18:44:00.000-07:00

New Zealand Herald

4:00AM Monday Apr 13, 2009
By Steve Connor

Pessimism and shyness is one of four categories scientists investigated.

Personality types are linked with structural differences in the brain - which could explain why one child grows up to be impulsive and outgoing while another becomes diligent and introspective.

Anatomical differences between the brains of 85 people have been measured and linked with the four main categories of personality types as defined by psychiatrists using a clinically recognised system of character evaluation.

The researchers said the brain differences are structural and can be measured as variations in the size of specific regions of the brain that appear to be linked with each of the four personality types.

Brain scans that measure differences in volume down to an accuracy of less than one cubic millimetre found, for instance, that people defined as novelty-seeking personalities had a structurally bigger area of the brain above the eye sockets, known as the inferior part of the frontal lobe.

People with smaller volumes of tissue in this region displayed higher levels of timidity, approval-seeking behaviours and a greater tendency to seek gratification from external sources such as food or drugs, said Professor Annalena Venneri of the University of Hull.

People with "harm-avoidance" personalities had significantly smaller volumes of tissue in brain regions called the orbito-frontal area and the posterior occipital region, compared with other personality types.

"Reward-dependence" personalities stood out for having smaller volumes of tissue in the fronto-striatal and limbic areas of the brain.

If the findings are confirmed by other scientists, they suggest that children are not only born with a given personality type, but they develop anatomically different brains as a result of being that sort of person. It raises the prospect of being able to test a young child's future personality by viewing the anatomy of their brain with a hospital scanner.

"This study shows that personality traits are something you are born with, but their full expression can be modulated during development with the right approach," said Professor Venneri, who carried out the study with colleagues from the University of Parma in Italy and Washington University in St Louis.

The four personality types were classified as "novelty seeking" - characterised by impulsive actions; "harm avoidance" - marked by pessimism and shyness; "reward dependence" - with an addictive personality; and "persistence" - who are people who tend to be industrious, hard-working and perfectionist.

"If you are looking at volume, you are quantifying the tissue that is there. What we found was not just speculative. There is quite a bit of difference between people with different personality traits," said Professor Venneri.

"The fact that traits are reflected in specific anatomical differences is useful to know, for instance when it comes to understanding a child's behaviour and choosing the right approach so that somebody who is, for example, particularly timid might be helped through education and development.

Article continued at:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=10566320

Intelligence is Largely Inherited

2009-03-24T20:31:00.000-07:00

Study gives more proof that intelligence is largely inherited
UCLA researchers find that genes determine brain's processing speed
By
Mark Wheeler
3/17/2009

UCLA Newsroom

They say a picture tells a thousand stories, but can it also tell how smart you are? Actually, say UCLA researchers, it can.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience Feb. 18, UCLA neurology professor Paul Thompson and colleagues used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain's axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain's wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.

Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin — the fatty sheath of "insulation" that coats our axons and allows for fast signaling bursts in our brains. The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses.

Thompson and his colleagues scanned the brains of 23 sets of identical twins and 23 sets of fraternal twins. Since identical twins share the same genes while fraternal twins share about half their genes, the researchers were able to compare each group to show that myelin integrity was determined genetically in many parts of the brain that are key for intelligence. These include the parietal lobes, which are responsible for spatial reasoning, visual processing and logic, and the corpus callosum, which pulls together information from both sides of the body....

More here: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/more-proof-that-intelligence-is-85134.aspx

Are You Meant to Be a Bachelor?

2009-02-07T12:37:00.000-08:00

Researchers find men with a certain gene are less likely to be married

Men's Health
By: Abby Lerner

If the thought of being in a committed relationship makes you break out into a sweat, there's nothing wrong with you—you may just be programmed to be single.

Swedish researchers looked at variants of a particular gene—the “monogamy gene”—that encodes for a hormone called vasopressin and found that one of these variants (or a lack thereof) is associated with a distinctive kind of pair-bonding behavior in men. The findings suggest an explanation for why some men commit to monogamous relationships while others have a hard time shaking their frat-house habits.

Men who carried only one copy of the “monogamy gene” were more likely to be unmarried or to report some form of marital crisis within the last year, compared to similar men without the gene. Those with two copies of the variant were more than twice as likely to have a dysfunctional marriage, according to the study from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

More than 500 same-sex twin pairs and their spouses or partners of at least 5 years participated in the study and were given tests to determine how bonded they were to each other. Researchers asked questions such as whether the subjects were put off when people came too close, how often the couple did things in common outside the family, and whether either partner had spoken with a close friend about divorce, separation, or marital crisis. Overall, those with the monogamy gene scored lower on the bonding test.

This study adds to previous research done on voles, small rodents often studied for their human-like social qualities, such as picking a mate for life. The researchers cite a vole study which found that the more bonded and social prairie vole has a genetic makeup that differs from their less social and more sexually adventurous cousins, the montane and meadow vole.

So there's scientific data to back it up: Some guys just truly aren't the relationship type....

http://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/monogamy-your-genes

'Warrior gene' predicts aggressive behavior after provocation

2009-01-21T19:49:00.000-08:00

January 21st, 2009 in Medicine & Health / Genetics

Individuals with the so-called "warrior gene" display higher levels of aggression in response to provocation, according to new research co-authored by Rose McDermott, professor of political science at Brown University. . . .

Monoamine oxidase A is an enzyme that breaks down important neurotransmitters in the brain, including dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. The enzyme is regulated by monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA). Humans have various forms of the gene, resulting in different levels of enzymatic activity. People with the low-activity form (MAOA-L) produce less of the enzyme, while the high-activity form (MAOA-H) produces more of the enzyme.

Several studies have found a correlation between the low-activity form of MAOA and aggression in observational and survey-based studies. Only about a third of people in Western populations have the low-activity form of MAOA. By comparison, low-activity MAOA has been reported to be much more frequent (approaching two-thirds of people) in some populations that had a history of warfare. This led to a controversy over MAOA being dubbed the "warrior gene."

Self Control and Belief in God

2008-12-30T13:05:00.000-08:00

December 30, 2008
Findings
For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It
By JOHN TIERNEY

NEW YORK TIMES

...In a new paper [in the upcoming issue of the Psychological Bulletin], Miami psychologists surveyed the literature to test the proposition that religion gives people internal strength.

“We simply asked if there was good evidence that people who are more religious have more self-control,” Dr. McCullough. “For a long time it wasn’t cool for social scientists to study religion, but some researchers were quietly chugging along for decades. When you add it all up, it turns out there are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control.”

As early as the 1920s, researchers found that students who spent more time in Sunday school did better at laboratory tests measuring their self-discipline. Subsequent studies showed that religiously devout children were rated relatively low in impulsiveness by both parents and teachers, and that religiosity repeatedly correlated with higher self-control among adults. Devout people were found to be more likely than others to wear seat belts, go to the dentist and take vitamins.
But which came first, the religious devotion or the self-control? It takes self-discipline to sit through Sunday school or services at a temple or mosque, so people who start out with low self-control are presumably less likely to keep attending. But even after taking that self-selection bias into account, Dr. McCullough said there is still reason to believe that religion has a strong influence.

“Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion,” he said. “The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.”

In a study published by the University of Maryland in 2003, students who were subliminally exposed to religious words (like God, prayer or bible) were slower to recognize words associated with temptations (like drugs or premarital sex). Conversely, when they were primed with the temptation words, they were quicker to recognize the religious words.

“It looks as if people come to associate religion with tamping down these temptations,” Dr. McCullough said. “When temptations cross their minds in daily life, they quickly use religion to dispel them from their minds.”

In one personality study, strongly religious people were compared with people who subscribed to more general spiritual notions, like the idea that their lives were “directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being” or that they felt “a spiritual connection to other people.” The religious people scored relatively high in conscientiousness and self-control, whereas the spiritual people tended to score relatively low.

“Thinking about the oneness of humanity and the unity of nature doesn’t seem to be related to self-control,” Dr. McCullough said. “The self-control effect seems to come from being engaged in religious institutions and behaviors.”....

Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.

“People can have sacred values that aren’t religious values,” he said. “Self-reliance might be a sacred value to you that’s relevant to saving money. Concern for others might be a sacred value that’s relevant to taking time to do volunteer work. You can spend time thinking about what values are sacred to you and making New Year’s resolutions that are consistent with them.”

Of course, it requires some self-control to carry out that exercise — and maybe more effort than it takes to go to church.

“Sacred values come prefabricated for religious believers,” Dr. McCullough said. “The belief that God has preferences for how you behave and the goals you set for yourself has to be the granddaddy of all psychological devices for encouraging people to follow through with their goals.
That may help to explain why belief in God has been so persistent through the ages.”

Why Darwin Would Have Loved Botox

2008-10-22T10:53:00.000-07:00

[excerpt]
By Karl Zimmer
Discover Magazine

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/nov/15-why-darwin-would-have-loved-botox/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=

...When humans mimic others’ faces, in other words, we don’t just go through the motions. We also go through the emotions.

Recently Bernhard Haslinger at the Technical University of Munich realized that he could test the facial feedback theory in a new way. He could temporarily paralyze facial muscles and then scan people’s brains as they tried to make faces. To block facial feedback, Haslinger used Dysport, a Botox-like drug available in Europe.

Botox and Dysport are brand names of a toxin made by the spore-forming bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Botulinum docks on the surface of neurons, blocking the release of a transmitter called acetylcholine. In small amounts botulinum can be fatal. In far, far smaller amounts, it can simply paralyze a small patch of muscles for a few weeks. Haslinger has used Dysport in people with movement disorders like dystonia to help reduce unwanted muscle movement. But Botox and Dysport are best known as treatments to mask aging. Injections into the muscles that make frowns can slow the growth of lines around the eyebrows.

For his brain experiment, Haslinger and his colleagues gave 19 women Dysport injections. Two weeks later the scientists scanned their brains as they showed the women a series of angry or sad faces and asked them either to imitate or just to observe the expressions. Haslinger then ran the same experiment on 19 women without Dysport and compared the two sets of scans.

When the women made sad faces, the same brain regions became active in both those with Dysport and those without. But making angry faces triggered different patterns. In the Dysport-free women, a region known as the amygdala—a key brain region for processing emotions—became active. In the women with Dysport, who could not use their frown muscles, the amygdala was quieter. Haslinger also found another change, in the connections between the amygdala and the brain stem, where signals can trigger many of the feelings that go along with emotions: Dysport made that connection weaker.

Of course neuroscience labs are not the only place where people get shots of Dysport or Botox. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in the United States doctors administer millions of injections of Botox each year, many of them to people’s faces. Haslinger’s research suggests that this is part of a massive, unplanned experiment.

In June 2008 in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, a team of cosmetic surgeons suggested this experiment is making all of us happier. People with Botox may be less vulnerable to the angry emotions of other people because they themselves can’t make angry or unhappy faces as easily. And because people with Botox can’t spread bad feelings to others via their expressions, people without Botox may be happier too. The surgeons grant that this is just speculation for now. Nevertheless, they declare that “we are left with the tantalizing possibility that cosmetic procedures may have beneficial effects that are more than skin deep.”

Maybe. But for all the Botox youthfulness plastic surgeons may want to think about, neuroscience raises a darker possibility. Making faces helps us understand how other people are feeling. By altering our faces we’re tampering with the ancient lines of communication between face and brain that may change our minds in ways we don’t yet understand.

Risk and reward compete in brain

2008-10-12T20:54:00.001-07:00

Imaging study reveals battle between lure of reward and fear of failure.

That familiar pull between the promise of victory and the dread of defeat – whether in money, love or sport – is rooted in the brain's architecture, according to a new imaging study.

Neuroscientists at the USC Brain and Creativity Institute have identified distinct brain regions with competing responses to risk.

Both regions are located in the prefrontal cortex, an area behind the forehead involved in analysis and planning.

By giving volunteers a task that measures risk tolerance and observing their reactions with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found that activity in one region identified risk-averse volunteers, while activity in a different region was greater in those with an appetite for risk.

The study appeared online Oct. 8 in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

"We can see risk as a battle between two forces," said Antoine Bechara, professor of psychology at USC. "There is always a lure of reward. There's always a fear of failure. These are the two forces that are always battling each other."

In his previous research, Bechara had used the same task to measure risk tolerance in brain-damaged patients. He and other researchers showed that the prefrontal cortex is critical for proper risk assessment.

But because brain lesions differ in every patient and affect multiple areas, lesion-based studies usually cannot pinpoint the role of smaller brain regions.

So Bechara's group at the institute decided to repeat the experiment with fMRI.

"We were interested in how normal people perform this task. What's going on in their brain?" asked first author Gui Xue, a postdoctoral research associate at the institute.

Bechara called his group's study the first to frame a person's risk profile in terms of the interaction between two brain regions.

Co-author Zhong-Lin Lu, professor of psychology at USC, said: "What this study has done is essentially localize two separate centers for the fear of risk and the lure of reward."

Contact: Carl Marziali
marziali@usc.edu
213-740-4751
University of Southern California

As Barriers Disappear, Some Gender Gaps Widen

2008-09-10T19:08:00.000-07:00

New York Times
September 9, 2008
Findings

By JOHN TIERNEY

When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus stereotypes keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative, nurturing, cautious and emotionally responsive. Men tend to be more competitive, assertive, reckless and emotionally flat. Clear differences appear in early childhood and never disappear.

What's not clear is the origin of these differences. Evolutionary psychologists contend that these are innate traits inherited from ancient hunters and gatherers. Another school of psychologists asserts that both sexes’ personalities have been shaped by traditional social roles, and that personality differences will shrink as women spend less time nurturing children and more time in jobs outside the home.

To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

These findings are so counterintuitive that some researchers have argued they must be because of cross-cultural problems with the personality tests. But after crunching new data from 40,000 men and women on six continents, David P. Schmitt and his colleagues conclude that the trends are real. Dr. Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy modern societies level external barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being revived.

The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women. Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America.

To explain these differences, Dr. Schmitt and his collaborators from Austria and Estonia point to the hardships of life in poorer countries. They note that in some other species, environmental stress tends to disproportionately affect the larger sex and mute costly secondary sexual characteristics (like male birds’ displays of plumage). And, they say, there are examples of stress muting biological sex differences in humans. For instance, the average disparity in height between men and women isn’t as pronounced in poor countries as it is in rich countries, because boys’ growth is disproportionately stunted by stresses like malnutrition and disease.

Personality is more complicated than height, of course, and Dr. Schmitt suggests it’s affected by not just the physical but also the social stresses in traditional agricultural societies. These villagers have had to adapt their personalities to rules, hierarchies and gender roles more constraining than those in modern Western countries — or in clans of hunter-gatherers.

“Humanity’s jaunt into monotheism, agriculturally based economies and the monopolization of power and resources by a few men was ‘unnatural’ in many ways,” Dr. Schmitt says, alluding to evidence that hunter-gatherers were relatively egalitarian. “In some ways modern progressive cultures are returning us psychologically to our hunter-gatherer roots,” he argues. “That means high sociopolitical gender equality over all, but with men and women expressing predisposed interests in different domains. Removing the stresses of traditional agricultural societies could allow men’s, and to a lesser extent women’s, more ‘natural’ personality traits to emerge.”

Some critics of this hypothesis question whether the international variations in personality have more to do with the way people in different cultures interpret questions on personality tests. (For more on this debate, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.) The critics would like to see more direct measures of personality traits, and so would Dr. Schmitt. But he notes that there’s already an intriguing trend reported for one trait — competitiveness — based on direct measures of male and female runners.

Competitive running makes a good case study because, to mix athletic metaphors, it has offered a level playing field to women the past two decades in the United States. Similar numbers of males and females run on high school and college teams and in road races. Female runners have been competing for equal shares of prize money and receiving nearly 50 percent more scholarship aid from Division I colleges than their male counterparts, according to the N.C.A.A.

But these social changes have not shrunk a gender gap among runners analyzed by Robert Deaner, a psychologist at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, who classifies runners as relatively fast if they keep close to the pace of the world’s best runners of their own sex. When Dr. Deaner looks at, say, the top 40 finishers of each sex in a race, he typically finds two to four times as many relatively fast male runners as relatively fast female runners.

This large gender gap has persisted for two decades in all kinds of races — high school and college meets, elite and nonelite road races — and it jibes with other studies reporting that male runners train harder and are more motivated by competition, Dr. Deaner says. This enduring “sex difference in competitiveness,” he concludes, “must be considered a genuine failure for the sociocultural conditions hypothesis” that the personality gap will shrink as new roles open for women.

If he and Dr. Schmitt are right, then men and women shouldn’t expect to understand each other much better anytime soon. Things could get confusing if the personality gap widens further as the sexes become equal. But then, maybe it was that allure of the mysterious other that kept Mars and Venus together so long on the savanna.

Swedish Researchers Say 40 Percent Of Men Possess Gene Linked To Infidelity Among Voles

2008-09-03T21:18:00.000-07:00

Male infidelity may be in genes
Genetic variant keys marital ill
By Shankar Vedantam
The Washington Post
Article Last Updated: 09/02/2008 11:20:52 PM MDT

Men are more likely to be devoted and loyal husbands when they lack a particular variant of a gene that influences brain activity, researchers announced this week — the first time that science has shown a direct link between a man's genes and his aptitude for monogamy.

The finding is striking because it not only links the gene variant — which is present in two of every five men — with the risk of marital discord and divorce, but also appears to predict whether women involved with these men are likely to say their partners are emotionally close and available, or distant and disagreeable. The presence of the gene variant, or allele, also seems predictive of whether men get married or live with women without getting married.

"Men with two copies of the allele had twice the risk of experiencing marital dysfunction, with a threat of divorce during the last year, compared to men carrying one or no copies," said Hasse Walum, a behavioral geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who led the study. "Women married to men with one or two copies of the allele scored lower on average on how satisfied they were with the relationship compared to women married to men with no copies."

The scientists studied men because the hormone being examined is known to play a larger role in their brains than in women's brains.

The finding set off a debate about whether people should conduct genetic tests to find out whether potential mates are bad marriage prospects. Several independent scientists called the discovery remarkable and elegant but disagreed over whether such information ought to be used in making personal decisions about love and marriage.

Walum said that the presence of the allele increased the risk of conjugal discord but that many other factors probably shape marital behavior. But he and other scientists said the study is the latest piece of evidence to show that biology — down to the level of individual genes — can play a powerful role in shaping complex human behavior.

In other words, if a man's culture, religion and family background each have a seat at the conference table that determines his attitudes toward marital fidelity and monogamy, his genes might well sit at the head of the table.

"There are many ways this information can help a man and his wife when they marry," said Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University who studies romantic love. "Knowing there are biological weak links can help you overcome them."

Why Jamaican Runners did so well in the Olympics: the 'T' Factor

2008-09-02T21:23:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from "The Athletic Prowesss of Jamaicans" by William Aiken,M.D., Jamaica Gleaner, November 22, 2006

"I wish to propose a hypothesis that addresses not only the aspect of Jamaica's raw athletic talent, but also encompasses an explanation of seemingly diverse phenomena as our high incidence of prostate cancer (one study found it to be by far the highest in the world at 304 / 100,000 men / year), our high crime rate (murder capital of the world status earlier this year), our high road traffic accident and fatality rate, and our alleged high levels of promiscuity.

What do these seemingly disparate phenomena, characteristic of Jamaican life, have in common? On close examination these phenomena are manifestations of high levels of aggressiveness and drive, high libidos, highly efficient muscles from persons of lean body mass and black ethnicity. On closer scrutiny all of these phenomena are either related to high circulating levels of testosterone or alternatively to high levels of responsiveness of testosterone receptors to circulating testosterone.

It has already been shown that the testosterone receptors of blacks are different genetically to those of whites and this difference confers increased responsiveness to testosterone. I propose that Jamaicans of primarily African descent have even greater testosterone responsiveness than blacks anywhere else.

The middle passage

But why should this be? I believe the answer to this lies in the slave ship routes within the Caribbean and the New World.

First, let us assume that all Africans who survived the trek from the African interior to the West African coast and subsequently the middle passage would have been more or less subject to the same inhumane conditions which would have produced a severe selection pressure that enabled only the fittest slaves to survive the journey.

My hypothesis is that for each incremental increase in the journey travelled, once the slave ships entered the Caribbean, there was a corresponding selection pressure which ensured that only the fittest of the fit slaves survived and furthermore the traits which enabled survival were somehow dependent on high levels of responsiveness to testosterone.

Characteristics such as aggression, determination, drive, strong bones, lean body mass, high surface area to body mass ratio, highly efficient and responsive muscles were probably all important for survival and are testosterone-dependent.

Since Jamaica was one of the last stops to be made by the slave ships it ensured that only the most resilient and fittest of slaves were alive to disembark in Jamaica.

This hypothesis is supported by a number of observations. African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean people are represented far more frequently in sprinting events than persons from Africa. Even more interesting is that as one goes westward within the Caribbean, sprinting prowess becomes more prevalent and reaches its peak by the time Jamaica and Bahamas are reached.

This hypothesis in no way minimises the important contributions of good sport administration, excellent coaching and proper nutrition but rather looks at one aspect of the puzzle in attempting to explain the raw athletic talent that seems to be disproportionately high in Jamaicans."

Dr. William Aiken is the head of Urology at the University Hospital of the West Indies and president of the Jamaica Urological Society; email: yourhealth@gleanerjm.com.

Feminism and Freedom

2008-09-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

Thomas Carlyle has ascribed the insights of genius to "cooperation with the tendency of the world."

“It is time to leave the question of the role of women in society up to Mother Nature--a difficult lady to fool. You have only to give women the same opportunities as men, and you will soon find out what is or is not in their nature. What is in women's nature to do they will do, and you won't be able to stop them. But you will also find, and so will they, that what is not in their nature, even if they are given every opportunity, they will not do, and you won't be able to make them do it.”

-Clare Boothe Luce, a conservative feminist who in her heyday in the 1940s was a popular playwright and a member of the U.S. Congress,

We know from common observation that women are markedly more nurturing and empathetic than men. The female tendency to be empathic and caring shows up very early in life. Female infants, for example, show greater distress and concern than male infants over the plight of others; this difference persists into adulthood. Women do not merely say they want to help others; they enter the helping and caring professions in great numbers. Even today, in an era when equal rights feminism is dominant in education, the media, and the women's movement, women continue to be vastly overrepresented in fields like nursing, social work, pediatrics, veterinary medicine, and early childhood education. The great nineteenth-century psychologist William James said that for men "the world is a theater for heroism." That may be an overstatement, but it finds a lot of support in modern social science--and evidence from everyday life. Women are numerically dominant in the helping professions; men prevail in the saving and rescuing vocations such as policemen, firefighters, and soldiers.

-Christine Hoff Sommers
Excerpted from Feminism and Freedom
AEI Online

A New Frontier for Title IX: Science

2008-07-14T22:53:00.000-07:00

July 15, 2008
Findings
New York Times
By JOHN TIERNEY

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

The members of Congress and women’s groups who have pushed for science to be “Title Nined” say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women’s interest in some fields isn’t the same as men’s.

In this debate, neither side doubts that women can excel in all fields of science. In fact, their growing presence in former male bastions of science is a chief argument against the need for federal intervention.

Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of role models and mentors, women now constitute about half of medical students, 60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s. They earn the majority of doctorates in both the life sciences and the social sciences. They remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering. Even though their annual share of doctorates in physics has tripled in recent decades, it’s less than 20 percent. Only 10 percent of physics faculty members are women, a ratio that helped prompt an investigation in 2005 by the American Institute of Physics into the possibility of bias.
But the institute found that women with physics degrees go on to doctorates, teaching jobs and tenure at the same rate that men do. The gender gap is a result of earlier decisions. While girls make up nearly half of high school physics students, they’re less likely than boys to take Advanced Placement courses or go on to a college degree in physics.

These numbers don’t surprise two psychologists at Vanderbilt University, David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow, who have been tracking more than 5,000 mathematically gifted students for 35 years.

They found that starting at age 12, the girls tended to be better rounded than the boys: they had relatively strong verbal skills in addition to math, and they showed more interest in “organic” subjects involving people and other living things. Despite of their mathematical prowess, they were less likely than boys to go into physics or engineering.

But whether they grew up to be biologists or sociologists or lawyers, when they were surveyed in their 30s, these women were as content with their careers as their male counterparts. They also made as much money per hour of work. Dr. Lubinski and Dr. Benbow concluded that adolescents’ interests and balance of abilities — not their sex — were the best predictors of whether they would choose an “inorganic” career like physics.

A similar conclusion comes from a new study of the large gender gap in the computer industry by Joshua Rosenbloom and Ronald Ash of the University of Kansas. By administering vocational psychological tests, the researchers found that information technology workers especially enjoyed manipulating objects and machines, whereas workers in other occupations preferred dealing with people.

Once the researchers controlled for that personality variable, the gender gap shrank to statistical insignificance: women who preferred tinkering with inanimate objects were about as likely to go into computer careers as were men with similar personalities. There just happened to be fewer women than men with those preferences.

Now, you might think those preferences would be different if society didn’t discourage girls and women from pursuits like computer science and physics. But if you read “The Sexual Paradox,” Susan Pinker’s book about gender differences, you’ll find just the opposite problem.

Ms. Pinker, a clinical psychologist and columnist for The Globe and Mail in Canada (and sister of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist), argues that the campaign for gender parity infantilizes women by assuming they don’t know what they want. She interviewed women who abandoned successful careers in science and engineering to work in fields like architecture, law and education — and not because they had faced discrimination in science.

Instead, they complained of being pushed so hard to be scientists and engineers that they ended up in jobs they didn’t enjoy. “The irony was that talent in a male-typical pursuit limited their choices,” Ms. Pinker says. “Once they showed aptitude for math or physical science, there was an assumption that they’d pursue it as a career even if they had other interests or aspirations. And because these women went along with the program and were perceived by parents and teachers as torch bearers, it was so much more difficult for them to come to terms with the fact that the work made them unhappy.”

Ms. Pinker says that universities and employers should do a better job helping women combine family responsibilities with careers in fields like physics. But she also points out that female physicists are a distinct minority even in Western European countries that offer day care and generous benefits to women.

“Creating equal opportunities for women does not mean that they’ll choose what men choose in equal numbers,” Ms. Pinker says. “The freedom to act on one’s preferences can create a more exaggerated gender split in some fields.”

Applying Title IX to science was proposed eight years ago by Debra Rolison, a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory. She argued that withholding federal money from “poorly diversified departments” was essential to “transform the academic culture.” The proposal was initially greeted, in her words, with “near-universal horror.”

Some female scientists protested that they themselves would be marginalized if a quota system revived the old stereotype that women couldn’t compete on even terms in science. But the idea had strong advocates, too, and Congress quietly ordered agencies to begin the Title IX compliance reviews in 2006.

The reviews so far haven’t led to any requirements for gender balance in science departments. But Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about gender wars in academia, predicts that lawyers will work gradually, as they did in sports, to require numerical parity.

“Colleges already practice affirmative action for women in science, but now they’ll be so intimidated by the Title IX legal hammer that they may institute quota systems,” Dr. Sommers said. “In sports, they had to eliminate a lot of male teams to achieve Title IX parity. It’ll be devastating to American science if every male-dominated field has to be calibrated to women’s level of interest.”

Whether or not quotas are ever imposed, some of the most productive science and engineering departments in America are busy filling out new federal paperwork. The agencies that have been cutting financing for Fermilab and the Spirit rover on Mars are paying for investigations of a problem that may not even exist. How is this good for scientists of either sex?

Study Finds Genetic Link to Violence, Delinquency

2008-07-14T22:47:00.000-07:00

By Maggie Fox
Health and Science Editor ~ Yahoo News
Mon Jul 14, 2:16 PM ET

Three genes may play a strong role in determining why some young men raised in rough neighborhoods or deprived families become violent criminals, while others do not, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

One gene called MAOA that played an especially strong role has been shown in other studies to affect antisocial behavior -- and it was disturbingly common, the team at the University of North Carolina reported.

People with a particular variation of the MAOA gene called 2R were very prone to criminal and delinquent behavior, said sociology professor Guang Guo, who led the study.

"I don't want to say it is a crime gene, but 1 percent of people have it and scored very high in violence and delinquency," Guo said in a telephone interview.

His team, which studied only boys, used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a U.S. nationally representative sample of about 20,000 adolescents in grades 7 to 12. The young men in the study are interviewed in person regularly, and some give blood samples.

Guo's team constructed a "serious delinquency scale" based on some of the questions the youngsters answered.

"Nonviolent delinquency includes stealing amounts larger or smaller than $50, breaking and entering, and selling drugs," they wrote in the August issue of the American Sociological Review.

"Violent delinquency includes serious physical fighting that resulted in injuries needing medical treatment, use of weapons to get something from someone, involvement in physical fighting between groups, shooting or stabbing someone, deliberately damaging property, and pulling a knife or gun on someone."

GENES PLUS ENVIRONMENT

They found specific variations in three genes -- the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene, the dopamine transporter 1 (DAT1) gene and the dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2) gene -- were associated with bad behavior, but only when the boys suffered some other stress, such as family issues, low popularity and failing school.

MAOA regulates several message-carrying chemicals called neurotransmitters that are important in aggression, emotion and cognition such as serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine.

The links were very specific.

The effect of repeating a grade depended on whether a boy had a certain mutation in MAOA called a 2 repeat, they found.

And a certain mutation in DRD2 seemed to set off a young man if he did not have regular meals with his family.

"But if people with the same gene have a parent who has regular meals with them, then the risk is gone," Guo said.

"Having a family meal is probably a proxy for parental involvement," he added. "It suggests that parenting is very important."

He said vulnerable children might benefit from having surrogates of some sort if their parents are unavailable.

"These results, which are among the first that link molecular genetic variants to delinquency, significantly expand our understanding of delinquent and violent behavior, and they highlight the need to simultaneously consider their social and genetic origins," the researchers said.

Guo said it was far too early to explore whether drugs might be developed to protect a young man. He also was unsure if criminals might use a "genetic defense" in court.

"In some courts (the judge might) think they maybe will commit the same crime again and again, and this would make the court less willing to let them out," he said.
(Editing by Will Dunham)

Gay Men and Heterosexual Women Have Similarly Shaped Brains, Research Shows

2008-06-16T19:39:00.000-07:00

Lesbians and heterosexual men show same pattern· Findings may throw light on depression and autism

Ian Sample, science correspondent
The Guardian

Tuesday June 17 2008

Striking similarities between the brains of gay men and straight women have been discovered by neuroscientists, offering fresh evidence that sexual orientation is hardwired into our neural circuitry.

Scans reveal homosexual men and heterosexual women have symmetrical brains, with the right and left hemispheres almost exactly the same size. Conversely, lesbians and straight men have asymmetrical brains, with the right hemisphere significantly larger than the left.

Scientists at the prestigious Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden also found certain brain circuits linked to emotional responses were the same in gay men and straight women.

The findings, published tomorrow in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest the biological factors that influence sexual orientation - such as exposure to testosterone in the womb - may also shape the brain's anatomy.

The study, led by the neurobiologist Ivanka Savic, builds on previous research that has identified differences in spatial and verbal abilities related to sex and sexual orientation. Tests have found gay men and straight women fare better at certain language tasks, while heterosexual men and lesbians tend to have better spatial awareness.

Savic and her colleague Per Linström took MRI brain scans of 90 volunteers who were divided into four groups of similar ages according to whether they were male, female, heterosexual or homosexual. The scans showed the right side of the brain in heterosexual men was typically 2% larger than the left. Lesbians showed a similar asymmetry, with the right hand side of the brain 1% larger than the left.

Scans on homosexual men and heterosexual women revealed both sides of the brain were the same size.

The results could explain a University of London study earlier this year that found gay men and straight women share a poor sense of direction compared with heterosexual men, and were more likely to navigate using landmarks alone.

The right hand side of the brain dominates spatial capabilities, so may be slightly more developed in heterosexual men and lesbians. An earlier study by the same team found gay men and straight women outperformed lesbians and straight men at tasks designed to test verbal fluency.

Savic's team has yet to confirm whether the differences in brain shape are responsible for sexual orientation, or are a consequence of it. To find out, they have begun another study to investigate brain symmetry in newborn babies, to see if it can be used to predict their future sexual orientation.

"These differences might be laid down during brain development in the womb, or they could happen after birth, though it could very likely be a combination of the two," said Savic.

In another series of tests, Savic and Lindström used a technique called positron emission tomography (PET) to look at brain wiring in a smaller group of volunteers. They found heterosexual women and gay men shared brain circuitry linking a region called the amygdala, which plays a key role in emotional responses, to other parts of the brain.

The research is part of a larger effort to identify differences between the male and female brain, in the hope they will shed light on why some mental disorders affect men and women differently. For example, major depressive disorders are far more common and persistent in women, while autism is around four times more common in boys than girls.

"There's a well known uneven sex distribution in the number of psychiatric disorders and trying to understand sex differences, and differences in orientation, may give you a hint of the mechanism underlying these diseases," said Savic.

Testosterone and paternal investment

2008-05-15T23:57:00.000-07:00

As modern humans moved north into environments with longer winters, women were less able to feed themselves and their children through food gathering. They thus became more dependent on food from their male partners. For men, this greatly increased the cost of having a wife and children, thus making polygyny prohibitively expensive for all but the ablest hunters.

Initially, this situation came about by men and women pushing their respective envelopes of behavioral plasticity. It may not have been the happiest of situations, but circumstances left no other choice.Over time, however, natural selection should have improved things by favoring men who were less predisposed to polygyny and more predisposed to provide for their wives and children.

How? Apparently, by lowering testosterone levels in men once they've entered a pair bond. This has been shown by findings recently presented at this year's annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. According to Shur et al. (2008):

"Numerous studies reveal a negative correlation between testosterone concentration and paternal care in diverse mammals including non human primates and humans. Several researchers suggest that spousal investment accounts for the lower testosterone of married men compared to unmarried men, but findings that the lowest testosterone levels are observed in married men with children implicate paternal care as particularly relevant. Thus testosterone reduction may reflect a facultative shift in male reproductive strategy from intrasexual competition and copulation to care of young.

This hypothesis was tested with wild olive baboons, among whom lactating females form close 'friendships' with their male partners.In contrast to control males, male friends experienced a decrease in testosterone level coinciding with the birth of their female friends'infants. Male friends also maintained a lower basal testosterone level than did control males during the lactation period of their female friends. Testosterone levels in male friends increased gradually corresponding with developing infant independence.

This finding may explain the marked differences in testosterone levels we see in humans, particularly between tropical and non-tropical populations. These levels seem to decrease wherever men compete less keenly for mates (because polygyny is less common) and wherever they invest more in parenting. Lowering the level of testosterone seems to lower the threshold for expression of paternal investment.

If the testosterone level has fallen in some populations because of selection for paternal investment, we should see evidence of such selection elsewhere, e.g., altered spatial distribution of testosterone receptors in the brain, more mental space dedicated to parenting behavior...."

Respecting - And Recognizing - American D.N.A.

2008-05-15T23:49:00.000-07:00

By Michael Medved
http://townhall.com/Columnists/MichaelMedved/2008/05/14/respecting_-_and_recognizing_-_american_dna

...[T]wo respected professors of psychiatry have recently come out with challenging books that contend that those who chose to settle this country in every generation possessed crucial common traits that they passed on to their descendents. In “American Mania,” Peter C. Whybrow of U.C.L.A. argues that even in grim epochs of starvation and persecution, only a small minority ever chooses to abandon its native land and to venture across forbidding oceans to pursue the elusive dream of a better life. The tiny percentage making that choice (perhaps only 2%, even in most periods of mass immigration) represents the very essence of a self-selecting group. Compared to the Irish or Germans or Italians or Chinese or Mexicans who remained behind in the “Old Country,” the newcomers to America would naturally display a propensity for risk-taking, for restlessness, for exuberance and self-confidence –traits readily passed down to subsequent generations. Whybrow explained to the New York Times Magazine that immigrants to the United States and their descendents seemed to possess a distinctive makeup of their “dopamine receptor system – the pathway in the brain that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking.”

John D. Gartner of Johns Hopkins University Medical School makes a similar case for an American-specific genotype in “The Hypomanic Edge”—celebrating the frenzied energy of American life that’s impressed every visitor since Tocqueville. The United States also benefited from our tradition of limited government, with only intermittent and ineffective efforts to suppress the competitive, entrepreneurial instincts of the populace. Professor Whybrow says: “Here you have the genes and the completely unrestricted marketplace. That’s what gives us our peculiar edge.” In other words, “anything goes capitalism” reflects and sustains the influence of immigrant genetics....

Genes, bad parenting keys to violence

2008-04-09T22:49:00.001-07:00

From correspondents in London
April 10, 2008 04:00am

WHETHER a criminal teenager turns into a violent adult or grows out of crime, may be related to how low his ears are set or the types of food he was given as a child.

International research shows antisocial behaviour in young adults can be written into their genetic code, and made worse by bad parenting.

Indicators that an antisocial child may turn into a life-long violent criminal can be picked up in kindergarten, according to research summarised in this week's New Scientist magazine.

Of the 535 males and 502 females born in New Zealand in 1972 and 1973 who were signed up at birth to the University of Dunedin's Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, those who dabbled in crime as a teenager can be divided into two clear groups, Terrie Moffitt from the Institute of Psychiatry in London said.

The more common type took up petty crime in adolescence keen to impress "badass" friends, she said.

But the more problematic type had biological predispositions to behaviour problems, the signs of which could be picked up as young as three years of age.

These children - more often boys - tended to have a low IQ, poor language skills, and were often diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Minor physical anomalies such as low-seated ears or furrowed tongues - possibly a sign of poor neural development or damage - could also be signs.

Combined with bad parenting, poverty or abuse, these children were at greater risk of turning to a life-long criminal career, she said.

The early onset group accounted for only 10 per cent of the Dunedin males, but by the age of 26 they had accrued almost half of the violent convictions for the entire study.

Ms Moffitt's study of the Dunedin children also focused on the activity of an enzyme linked to aggression in both animals and humans.

By itself, the activity of the enzyme had little influence, but if the boys were more predisposed to aggression and had suffered some abuse as children they were three times as likely to be diagnosed with conduct disorder in adolescence and 10 times as likely to have been convicted of a violent crime in adulthood.

A US study has found there is a worrying subset of kids within the early onset group who do not react emotionally at all, scoring high in tests used for diagnosing adult psychopathy.

A study at the University of New Orleans found the 30 per cent of early onset antisocial children who showed these traits were most likely to turn to life-long violence.

Children in this group lack empathy and guilt, are thrill-seeking, fearless and narcissistic, says psychopathy expert James Blair from the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States.

Learning to fear punishment or recognise someone else's fear or sadness is difficult for psychopaths, he said.

"If they want something and punching someone in the face is the way to extract it, they might be more likely to engage in that kind of behaviour," he said.

Mr Blair said there are few signs that these psychopathic traits are caused by external factors like poor parenting or abuse, but they could be triggered by social forces like poverty.

The generally accepted approach to tackling the problem of antisocial and violent children is to intervene as young as possible with improved parenting.

Some experts say better parenting could even begin before birth.

A trial of monthly nurse visits throughout pregnancy and until the child's second birthday, in New York in the late 1970s, has been praised by scientists at the University of Colorado.

By the age of 15, the 315 children involved in the trial had only half of the number of arrests, one fifth the number of convictions, smoked and drank less and were less promiscuous than their untreated contemporaries.

Source: News.com.au
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23515693-2,00.html

Negligent, attentive mouse mothers show biological differences

2008-04-09T22:46:00.000-07:00

Photo: Jeff Miller

In mice, child neglect is a product of both nature and nurture, according to a new study. Writing in the journal PLoS ONE on April 9, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison describe a strain of mice that exhibit unusually high rates of maternal neglect, with approximately one out of every five females failing to care for her offspring.

By comparing the good mothers to their less attentive relatives, the group has found that negligent parenting seems to have both genetic and non-genetic influences, and may be linked to dysregulation of the brain signaling chemical dopamine.

As a possible model for human child neglect, these mice offer a valuable opportunity to investigate the biological and behavioral bases of naturally occurring maternal neglect, say UW-Madison zoology professor Stephen Gammie, who led the study, and co-author psychology professor Anthony Auger.

Good mouse mothers suckle, groom, and protect their pups, while their neglectful sisters may start out trying to care for a litter, but fail to follow through. "There seems to be a switch early on. The neglectful mice may nurse for a day or two after birth, but then the parental care ceases," Gammie says.

To separate the effects of genes and environment, the researchers set up a fostering study, in which pups born to previously nurturing mothers and previously neglectful mothers were switched immediately after birth.

Surprisingly, while nurturing moms attentively cared for foster pups born to other nurturing females, some became more neglectful when given foster pups born to a neglectful mother.

"In some cases the previously nurturing mothers would actively scatter the pups away from the nest, suggesting a negative cue from the pups or a lack of a positive cue," Gammie says. The result suggests that the offspring are somehow able to influence females' behavior and shows that maternal care can be affected by non-genetic factors.

In the fostering study, previously neglectful mothers did successfully raise some of the pups born to previously nurturing mothers, but these surviving pups showed lasting effects, including hyperactivity and low adult body weight. Some females neglected as youngsters were also poor mothers as adults, suggesting some aspects of neglect can be transmitted across generations.

The group also found evidence of genetic factors contributing to neglect. For example, virgin females that exhibited poor self-grooming and hyperactive behavior were at greater risk for becoming neglectful mothers.

To identify possible biological differences, the researchers analyzed brains of neglectful and nurturing mothers shortly after birth. In several brain regions - including some implicated in both maternal behaviors and reward responsiveness - they found higher levels of activity as well as signs of abnormal dopamine signaling in the neglectful mothers.

These patterns suggest that naturally occurring maternal neglect in these mice reflects disrupted reward-seeking behavior, Gammie says. In other words, these females may have the physical capability to take care of their pups, but may lack the proper motivation.

"It's been shown in a number of studies that parental care is a motivated, reward-related behavior," he says. "And it has been suggested by others that some aspects of child neglect in humans could result from a lack of reward of an offspring to the parent."

Though often overshadowed by more visible abuse cases, human child neglect may actually be a more widespread problem. A report published last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on U.S. children found that, among infants less than a week old, nearly 70 percent of nonfatal mistreatment cases from 2005 to 2006 were instances of neglect.

Child neglect has devastating consequences, Auger says, and the natural occurrence of maternal neglect within this mouse strain offers a powerful opportunity to investigate the biological and behavioral bases of maternal neglect.

Though he cautions that it's too early to know how their findings will translate to humans, for the mice "the difference is quite dramatic in the brain. Dopamine is likely not the only thing being disrupted, but it is an important starting signaling pathway to pursue."

Next, Auger says, "We hope to understand in greater detail the basis of naturally occurring neglect and provide treatment paradigms to these animals to restore natural maternal care of offspring."

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison
http://www.physorg.com/news126945766.html

Culture Can Change our Genes

2008-04-09T22:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_11.html#christakis

NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS
Physician and social scientist, Harvard

I work in a borderland between social science and medicine, and I
therefore often find myself trying to reconcile conflicting facts and
perspectives about human biology and behavior. There are fellow
travelers at this border, of course, heading in both directions, or
just dawdling, but the border is both sparsely populated and
chaotic. The border is also, strangely, well patrolled, and it is
often quite hard to get authorities on both sides to coordinate
activities. Once in a while, however, I find that my passport (never
quite in order, according to officials) has acquired a new visa. For
me, this past year, I acquired the conviction that human evolution
may proceed much faster than I had thought, and that humans
themselves may be responsible.

In short, I have changed my mind about how people come literally to
embody the social world around them. I once thought that we
internalized cultural factors by forming memories, acquiring
language, or bearing emotional and physical marks (of poverty, of
conquest). I thought that this was the limit of the ways in which
our bodies were shaped by our social environment. In particular, I
thought that our genes were historically immutable, and that it was
not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.
I thought that we as a species evolved over time frames far too long
to be influenced by human actions.

I now think this is wrong, and that the alternative — that we are
evolving in real time, under the pressure of discernable social and
historical forces — is true. Rather than a monologue of genetics, or
a soliloquy of culture, there is a dialectic between genetics and
culture.

Evidence has been mounting for a decade. The best example so far is
the evolution of lactose tolerance in adults. The ability of adults
to digest lactose (a sugar in milk) confers evolutionary advantages
only when a stable supply of milk is available, such as after milk-
producing animals (sheep, cattle, goats) have been domesticated. The
advantages are several, ranging from a source of valuable calories to
a source of necessary hydration during times of water shortage or
spoilage. Amazingly, just over the last 3-9 thousand years, there
have been several adaptive mutations in widely separated populations
in Africa and Europe, all conferring the ability to digest lactose
(as shown by Sarah Tishkoff and others). These mutations are
principally seen in populations who are herders, and not in nearby
populations who have retained a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. This trait
is sufficiently advantageous that those with the trait have notably
many more descendants than those without.

A similar story can be told about mutations that have arisen in the
relatively recent historical past that confer advantages in terms of
surviving epidemic diseases such as typhoid. Since these diseases
were made more likely when the density of human settlements increased
and far-flung trade became possible, here we have another example of
how culture may affect our genes.

But this past year, a paper by John Hawks and colleagues in PNAS
functioned like the staccato plunk of a customs agent stamping my
documents and waving me on. The paper showed that the human genome
may be changing at an accelerating rate over the past 80,000 years,
and that this change may be in response not only to population growth
and adaptation to new environments, but also to cultural developments
that have made it possible for humans to sustain such population
growth or survive in such environments.

Our biology and our culture have always been in conversation of
course — just not (I had thought) on the genetic level. For example,
rising socio-economic status with industrial development results in
people becoming taller (a biological effect of a cultural
development) and taller people require architecture to change (a
cultural effect of a biological development). Anyone marveling at
the small size of beds in colonial-era houses knows this firsthand.
Similarly, an epidemic may induce large-scale social changes,
modifying kinship systems or political power. But genetic change
over short time periods? Yes.

Why does this matter? Because it is hard to know where this would
stop. There may be genetic variants that favor survival in cities,
that favor saving for retirement, that favor consumption of alcohol,
or that favor a preference for complicated social networks. There
may be genetic variants (based on altruistic genes that are a part of
our hominid heritage) that favor living in a democratic society,
others that favor living among computers, still others that favor
certain kinds of visual perception (maybe we are all more myopic as a
result of Medieval lens grinders). Modern cultural forms may favor
some traits over others. Maybe even the more complex world we live
in nowadays really is making us smarter.

This has been very difficult for me to accept because, unfortunately,
this also means that it may be the case that particular ways of
living create advantages for some, but not all, members of our
species. Certain groups may acquire (admittedly, over centuries)
certain advantages, and there might be positive or negative feedback
loops between genetics and culture. Maybe some of us really are
better able to cope with modernity than others. The idea that what
we choose to do with our world modifies what kind of offspring we
have is as amazing as it is troubling.

Lizards Undergo Rapid Evolution after Introduction to a New Home

2008-03-26T23:46:00.000-07:00

In 1971, biologists moved five adult pairs of Italian wall lizards from their home island of Pod Kopiste, in the South Adriatic Sea, to the neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru. Now, an international team of researchers has shown that introducing these small, green-backed lizards, Podarcis sicula, to a new environment caused them to undergo rapid and large-scale evolutionary changes.

"Striking differences in head size and shape, increased bite strength and the development of new structures in the lizard's digestive tracts were noted after only 36 years, which is an extremely short time scale," says Duncan Irschick, a professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "These physical changes have occurred side-by-side with dramatic changes in population density and social structure." Results of the study were published March 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers returned to the islands twice a year for three years, in the spring and summer of 2004, 2005 and 2006. Captured lizards were transported to a field laboratory and measured for snout-vent length, head dimensions and body mass. Tail clips taken for DNA analysis confirmed that the Pod Mrcaru lizards were genetically identical to the source population on Pod Kopiste.

Observed changes in head morphology were caused by adaptation to a different food source. According to Irschick, lizards on the barren island of Pod Kopiste were well-suited to catching mobile prey, feasting mainly on insects. Life on Pod Mrcaru, where they had never lived before, offered them an abundant supply of plant foods, including the leaves and stems from native shrubs. Analysis of the stomach contents of lizards on Pod Mrcaru showed that their diet included up to two-thirds plants, depending on the season, a large increase over the population of Pod Kopiste.

"As a result, individuals on Pod Mrcaru have heads that are longer, wider and taller than those on Pod Kopiste, which translates into a big increase in bite force," says Irschick. "Because plants are tough and fibrous, high bite forces allow the lizards to crop smaller pieces from plants, which can help them break down the indigestible cell walls."

Examination of the lizard's digestive tracts revealed something even more surprising. Eating more plants caused the development of new structures called cecal valves, designed to slow the passage of food by creating fermentation chambers in the gut, where microbes can break down the difficult to digest portion of plants. Cecal valves, which were found in hatchlings, juveniles and adults on Pod Mrcaru, have never been reported for this species, including the source population on Pod Kopiste.

"These structures actually occur in less than 1 percent of all known species of scaled reptiles," says Irschick. "Our data shows that evolution of novel structures can occur on extremely short time scales. Cecal valve evolution probably went hand-in-hand with a novel association between the lizards on Pod Mrcaru and microorganisms called nematodes that break down cellulose, which were found in their hindguts."

Change in diet also affected the population density and social structure of the Pod Mrcaru population. Because plants provide a larger and more predictable food supply, there were more lizards in a given area on Pod Mrcaru. Food was obtained through browsing rather than the active pursuit of prey, and the lizards had given up defending territories.

"What is unique about this finding is that rapid evolution can affect not only the structure and function of a species, but also influence behavioral ecology and natural history," says Irschick.

Source: University of Massachusetts Amherst
http://www.physorg.com/news127667797.html

The bioecological model

2008-03-19T22:45:00.000-07:00

An email sent to Kristin Jacobson, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago Medical School

Dear Prof. Jacobson,

I was just leafing through my University of Chicago Magazine this evening when I came across the article summarizing your new grant. I have to say I was amazed. Though the author tiptoed around the area under investigation, you are entering some very choppy waters. The attempt to identify the genetic and biological contributions to anti social behavior and cognition is normally considered taboo, since it inevitably ventures into racial variables. Though I am familiar with some work reported in press releases and abstracts of journals, as you can see from my weblog, most researchers, considering the downside, tend to avoid such studies, even with the best of intentions.

I can't help be reminded of the unfortunate lesson of Chicago's Dr. Bruce Lahn, with whom you undoubtedly have discussed your research interests. As was noted several years ago in the Wall Street Journal: The university's patent office is also having second thoughts. Its director, Alan Thomas, says his office is dropping a patent application filed last year that would cover using Dr. Lahn's work as a DNA-based intelligence test. "We really don't want to end up on the front page...for doing eugenics," Mr. Thomas says. Lahn himself has backed away from the research that brought him so much notoreity and made Univeristy officials "nervous". As the Journal reported Lahn saying about the neurogenetics: "It's getting too controversial." Won't Dean Madera and Media Relations Director John Easton, or their successors, be equally concerned about what you might turn up? Lawrence Summers was hounded out of the presidency of Harvard for just injecting some off the cuff and off the record speculation about neurological gender differences that flow from the data.

I commend you for your courage, since I do believe with you that empirical evidence about the interplay of nature and nurture should inform our public policy decisions.

Cordially,

Tom Merle
M.A. '74
_______________________________

Teenagers behaving badly
Univerity of Chicago Magazine, Mar/April '08

http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0834/investigations/teenagers.shtml

They’re getting high off cold meds, posting lewd photos on MySpace, and developing online gambling addictions. The sins may be new, but problem behavior has long been a rite of passage for U.S. teens. In fact, says behavioral geneticist Kristen Jacobson, troublemaking is so common for Americans between ages 14 and 18 that “it’s almost normative.” Yet individual differences abound. Why do some youths make relatively harmless crank calls while others wield knives and bully classmates? Why do some emerge from adolescence as well-adjusted adults while others sink into a cycle of delinquent behavior? Jacobson, an assistant professor of psychiatry, wants to understand the divergence. With a $1.5 million National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award she won this past September, she’ll study how environmental and genetic influences interact to shape adolescent conduct, including nonviolent delinquency, aggression, and substance abuse.

When delinquency persists past adolescence, Jacobson says, genes may be partly to blame.
“People may be acting out for genetic reasons, but they may be acting out for environmental reasons as well,” says Jacobson. Known as the “bioecological model,” her chosen approach sees individual development as a set of interactions between genes and environmental factors such as family, school, and community. Much of Jacobson’s research on teens has focused on twin studies, and she is associate director of the psychiatry department’s twin-studies program. By comparing identical twins, who share all of their DNA, with fraternal twins, who share only half, geneticists can better pinpoint which behaviors may be genetically linked.

Jacobson describes many of the environmental influences she studies as “grandmother science,” or things a typical grandmother might warn her grandchild about. Peer pressure is one example. “Kids who hang out with other kids who do bad things tend to get in trouble,” she says. In fact, most problem behavior, both aggression and nonviolent delinquency, such as lying to parents and stealing, drops off as teens grow up and leave high school.

Yet some adolescents exhibit more lasting problems. In research conducted in 2003, Jacobson analyzed twin-studies data to identify two pathways of antisocial conduct: adolescent-limited and life-course persistent. Each is characterized by a different degree of heritability, or genetic influence. The first group, which makes up roughly 50–75 percent of troubled teens, describes those whose acting out, influenced mainly by environmental factors, tapers off after adolescence.

Children whose difficulties continue, on the other hand, make up less than ten percent of the population and exhibit higher genetic influence. They often act out earlier in life and score higher on early-childhood tests that measure maternal depression, maternal life stress, low socioeconomic status, single parenthood, home environment, and parental treatment.

As genetic technology improves and more human-development researchers seek out the individual genes that influence behavior, Jacobson continues to stress the importance of environmental variables, which may even alter how genes express themselves. A 2005 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, found variation in identical twins’ DNA methylation levels, a driver of gene expression. Because both siblings have the same gene set, says Jacobson, whose NIH study builds on these findings, such a divergence may result from environmental influences—the level of maternal care in infancy is one example—that cause twins’ genes to express themselves differently.

If the way a parent treats a child can change the body’s biology, Jacobson reasons, so might other environmental influences. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, for example, link early-life family adversity with decreased activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotion regulation and believed to play a role in developing aggressive behavior.

Understanding how deviance develops on both genetic and environmental levels could offer new ideas on how to help at-risk teens. Researchers have long observed that children from low socioeconomic environments, a group over-represented by racial and ethnic minorities, show the worst developmental outcomes. Furthermore, the influence of genes on those outcomes may be different from other populations. As a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, Jacobson coauthored a 1999 paper in Child Development finding that genetic influence on verbal IQ varied depending on parents’ education levels. For children from a highly educated family, genetic influence was greater than for those with less education. In other words, says Jacobson, environmental influences played a larger role on verbal IQ for the disadvantaged. [this does not follow]

Over the next five years her NIH study will investigate the environmental, psychosocial, biological, and genetic risk components of delinquency across socioeconomic and racial groups. The multidisciplinary project—one of the only large-scale genetic studies of adolescent delinquency to look at ethnicity and socioeconomic status beyond Caucasians—will use in-school surveys, interviews, computer-based tests of traits like impulsivity, and fMRI to parse the effects of nature and nurture....

Jacobson emphasizes that her project, an attempt to cull data at several levels, is more exploratory than hypothesis-driven. Thus while it would be premature for her to speculate on what intervention programs might best help at-risk teens, her work should shed light on why some kids struggle while others thrive. For teens whose bad behavior—not to mention whose parents and teachers—cries out for real-world solutions, Jacobson is laying critical groundwork.

"...the biological pressures that whisper within men."

2008-03-15T10:47:00.001-07:00

Do you Want a Man.... or a Worm?

Los Angeles Times

Among mammals, expecting monogamy tends to run against the grain of nature.

By David P. Barash
March 12, 2008

As an evolutionary biologist, I look at New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's now-public sexual indiscretions and feel justified in saying, "I told you so."

One of the most startling discoveries of the last 15 years has been the extent of sexual infidelity (scientists call it "extra-pair copulations" or EPCs) among animals long thought to be monogamous. It's clear that social monogamy -- physical association and child rearing between a male and a female -- and sexual monogamy are very different things. The former is common; the latter is rare.

At one point in the movie "Heartburn," Nora Ephron's barely fictionalized account of her marriage to reporter Carl Bernstein, the heroine tearfully tells her father about her husband's infidelities, only to be advised, "You want monogamy? Marry a swan." Yet thanks to DNA evidence, we know now that even those famously loyal swans aren't sexually monogamous.

One species that is, and, significantly, perhaps the only one that could be reliably designated as such, is Diplozöon paradoxum, a parasitic worm that inhabits the intestines of fish. Among these animals, male and female pair up while adolescents; their bodies literally fuse together, whereupon they remain sexually faithful until death does not them part.

One of the most important insights of modern evolutionary biology has been an enhanced understanding of male-female differences, deriving especially from the production of sperm versus eggs. Because sperm are produced in vast numbers, with little if any required parental follow-through, males of most species are aggressive sexual adventurers, inclined to engage in sex with multiple partners when they can. Males who succeed in doing so leave more descendants.

A story is told in New Zealand about the early 19th century visit of an Episcopal bishop to an isolated Maori village. As everyone was about to retire after an evening of high-spirited feasting and dancing, the village headman -- wanting to show sincere hospitality to his honored guest -- called out, "A woman for the bishop." Seeing a scowl of disapproval on the prelate's face, the host roared even louder, "Two women for the bishop!"

On balance, the Maori headman had an acute understanding of men. He also reflected a powerful cross-cultural universal: Around the world, high-ranking men have long enjoyed sexual access to comparatively large numbers of women, typically young and attractive. Moreover, women have by and large found such men appealing beyond what may be predicted from their immediate physical traits. "Power," wrote Henry Kissinger, "is the ultimate aphrodisiac."

Power-as-pheromone is pretty much the default among mammals. Elk, elephant seal, baboon or chimpanzee, in a wide array of species, females eagerly mate with dominant males while disdaining subordinates. And they do so, more or less, in harems.

Not surprisingly, before the homogenization of cultures that resulted from Western colonialism, more than 85% of human societies unabashedly favored polygamy. In such societies, men who accumulate power, wealth and status gain additional wives and consorts. In avowedly monogamous cultures, successful males accumulate a wife and often additional girlfriends. Even if, thanks to birth control technology, they do not actually reproduce as a result (and thus enhance their evolutionary "fitness"), they are responding to the biological pressures that whisper within men.

Part of being successful, moreover, is a tendency to feel entitled and often to be uninhibited -- in part because one outcome of our species-wide polygamous history is that successful men have been those who took risks, which paid off. The losers were mostly found among the unsuccessful bachelors who, by definition, did not contribute very much to succeeding generations of men, or to their inclinations.

All of which contributes to the apparent sex appeal of such less-than-stunning physical specimens as Kissinger, Woody Allen and Bill Clinton, not to mention the persistence of sex scandals among the popular and powerful across the political and ideological spectrum, including Thomas Jefferson, JFK, Hugh Grant, Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig and a long list, receding almost to the infinite past as well as likely into the indefinite future. For men at the top -- rock stars, successful athletes, politicians, wealthy CEOs, the jet-set glitterati -- such opportunities are exceedingly numerous, not so much because they have insatiable sex drives but because they are dominant males in a biologically randy species.

Some readers may bridle at this characterization of Homo sapiens as EPC-inclined, but the evidence is overwhelming. That doesn't justify adultery, by either sex, especially because human beings -- even those burdened by a Y chromosome and suffering from testosterone poisoning -- are presumed capable of exercising control over their impulses. Especially if, via wedding vows, they have promised to do so. After all, "doing what comes naturally" is what nonhuman animals do. People, most of us like to think, have the unique capacity to act contrary to their biologically given inclinations. Maybe, in fact, it is what makes us human.

But even a smidgen of evolutionary insight suggests that maleness plus money plus political power isn't likely to add up to the kind of sexual restraint that the public expects. A concluding word, therefore, to the outraged voters of New York state: You want monogamy? Elect a swan. Or better yet, a Diplozöon paradoxum.

David P. Barash, an evolutionary biologist, is professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

Impulsive Aggressive Behavior

2008-03-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

Nature or nurture - why do some of us see red?

University of Manchester researchers are investigating why some people remain calm in the face of life's niggles, while others 'flip' with little provocation.

Recent studies using new brain-imaging technology have discovered that a change in the brain's neurochemical activity may be related to increased impulsive aggression (when someone unexpectedly reacts violently with little provocation, as opposed to someone deliberately 'looking for trouble'). Now psychologist Angela Rylands wants to deploy the University's world-leading HRRT PET brain scanner, based at its Wolfson Molecular Imaging Centre (WMIC), as part of a project to find out more.

Angela said: "Positron emission tomography (PET) scanning has revealed that a deficit in brain serotonin neurotransmission may leave some people more prone to aggression and impulse control disorders. I want to establish to what extent such behaviours are rooted at a molecular level and how much does learning from the environment around us also play a part."

One of her case studies, 39-year-old former professional bodyguard turned retail manager Carl Hayes, is available for interview. Carl is taking part in order to find out why he loses his temper so easily (he once set light to £800 in a row with his ex-wife).

Angela is looking for other males aged 18 or over, who do not use illegal drugs, and who feel they may be impulsively aggressive to have their brains scanned, to develop the team's understanding of the processes at work. Genetic samples will also be taken to enable them to investigate any interesting polymorphisms (genetic markers which occur in different forms from person to person), as previous research has implicated specific polymorphisms in aggressive behaviour.

Angela will then carry out psychological assessments of participants' previous exposure to aggression and neuropsychological tests to assess their aggressive capacity.

"It's well known that the prefrontal brain regions are associated with normal social and emotional behaviour, and that people with damage to these areas are more impulsive and aggressive," Angela continued. "We now want to see whether subtle deficits in the brain's serotonin system can explain differing levels of aggression in people who don't have brain damage. Our first theory is that higher capacity for impulsive aggression will be found in those with the lowest levels of brain serotonin. The second is that a combination of our genetic makeup and a harsh or abusive childhood may lead to the brain serotonin system not developing normally.

"The areas of serotonin neurotransmission that we are interested in are in the brain regions associated with inhibitory control. Of course people need to take responsibility for their own behaviour, but it could be that some people have difficulties controlling aggression because of impaired regulation of negative emotions or social behaviour by the serotonin system in their brains.

"The genetic samples we take and our assessments of people's exposure to aggression in their childhoods may uncover the factors that adversely influence the developing serotonin system and lead to a dysfunctional system in the mature adult.

"If we can get to the root of impulsive aggressive behaviour - be it nature, nurture or a combination of the two - it could help us to identify how we can break the cycle of impulsive and aggressive behaviour and intervene with future generations at risk from losing control."

She added: "This work may prevent future generations suffering the consequences of impulsive aggression.

"Aggression that occurs as a consequence of poor impulse control presents a burden for society. Each year over half a million people worldwide die from interpersonal violence. The financial burden of violent crime adds to this, incurring expenditures for the criminal justice system, for the incarceration of offenders and to local victims. Socioeconomic costs and public health issues persist, as a consequence of aggressive behaviour.

"The underpinnings of aggression should be identified to enable advancement towards preventative measures."

Participants will visit the WMIC for a screening session, followed by a scan if appropriate. They will then undergo psychological assessments of their previous exposure to aggression, and neuropsychological tests to assess their aggressive capacity. Volunteers will be reimbursed for their time and travel expenses.

Source: University of Manchester

http://www.physorg.com/news124640467.html