Scientific American - Bering in Mind

The End of Gays: Gay Marriage and the Decline of the Homosexual Population

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:49:00 EST

It is admittedly odd to think that a progressive, humanitarian shift in attitudes toward gays and lesbians might lead, ironically, to a noticeable decline in the homosexual population. Yet this is precisely what I predict will happen over the very long course of natural selection should the societal-level normalization of adult homosexual relationships, such as is happening currently with the triumphant legalization of gay marriage in my new home state of New York, continues happily on its way. (I add these emotive terms, “triumphant” and “happily,” to highlight the obvious and inherent goodness of a legal acknowledgment of human sexual diversity, and to make it clear that what I’m exploring in this brief, speculative essay are only the non-politic, genetic consequences of these accomplishments, and nothing more.)

Not so very long ago, the concept of “gay marriage” was so far from being a legal possibility in its literal sense that most listeners would have probably interpreted this phrase to mean a closeted gay man married to a woman, or a lesbian to a man. From all accounts, such “mixed-orientation marriages” have been around since the very institutionalization of marriage itself and are so common as to be banal. In one extensive study in 1978, for example, researchers Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg, factoring in ethnic differences, found that 35 percent of gay white males, and 13 percent of gay black males, reported having been married to a woman. By contrast, 47 percent of black lesbians and 20 percent of white lesbians had been married to a man.

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18 Attributes of Highly Effective Liars

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:37:00 EST

Niccolò Machiavelli might well have titled his 16 th -century Dell'arte Della Guerra (" The Art of War ") as The Art of Lying , since verbal deception--mainly, how to get away with it--was so central to his political psychology. To say that the exquisitely light-of-tongue are "talented" is, of course, sure to be met with moral outrage. We place a social premium on the ability to ferret out other people’s lies, especially, as we’ve seen just this week in the news, when they may hide brutal and ugly crimes.

Still, there is something darkly fascinating about those skilled in verbal legerdemain. And at least one team of scientists, led by Dutch psychologist Aldert Vrij , believes that it has identified the precise ingredients of "good liars." These researchers outline the following 18 traits (pdf) that, if ever they were to coalesce in a perfect storm of a single perpetrator, would strain even seasoned interrogators’ lie-detection abilities:

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Female Ejaculation: The Long Road to Non-Discovery

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 16:01:00 EST

I confess: this subject--the science of female ejaculation--is not an easy topic for me to write about. I could, in principle, feign complete gynaecological objectivity, affixing to my literary visage the stone-faced look of a caring urologist palpating your pudendum. But I suspect you know me better than that by now. Of course I do care. Yet for better or worse, the truth is that, should a drop of such mysterious fluid (and it really is mysterious, as we’re about to see) ever make contact with my skin, I may well writhe about on the floor as if Satan just spat at me.

Now, having said that, there’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of, ladies, if you are indeed an ejaculator. And in fact I find it unfortunate that female ejaculation would ever inspire distress, embarrassment or shame. I’m not like most men , after all, since I just happen to prefer semen over vaginal fluids. And, actually, at the risk of inciting a certain hair-trigger contingency of readers poised to pounce on me, female ejaculation, in spite of my own homosexual biases, which I’ll try to keep from saturating our discussion, is an enormously fascinating subject matter that has largely escaped serious scientific inquiry, particularly from an evolutionary perspective.

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Why I'm Not Proud of Being Gay

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 21:20:00 EST

The Oxford English Dictionary (hereon "OED", for simplicity’s sake) offers several alternative definitions for the term pride . Almost none of them are positive. For present purposes, let’s skip the more obscure leonine variant--and in fact, a "pride of lions " may actually have its etymological roots in the symbolic representation of this animal during the Middle Ages for the biblical sin--and instead turn our attention to the rather slippery semantic aspects, since there’s a lot encapsulated by this peculiarly bipolar word. I’m inspired to engage in this linguistic activity because the annual "Pride Week" for us gays and lesbians is soon at hand, and I’m particularly interested in knowing what it is, exactly, that I’m supposed to be proud of.

In the following two OED definitions, for example, pride is portrayed as being inherently antisocial, a very, very bad thing:

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Getting a Little Racy: On Black Beauty, Evolution and the Science of Interracial Sex

Tue, 31 May 2011 08:06:00 EST

A few weeks ago, Satoshi Kanazawa, a blogger at Psychology Today who was already notorious for his dubious claims about racial differences, especially with respect to intelligence, proclaimed on the basis of a bizarre data analysis that Black women are “objectively” the least attractive females of all the races. Objectively , mind you, which implies that it’s a matter of fact rather than his personal taste. Kanazawa, a Reader in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics (and not, incidentally, a psychologist, though he refers to himself--much to that discipline’s chagrin--as an evolutionary psychologist) and presently a visiting scholar at Cornell, scratched his head over these results. “ The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women,” explains Kanazawa, “is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and … [w]omen with higher levels have more masculine features and are therefore less physically attractive. ”

I suspect Kanazawa is already self-flagellating in a remote cave somewhere, so I won’t address the many flaws in his disarmingly indelicate approach--that’s been done without pause, and deservedly so, in many other forums already. Neither will I revisit his troubled methodology for arriving at these strange conclusions, which have since been rebuked roundly by other researchers , one who failed to replicate Kanazawa’s controversial findings. I’ll simply say that, even if you are a racist, you must accept that Kanazawa’s assertion that attractiveness is measurable as an “objective” quality is erroneous.

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Sex, Sleep and the Law: When Nocturnal Genitals Pose a Moral Dilemma

Fri, 20 May 2011 21:41:00 EST

It may seem to you that, much like their barnyard animal namesake, men’s reproductive organs the world over participate in a mindless synchrony of stiffened salutes to the rising sun. In fact, however, such "morning wood" is an autonomic leftover from a series of nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) episodes that occur like clockwork during the night for all healthy human males--most frequently in the dream-filled rapid eye movement (REM) periods of sleep from which we’re so often rudely awakened in the A.M. by buzzers, mothers, or others.

For those with penises , you may be surprised to learn how frequently your member stands up while the rest of your body is rendered catatonic by the muscular paralysis that keeps you from acting out your dreams. (And thank goodness for that. Carlos Schenck and his colleagues [pdf] from the University of Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center describe the case of a 19-year-old with sleep-related dissociative disorder crawling around his house on all fours, growling, and chewing on a piece of bacon--he was ‘dreaming’ of being a jungle cat and pouncing on a slab of raw meat held by a female zookeeper.) Scientists have determined that the average 13- to 79-year-old penis is erect for about 90 minutes each night, or 20 percent of overall sleep time. With your brain cycling between the four sleep stages , your "sleep-related erections" appear at 85-minute intervals lasting, on average, 25 minutes. (It’s true; they used a stopwatch.) I didn’t come upon any evolutionary theories or a proposed "adaptive function" of NPT, but we do know that it’s not related to daytime sexual activity , it declines (no pun intended) with age, and it’s correlated positively with testosterone levels. Females similarly exhibit vaginal lubrication during their REM-sleep, presumably with many dreaming of erect penises.

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My Dead Mother, the Tree That Never Was: The Psychology of "Green Burial" Practices

Wed, 04 May 2011 09:01:00 EST

Mother’s Day is forever tinged with a certain sadness for me because it’s the day I accompanied my mother eleven years ago to the cemetery where she’s been interred ever since. Well, that’s not entirely true. She didn’t die that very day--death wouldn’t come for another six months yet.

We were in the funeral home shopping for a shiny new casket and to make final arrangements for her corpse, an unwelcome visitor that would be arriving sometime soon, though precisely when even the doctors couldn’t say. For her peace of mind if nothing else, she was intent on tidying up the financial and administrative minutia that comes with dying as a human being. As soon as the umbilical cord is cut, after all, we’re attached to another made of red-tape, and that one grows longer with each passing year, so that we die tangled up in it in the end.

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"In God We Trust" (At least until the government gets its act together)

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 20:31:00 EST

One of the more predictable outcomes of a government shutdown --in fact, the hyperbolic chatter alone regarding the uncertainties of such a major disruption is enough to do the trick--is that there will be a noticeable surge in the nation’s religious beliefs. According to Duke University psychologist Aaron Kay and his colleagues, God and government are more than just two sides of the same US-issued coin. In fact, they share a common cognitive denominator. For most people, both God and government function alongside one another to provide us, unthinkingly so, with a supportive sense of external control.

This is meaningful, reason these psychologists, because only in a stable, predictable, organized world can we fragile human beings feel as though we have any personal influence over our surroundings; faith in such a "just world"--especially, the feeling that our rule-based actions will be met predictably rather than arbitrarily and capriciously--serves a core emotional need for our species. The relative degree by which we invest psychologically in an all-powerful God or a viable manmade government is inconsequential, argues Kay; either way, we’re sipping from the same salubrious well of self-efficacy.

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Homophobia Phobia: Bad Science or Bad Science Comprehension?

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 08:00:00 EST

Two columns ago , I discussed evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup’ s theory about the possible adaptive function of homophobia, or, more broadly defined, negative attitudes toward gay people. Central to his position--which, he assures me, has not since wavered--is that homophobic responses "are proportional to the extent to which the homosexual [is] in a position that might provide extended contact with children and/or would allow the person to influence a child’s emerging sexuality." I also described a set of studies meant to test some hypotheses related to this theory, and which, according to Gallup, offered provisional evidentiary support.

I expressed some unease with the implications (and insinuations) of Gallup’s line of argument. But I was also rather unabashed in my conviction that his theory, though impolitic, was not only plausible, but also insightful and worth revisiting, particularly now, when homophobia may be too hastily, and simplistically, characterized as "socially learned." To explicate, using the neutral language of evolution, the idea that homophobia may be adaptive, and furthermore that it is adaptive because children exposed to homosexuals may themselves develop same-sex attractions , is a delicate affair, to say the least. It is tempting to see Gallup’s position, as many indeed have, as a homophobia apologetic disguised as science, one that was specific to a particular time and place. A 2006 piece by psychologist Stephen Clark , for example, accused Gallup of "suggest[ing] that negative attitudes and discrimination directed toward homosexuals are justified on evolutionary grounds." Jeremy Yoder , a PhD student studying evolutionary biology, concludes similarly that Gallup’s unwarranted argument "gives natural selection approval to prevailing ugly stereotypes."

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Signs, signs, everywhere signs: Seeing God in tsunamis and everyday events

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:25:00 EST

It’s only a matter of time--in fact, they’ve already started cropping up--before reality-challenged individuals begin pontificating about what God could have possibly been so hot-and-bothered about to trigger last week’s devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. (Surely, if we were to ask Westboro Baptist Church members, it must have something to do with the gays.) But from a psychological perspective, what type of mind does it take to see unexpected natural events such as the horrifying scenes still unfolding in Japan as "signs" or "omens" related to human behaviors?

In the summer of 2005, my University of Arkansas colleague Becky Parker and I began the first experimental study to investigate the psychology underlying this strange phenomenon. In this experiment , published the following year in Developmental Psychology , we invited a group of three- to nine-year-old children into our lab and told them they were about to play a fun guessing game. It was a simple game in which each child was tested individually. The child was asked to go to the corner of the room and to cover his or her eyes before coming back and guessing which of two large boxes contained a hidden ball. All the child had to do was place a hand on the box that he or she believed contained the ball. A short time was allowed for the decision to be made but, importantly, during that time the children were allowed to change their mind at any time by moving their hand to the other box. The final answer on each of the four trials was reflected simply by where the child’s hand was when the experimenter said, "Time’s up!" Children who guessed right won a sticker prize.

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Natural homophobes? Evolutionary psychology and antigay attitudes

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:57:00 EST

Consider this a warning: the theory I’m about to describe is likely to boil untold liters of blood and prompt mountains of angry fists to clench in revolt. It’s the best--the kindest--of you out there likely to get the most upset, too. I’d like to think of myself as being in that category, at least, and these are the types of visceral, illogical reactions I admittedly experienced in my initial reading of this theory. But that’s just the non-scientist in me flaring up, which, on occasion, it embarrassingly does. Otherwise, I must say upfront, the theory makes a considerable deal of sense to me.

The work in question dates back to 1995-1996 and involves a four-paper exchange published in Ethology and Sociobiology . It is a dialogue between two influential evolutionary psychologists-- Gordon Gallup of SUNY-Albany, whose work on human sexuality I’ve covered before, and British psychologist John Archer of the University of Central Lancashire. Their primary debate is about whether or not people’s aversion to homosexuality (colloquially called "homophobia," although both authors acknowledge that this is a misnomer because it is more a negative attitude towards this demographic than it is fear) is a product of natural selection or, alternatively, a culturally constructed, transmitted bias. That this discussion ended in 1996, and not a single study to my knowledge has sought to disentangle the various knots in both scientists’ positions, is revealing in its own right, and probably reflective of shifts in the social zeitgeist since then.

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Why do funny ladies like the ladies? The over-representation of lesbians in comedy

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 09:13:00 EST

Recently I noticed a queer pattern--something that appears, for whatever reason, to have eluded serious academic consideration. Jerry Seinfeld might have opened up this can of worms by saying, "Have you ever noticed how female comedy is dominated by lesbians? Not that there’s anything wrong with that."

Not all comediennes, of course, find men as arousing as sidewalk pavement. Sarah Silverman, Elayne Boosler, Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin, for example, seem to prefer the company of men. But they are crowded out on the roster of female comedy all-stars by a long list of Sapphic wise-girls: Jane Lynch, Ellen Degeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Judy Gold, Sandra Bernhard, Wanda Sykes (pictured above), Lily Tomlin, Kate Clinton, Paula Poundstone, Carol Leifer, Kathleen Madigan, Margaret Cho …

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My lust: A Valentine's Day confession and the psychology of infatuation

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 11:09:00 EST

Author’s Note: The following was originally posted at The Psychologist Web site as part of their "Sin Week." Once you've read my confession on the sin of lust , be sure to check out my colleagues' shameful confessions about their own gluttony , sloth , pride , wrath , envy and greed at the BPS Research Digest .

I have been happily tasked, on this Valentine’s Day, with writing about the sin of lust. But before I expurgate my lascivious soul, let us first get the concept of lust straight--and I should warn you that this will be the only thing straight about my confession.

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