Photo credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan, gay political pundit and blogger at The Daily Beast, lobbed some rather nasty insinuations my way last Wednesday. He was flabbergasted that any fellow gay man could possibly think that infant male circumcision is justifiable. “The whole thing is madness,” wrote Sullivan, disgusted with the very thought of it. Now before I respond, here’s some of the context behind this spat.

Two years ago, here at my Bering in Mind column at Scientific American, I reviewed some of the science and bioethical issues associated with the always-incendiary topic of infant male circumcision. In that earlier piece, titled “Is Male Circumcision a Humanitarian Act?” I highlighted some research from the past decade elucidating the now established fact that rates of HIV acquisition are significantly lower among circumcised heterosexual males, namely because they lack the high concentration of target receptor cells for the virus found on the inner mucosal surface of the prepuce. This anti-HIV effect is dramatic; it is at least on the magnitude of a 60 percent reduction in this demographic. Most of this research was conducted with African populations, but not exclusively so, nor has every study been equally incontrovertible.

About a week ago, I was asked by Discover magazine to revisit this topic in light of the controversial revised position statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which had just been published in the journal Pediatrics a few days earlier. The AAP task force, comprised of an accomplished team of pediatric bioethicists, epidemiologists, urologists and anaesthesiologists, along with consultants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, analyzed hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies published between 1995 and 2010, including the HIV findings that I’d gone over in my original Scientific American piece. The consensus regarding this cascade of new datasets—all of which, they claimed, they went over methodically with a fine-toothed comb—moves the AAP away from its historically noncommittal view and towards a clear stance that the benefits of infant male circumcision now unambiguously outweigh its minimal risks when performed under sterile conditions by properly trained physicians.

The AAP has not strayed from their message that the decision is to be made by parents only. Yet the Academy’s endorsement of infant male circumcision as a minimally invasive prophylactic medical procedure offering potentially major health benefits makes it aligned—and unapologetically so—with a growing body of other formidable organizations, including the World Health Organization and UNAIDS.

In my editorial at Discover, I concurred with the AAP’s scientifically updated view. Sullivan read my piece and, in a post he chose to label with the deliberately rabble-rousing title, “Attacking Sexual Pleasure at Birth,” he cited dubious survey data suggesting negligible sexual problems in circumcised adult males, then wrote this:

Jesse Bering thinks parents should follow the American Academy of Pediatrics’s recommendation on male genital mutilation. Yes, I have seen someone slowly succumb to AIDS and it wasn’t because they were uncircumcized. It was because we had no treatments for it. The 60 percent number is from female-to-male transmission in Africa – with very very limited application in the US. It’s rare to read a gay man who still echoes the HIV-phobia of the 1980s – but Bering’s irrational panic is pretty glaring. And the notion that in order to prevent infection via a body part, you just remove that body part after birth is equally bizarre. Can you imagine … forcible prophylactic mastectomies to prevent breast cancer? This whole thing is madness. Mutilation of any part of an infant’s body should only be for vital immediate health dangers, not nebulous future threats, which the person could choose for himself later, if he so wanted. It’s only the foreskin and the clitoris that can be treated this way – and rational people defend the barbaric. And by the way, why doesn’t Bering demand his unmutilated partner to remove his own foreskin to lower the chance of HIV infection? Because this kind of barbarism could only be done to infants and be defensible.

There’s so much propaganda stuffed into Sullivan’s commentary that I’m not entirely sure where to begin. I should point out, before going any further, that my first choice in addressing this would have been to reconcile our differences privately. Having just finished a series of fun interviews for his Dish blog at the Daily Beast, I thought that Sullivan would at least respond to my friendly email about his rather personal post. Even a “well, let’s just agree to disagree” quick exchange would have gone far. But I heard only steely silence. My participation in the “Ask Jesse Bering Anything” video series was by his invitation, so if he feels so strongly about infant male circumcision, I’d have thought he’d have been aware of what I wrote on this subject two years ago (it’s been up at Scientific American all this time, after all). My Discover piece doesn’t waver from that earlier position; it’s merely a reiteration of my personal opinion that, knowing what we do now, and with a rationale no longer linked to indefensible, archaic religious customs, infant male circumcision is—to me—the more humane choice for parents facing this hard decision. Anyway, what I write below is the result of Sullivan’s revealing muteness. It’s not the way that I’d have preferred this go.

With that in mind, what on earth does my being gay—our being gay—have to do with anything at all? It certainly doesn’t affect my ability to critically evaluate cumulative, peer-reviewed studies conducted by leading specialists in their fields. Or would Sullivan prefer I do as he does, which is to skim cherry-picked abstracts through his confirmation-biased lens, something that, contrary to unfounded accusations levelled against them, the AAP did not do? Or perhaps like Sullivan, I should swallow whole the angry, emotionally flooded baby-harming message that litters intactivist websites, blog comments and Twitter feeds, all while brazenly turning a deaf ear to the measured and—more importantly—knowledgeable advice of world-renowned bioethicists serving at their own peril (given the vitriol of those like him regarding this subject) on expert panels working for the public good, and which are governed by the admirable, if impossible, goal of balancing ethics and objectivity?

Does Sullivan believe that, because I’m gay, I shouldn’t be concerned whatsoever about HIV/AIDS in heterosexual males, but rather only in gay males like us? That this is their problem and not our problem? That’s quite a limited style of humanitarianism, if so. He also apparently hasn’t read some of the latest research indicating that male circumcision may reduce the likelihood of HIV acquisition in insertive-only gay males (“tops”) similar to straight males engaging in penile-vaginal sex. Or is Sullivan saying that because there are effective treatments for HIV now, any fear of HIV in the gay male community today must therefore be “panicky” and irrational? My own fears are entirely irrelevant to the arguments that I made, but in fact Sullivan is right that, while it may no longer be the 1980s, I’m still scared shitless by HIV. I’ve written about my relationship with AIDS before, and my paranoia is something, admittedly, I’ll probably never escape entirely. But I’m also a Type I diabetic on a writer’s salary, already paying a small fortune (one that exceeds my mortgage payments) for private health insurance just to keep myself alive with insulin and other basic medical supplies. Both of my parents had heritable forms of cancer at young ages, and that places me at heightened risk of other life-threatening illnesses. Adding HIV into the mélange of my worries is, indeed, scary as hell to me. Sullivan ought to do a little navel-gazing before traipsing any further into his fury—he is exceedingly fortunate to survive as an HIV-positive Brit in the US with employee-provided healthcare.

The circumcision debate is not my cause célèbre. I’m just a science writer who was asked to weigh in on the AAP decision in an editorial. Yet I confess, this whole issue really is starting to perturb. The righteous indignation of those who casually employ such mutilation rhetoric should be turned right back against them by those of us who are, in fact, circumcised males and do not appreciate being called “mutilated” or made to feel as if we are inferior or less desirable as sexual partners simply because we lack a foreskin. Likewise, women (or men) in healthy, positive sexual relationships with circumcised men should really be speaking up more loudly on behalf of their partners.

Sure, there are circumcised men out there who wish they still had their foreskin. There are people who have issues with everything when it comes to bodily issues. There are also plenty of men who have suffered from god-awful infections and only wish today that their parents had them circumcised as infants. The vast, vast majority of circumcised men who had the procedure done in infancy feel neither “violated” nor “mutilated.” To say that it’s the least of our worries is a monumental understatement. We have zero complaints about our sexual function, we are by no means jealous of men with foreskin (and smegma), and we feel absolutely no shame about our circumcised penises, in spite of the fact that the intactivists (an aggressively vocal minority that is, incidentally, overwhelmingly comprised of women and non-circumcised men who have no insight whatsoever into what it’s like to be a man who had his foreskin removed during a developmental stage that guarantees he has no memory of it) have made it their mission in life to convince us that we should be.

Not everyone sees infant male circumcision as an important issue for our collective conscience to be grappling with. Nor do most conceptualize it as “genital mutilation,” least of all those of us who have actually been circumcised as infants and should arguably be the ones deciding whether what was done to us deserves to be classified as a human rights violation. Even if you insist on casting it in this light, parents today who opt for circumcision are saving their sons from having to decide as adult males, with adult male genitalia (and thus with much more elaborated, intricate veinal and nerve systems in their reproductive organs), whether or not to undergo a qualitatively more complicated and expensive medical procedure as a “consenting adult.”

Sullivan trots out the standard intactivist party line, which is to compare infant male circumcision with the removal of some critical body part as a pre-emptive measure. “Can you imagine … forcible prophylactic mastectomies to prevent breast cancer?” he writes, astounded by my and the AAP’s stupidity. Notice how intactivists like to sneak in loaded words like “forcible” to trump up the false horror. Nobody is “forcing” parents to circumcise their infant sons. I’ve stressed repeatedly that I am not “pro-circumcision” but “pro-parent choice,” and the AAP has emphasized the same. Sullivan would have you believe that male circumcision is now occurring by government decree. We can play runaround mind games all day long about parents being okay with the removal of some body parts in our culture and not others. Perhaps I’m just not tapped in, but I’ve certainly not seen any activist communities take on the cause of prophylactic wisdom tooth removal in adolescents, or better yet, the non-health related extraction of fully functional teeth to make way for braces and create an aesthetically pleasing smile. Like foreskin, permanent teeth are permanently removed. And guess what, also like foreskin, while the risk of complications is present for any invasive procedure, their judicious removal doesn’t really make much, if any, difference for the individual’s quality of life either.

But here’s why Sullivan’s little thought experiment really had steam coming out of my ears. When I was in elementary school, my mother had a double mastectomy—one breast contained a malignant tumor that had already metastasized to her lymph nodes and the other breast harbored a precancerous growth that may or may not have done the same, and so she followed the surgeon’s advice to have that one removed a few months later as a preventative measure, which was not an easy decision. She endured years of chemotherapy, and I have clear memories of clumps of her hair falling out in my hands while she vomited her guts out over the toilet. This was followed by the brand new trauma of deciding to undergo breast reconstruction surgery—she was still a young woman, after all—with areolas formed by skin grafts from her inner thighs. (She died of a different cancer several years later.) For Sullivan to so breezily liken my complete non-issue of being circumcised as an infant to my mother’s devastating experiences in her mid-thirties with prophylatic mastectomy is the height of an emotionally addled arrogance masquerading as “obvious” logic.

Furthermore, infant male circumcision is not, as Sullivan would have you believe, the moral equivalent of female clitoridectomy. That analogy would only apply if, say, circumcision meant the removal of the actual glans penis (the “head”) and if it were done not in the best health interest of the child, but instead to eliminate his capacity for any future sexual pleasure. So to compare removal of the male foreskin with that hideous practice of clipping off the clitoris is, at best, a show of remarkable naiveté regarding human reproductive anatomy. At worst, it is patent dishonesty by a rhetorician that is designed to exploit the emotions of more ignorant others. I’ll let you decide which of the two Sullivan is guilty of in juxtaposing foreskin with clitoris.

Even minor diminution of sexual pleasure is far from being an obvious result of male circumcision. Until some clever cognitive scientist comes up with a way to operationally define the subjective degree of “mind-blowing” sensitivity often claimed to be experienced by uncircumcised intactivist men, above and beyond that felt routinely by lifelong circumcised males, I remain thoroughly unimpressed by this particular argument. In fact, the limited data that do exist on this subject dispute such a claim. A thermal imagining study conducted in 2007 revealed no difference between the sensitivity of circumcised and uncircumcised erect penises in males between the ages of 18 and 45. In fact, this alleged difference in pleasure-qualia also fails to find much anatomical support. In a systematic critique of anti-circumcision arguments currently in press at the Journal of Law and Medicine, Richard Wamai and colleagues write that, “Of all glabrous (hairless) regions of the body, the foreskin has the lowest number and least sophisticated Meissner’s corpuscles (touch receptors). More important, though, is the fact that sexual sensations are mediated by genital corpuscles, not Meissner’s corpuscles, and these are absent from the foreskin.”

I don’t need someone else to tell me what I should be outraged by, Sullivan, thank you very much. It’s certainly not going to be in response to already stressed-out parents acting sensibly as their child’s health advocate and appealing to the ethical directives of professionals, rather than online blowhards who think that repeatedly referring to an act with an amygdala-fuelled term like “mutilation” makes it so. If you want your child to be at an increased risk of urinary tract infections, herpes, genital ulcers, HPV and HIV, that’s entirely your choice, and feel free to celebrate with other science-denialists sharing similarly misplaced passions. But spare me your righteous indignation over those parents today that fail to see their benevolent, educated decision to circumsize their infant sons as an “attack on their sexual pleasure at birth.”

Delivering upon new parents such a guilt trip is simply loathsome.

The connection may not be immediately apparent to those uninitiated into my research area of the cognitive science of religion, but take my hand and allow me to walk you through this theoretical briar patch.

In an article titled “Princess Alice is Watching You: Children’s Belief in an Invisible Person Inhibits Cheating,” published last year in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, I, along with my former PhD students, Jared Piazza and Gordon Ingram, used the invisible-person-in-chair scenario to test a simple but important hypothesis: When no other actual person is around, and when we’re tempted to do something we know we shouldn’t, the illusion of a supernatural watcher should meaningfully influence our behavioral decision-making. The key to our experiment was creating a fun but competitive game in which, on the one hand, children were explicitly told that cheating was not allowed. On the other hand, however, they would find cheating very appealing if they thought they could get away with it. In other words, we created a laboratory condition that, at least in a very general sense, reflected the temptations that both children and adults face every day.

There was also an empty chair in the room, facing the child. I’ll get to that soon.

We tested 68 kids between the ages of 5 to 9 for this particular study. The basic rules of the game—a target board using Velcro balls—were straightforward enough for even the youngest children. After being told that the goal was to get the bull’s-eye and that lesser points were awarded for throws that connected to the board further away from the center, each child was given three additional rules. First, they had to throw the balls with their back to the target (looking over one’s shoulder was permitted, however). Second, they had to throw the balls using only their non-dominant hand (a wristband was placed on their right or left wrist as a reminder of which hand they could use). Finally, they had to stand at a distance of approximately 6 feet from the target. This line was marked clearly with tape on the floor and children were instructed not to cross it.

In essence, then, we created a nearly impossible task. But that didn’t dilute the children’s efforts. Only after each child displayed six successive throws without breaking any of these rules (indicating their comprehension) did we proceed. Each child was also told that they were competing against other kids, and that whoever got the highest score would win a special prize. A bit cruel, yes, but we had to create an incentive—and all children in the end got a decent consolation prize.

These foregoing rules, the basic setup, were the same for every child. But here’s the trick: each child had also been randomly assigned to one of three different conditions. For those who’d been assigned to the “no supervision” condition, the experimenter feigned having to do something and left the child alone in the room to play the game on his or her own, saying that the points would be added up when he returned. For those who’d been randomly assigned to the “adult supervision” condition, by contrast, the experimenter again left the room for the child to play on his or her own, but a second adult, friendly enough but neutral, sat in the chair and watched the child play the game without interacting. Finally, those children who’d been randomly assigned to the “invisible agent” condition were introduced to “Princess Alice.” They were told that Princess Alice was a “friendly magical princess … that could make herself invisible … and is in the room with us right now and is sitting in that chair.” Before exiting the room, the experimenter reminded this group of children that they wouldn’t be alone, but rather Princess Alice was there too and would keep them company. So in other words, this last condition was physically the exact same as the “no supervision” condition (alone in the room with an empty chair), but it included a psychological manipulation: children in this condition were told about a supernatural presence occupying the chair.

In reality, the experimenter simply went to an adjacent observation room. There, together with the child’s (usually giggling) mother or father, he recorded the child’s behavior through a hidden camera for a period of three minutes before returning.

Although we examined a host of other factors as well (including age, gender, and individual differences in children’s temperament), the most important question for us, of course, was the extent to which children would be more or less likely to cheat as the result of their being randomly assigned to one of these three different room conditions. Remember, we stacked the deck methodologically so that it was possible for any given child to cheat in one of three ways: facing the target when throwing the ball, using their dominant hand, or crossing the line to get a closer range. Any of these violations, let alone all three, would put someone at an unfair advantage over those who obediently followed the rules of the game. Every child knew this going in.

So what did we find? Just as we expected, basically, and probably what you’d have as well. Those children who were randomly assigned to the “no supervision” condition were the most likely of the bunch to cheat when the experimenter exited the room. Nearly half of these kids, in fact, were so brazen in their transgressions that they simply walked right up to the wall and manually placed the ball on the target (usually just shy of the bulls-eye to cleverly simulate some relative degree of marginal error), thereby breaking all three rules at once! Those in the “invisible agent” condition, by contrast, were just as well-behaved when they thought Princess Alice was in the room as were those kids being watched by an actual, flesh and blood person sitting in the chair before them and supervising their behavior.

But there’s an important caveat, too. This rather astonishing Princess Alice effect only panned out statistically for those children who said that they believed that she was real. The more sceptical children in the “invisible agent” condition, by contrast, were just as likely to cheat when left alone as those in the “no supervision” condition. Yet even those who adamantly denied that Princess Alice was real during their initial introduction to her, when left alone in the room, seemed to display some curious signs of ambivalence about her. In fact, for those kids in the “invisible agent” condition that did cheat, the majority only did so after “disconfirming” her non-existence by running their hand across the chair. Some even “Eastwooded” her by speaking to her.

We’re all susceptible to tales of the supernatural, in other words, but genuine belief matters. For those who truly believed in this laboratory concocted spiritual entity, she was real enough in their minds, anyway, to affect their behavior in an empirically demonstrable way. As I’ve been arguing for the past several years now, from an evolutionary perspective, it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever if the belief itself is true or patently delusional. Natural selection isn’t a mind reader and isn’t concerned about ontological reality; rather, evolution operates on the organism’s behavioral output, and if that behavioral output consistently leads to reproductive success, then the mental processes responsible for it are going to undergo selective pressure. If our ancestors thought that they were alone and/or could get away with something, but in fact were underestimating other people’s finding out, then the illusion of a concerned “invisible agent” would have helped them to inhibit selfish, impulsive decisions that could have seriously compromised their reputations, and hence their genetic interests.

Sure, Princess Alice probably wasn’t haunting the African savannas in which our ancient relatives were having their neural systems pruned by evolutionary forces tens of thousands of years ago, but there were almost certainly other fabricated creatures just like her (e.g., the spirits of dead loved ones, supernatural deities). And incidentally, we found the same general effect in a separate study with adult participants several years earlier (Study 3). College students who were told that a ghost had recently been spotted in an empty chair in the corner of a room were less likely to cheat than other subjects at a competitive task when left alone.

Just as we implanted the thought of Princess Alice in the minds of young children in our lab, so too has the idea of every single god or spirit been transmitted from adult to child in the past. The difference, of course, is that whereas we took great care to debrief the children in our study by telling them that Princess Alice was only make-believe and part of our silly little experiment, children in the past were never debriefed about the fictitious gods that they grew up with. The original fabulists died off without telling them that it was all made up. So when these children became adults and communicated the very same stories to their own children, they did so with all the potent conviction of true believers. (For more on this, see psychologist Paul Harris’s excellent new book, Trusting What You’re Told.) Fast forward eons and gloss over infinite complexity and conceptual nuance, but the result is all the same: Today the earth brims with the descendants of those children who were never disabused of such false information.

The children in our study who believed ardently that Princess Alice sat watching them throw Velcro balls against a wall bring us back full circle to Clint Eastwood’s performance at the GOP convention last Thursday. The actor stood before an audience buzzing with religious brains just as equally convinced that Jesus knows (and cares) what they do in secret and will reward them, not with stickers and stuffed animals, but with an eternity in heaven for following his rules. And they laughed hysterically at a man having a conversation with an invisible person sitting in a chair.

The fact that Clint Eastwood’s empty wooden chair at the RNC held the missing Commander-in-Chief is poetical to me in another way as well. Much like the God of biblical lore, but without omniscient supernatural abilities, the President represents the ultimate “Big Brother” in social regulatory terms, with a panoptical view into our private lives. Here’s what I wrote in The Belief Instinct:

The philosopher Voltaire famously said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” That was sound logic at the time. But remember, Voltaire wrote this in 1768 during the French Enlightenment. Things have changed since then, to say the least. With today’s social-tracking technology (Social Security numbers, the Internet, hidden cameras, caller ID, fingerprints, voice recognition software, “lie detectors,” facial expression, DNA and handwriting analysis, to name just a few particularly effective behavior-regulating devices presently in place in the modern world), Voltaire’s declaration doesn’t really pertain anymore—at least, not for large-scale, developed nations. Who needs Voltaire’s “eye in the sky” when today we’ve got millions of virtual superhuman eyes trained on us from every possible angle, lodged discreetly in every pore of our lives? Human [brain] evolution hasn’t quite caught up with human technology, however, and the adaptive illusion of God is likely to survive so long as … our species’ cognitive blueprint [remains].

In any event, RNC shenanigans aside, I do take some comfort in knowing that another famous actor, Morgan Freeman, the very voice of God, in fact, has a lucid understanding of what goes on inside of human minds when contemplating invisible people in chairs. Click below to watch a re-enactment of the Princess Alice study, from the latest episode of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.

Slate: http://www.slate.com/authors.jesse_bering.html

Das Magazin (in German): http://dasmagazin.ch/dasMagazin/index.html

Personal website: www.jessebering.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=739554045

and of course, Twitter: @jessebering

In the end, Romney saved only a handful of francophone souls, and by the spring of 1969, he was taking his joyful vows with the newly Mormon Ann Davies under a stained-glass halo at the Salt Lake Temple. This was the same spot, in fact, where a future president of the LDS Church, Spencer W. Kimball, had been ordained as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles back in 1943, a powerful governing body staffed by so-called latter-day prophets. Indeed, somewhere in Utah on the couple’s wedding day, Elder Kimball—who reportedly once brought Romney to tears with his revelations about racial equality—was polishing up the final draft of his LDS classic The Miracle of Forgiveness. In this 1969 book, Kimball offered some rather prescient thoughts about an issue that would, ironically, come to trouble Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “After consideration of the evil aspects, the ugliness and prevalence of … homosexuality,” wrote Kimball, “the glorious thing to remember is that it is curable and forgivable. Certainly it can be overcome,” he continued optimistically, “for there are numerous happy people who were once involved in its clutches and have since completely transformed their lives.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking: that’s rather unfair, digging up some old bigot’s misinformed views as somehow reflecting Romney’s present beliefs. Granted, you’ll say, this was indeed the rhetoric in which Romney’s brain bathed during its most formative years, crystallizing his moral prism. But after all, people do “evolve.” Churches change. Except if you’re the Mormon Church, where mid-20^th century antiscientific views on homosexuality thrive. Fast-forward to the more recent past, where in 1995, the fiery jurist, Dallin H. Oaks (a current member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles), penned an influential article in the LDS magazine Ensign. Titled “Same-Gender Attraction,” it was composed with litigious precision, the author stating for his confused Mormon readers the unwavering position of his client (“the Creator”) on what the latter intended for human beings to do with their genitalia. “All should understand that persons struggling with the burden of same-sex attraction,” he wrote, “are in special need of love and encouragement.”

How kind. Don’t bash us, by God—pity us, help us, for we are afflicted souls. The Devil sets traps for our mortal lives in the throbbing crotches of handsome men. And for my lesbian sisters, you poor, suffering creatures, do watch out for that Satan; he’s a tricky one. Before you know it you’re stuck in a bout of tribadism or cunnilingus yet again. Oaks urges his fellow LDS members to show compassion for those enticed by same-sex flesh. We’re just like you, only intoxicated by Lucifer’s pheromones. “[Satan] seeks to undermine the principle of individual accountability,” Oaks explains, “to persuade us to misuse our sacred powers of procreation, to discourage marriage and childbearing by worthy men and women, and to confuse what it means to be male or female.” Same-sex urges, he goes on to say, may occur for those suffering from this sickness but these urges should be “redirected” to more appropriate outlets—namely, vaginas for gay men and penises for lesbians. Acting on them is to succumb to grievous sin, which warrants Church discipline.

You might note that 1995 was eons ago in terms of how far society has come in recognizing the non-evil nature of LGBT couples: that is, those who not only think gay thoughts, but who also—brace yourself—make love to their same-sex partners. Surely the LDS Church must have gotten with the times? There are small splinters of dissent, but even today, if you show me a mainstream Mormon who has positively affirmed his or her gay identity, I will show you an ex-Mormon, or at least one imminently excommunicable. Rather, the divinely defiant LDS Church still routinely shuttles off its tortured “non-gay homosexuals” (those who “suffer from same-sex attractions” but who reject the “gay lifestyle” as an option) to “treatment programs” such as Evergreen International. Individuals with these unrelenting desires are not promised a “cure”; they’re forewarned that the road to becoming straight is anything but, and that few will make it to the end of this perilous journey. Like the alcoholic in AA, “relapses” into wrong-gendered lust are tended to by stern yet compassionate LDS mentors who’ve “been there” themselves and know what it’s like to crave such beastly, filthy things. Still, for those who try—for those who sincerely believe in miracles—these embattled mortals are assured that “there is hope.”

Directly at odds with scientific evidence and now rejected vehemently by every single reputable mental health organization in the World, LDS-based counsellors promote the asinine and potentially dangerous lie that sexual orientation can be “reoriented” through the patient’s hard efforts. In cozy collaboration with the Church’s general authorities, Evergreen peddles on its website CDs such as Overcoming Homosexuality: Developing Heterosexual Attraction and a special workbook for lesbians, Practical Exercises for Women in Recovery of Same-Sex Attraction. “If you are faithful, on resurrection morning—and maybe even before then,” a Mormon authority pronounced to those attending a recent Evergreen conference, “you will rise with normal attractions for the opposite sex.”

It’s unclear if Romney is exactly this stupid concerning human nature. His record on gay civil rights is notoriously seesawed. But until he clearly denounces the LDS conception of homosexuality as a wilful choice or one whose only acceptable solution is lifelong celibacy or sham heterosexuality, we can only assume (after all, he’s not been shy about his devotion to the teachings of the Church, and he even served as a longstanding bishop and stake president) that every time he gives that tired old media sound bite, “marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman,” what he really means to say is that happy LGBT Americans are just crafty demons in disguise.

UPDATE: PLEASE SEE MY RESPONSE TO THE COMMENTARIES IN RESPONSE 46 IN THE THREAD BELOW.

Color postcard. “I.C.R.R. Through University, Miss.” Published by University Store, University, Miss. Circa 1920.

(The following is a companion piece to the Slate article, “Eugene Hoskins Is His Name: The long-forgotten story of a black autistic man in Oxford, Miss., who crossed paths with William Faulkner.” You can read that story by clicking here.)

When Professor Hiram Byrd opened up the autistic savant Eugene Hoskins’ private notebook back in Oxford, Mississippi in 1920, here’s what he described seeing:

“Mississippi Division, Jackson District.” Then follows the names of stations leading from Jackson, Tenn – (Just as they were spelled out in his book) Bemis, Melases, Medon, Teag, Toone, Shandy, Bolivar, Hickery Valley, Temper, Grand Junction, Michigan City, Hudsonville, Holly Springs, etc. He has two pages of these names, aggregating 34, which he took great delight in naming off to me. Then comes a page with the following words on it. “Engine Number is 1746 Run from Frogmoor to Mounds Engine Number is 795 919 914 906 851 945 887 Run from Water Valley to Frogmoor 1 Miles to Jackson.” Given a start on this page, he reels off everything from it. Then comes another page which starts “Northern Line Passenger Engine Number is 1140 1139 1008 1065 1080 1141. Runs from Champaign to Centralia 130 Miles Illinois Division Champaign District.”

This was two decades before autism was identified as a distinct neurocognitive disorder, so at the time, Byrd could only scratch his head over Eugene’s unusual preoccupation with train schedules. They riveted his attention. Today, we know that such an obsession isn’t altogether unusual among autistic savants. Fast-forward to 1989 and cross the Atlantic Ocean to London, England, for example, where the psychologists Neil O’Connor and Beate Hermelin were studying a group of British autistic savants who, just like Hoskins, were infatuated with public transport. For them, life was all about getting a handle on bus schedules rather than train schedules.

“They were of low general intelligence,” explained the authors of their sample of six, “but had an unusual knowledge of bus routes, bus numbers and bus timetables.” A series of experiments comparing this group with non-autistic control subjects revealed that their astonishing memory for bus-related items failed to extend to non-bus topics, such as lists of vegetables. In fact, when trying to memorize random digit pairs, the autistics shoehorned this novel numerical information into their bus mnemonics, spontaneously seeing all digits as bus routes and bus numbers. They even tried to lump together the random number pairs presented to them by appealing to their knowledge of home garages from which their trusty London-based buses were run.

Autistic savants don’t appear to be gifted with a general memory, in other words; instead, their phenomenal skills are limited to niche areas or subject matters, or, in the parlance of today’s autism research, “circumscribed interests.” Not all autistic individuals are savants, which implies a mental or sensory disability but an outstanding capacity in a narrow domain of intellectual or artistic function. Nor are all savants autistic. But these so-called “islets of abilities” are much more common among autistic people (9.8 percent) than among those who are mentally retarded (0.6 percent). In addition to numbers, dates and places, and often linked to them, researchers have identified several other frequent categories of circumscribed interests, unusual preoccupations that manifest at very young ages in autistic children. Things like trains, vehicles, planes, blocks, home electronics, computer equipment, road signs and sporting equipment are all subjects of “high autism interest.”

Children without autism can have passionate interests and hobbies as well, of course, but as psychologist Lauren Turner-Brown and her colleagues showed last year in a study with autistic children and their “typically developing” peers, the circumscribed interests of the former are uniquely non-social in nature. A recent study led by psychologist Noah Sasson revealed that even two-year-old autistic children exhibit greater attention to visual depictions of “high autism interest” objects over faces or photos of more commonplace items, such as clothing. Some psychologists, such as the Cambridge University autism researcher Simon Baron Cohen, believe that while high-functioning autistics fail to understand—and to be even less interested in—the psychologically nuanced dramas and everyday soap operas appealing to the rest of us, they often possess heightened abilities in the areas of physics and mechanical systems. Another way to say this is that autistics gravitate to the question of how things work (including how other people behave) instead of the question of why they do so: theirs is a worldview based on the observable principles of movement rather than a philosophy of abstract hidden causes.

One especially revealing example of how a high-functioning autistic individual can get by in the real world by exploiting their heightened knowledge of surface-level behaviors, without having to think very deeply about the confusing mental states underlying other people’s actions, is provided by University of Sheffield psychologist Digby Tantum. This is the case a woman with Asperger’s syndrome trying to navigate her way around the use of a crowded ATM machine:

She had observed that when people lined up, they left a gap between themselves and the person in front, and that this gap was substantially larger in the case of men standing behind women. She used this information to jump lines, looking for this combination and pushing in behind the woman nearest the front who was followed by a man.

This woman’s understanding of the way people work was motivated by a desire to learn how they behaved in this particular social setting, not their mental reasons for doing so. Only by assessing and becoming extraordinarily sensitive to the way routines and conventional social rules intersect with people’s overt behavior could she enter the social environment, albeit inappropriately in this instance—after all, she couldn’t understand why those waiting patiently in line behind her got so angry.

What first captured Byrd’s attention and prompted him to look deeper into Eugene Hoskins’ case were his calendar-calculating feats, meaning he could swiftly name the weekday of any given date. It’s only in recent years that scientists have examined the phenomenon of human calendar calculation, and what they’ve discovered about modern chronologic prodigies aligns remarkably well with Hoskins’ impressive performances in Oxford. According to the behavioral neurobiologist Anna Dubischar-Krivec, calendar-calculator skills tend to develop between the ages of 8 and 15. Often other savant talents, such as musical, drawing, or navigational virtuosity, accompany them. In a 2009 study comparing three savant calendar calculators with “normal” controls, Dubischar-Krivec found that unlike expert mathematicians who could also calculate dates rapidly, the autistic sample was unable to articulate exactly how they were able to pull off their astonishing feats. And the same went for Hoskins. “Asked how he does it, Eugene says he can’t tell you—that he doesn’t know himself.”

A talented mathematician, on the other hand, might explain the formulae of perpetual calendars, such as the 28-year rule (the same calendars are shared by two years 28 years apart within the same century) and Pope Gregory’s exception to this rule, in which he declared in 1582 that century years are not leap years unless they’re divisible by 400. Although some questions remain over savant calendar calculation, scientists realize it’s not quite as supernatural as it was considered in Hoskins’ day. After conducting a series of experiments meant to probe the techniques of perhaps the fastest living autistic-savant calendar calculator (a 21-year-old man named “Donny” with an IQ of 71 who tested at a 98 percent level accuracy in naming the weekday of any date between the year 1 and the year 9999, at speeds up to 700 ms), Marc Thioux and his colleagues from the Yale School of Medicine conclude that the starting point for such an awe-inspiring capacity is the autistic child’s preoccupation with numbers and dates, in combination with a penchant for repetition and ritual. Parents or others in the community marvelling over and praising the child for their unique numerical abilities are also rewarding the autistic person with social acceptance, further motivating their skill development in this rather non-practical domain.

Similarly, Dubischar-Krivec argues that calendar calculation in autistic savants involves a mix of rote memory for previous dates and, eventually (at least for some, like Donny), an implicit understanding of the underlying algorithms driving the Gregorian calendar, such as the fact that if a non-leap year starts on a Sunday, the following year will begin on a Monday. Like most autistic calendar calculators, Hoskins had his limits: “He can’t go back beyond 1901,” Byrd says, “and can’t go forward beyond 1924. But during these 24 years success is 100%.” Most telling, perhaps, is that Dubischar-Krivec’s handful of autistic-savant calendar calculators often failed to solve basic arithmetic problems in which memorization failed them.

In high school, I had a classmate who was a calendar calculator, who walked on his tiptoes and seemed altogether indifferent to the ridiculous social dramas of adolescence that burdened the rest of us. Looking back, of course, it’s clear as day that he was an autistic savant. I only wish I knew then what I know now. But research into both autism and savantism has grown at an astonishing rate over the past few decades. And these findings are slowly trickling into the public consciousness, so that we are becoming more aware of—and more importantly, more sensitive to—issues of neurodiversity and the signature characteristics of those falling along the autistic spectrum.

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

The following is an edited excerpt from The Belief Instinct, which will be released as a paperback on Feb. 20.

When I moved to my previous house in a small village in Northern Ireland in late 2007, there was still quite a bit of work to be done, including laying flooring in an intolerably small, outdated bathroom in the garage. So for about ten seconds each day, over a period of about a year, whenever I stood in my bare feet on that cold concrete floor doing what it is that human males do at a toilet, my eyes would inevitably zero in on an area of flooring just at the crook of the plumbing and the wall. Here the mysterious word ORBY appeared mockingly in white paint, scribbled on the cement like the singular flash of an artist signing a masterpiece in proud haste.

For the longest time, in my usual groggy state first thing in the morning, this “Orby” character didn’t particularly weigh on my thoughts. Rather, more often than not I would simply stumble back to bed, pondering why anyone—perhaps a contractor, a builder, a plumber, maybe the previous owner of the house—would have left this peculiar inscription on the floor behind a toilet. What blue-collar ribaldry between workers could have led to such an inscrutable act? Was it an inside joke? A coded message to someone special, someone who once stood at the very same toilet? And what kind of word or name was “Orby” anyway? Then, also more often than not, I’d drift off to sleep again and forget all about Orby, at least until my bladder would stir me awake next. That is, until one night when, snapping out of a drowsy, blinking delirium, I leaned down and studied it more closely. When I did this, it became obvious that “ORBY” wasn’t a signature at all—just some randomly dribbled droplets of paint that looked, from a height, as if it spelled something meaningful and cryptic.

Embarrassing, yes, but perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. After all, several recent studies with young children have revealed that, from a very early age, humans are prone to attribution errors by associating the appearance of order with intentional agency. For example, in a study by Yale University psychologist George Newman and his colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of four-year-olds was told a story about a little boy named Billy. Billy had been busy playing with his toys in his bedroom before deciding to go outside to play. The children were shown a picture of Billy’s room when he left it, which revealed several piles of toys. Next they were shown two cards, each depicting different changes to the bedroom that allegedly happened while Billy was outside.

One card showed the piles of toys in the room stacked neatly together, arranged by color and size and so on. The other image showed these same objects, but in disarray. Half of the children in the study were told that a strong gust of wind had come in through an open window and changed the things in the room, whereas the other half were told that Billy’s older sister, Julie, had made the changes while he was away. Then all of the children were simply asked, “Which of these piles looks most like if [Julie, the wind] changed it?” Those in the wind condition pointed strictly to the disordered objects, whereas those in the older-sister condition were just as likely to point to the disordered as they were to the ordered objects. In other words, these preschoolers believed that whereas inanimate causal forces such as wind can lead only to disorder, intentional agents (such as Billy’s older sister, Julie) can cause either order or disorder. Amazingly, Newman and his coauthors used nonverbal measures to discover that even twelve-month-old infants display this same cognitive bias.

These findings have clear implications for understanding the ineradicable plague of religious creationism. Newman and his colleagues write that “the tendency to use intentional agents to explain the existence of order has often been cited as the reason why people have used versions of the ‘Argument from Design’ to motivate intentional deities who create an ordered universe.”

In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Richard Dawkins famously criticized eighteenth-century theologian-philosopher William Paley’s natural theology by showing how mechanical evolutionary processes can create the appearance of creative intent without any forethought or intelligence being involved at all. But all those pre- Darwinian, “ecumaniacal,” and unenlightened thinkers such as Paley weren’t just swooning over some basic insinuation that God produced order simply for the sake of producing order. That in itself wasn’t terribly interesting. Rather, these naturalists wanted to know why He organized things this way and not some other way.

One of the more intriguing implications of Newman’s work, therefore, is its relevance to our search for meaning in nature. For the faithful, God is seen not only as a tidy homemaker who makes things nice and orderly, but as having left us clues—a sort of signature in the seams—so we’d know and understand His intentions in His use of order. If Julie went into her little brother’s room and made a mess, for example, it’s hard not to see this act as her also giving Billy a sneering message (“this is what you get when you tattle on me”), just as she would be sending a more positive message by thoughtfully organizing his toys (“I don’t say it enough, but you’re not half-bad as little brothers go”). Likewise, God is seen as embedding messages in the secret language of plants, organisms, genes, and all the poetic contingencies threading these things continuously together. At least, that’s been the view of many famous naturalists throughout history who’ve strained to use their empiricism to solve the riddle of God, especially, of course, those employing their craft before the mainstreaming of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

On his deathbed in 1829, for example, an eccentric British aristocrat named Francis Egerton (also known as the 8th Earl of Bridgewater)—eccentric, among other things, because he was known to throw dinner parties for his dogs while dressing them up in the day’s trendiest couture—left the Royal Society a portion of his financially swollen estate. The money was to be used to commission a group of prominent naturalists to write a major apologist creed “on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.” (In other words, let’s have a look at the natural world to see what’s going on in God’s mind.) Eventually, eight authors were selected as contributors, each paid a thousand pounds sterling, a handsome sum at the time. The individual books that were published as part of the project—what became known as The Bridgewater Treatises—trickled out over a period of seven long years (1833–1840). One of these, a hefty two-volume work by noted entomologist William Kirby, sought to reconcile popular theological teachings with the extraordinary and subtle biological diversity in the animal kingdom that was so apparent to him. Kirby, an original member of the Linnean Society who had made a name for himself studying English bees on the grounds of a rural parsonage in Suffolk, seems to have seen himself more as detective than naturalist:

Since God created nothing in vain, we may rest assured that this system of representation was established with a particular view. The most common mode of instruction is placing certain signs or symbols before the eye of the learner, which represent sounds or ideas; and so the great Instructor of man placed this world before him as an open though mystical book, in which the different objects were the letters and words of a language, from the study of which he might gain wisdom of various kinds.

Even in their day, The Bridgewater Treatises were so larded with Christian propaganda that most scientists dismissed them entirely. The anatomist Robert Knox, a known critic of natural theology (but better known as the anatomy professor involved in the infamous Burke and Hare body-snatching case, in which Knox paid a pair of murderers to supply him with fresh corpses for his dissection lectures at the University of Edinburgh), apparently had a good sense of humor too, referring to them as “The Bilgewater Treatises.” But despite the dubious quality of the work, one can see from the Kirby passage highlighted above just how central theory of mind was, at the time, to the burgeoning field of natural theology. Theory of mind, the ability to reason about unobservable psychological states, is an evolved social cognitive trait that may or may not be unique to human beings, and which enables us to explain and predict other people’s and animals’ actions.

In fact, it continues to be central to this day, and it is part of the reason that many contemporary natural scientists see no inherent conflict between their faith and their work. In self-proclaimed “evolutionary evangelist” Michael Dowd’s Thank God for Evolution (2009), the same old theme emerges anew. Dowd, who brandishes the unusual self-identity as both Darwinian and Christian apologist, writes that “facts are God’s native tongue!”:

The discovery of facts through science is one very powerful way to encounter God directly. It is through the now-global community of scientists, working together, challenging one another’s findings, and assisted by the miracles of technology, that “God’s Word” is still being revealed. It is through this ever-expectant, yet ever-ready to-be-humbled, stance of universal inquiry that God’s Word is discerned as more wondrous and more this-world relevant than could have possibly been comprehended in any time past.

You may be surprised to learn that natural theology still has its supporters among some rather prominent philosophers and scientists. In 2008, the John Templeton Foundation sponsored a major international conference on the subject at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History. The primary aim of this gathering—fittingly called “Beyond Paley: Renewing the Vision of Natural Theology”—was “to review every aspect of the question of whether the divine can be known through nature.” Just like William Kirby, modern-day advocates of natural theology tend to view God as a sort of enigmatic foreigner speaking a foreign tongue, the intricate and beautiful language of nature. And their primary scientific task is to translate this strange, almost unintelligible language into a form that reveals His benevolent, creative intentions for humanity. (Or at least one that satisfies their own personal view of what His intentions should be.)

Guest speakers at the Oxford event were well-known figures in the Christian community, such as Simon Conway Morris (a Cambridge evolutionary paleobiologist whose Gifford Lecture the previous year had been titled “Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation”), Justin Barrett (a psychologist who believes that the human mind evolved in the way that God intended it to evolve, for us to perceive Him more accurately), and Alister McGrath (controversial author of The Dawkins Delusion, and one of the principal advocates of a modern-day “scientific theology”).

What is ironic is that these contemporary scholars are, in all probability, using their mindlessly evolved theory of mind to make meaning of the meaningless. Either that, or we must concur with them that meaning is in fact “out there” and that the evolution of the human brain was indeed guided by God, a God that slowly, methodically, over billions of years, placed our ancestors into the perfect selective conditions in which they were able to develop the one adaptive trait— theory of mind—that, in addition to serving its own huge, independent, adaptive functions for interacting with other human beings, also enabled this one species to finally ponder His highly cryptic ways and to begin guessing about what’s on His mind.

The theory of natural selection, of course, has more than enough explanatory oomph to get us from the primordial soup of Day 1 of life on earth to the head-spinning, space-traveling, finger-pointing, technologically ripe conurbations we see today. Even if an intentional God were needed for Existence with a capital “E” (which is by no means obvious), He certainly wasn’t needed for our particular human existence. Neither was He needed for the evolution of the cognitive system—theory of mind—that has allowed us to develop theories about unobservable mental states, including His. And He definitely wasn’t needed to account for what we’ve evolved to perceive as “good” and “evil”; that, too, is the clear handiwork of natural selection operating on our brains and behaviors.

There’s no more reason to believe that God frets about the social, sexual, or moral behaviors of human beings—just one of hundreds of presently living species of primates—than there is to believe that He’s deeply concerned about what Mediterranean geckos have for lunch or that He loses sleep over whether red-billed oxpeckers decide to pick bloated parasites off the backs of cows or rhinoceroses in the Sudan. We are just one of billions of species occupying this carbon-infused planet spinning in this solar system, and every single one of these species, along with every single detail of their bodies, behaviors, and brains (even if they lack bodies, behaviors, and brains) can be accounted for by natural evolutionary processes.

As the legendary biologist J. B. S. Haldane replied cheekily after being asked what he had learned about God from his work in studying evolution, “The Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

Image from pushofhope.com

Dear Jesse,

I have a pretty serious porn/Internet addiction. Yeah, yeah, every other guy says they’re addicted, but for me it has impeded school, sleep, eating, and socializing. I’ve failed classes because of it and lost friends. Last semester, I probably spent more time online than I did sleeping. Often, I would go multiple days staying in my room “porning,” not going to classes, not going to the cafeteria, and eating granola bars for meals. I identify as a straight male and get easily aroused by women. However, I enjoy anal stimulation and I am sometimes able to suck myself (yes, you read that right). I also enjoy MTF transgender porn. I am very comfortable with my sexuality; it’s just that the compulsion has effectively ruined much of my life. I’ve had my family and friends password protect computers and smart phones, started seeing a sexologist in addition to my psychiatrist, as well as begun attending Sex Addict Anonymous meetings. I’m still trying to get the hang of SAA, especially as an atheist. Although I’ve tried looking to the group as my “higher power,” it’s still challenging. How can an atheistic porn addict use a 12-step program?

—Atheistic Porn Addict

Dear Atheistic Porn Addict,

When he penned that famous opening line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …” Charles Dickens couldn’t possibly have known that one faraway day, the average person, in whatever corner of the globe he or she happened to be in, could in milliseconds, and with all the cunning and labor of a fingertip’s slight pressure on a button, summon a nearly infinite supply of people displaying their genitals. Yet for those of us who happen to be aroused by other attractive human beings (with perhaps a handful of exceptions, that means everyone reading this) the current age of the digital libido is arguably one of the best of times to be alive in the history of our species’ sexuality. As you’ve experienced firsthand, however, it’s also one of the worst of times, and for very much the same reasons.

First, let’s address your conundrum as being an atheist surrounded by spiritual people who are similarly struggling with sex addiction. The faith-based component of 12-step programs has been criticized before as potentially discriminatory against nonbelievers who are just as in need of support as are their believing peers. Still, this nondenominational, “spiritual-but-not-religious” emphasis on God as being the key to fixing people’s addictions strikes me as particularly bizarre when it comes to sexuality. Asking God to change something that, in evolutionary terms, is exquisitely designed to fit our ancestral environment reveals a profound discontent with our animal nature. Like many others, your expressed sexual adaptations have admittedly gone a bit haywire in the face of unanticipated cultural innovations that so assiduously exploit them. But as the psychologist Gad Saad of Concordia University explains in his recent book, The Consuming Instinct, “in the same way that a juicy burger caters to our evolved penchant for fatty foods, the visual imagery inherent to hardcore pornography ultimately appeals to men’s sexuality.”

I was surprised to see the SAA has modified the traditional 12 steps of the Alcoholic Anonymous pledges to suit its own domain of carnal overindulgence. This means that half of these steps inform sex addicts that, before they can ever hope to reel in their hyperactive lust, they must first explicitly petition for God’s intervention or that of some ineffable “Power.” This isn’t to say that there isn’t pragmatic value in such beliefs for many—even most—people. After all, the functional utility of a spiritual worldview is completely separate from its truth-value. For a scientific atheist who has done his or her homework, however, adopting such a worldview is about as easy as slipping into a new ethnicity or switching to a different sexual orientation. This leaves you at a distinct disadvantage in a 12-step program.

I suppose if it offers communal support and you aren’t strongly pressured to subscribe to the spiritual message (perhaps it’s more tangential to your specific group’s practices), it could be beneficial, sort of like an indifferent atheist attending church every Sunday just to remain strategically entrenched in a pleasant community. But meanwhile, let me offer a few research-informed observations about your predicament that you’re unlikely to hear at any SAA meetings. None of these, you’ll be relieved to know, involves God at any step of the way.

Let’s first set the stage with some empirical data about today’s pornography racket. One of the best accounts of the factors driving this juggernaut of an industry is a review article by the Italian economist Fabio D’Orlando. The author offers some mind-blowing statistics about the money being generated by the business of flesh. It’s probably even more substantial today (six years later), but in 2006 global porn revenues were estimated at some 97 billion dollars. D’Orlando quotes an account by Jill Manning, who testified the previous year to a Senate subcommittee on the effects of pornography on society that “[p]ornography revenue is now greater than the combined revenues of all professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises and is almost twice the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC.” Or, to keep comparisons in the same e-vein, the industry has larger revenues than the combined earnings of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix.

The advent of the Internet created the perfect storm for ravenous consumption, what scholars refer to as the “Triple A Engine” effect (affordability, access, and anonymity). The rapid cultural normalization of porn, generated by this Triple A Engine, is something that those of us past the age of, say, 35 witnessed firsthand. “In my day”—as old-timers like me tend to say—the closest I could get to naked men as a teenager was tilting my head like a confused dog at the infuriatingly scrambled lines of the Playboy Channel on cable TV, convincing my mother to purchase Men’s Fitness magazines at the grocery store (I’m still amazed she didn’t catch on with that one), creeping downstairs during the rare Cinemax free-view weekends to watch soft-core porn at 3am, and spending a considerable amount of time glued to those cheesy exercise-equipment infomercials featuring tan, equine-toothed, shirtless men doing sit-ups while wearing tight red shorts that promised a big reveal at any moment. I’m 36, so this wasn’t that long ago, really, but I’d guess it’s still a considerably tamer adolescent experience with “salacious” images than yours. That’s not to say that I didn’t fantasize about more explicit scenes. Oh, the things I dreamt up. But like most people in the early 1990s, I wasn’t about to go on a public scavenger hunt for porn. When I was 18, I slid into an independent bookstore and blushingly purchased an expensive Robert Mapplethorpe volume (just slightly more extreme than the soporific stuff I was used to), but that was as far as I was willing to risk attaching my face to my self-consciously sordid desires. Then the Internet happened and, well, let’s just say Men’s Fitness lost a very loyal customer.

Approximately 12 percent of all web pages now are pornographic. In the US alone, during the single month of April 2005, there were 34,376,000 unique visitors to porn sites. This amounts to about a quarter of all Internet users going online that month for sexual purposes, with each person viewing an average of 239 XXX pages. Every day, 68 million Internet search engine requests (25 percent of all search terms entered) are for pornography. Importantly, around three quarters of those visiting hardcore porn websites are male and between the ages of 18 and 45. Whether you’re a fan of porn or see it as a plague on society, these are the naked facts.

The point is that times have changed, and fast. For the most part, science hasn’t kept pace with the cataclysmic shift in pornography’s effects on human sexuality. According to the social historian Lisa Zigel, conservative attitudes continue to thwart serious theoretically motivated, non-moralistic studies on pornography. This is a shame, especially given its obviously important role in the everyday lives of so many people. “Scholars who examine pornography do so at their own risk. Grants, funding, promotions—the bread and butter of academic life—are generally not supportive of the study of pornography. And few other topics are at once so nebulous and heated.”

There are a handful of positive exceptions to this empirical lacuna, most coming from the field of evolutionary psychology. To understand the strong male interest in pornography, we must, as Saad suggests, look to our species’ adaptive past, where men would have sought casual sex with multiple partners without commitment. Here’s another way to think about it. A pregnant woman who has sex with 100 men in one year isn’t likely to increase her genetic fitness; once she’s pregnant, she can have sex with all the men in the world and her fitness would be negligibly effected. Not so for a man who has sex with 100 women.

Starting with the anthropologist Donald Symons in his classic book, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, pornography has been interpreted as a contemporary reflection of men’s evolved sexuality more generally. (And gay men are identical in every way according to this logic, just with an inverted pattern of attraction.) Symons argued that, in contrast to women’s prototypical erotic fantasies, which usually involve romance and multiple sources of stimulation beyond the visual, men fantasize about a place where “sex is sheer lust and physical gratification, devoid of more tender feelings and encumbering relationships, in which women are always aroused, or at least easily arousable, and ultimately are always willing.” My guess is that sounds a lot like the world you’ve been occupying while locked away in your room “porning.”

Pornography has been used to test various evolutionarily based experimental hypotheses. The psychologist Nicholas Pound, for example, found that men strongly prefer to watch multiple men having sex with one woman (e.g., “gang bangs”) than multiple women having their way with one man. This is counterintuitive on the surface—after all, one wouldn’t think that close-ups of other men’s erections would be more arousing to straight men than would numerous nude, lascivious women. But Pound argues that we can understand this interesting titbit through our knowledge of human sperm competition.

They may not be aware of it, but what really turns men on are cues suggesting other males are challenging their reproductive success with highly desirable, fertile females. In the real world, most of us don’t often run into group sex (still, I once saw a half-hearted public orgy during Mardi Gras in the French Quarter, and swingers clubs do exist), but this doesn’t mean that “facultative polyandry” didn’t occur with more frequency in the ancestral past. As Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jatho argued convincingly in Sex at Dawn, such polyamorous practices may have been more common for our ancestors than previously thought. Also, there are plenty of more subtle, indirect cues (men flirting with one’s wife or her having a close male friend, for example) that can trigger a similar response even for men in monogamous marriages. Increased arousal translates to behavior and physiology that gives men a leg-up in their particular sperm war, including more impressive penile tumescence and deeper thrusting in the vaginal tract. Both of these capitalize on the human coronal phallic design that I’ve discussed before, improving one’s ability to displace other men’s competing sperm and supplant it with one’s own. In fact, in a more recent controlled study, the evolutionary biologists Sarah Kilgallon and Leigh Simmons confirmed that men who masturbated to pornographic images depicting sperm competition (two males with one female) produced ejaculate containing more motile, energetic sperm than those pleasuring themselves to three naked women.

Another evolution-minded study on Internet pornography was a 2010 report by the psychologists Patrick and Charlotte Markey. Building their case on prior evidence showing that testosterone levels in males rise after winning social competitions (even something as minor as a coin toss) and noting how this occurs in the wake of vicarious wins (such as one’s favorite team taking home the World Cup), and furthermore that such spikes in testosterone spur various reproductive behaviors, the Markeys reasoned that fluctuating trends in online pornography use might be predicted by ambient political currents. Using Google Trends data, and after controlling for “pornography-seeking behaviors” (e.g., people Googling keywords such as “boobs” and “xtube”) the week before the elections, the Markeys confirmed that citizens living in states voting for the winning political party in the wake of three different major US elections in 2004, 2006 and 2008 were searching the Internet for significantly more porn than were those living in states favoring the losing parties.

The question of pornography addiction is controversial—some scholars feel that the construct of “addiction” should apply only to neurobiologically based chemical dependency. But cases like yours are convincing to me that it’s very real. One thing that stands out to me in your letter is your stated attraction to several deviant forms of stimulation. (And I mean “deviant” only in a purely statistical sense, not a moral one). This is because alongside the evolutionary reasoning, other scholars believe that a central consequence of overexposure to Internet pornography is hedonic adaptation, which means that what was once arousing no longer does the trick, and thereby addicts escalate to increasingly extreme (“harder”) images. “As part of the escalation process,” writes the clinical psychologist Patrick Carnes, “patients become obsessed and preoccupied with new behaviors never even known about. Suddenly Asian women or girls who smoke or uncircumsized men become a sexual focus that is difficult to dislodge from the patient’s thinking.” On a lesser scale, imagine having only a single unchanging pornographic image as a “masturbatory aid” for the rest of your life. No matter how arousing it was the first time you encountered it, hedonic adaptation is inevitable. (Some say this is exactly what monogamy amounts to.)

What I think is relevant about escalation for your situation is that, according to D’Orlando, the porn addict now must spend more and more time searching for material that is sufficiently arousing to satisfy his or her lust. This would suggest that much of your “porning” time is probably spent discarding or sifting through relatively non-arousing material in search of the elusive hit that your brain requires.

Listen to the expert specialists that are trying to help you—they know what they’re doing. Pray to God if you want (it probably won’t help, but it won’t hurt either). But having knowledge of the underlying psychological factors motivating your behaviors is vital. And you never know, one day your experiences may give you unique insight into developing a science of pornography that helps millions of others just like you.

Have a question to pose for the Bering in Mind ‘Ask Me Anything’ feature? Please read the rules here first, then email beringinmind@gmail.com or submit through the “Ask Anything” portal at www.jessebering.com. Questions may be minimally edited for clarity and length.

© Charles M. Schulz

There are very few things that I can complain about regarding my childhood. I had wonderful parents. Lovely people, really. And this makes their heinous breach of parental olfactory responsibilities all the more incomprehensible. You remember Pig-Pen in the Peanuts cartoons? That was me. I think you can even make out the haze of stink plumes faintly surrounding my carcass in some old family photos.

The first time I realized that I smelled a bit ripe was during a soccer game when I was about 9. I was the goalie picking daisies while our team dominated the other end of the field, and in my solitude I caught a whiff of what can only be described as a cross between my unshaven grandfather in Florida who liked to eat raw onions like they were apples and the soggy eau-de-urea woodchip shavings clumped in the corners of my hamster’s cage. “What the hell is that smell?” I thought to myself, genuinely perplexed. Lifting my arms revealed the source of these toxic fumes, a fact that simultaneously fascinated and repulsed me. I think I was left so woozy by my own stench that I forgot to share the news with my parents, who might have coughed up 99 cents for a stick of deodorant for me.

Still, you’d think that at least by the time I was in middle school and one of my friends had pieced together the similarities between my particular presence and his experiences with one of the world’s smelliest cheeses, their little Limburger child would have offended their nasal cavities enough to sit me down and have a frank talk about my “irregular” showering habits. But it took a startlingly forthright female classmate to patiently explain to me the basic principles of armpit hygiene and to suggest that, just perhaps, daily showers and deodorant wouldn’t be bad investments for my social life.

In any event, according to new research by the psychologists Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro and Paul Bloom, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t come out of the closet until these malodorous life lessons were completed and I smelled like a freshly cut pine tree, or else my unholy aroma would have confounded my acceptance as a gay teen. In a study published last year in the journal Emotion, these authors investigated the relationship between feelings of disgust and attitudes toward gays and lesbians, among several other hot-button topics circulating in today’s politicized atmosphere. A long line of studies had confirmed a strong connection between disgust and moral reasoning, but very few of these had involved experiments in which feelings of disgust to unrelated sources were elicited prior to gauging participants’ opinions.

The experiment was relatively brief and straightforward. Sixty-one heterosexual undergraduates (50 women, 11 men) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions, which, for the sake of clarity, we’ll call simply the “stink” or “no-stink” conditions. The participants were told that they’d merely be answering a survey on their social and political attitudes, and had no idea that the critical manipulation in the study was actually the presence or absence of a noxious ambient odor in the room while they answered these sensitive questions. (Actually, at the end of the study, two people said they guessed the smell had something to do with the experiment, so their data were excluded from the analyses.)

For those students unlucky enough to find themselves in the stink condition, a research assistant snuck into the 600-square-foot lab room just beforehand and applied a commercially available novelty stink spray to a trash can in the corner. (The phenomenology of this smell was—I got the sense from speaking to one of the authors—vaguely akin to the effluvium leaking from the threatening anus of a patient in the ER who’d just ingested an enormous bowl of chilli with questionable contents.) The remaining half of the participants was tested in the same room, sans the stink.

The first thing that all were asked to complete was a “feeling thermometer,” which assessed, by degree of “social warmth,” how they felt toward various groups on a scale of 0 (Very Cold) to 100 (Very Warm). Not that these groups are mutually exclusive, nor was this an exhaustive list of social categories, but for the sake of the experiment these groups were boiled down into 19 possible targets of evaluation. They included “Gay Men,” “Lesbians,” “Straight Men,” “Straight Women,” “European Americans,” “the Elderly,” “Immigrants,” “College Students,” “African Americans,” “Midwesterners,” “Athletes,” and “Southerners,” among others. Presentation of groups on the list was randomized to prevent any possible order effects—in other words, across both conditions, some people saw “Lesbians” in the 17^th spot in the list, others saw this as the 3rd group listed, and so on.

And the same type of randomization was done for the items in the next section of the survey completed by the participants, in which they were asked, on a scale of 1 (Completely disagree) to 7 (Completely agree), how they felt about several polarizing contemporary issues, including gay marriage, abortion, and the war in Iraq. There were two other parts to the study. The first of these simply asked the participants to rate themselves on their degree of political conservativeness (a seven-point scale from “Extremely Liberal” to “Extremely Conservative”). And finally, those in the stink condition were asked just how disgusting they found the smell in the room. Alas, they all noticed it and indeed found it disgusting.

So what exactly was the researcher’s hypothesis, again? There were two key possibilities, really. It could be that the disgusting odor caused a general negativity effect across the board; in other words, compared to being in a perfectly odor-free room, being confined to a small area that smells like flatulence makes everyone cranky about everything. If this were the case, then the disgust cue should produce especially negative evaluations of all the socially disenfranchised groups (not only gays and lesbians, but also black people and the elderly, for instance). The alternative hypothesis, and the one actually supported by the findings from this study, was that the odor would trigger negative judgements of only the homosexuals.

Independent of the gender of the participants and their political orientation, those who’d been randomly assigned to the stink condition expressed significantly less warmth (an average feeling-thermometer rating of about 57) towards gay men than did those in the no stink condition (a 70 on the warmth scale). This statistically meaningful effect wasn’t found for any of the other social groups used in the study, although the data trended in this direction for lesbians, too.

The smell didn’t influence participants’ attitudes toward specific political issues, such as gay marriage, so that’s one good thing. But the disgust prime did make all of these heterosexual students from a major Northeastern University less sympathetic—or at least, “less warm”—to gay men. “Our results highlight the power of disgust to affect attitudes even among political liberals,” the authors point out in assessing their findings, “who are more likely than political conservatives to believe that one should not rely on feelings of disgust when making moral judgements.”

In fact, while the link was already well-known, the study is one of the first to demonstrate a direct, separate causal role of disgust in moral reasoning. Being aware of the powerful influence of disgust in the social domain is a vital first step in correcting moralistic fallacies stemming from gut feelings. Yet while the anti-gay disgust effect is real enough, interpreting precisely why it’s such a potent force behind the social oppression of homosexuals in particular isn’t clear. The researchers concede that more work is necessary to tease apart competing explanations, but one of the study’s authors, Cornell University’s David Pizarro, emailed me his thoughts:

I think what’s happening is that the social category of “gay men” (and to a lesser extent, gay women) is one that is defined by the sexual act. In this study, gay men were at a paradoxical disadvantage because we didn’t have other groups defined by their sexual act. Given that—perhaps for incest avoidance, or for disease avoidance more broadly—sex seems to be especially influenced by purity and disgust, I think that if any other social group were to be defined by their sexual act, we might see disgust influencing participants’ attitudes about them, too. I tell my class to imagine if the first thing they learned about a person is that he or she frequently masturbated to pregnant women. The sexual disgust response would likely eclipse every other aspect of the person, such as their also being a fireman, a pharmacist, or Irish.

I think Pizarro is on the right track. Yet I do wonder what might have happened if these scientists had used an odor other than faux fart. I mean, perhaps the implicit thought of anal sex in the participants’ minds, coupled with an, ahem, specific “genre” of odor that emanates from the very orifice employed in the stereotypical sex act of gay men, left a particularly chilly frost on these heterosexuals’ feeling thermometer when considering us. Of course, it’s not an act common to all gay men, (e.g., gay virgins), nor are heterosexuals uninvited to that particular party, but good or bad, it’s the first thing that comes to many people’s heads when thinking about gay men. The lesbian effect wasn’t as strong, after all, and perhaps the smell of, say, expired fish might have similarly tilted the scale against my gay female friends. Another way to get at this might be an age-modified study, assessing pre-sex educated children’s warmth toward these different social groups. If the effect is odor-general and isn’t about the specific sex act per se, then those naïve to the mechanics of sex should display a pattern of results similar to the adult participants.

To crack this case for now, maybe on odd days I’ll return to my rancid youth by tossing the deodorant and taking a break from all that showering business. I’ll introduce myself to random strangers as gay, letting them breathe it all in and making a mental note of just how swiftly these folks pull away from my handshake versus those who get the same greeting, only with my ambrosial glands accompanying it instead.

Early twentieth century residents at an American institute for the feebleminded.

Back when I was a graduate student in Louisiana studying chimpanzees, I came across a chapter from an old book called The Speech of Monkeys. First released in 1892, it was a pioneering text in animal behavior and the study of nonhuman communication, published by the very respectable Charles L. Webster and Company, the house of Mark Twain and several other famous authors of the time. So while not commercial, it was at least a serious academic source that comparative psychologists occasionally cite even today. Reading this in 1998, I was well aware, of course, of historical context, yet the title of this particular chapter by an early primatologist—actually, one of America’s first evolutionary theorists post-Darwin—by the name of Richard Garner was still enough to make me do a double-take, just to make sure I’d read it correctly. Garner was a former Confederate soldier from Virginia who lived in a very different world than ours, so perhaps we shouldn’t judge him too harshly. But what I saw was this: “Five little brown cousins: Mickie, Nemo, Dodo, Nigger, and McGinty. Nemo apologizes to Dodo.” These “brown cousins” were actually a colony of monkeys in the Cincinnati Zoo, so from an allegedly scientific point of view, this was rather biased language, even for the times.

There’s more than one such “shocking” title to be found in the historical academic literature, but what’s important for us to remember is that words that are outrageously offensive today were, by contrast with the example above, simply run-of the-mill technical jargon in the past. If for no other reason than simple navel gazing, it’s worth reviewing some of these antiquated titles. On the one hand, they serve to remind us how far we’ve come in humanizing those who need protection and understanding the most; on the other hand, however, many of these uncomfortable, cold-sounding titles leave us asking what scientists of yore were thinking in the first place.

First, there’s the long, embarrassing history of racism in science (sadly Garner was just the beginning), particularly with respect to the study of intelligence. Richard Hernnstein and Charles Murray’s notorious The Bell Curve—for which The New York Times Bob Herbert referred to as a “a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship”—came out in 1994. But long before that controversial book, the empirical records were already littered with black IQ-bashing titles, such as “Some Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain” (American Journal of Anatomy, 1905), “Negro-White Hybrids in Jamaica” (Eugenical News, 1928), and “Effect Upon Negro Digit-Symbol Performance of Anticipated Comparison with Whites and with Other Negroes” (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1964).

The content of these articles, needless to say, is even worse than their headings. But remember, “negro” was the politically correct term for much of the twentieth century, fading from the academic vernacular only in the early 1970s. Unless it’s a study on the history of discriminatory rhetoric, can you imagine “negro” in the title of an article in, say, next week’s issue of Science or Nature?

People with developmental disorders, including children, were affixed with clinical labels that ring horribly inappropriate and cruel to our ears today. Consider, “A Study of Mortality in Four Thousand Feeble-minded and Idiots,” (New York Medical Journal, 1913), “Analyses of the Blood of Idiots” (Science, 1931), “When Is a Moron Not a Moron?” (Journal of Delinquency, 1920) “Training the Idiot and the Imbecile” (Proceedings of the American Association for the Study of the Feebleminded, 1927), and “Teaching Reading Vocabulary to Lower Grade Morons” (Proceedings of the American Association on Mental Deficiency, 1937). European social scientists were just as cynical with their treatment of cognitively disabled children. German scientists in the early 1930s, for example, were about to fall into an entirely new category of objectionable ethics; even so, “Das Dumme Kind. Ist Dummheit Heilbar?” (trans. “The Stupid Child. Is Stupidity Curable?” Psychologie Rundscháu, 1932) just sounds plain mean. A study on the heritability of Down syndrome is labeled, “The Kinship of Mongoloid Idiots” (Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 1939). And the French title, “Les ‘Kinésies de Jeu’ chez les Idiots” (trans. “Playful Bodily Movements in Idiots,” Annales Médico-Psychologiques, 1938), at least evokes a lighter feeling; but it also comes across today as carnivalesque, as though these “idiots” were strange, simian-like curiosities.

Then there’s the verboten “R word,” found in bold titles such as, “Training Retarded Children,” (Training School Bulletin, 1916), and The Retarded Child: How to Help Him (Public School Publishing Co., 1925). Today, not referring to him as retarded is a good start. The “R word” has recently been at the center of focused anti-discriminatory campaigns by groups like the Special Olympics and other organizations representing those with intellectual disabilities, even resulting in federal legislation barring its use in public discourse. Such appeals have also led to more than one celebrity apologizing for using the term thoughtlessly in an interview.

Originally, of course, the R word was a proper medical term referring to developmental impairments. Removed from today’s heated context, “retard” simply means to delay or thwart, and “retarded” was used routinely to capture this innocuous idea. The contrast between its innocent intention and the demeaning sense in which the term occurs now is made strikingly apparent by a 1928 article from the journal School & Society. In this piece called “The Retarded College Professor,” the author informs us that, “The typical professor from the whole population would doubtless show a greater retardation.” But this wasn’t a rub at their intelligence (though many academics’ stereotypical absentmindedness does make them vulnerable to the irony), only a study of how long it took them to get their PhDs and the factors that slowed them down along their educational path between degrees.

What dates an academic title most dramatically is its present derogatory meaning. There are few social categories that don’t take a hit here, either. Imagine reading a new scientific study titled, “Are Fat-Girls More Hypnotically Susceptible?” (Psychological Reports, 1976; neither here nor there, but the answer was yes). And my own people, homosexuals, were perhaps the last to be spared dehumanizing language. Not only were we considered, literally, full-blooded sociopaths by the APA, but scientists referred to us as “perverts” in their technical writings for much of the last century.

Like “retarded,” “perverted” was used originally in a clinically neutral manner. The term appears frequently in Havelock Ellis’s 1896 text Sexual Inversion, one of the first, and also one of the most sympathetic, psychosexual investigations into the nature of homosexuality. Coauthored by the brilliantly erudite and flamingly queer literary critic John Addington Symonds, the authors used the formal diagnosis “pervert” interchangeably (and unfortunately without any explanation) with the more palatable “invert.” The latter term, in their view, reflected homosexuality as being a sort of flipped-around form of normal sexual arousal. Perversions covered a wide range of morally proscribed sexual behaviors, and inverts (homosexuals) that acted on their natural proclivities were regarded as just one of many kinds of such outcasts.

Scholars who found homosexuality repugnant, and who didn’t try to hide their moralistic views, pirated this objective language, and soon it crept into everyday use. In response to what he saw as the normalization of a dangerous sexual disorder, a psychiatrist from the Manhattan State Hospital named Allan Hamilton penned “The Civil Responsibility of Sexual Perverts” (American Journal of Psychiatry, 1896). Hamilton felt strongly that homosexuality was so corrupting that anyone found in such sordid relationships should be separated legally by force. “I hold that under such circumstances not only may the aid of habeas corpus be implored for the purpose of effecting a separation, but that in aggravated instances the physician should, in manner specified, bring the matter before the attention of a committing judge.”

In any event, the die had been cast for the disparaging “P word” and it lived long in the clinical literature, especially within psychoanalytic circles. Only a few short decades ago, some scholars were interpreting anal intercourse among gay men as an unconscious desire among the recipient to nip off the other’s penis with his tightened sphincter. “In this way, which is so characteristic of the pervert,” argued psychiatrist Mervin Glasser in 1986, “he [is] trying to establish his father as an internal object with whom to identify, as an inner ally and bulwark against his powerful mother.” In other words, other men with big penises are like my daddy who, unlike me, was able to subdue my bully of a mother with his enormous phallus; so if only I could subsume such a magnificent rod in my own body, I too might conquer her. That may sound as scientific to us today as astrology or etchings on a tarot card, but, all the same, it’s the type of thing that so many gay men over the past century could have expected to hear if they ever sought counseling for their inevitable woes. Today the word “pervert” sounds silly, or at least provincial, when used to refer to someone from the LGBT community, but it’s still used disparagingly for other paraphilias, in which people similarly have no choice over their atypical sexual arousal patterns.

Words, of course, change more rapidly than minds. For example, scientific terminology referring to racial minorities may now be less abrasive than it once was, yet many believe that racist science is still alive and well, as was highlighted earlier this year by the scandal over London School of Economics professor Satoshi Kanazawa’s comments at Psychology Today regarding race and physical attractiveness. So it remains to be seen, really, if our hearts will one day keep pace with our language.

But I’ve been thinking: just to shake things up a bit, and since I’ve slowly been moving my regular writing over to my Slate column anyway, perhaps in lieu of offering you advice on how to handle your possibly perverted father-in-law who you suspect is an elderly frotteur, or how to be tactful while delicately informing your co-worker that she smells like a giant sewer rat, I can give you something even better—a peek at what the scientific data have to say about your particular issue. In other words, perhaps I can tell you why you’re going through what you are rather than what to do about it. I may not believe in free will, but I’m a firm believer that knowledge changes perspective, and perspective changes absolutely everything. Once you have that, you don’t need anyone else’s advice.

And good advice is really only good to the extent it aligns with actual research findings, anyway. Nearly two centuries worth of data in the behavioral sciences is available to inform our understanding of our everyday (and not so everyday) problems, yet rarely do we take advantage of this font of empirical wisdom. Instead we turn to wise old Aunt Bertie, or our BFFs, horoscopes and, well, advice columns. Or even worse, we don’t ask anyone at all and live in confusion, fear, or ignorance.

That’s not to say that I can’t give you a piece of my subjective mind alongside the objective data. I’m happy to judge you mercilessly before throwing you and your awkward debacle to the wolves in the comments section. Oh, I’m only kidding—kind of. Actually, anyone who has read my stuff in the past knows that I’m a fan of the underdog and unconventional theories and ideas. Intellectual sobriety has never been a part of this blog and never will be, if I can help it, so let’s have a bit of fun.

So go on, send your questions to beringinmind@gmail.com. And tell all your friends. Remember, these types of things are only as good as the material that you, the readers, give me to work with. I won’t use your name or other identity-compromising details, of course, in my public response to you. Do feel free to send me an anonymous email from a fake account, if you’re really that worried. But, honestly, if somehow you haven’t noticed over the years, I’m rather hard to offend or shock, and I can tell you with absolute sincerity that I find those that would condemn you elsewhere for things beyond your control to be anathema. “I am a man,” said the Roman philosopher Terence. “I consider nothing that is human alien to me.” Just give me some personal storyline and narrative context in your email—much like an advice column query—to make it mildly entertaining. I’ll take it from there.

If you answered “yes” to all of the above, then you may be suffering from “Puppy Pregnancy Syndrome.” Chances are, you’re also reading this from a small rural village in West Bengal India, just a short drive from Calcutta. That’s where this particular delusional disorder—in which otherwise sane men and women are convinced that it’s not only possible to become pregnant with an unwanted litter of pups, but it’s also fairly common—has gripped the villagers in a state of debilitating fear and panic for at least the past decade. These are some of the observations of a group of locally based psychiatrists who, several years ago, published a remarkable series of 7 such case studies in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry.

According to interviews with a random sample of 42 adult villagers (73 percent of whom believed with “definite certainty” that puppy pregnancy is real, and only 9 percent of whom were willing to completely discredit the concept), the etiology of any given case involves the person being recently bitten by a dog. It’s especially likely to result when the dog just happened to be in a state of sexual arousal at the time of the “attack,” since, as everyone in the village attests, dog saliva contains dog gametes. Thus, immaculate conceptions of canines in human carriers are unavoidable.

In fact, the psychiatrists reported how puppy pregnancy is such a problem for these people that there are even “medical” specialists in the community—bara ojhas—who specialize in treating the condition. They’re kept busy offering remedies and performing rituals for inducing abortions of the dog fetuses in hysterical human hosts. Personally, I find puppies cuter than most human babies, and I can think of far worse things than being grazed by the tooth of some worked-up bitch and bearing my very own litter of insanely adorable, good-natured (they’d take after me, after all) puppies. Or so I thought, until I read that puppy pregnancy in men is particularly unpleasant in that the ‘sire’ inevitably dies during the excruciating delivery of the puppies—through his penis. I think I speak for any man who knows what it feels like to micturate a pea-size kidney stone that the prospect of passing a golden retriever puppy through your penis is not a nice idea to dwell upon, no matter how cute that puppy may be. So, in this community, the role of the specialist is to prescribe charms and herbal medicines to help dissolve the puppy fetuses as early in the pregnancy as possible, so that, bit by bit, these dead dogs might slip out of one’s genitals unobtrusively.

So what exactly is happening here—can these people really believe that being bitten by a randy dog causes a person to become pregnant with puppies? It may sound crazy to us, but it’s as real as actual pregnancy to them. A hallmark of the condition, according to the Indian psychiatrists who authored the report, is “the absence of any realistic consideration about the absurdity of asexual animal pregnancy and pregnancy in males (to the degree of delusional conviction).” One woman swore she could hear the soft barking of puppies in her abdomen at night. The researchers argue that Puppy Pregnancy Syndrome meets the criteria for a “Culture-Bound Disorder.” Like other APA-backed examples from this controversial diagnostic category (such as koro, Brain Fag Syndrome, and Stendhal Syndrome) puppy pregnancy is the product of the emotionally-fuelled social transmission of a “mass-delusional belief” linked specifically to this West Bengal community. As evidence of their belief, nearly everyone in the village can name a person whose unexplained death was clearly the result of a toxic puppy pregnancy.

What’s especially interesting is that even reasonably well-educated, bright people in this village endorse such claims and are susceptible to these delusions, which shows just how powerful are ambient cultural attitudes and beliefs in shaping humans’ perceptions of reality. The only similar case I’ve come across is the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s account of the Azande telling him that lesbians give birth to cats—which seems reasonable (kidding!).

It may seem harmless enough to believe that mongrels are gestating in your abdomen, but the problem from a mental health perspective is that “patients” experience genuine somatic symptoms that massively disrupt their quality of life, so much so that psychiatric and therapeutic intervention is needed to alleviate their problems. After one 24-year-old college graduate had an encounter with a stray dog that scratched him on the leg six months earlier, he became extremely wary of dogs because he was deathly afraid that one might knock him up. “He was so preoccupied with dogs that even in the interview room,” the authors tell us, “he was apprehensive that a dog may come out from under the table.” To address his unending circular ruminations about puppy pregnancy, his dog anxiety, and his obsessive-compulsive need to search for microscopic fetal canine parts in his urine, he was prescribed Clomipramine (an antidepressant) and Thioridazine (an antipsychotic). Importantly, he also underwent a month of behavioral reconditioning with a dog while being treated as an inpatient.

I just hope the dog was fixed, for his sake.

Frankly, however, the precise chronological point at which we formally enter “middle age” is of little importance. What’s much more intriguing are the psychological changes thought to accompany it. (And in fact, based on our species’ average life expectancy today, most people overestimate it—technically, middle age would kick off no later than 32, at least for men.) After all, we’ve all heard of the dreaded “midlife crisis,” but what, exactly, is it? Furthermore, does it even exist as a scientifically valid concept? There’s no question that most people believe that it’s a genuine psychiatric phenomenon. In one study, University of Zurich investigators Alexandra Freund and Johannes Ritter found that 92 percent of their 372 respondents were absolutely convinced that the midlife crisis was real; 71 percent said that they’d even known someone in the throes of one.

My first encounter with this tragic illness was my mother informing me that, “your father is having a midlife crisis” after he suddenly bought a horse and left her for a younger woman (these things were related, but that’s another story). Needless to say, my mother’s diagnosis of my father wasn’t accompanied by tones of sympathy, and I’ve long feared the day when I, too, might inherit this shameful affliction, struck down by a sudden, incurable case of Joe-Shmoe hedonism. The most frequent symptoms of this disease, I gathered from television, were a shiny new convertible (or prize-winning stallion), a toupée, and the unshakable delusion that one is now attractive to twenty-year-old co-eds.

But this popular image of the “midlife crisis” is a far cry from what the scholar Elliott Jacques originally had in mind when he first coined this term back in 1965. Jacques wasn’t especially interested in women’s psychological functioning as they transitioned to midlife, which, he felt, “is often obscured … by the proximity of the onset of changes connected with menopause.” In fact, the “midlife crisis” is still seen today as a distinctively male type of problem, one often lobbed at men by disgruntled women to explain the formers’ selfish, impulsive behaviors. This gender stereotype is interesting in its own right. But what Jacques, a psychoanalyst, sought originally to examine with his notion of the midlife crisis was its relation to creative genius.

According to him, the midlife crisis is such a crisis that many great artists and thinkers don’t even survive it. “I had the impression,” explains Jacques, “that the age of 37 seemed to figure prominently in the death of individuals in this category.” So he decided to crunch the numbers with a “random sample” of 310 such geniuses and, indeed, he discovered that a considerable number of these formidable talents—including Mozart, Raphael, Chopin, Rimbaud, Purcell, and Baudelaire—succumbed to some kind of tragic fate or another and drew their last breaths between the ages of 35 and 39. “The closer one keeps to genius in the sample,” Jacques observes, “the more striking and clear-cut is this spiking of the death rate in midlife.”

Yet for those of you out there still on a golden path to glory—and how many remain of Kundera’s famed immortals it’s impossible to say—the good news is that an early death is by no means inevitable. Basically, argues Jacques, around the age of 35, genius can go in one of three directions. If you’re like that last batch of folks, you either die, literally, or else you perish metaphorically, having exhausted your potential early on in a sort of frenzied, magnificent chaos, unable to create anything approximating your former genius. The second type of individual, however, actually requires the anxieties of middle age—specifically, the acute awareness that one’s life is, at least, already half over—to reach their full creative potential. Before his 38^th birthday, for example, Bach was just an unusually talented church organist and music tutor; it was only in middle age, and after securing a cantorship in Leipzig, points out Jacques, that Bach’s “colossal achievements as a composer” really began in earnest. Although he’d produced Romeo and Juliet in his early thirties, Shakespeare is thought to have penned Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth all between the ages of 35 and 40. How’s that to make you feel like a sloth?

Finally, the third type of creative genius, says Jacques, is prolific and accomplished even in their earlier years, but their aesthetic or style changes dramatically at middle age, usually for the better. The “spontaneous effusions” that one produces in their late teens and twenties and which are “dictated [only] by the limits of the artist’s physical capacity” becomes more patient and refined. The work of the middle-aged artist is more “a sculptured creativity.” Dante represents the prototypical case here, argues Jacques. He began writing his sombre, philosophical The Divine Comedy at the age of 37, after his banishment from Florence. According to Jacques, The Divine Comedy is the poet’s “first full and worked-through conscious encounter with death”—his works before this reflected a more idyllic worldview.

Jacques also presented several clinical accounts from his therapist office, case studies of everyday men who weren’t part of this glittering pantheon, but who nonetheless were also grappling with the “midlife crisis.” The heart of the matter, Jacques believed, is in the discomfiting realization that one’s remaining time on earth is less than what they’ve already lived. Death is now clearly on “this side” of one’s narrative rather than some faraway, remote, abstract endpoint. (Hence the banal over-the-hill quips often overheard at 40^th birthday parties.) “For the first time in his life,” Jacques notes about the lamentations of one particularly sad middle-aged man, “he saw his future as circumscribed … he would not be able to accomplish in the span of a single lifetime everything he had desired to do. He could only achieve a finite amount. Much would have to remain unfinished and unrealized.”

Insightful as Jacques was, however, the phrase “midlife crisis” didn’t really creep into suburban vernacular as a catchall diagnosis until the late 1970s. This is when Yale’s Daniel Levinson, building on the stage theory tradition of lifespan developmentalist Erik Erikson, began popularizing tales of middle-class, middle-aged men who were struggling with transitioning to a time where “one is no longer young and yet not quite old.” This culminated in his well-known book, The Seasons of a Man’s Life. Levinson felt that midlife crises were actually more common than not and appeared like clockwork between the ages of 40 to 45. For Levinson, such crises were characterized primarily by a stark, painful “de-illusionment” process stemming from the individual’s unavoidable comparison between his youthful dreams and his sobering present reality. For most men, life moves so swiftly that, by the time you look back at what’s happened, you realize you’ve already suffered an irreparable loss of chance and opportunity. This life review causes depression, anxiety, and “manic flight,” a sort of desperate, now-or-never fumbling to experience the pleasures one has long denied oneself and an escape from stagnation.

In any event, how a man resolves this fundamental conflict, Levinson argued, shapes his outlook and adjustment from that point forward. One way to address this tension between storybook ambitions and anticlimactic adult realities is to focus on the bird in hand rather than those still in the bush. Data reveal that many middle-aged adults reformulate their aspirations in the wake of such a life review, gravitating now more toward maintenance goals—essentially, keeping things status quo and safeguarding their future—rather than setting their sights on lofty new dreams. The forty-year-old libertine protagonist in Michel Houellebecq’s Platform, for instance, has become perfectly content with his unglamorous job as a civil clerk; he’s also thoroughly uninspired by political and cultural changes. “It’s not up to me to adopt or invent new attitudes or new affinities with the world,” he reasons. “I gave up all that at the same time I developed a stoop and my face started to tend toward melancholy.” Complacency sounds grim and certainly has a negative ring to it, but you can look at it another way, too. It offers a mental buffer against anxieties tied to unrealizable dreams; it can even thwart potentially ruinous decisions when we’re most vulnerable to making them, such as quitting a hard-won job or leaving one’s family.

In the decades since Jacques and Levinson posited their mostly psychoanalytic ideas of the midlife crisis, a number of more empirically minded psychologists have attempted to validate it with actual data. And with little success. Epidemiological studies reveal that midlife is no more or less likely to be associated with career disillusionment, divorce, anxiety, alcoholism, depression or suicide than any other life stage; in fact, the incidence rates of many of these problems peak at other periods of the lifespan. Adolescence isn’t exactly a walk in the park either—as a teen, I’d worry so much about the uncertainties of my future that I vividly recall envying the elderly their age, since for them, no such uncertainties remained. Actually, old people—at least Swiss old people—aren’t fans of the “storm and stress” of adolescence, either. Freund and Ritter asked their elderly respondents which stage of their lives they’d prefer to return to, if they could. Most said middle age.

The authors conclude that although the male midlife crisis may not be supported by empirical data outside of psychodynamics, the fact that it remains so integral to Western notions of men’s development still gives it currency, since such social scripts—even if they’re not grounded in biologic functioning—can sometimes have dramatic effects. Freund and Ritter propose, therefore, a more “lenient concept” of the midlife crisis than earlier notions allowed. It may not be a “crisis” state per se, they say, but midlife poses clear challenges to people this age. “Because middle adulthood is commonly viewed as the middle of life, the change in future time perspective as the time until death is likely to highlight the limited remaining time for redirecting or correcting one’s personal developmental path.”

That’s sufficiently vague to permit your favorite middle-aged man his well-earned midlife crisis even in the absence of any rigorous empirical data supporting the existence of the construct.

There are exceptions, of course. Scholars hail Bob Dylan’s lyrics as works of poetic genius, and the same applies to that of other songwriters as well. (I think Beck ranks among the greatest surrealists, myself.) But when we consider how some of the more potent melodic memes are at once gratuitously bad yet capable of rooting remarkably deep into our collective consciousness—is anyone not familiar with that most enduring priapic paean, “My anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns, hon”?—the utter banality of most song lyrics becomes that much more curious.

Don’t just take my word for it. Let’s hear from the “Lyrical Gangster” himself, the Jamaican reggae singer Ini Kamoze, whose dancehall hit, “Here Comes the Hotstepper” soared to the top of the US and British charts back in 1994. And that song went a little something like this:

Extraordinary

Juice like a strawberry

Money to burn baby, all the time

Cut to fade is me

Fade to cut is she

Come juggle with me, I say every time

Here comes the hotstepper, murderer

I’m the lyrical gangster, murderer

Dial emergency number, murderer

Still love you like that, murderer

Astonishing. It’s as though his words go straight to my soul—if my soul were that of a mentally ill, homicidal circus clown. (If anyone out there happens to know why, exactly, Kamoze is inviting people to juggle with him, I’d be very keen to hear.) I don’t mean to pick on this particular performer. In fact, that any given song becomes a #1 hit says a lot more about the consuming public than it does the artist. Songwriters, after all, can pack only so much storyline into a radio-length track, so whatever punch they’re going to throw must come hard and fast, even if that means bypassing sanity or even any relevance to the line that comes immediately before.

Perhaps, however, there is more logic in lyric choice than even writers and singers themselves are aware. After boiling songs down to the weird literary nuclei of lyrics, scientists examining such “juice like a strawberry” coded language have discovered no less than the very essence of human nature. At least, that’s the intriguing claim being made by SUNY-Albany investigators Dawn Hobbs and Gordon Gallup in an article soon to be published in Evolutionary Psychology. In trying to decode the hidden messages in song lyrics, these investigators follow in the empirical footsteps of University of Guelph psychologists Hank Davis and Lyndsay McLeod, who in 2003 sampled a random selection of front-page newspaper stories from eight different cultures going back some three centuries. Davis and McLeod discovered that the hallmark of sensational news—what makes something particularly alluring to any readership—is its relevance to reproductive success in the ancestral past. Most high-profile, front-page stories dealt with things such as altruism, reputation, cheaters, violence, sex, and the treatment of offspring. In other words, argued these scientists, what whets our appetites in the social domain today are the very same gossipy topics of conversation that the first humans were probably gabbing about 150,000 years ago in sub-Saharan Africa. “Literary Darwinists” such as Jonathan Gottschall of Washington & Jefferson College have similarly plumbed the world’s epics, folk stories and fairytales for narrative evidence of a universal human psychology. Still other researchers have analyzed titles of romance novels and found “reproductive issues” to be especially salient, including ringers like Nobody’s Baby But Mine, The Bride and the Beast, and The Millionaire’s Pregnant Bride.

So adding to this body of between-the-lines data, it’s perfectly reasonable, surmised Hobbs and Gallup, to assume that song lyrics might similarly contain evolutionarily relevant messages. Their approach departs somewhat from Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s well-known metaphor of music being simply “auditory cheesecake.” Music has no adaptive significance or function in its own right, argued Pinker in his 1997 classic How the Mind Works, but instead it just so happens to pleasantly tickle other evolved domains of human cognition. Yet Pinker didn’t factor song lyrics into his evolutionary analysis. And if we tune our ears just right and listen carefully between the lines to what singers are actually singing about, we find, oddly enough, none other than natural selection flipping the figures behind the Billboard. The commercial success of droplets of inanity such as Kamoze’s “juice like a strawberry,” and “money to burn, baby, all the time” begin to make sense in this light, reason Hobbs and Gallup, because such language resonates very clearly with our species’ evolved social psychology. In fact—and listen up, prospective recording artists—the investigators found that, across music genres, the more “embedded reproductive messages” a given song contained, the more likely it was to have become a smash hit.

To determine all of this, the authors first developed a detailed coding system that “transform[ed] subjective emotions into objective actions.” By parceling out individual song lyrics from hundreds of songs in this way (drawing primarily from the Country, Pop and R&B genres for starters), the emotion-infused lines belted out or mumbled by singers became blanched Darwinian cryptograms. Batches of written lyrics were assigned to two different raters who evaluated them independently for categorization. For example, they were instructed to check off the category Resources for any lyrics that mentioned money, luxury items, cars, or other assets, or Rejection for those referring to divorce, break-ups, broken hearts or pair-bonded discord. (Note that repeated chorus verses in any songs were only counted once.) The full list of categories is shown below, along with samples of lyrics that exemplify each.

Genitalia (“My anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns, hon,” from ‘Baby Got Back’ by Sir Mix-A-Lot 1992)

Other Body Parts (“Put your pretty little arms around me” from ‘Big Green Tractor’ by Jason Aldean 2009)

Courtship/Long-Term Mating Strategies (“He said he’d like to get to know me just a little more/[he] ask[ed] me to dinner,” from ‘Switch’ by Keri Hilson, 2009)

Hook Up/Short-Term Mating Strategies (“Baby tell me I can have it,” from ‘Put It On Ya’ by Plies 2009)

Foreplay/Arousal/Sex Act Precursors (“When I kissed you, girl, I knew how sweet a kiss could be,” from ‘Sugar, Sugar’ by The Archies 1969)

Sex Act (“I want to f*ck you like an animal,” from ‘Closer’ by Nine Inch Nails 1994)

Sexual Prowess (“I rock ‘em, roll ‘em all night long, I’m a sixty-minute man,” from ‘Sixty Minute Man” by Billy Ward and the Dominoes 1951)

Promiscuity/Reputation/Derogation (“You don’t have to sell your body to the night,” from ‘Roxanne’ by the Police 1978)

Sequestering/Mate-Guarding (“I enchain you,” from ‘Pur ti Miro, Pur ti Godo’ by Monteverdi 1642)

Fidelity Assurance/Abandonment Prevention (“I’m gonna love you forever, forever and ever, amen,” from ‘Forever and Ever Amen” by Randy Travis 1987)

Commitment and Fidelity (“He knelt down and pulled out a ring, and said ‘Marry Me Juliette,’ from ‘Love Story’ by Taylor Swift 2009)

Resources (“Money to burn, baby, all the time,” from ‘Here Comes the Hotstepper’ by Ini Kamoze, 1994)

Status (“An army of brave men with me as their leader,” from ‘Celeste Aida’ by Verdi 1871)

Mate Provisioning (“I know she ain’t ever had a man like that, to buy her anything she desires,” from ‘Whatever You Like’ by T.I. 2009)

Appearance Enhancement/Sex Appeal (“Shopkeeper, give me my colour, to make my cheeks red, so that I can make the young men love [me] against their will,” from ‘Carmina Burana’ by Carl Orff, 1935)

Rejection (“She just looked me in the eye, said it’s over,” from ‘Red Light’ by David Nail 2009)

Infidelity/Cheater Detection/Mate-Poaching (“I know somebody paying child support for one of his kids, and on her 18^th birthday he found out it wasn’t his,” from ‘Gold Digger’ by Kanye West 2005)

Parenting (“He’d been up there all night, lying there in bed and listening to his newborn baby cry,” from ‘It Won’t Be Like This For Long’ by Darius Rucker, 2009)

Other Reproductive Message/Menstrual Cycle/Incest (“Enamored, the brother courts his own sister,” from ‘Winterstürme Wichen dem Wonnemond’ by Wagner 1870)

When the two independent raters compared their notes, their overall agreement was nearly 90 percent, which is very respectable for content-analysis studies and shows the coding system works. Generally speaking, and across the three different genres—even in opera arias dating back some five hundred years—all of this “auditory cheesecake” was glazed heavily and with a wide variety of reproductive messages. Looking closely at the data, country singers tended to emphasize commitment, parenting, rejection and fidelity assurance in their songs. The most frequent reproductive messages in pop songs, by contrast, were those dealing with sex appeal, reputation, and short-term mating strategies. R&B singers, meanwhile, harped on about resources, sexual intercourse and status. Country songs averaged 5.96 reproductive messages per song, Pop had 8.69, and R&B a whopping 16.77 per song.

For all genres, however, and across a sixty-year history of the Billboard charts, the sheer number of reproductive messages in a song was meaningfully linked to that song’s commercial success. This was true even after controlling for the fame of the recording artist. Many singers sell well because of an established name brand. But like any artist, even famous singers have flops, or at least produce songs that don’t get a lot of airtime. It turns out that these lesser-known, “B-side” tracks are infertile in more ways than one, since compared to their chart-topping counterparts, they contain significantly fewer lyrics coding onto the themes above. “In our view,” conclude Hobbs and Gallup, “the ubiquitous presence of these reproductive themes is a reflection of the evolved properties of the human [mind], where people are voting with their pocket books and listener preferences are [unwittingly] driving the lyrics.”

The authors, incidentally, are careful not to claim that lyrics are the only factor behind a song’s success. That would be naïve, given the huge variability in vocal talent. Never mind lyrics, an Amy Winehouse song probably wouldn’t have very much financial get-up-and-go with, say, Kim Kardashian in the recording booth. There are also hugely successful instrumental songs, not to mention (as I’ve discovered firsthand with Eastern Europeans’ immortal love affair with Michael Jackson and 1985’s Madonna) those that do well despite their being in a foreign language. And there are still many valid questions remaining, including how listener characteristics such as age and sex—perhaps even menstrual status in women—may relate to song choice or attention to lyrics. Beyond the simple “sex sales” axiom, however, Hobbs and Gallup’s data do reveal somewhat dramatically how song lyrics are related to our species’ most-pressing adaptive problems.

And buyers respond eagerly, it seems, to songs that push those creaturely buttons.

Image: Wikipedia

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.  

And Bell and Weinberg’s figures almost certainly underreport the actual frequency of such relationships, too, since their data come from surveys of sexual orientation collected during an unapologetically homophobic era. In other words, these statistics only take into account those individuals previously or currently in a mixed-orientation marriage willing to acknowledge their primary homosexual leanings. Those gay respondents still in the closet of conventional suburban matrimony would have been rather difficult to get an empirical grip on. (Just think of the tortured character of Colonel Frank Fitts in the film American Beauty.)  

Still, many studies have since examined the psychological experiences of those who acknowledge being in mixed-orientation marriages—including motivations to enter into such a marriage to begin with, internalized homophobia, self-awareness and acceptance, religious ideology, experimenting with open relationships, and so on—from the perspective of the homosexual as well as from that of the heterosexual spouse. The particular dynamics between such couples vary dramatically, of course, but the data reveal unequivocally that mixed-orientation marriages have an extraordinarily low rate of success, with one or both partners inevitably leaving due to sexual incompatibility. One interesting sex difference , reported in 1985 by University of Minnesota psychologist Eli Coleman, is that lesbians tended to marry men at younger ages (mean age of 21) than did gay men marrying women (mean age of 24). Lesbians also reported being less aware than gay men of their own homosexual orientation upon entering such ill-fitting marriages and a slower realization of their same-sex attractions. Personally, I don’t think I would ever have signed on to deceiving a marital partner as a cover. But I do remember scheming briefly, at the very closeted age of 17, about finding myself a nice, repressed lesbian who would be game for a lifelong sham marriage; alas, I’d no idea where such pitiable creatures congregated. (The Chinese seized on this ridiculous idea years later, however.)  

Yet mixed-orientation marriages, which, in the mid-1980s when the most recent data were collected, lasted on average 8.5 years for lesbians and 13.1 years for gay men, are often fruitful, even if they do involve undesirable sexual activity for at least one of the individuals in the relationship. And for our purposes, the most relevant findings for the question we started off with—which is whether the increasing public support for gay marriage will lead, ironically, to the eventual decline of the homosexual population—is the fact that most homosexuals in mixed-orientation marriages have had at least one child with their spouse. In fact, Coleman found that gay men married to women sired an average of 2 children with their wives, whereas lesbians bore an average of 1.2 children with their husbands.  

Perhaps you’re beginning to see where I’m heading with all of this. Although the precise genetic mechanisms underlying homosexuality are still relatively unknown, we do know that, however these mechanisms actually work, there are indeed clear, contributing genetic factors underlying homosexual orientation. The best evidence that homosexuality runs in families as a heritable biological trait comes from 1990s-era twin studies, which revealed that the concordance rate (the rate by which twin members overlap on anything from schizophrenia to creativity to sexual orientation) for homosexuality is significantly greater in monozygotic twins (identical) than in dizygotic twins (who share only half of their genes, just like non-twin siblings). The more rigorously controlled twin studies adjust for possible shared environmental influences by taking into account, for instance, the sexual orientation of non-twin siblings or twins separated at birth, and yet all reveal that homosexuality is at least partially heritable.  

Homosexuality is often presented as an evolutionary “mystery” because of the obvious reproductive disadvantages, and thus for decades researchers have sought some adaptive function for the culturally recurrent percentage (anywhere from 1 to 10 percent of the population, depending on the measures used) of the human population that is aroused more by the same than it is by the opposite sex. Yet if we consider the historical, and perhaps even the ancestral, percentage of the homosexual population that did in fact reproduce because of societal proscriptions against adult relations with the same sex, the mystery becomes considerably less profound.  

Even in societies where homosexuality was tolerated , such as in Ancient Greece, men tended to engage in pederasty with adolescent boys while maintaining wives and families at home—romantic relationships with fellow adults were by contrast considered reprehensible. Offspring resulting from such forced adult heterosexuality would require no effort on the part of lesbians, since sexual arousal is not a prerequisite for conception. For gay men, a healthy imagination ( what I’ve discussed before in this column in terms of erotic mental representation) would be all that is needed to transform in one’s mind a female vagina into one’s favorite male anus or mouth. If zoophiles can ejaculate into their wives only by imagining that their spouse’s vagina is actually a horse’s vulva, a man’s anus must certainly be within mind’s reach of the average married homosexual.  

Whatever alleles are associated with homosexual orientation are transmitted by these faux heterosexual means, and this is an age-old reproductive cycle that has been occurring for as long as adult homosexuality has been proscribed by human societies—and by all accounts, such proscription has been the species’ norm. But now, through our collective intelligence and our common sense, we’re breaking from that norm, and exclusive homosexual relationships are becoming not only tolerated, but legalized. These cultural developments are significant for the homosexual population, not only for the obvious sake of gaining equality and protection against persecution for an unalterable phenotypic trait, but because it means that the age-old reproductive cycle that has been so central to mixed-orientation marriages is slowly but surely breaking. This is not to say that lesbians and gay men who are now free to marry the same sex will no longer reproduce—many do, and this trend will continue with the advent of new reproductive technologies and increasing societal support (such as surrogacy) for those who desire their own biological children. But with the societal expectation for men and women to bear children under the roofs of traditional opposite-sex relationships obviously lessening, combined with the hefty financial costs of reproductive technologies, as well as the costly interpersonal complexities of arrangements such as surrogacy, not to mention the fact that homosexual activity among same-sex married couples cannot possibly lead to unplanned pregnancies, homosexual reproduction will clearly decline as same-sex marriages continue to rise.  

In an evolving culture of tolerance and with the available option of gay marriage, “coming out the closet” will occur at younger and younger ages, and fewer young people will therefore feel strong-armed by shame and obligation to enter into mixed-orientation marriages to begin with. As the direct result of an increasing understanding and acceptance of sexual diversity in human societies, fewer children in subsequent generations will be born in the wedlock of sexual-identity confusion. Even those who score more along the “bisexual” scale, but with a stronger arousal pattern for the same sex, will opt for their primary erotic target as a marriage partner rather than conform to cruelly imposed social scripts. And—if you’ll follow this through—over an exhaustive span of time, fewer heritable components associated with homosexuality will come to penetrate our species’ genome. Additionally, with this increasing societal acceptance of homosexuality, and as a way to circumvent the often insurmountable costs associated with alternative reproductive technologies (at least for gay men) I suspect that gay married couples will begin adopting children with increasing frequency through the support of state-sponsored equality initiatives , effectively putting a full stop to the transmission of their genes.  

In fact, these prosocial cultural developments may have consequences not only for the reproductive rates of homosexuals, but also for their heterosexual relatives who carry homosexual alleles. For example, findings from a 2008 study by Brendan Zietsch and his colleagues of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research revealed that the biological relatives of homosexuals (and therefore those that possess alleles linked to homosexuality, but who are themselves heterosexual) are at a reproductive advantage over those without homosexual relatives . According to the authors:  

The genes influencing homosexuality have two effects. First, and most obviously, these genes increase the risk for homosexuality, which ostensibly has decreased Darwinian fitness. Countervailing this, however, these same genes appear to increase sex-atypical gender identity, which … increase(s) mating success in heterosexuals.  

Zietsch and his colleagues argue, essentially, that while too many or too potent homosexual alleles may result in full-blown homosexuality—which, all else being equal—is disadvantageous to reproductive success, these same alleles in a heterosexual relative tend to lead to that person having more lifetime sexual partners and thus greater reproductive success. The logic here is that sex-atypical traits (for example, men who score more like females in kindness, empathy, and sensitivity, or women who, like men, are more willing to engage in uncommitted sexual relations) are good but not perfect indices of homosexual orientation , and when they do occur in heterosexual individuals, they make these people more attractive and or interpersonally appealing to the opposite sex. What I’d wager is that even this effect—which the authors believe is evidence of antagonistic pleitropy, a sort of cost-benefit heuristic in which the maladaptiveness of certain genetic expressions in one phenotype is offset by these same genes’ adaptiveness in another—will be compromised by same-sex marriage trends. After all, if nothing else, alleles linked to sex-atypicality will decrease in frequency as fewer homosexuals reproduce.  

Again, these are just my, admittedly, entirely speculative predictions for the decline of homosexuality as a direct result of the increasing legalization of gay marriage and the domestication of exclusively same-sex relationships. If only religious fundamentalists were brighter—which, by contrast, I see absolutely no sign of change—they might begin to see gay marriage as an answer to their homophobic prayers after all.  

Biology is infinite irony.

About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

Take a look at the complete line-up of bloggers at our brand new blog network.

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:  

(1) manipulativeness. "Machiavellians" are pragmatic liars who aren’t fearful or anxious. They are "scheming but not stupid," explain the authors. "In conversations, they tend to dominate, but they also seem relaxed, talented and confident."

(2) acting. Good actors make good liars; receptive audiences encourage confidence.

(3) expressiveness. Animated people create favorable first impressions, making liars seductive and their expressions distracting.

(4) physical attractiveness. Fair or unfair, pretty people are judged as being more honest than unattractive people. 

(5) natural performers. These people can adapt to abrupt changes in the discourse with a convincing spontaneity.

(6) experience. Prior lying helps people manage familiar emotions, such as guilt and fear, which can “leak” behaviorally and tip off observers.

(7) confidence. Like anything else, believing in yourself is half the battle; you’ve got to believe in your ability to deceive others.

(8) emotional camouflage. Liars "mask their stark inclination to show the emotional expressions they truly feel" by feigning the opposite affect.

(9) eloquence. Eloquent speakers confound listeners with word play and buy extra time to ponder a plausible answer by giving long-winded responses.

(10) well-preparedness. This minimizes fabrication on the spot, which is vulnerable to detection. 

(11) unverifiable responding. Concealing information ("I honestly don’t remember") is preferable to a constructed lie because it cannot be disconfirmed.

(12) information frugality. Saying as little as possible in response to pointed questions makes it all the more difficult to confirm or disconfirm details.

(13) original thinking. Even meticulous liars can be thrown by the unexpected, so the ability to give original, convincing, non-scripted responses comes in handy.

(14) rapid thinking. Delays and verbal fillers ("ums" and "ahs") signal deception, so good liars are quick-witted, thinking fast on their feet.

(15) intelligence. Intelligence enables an efficient shouldering of the “cognitive load” imposed by lying, since there are many complex, simultaneously occurring demands associated with monitoring one’s own deceptiveness.

(16) good memory. Interrogators’ ears will prick at inconsistencies. A good memory allows a liar to remember details without tripping in their own fibs.

(17) truth adherence. Lies that "bend the truth" are generally more convincing, and require less cognitive effort, than those that involve fabricating an entire story.

(18) decoding. The ability to detect suspicion in the listener allows the liar to make the necessary adjustments, borrowing from strategies in the preceding skill set.  

Why give the criminals such helpful advice? The authors anticipated these concerns, clarifying that they hope this knowledge will assist interrogators, rather than those sitting on the other side of the table. Furthermore, "Undoubtedly," they write, "this [work] provides tips that liars could use to make their performance more convincing, but most characteristics we mentioned are inherent, and related to personality." 

In other words, there’s still a certain, inimitable je ne sais quoi to the great deluders. And should you find yourself so burdened with this particular type of genius, perhaps, as Mark Twain offered:

… the wise thing is to train [yourself] to lie thoughtfully,
judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie
for others’ advantage, and not [y]our own; to lie healingly,
charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie
gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly,
frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with
pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of [y]our high calling.

Good advice from Samuel, as always.

Image: Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito, from Wikimedia Commons

About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

Take a look at the complete line-up of bloggers at our brand new blog network.

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.

This is all the more puzzling given that female ejaculation, which is usually defined as the expulsion of a significant amount of fluid around the time of orgasm—estimates range from, on average, 3 to 50 ml (about 10 teaspoons)—is a topic that was first described by scholars around 2000 years ago. In an extraordinary review article last year in Sexual Medicine History, urologist Joanna Korda and her colleagues combed through the translated texts of the ancient Eastern and Western literatures and plucked out multiple references that would appear to distinguish between common vaginal lubrication during intercourse and the rarer external ejaculation of sexual fluids. The 4th century Taoist text, "Secret Instructions Concerning the Jade Chamber," for example, written for the enterprising man in the art of satisfying a woman in bed, suggested that he decipher the following "five signs" of feminine arousal accordingly:

(1) "reddened face" = "she wants to make love with you"

(2) "breasts hard and nose perspiring" = "she wants you to insert your penis"

(3) "throat dry and saliva blocked" = "she is very stimulated and excited"

(4) "slippery vagina" = "she wants to have her orgasm soon"

(5) "the genitals transmit fluid" = "she has already been satisfied"

I wouldn’t recommend you implement these secret instructions today; citing number two in your defence that, say, some woman with a sweaty nose wanted you to insert your penis into her isn’t likely to hold up in a court of law. But the fact that this ancient text distinguishes between "slippery vagina" and "the genitals transmit fluid," reason Korda and her coauthors, means that the latter can "clearly be interpreted as female ejaculation [at] orgasm." In ancient India, the Kamasutra, which dates to 200-400 A.D., speaks of "female semen" that "falls continually." And in the West, even Aristotle had something to say about female discharge during sexual intercourse, which, he pointed out, "far exceeds" the seminal emission of the man. He also noted—and it’s tempting to speculate about just how he came to this conclusion—that female ejaculation tends to be "found in those who are fair-skinned and of a feminine type generally, but not in those who are dark and of masculine appearance."

It wasn’t until the latter half of the 17th century, however, that the first truly scientific account of female ejaculation would be presented, this by a Dutch gynecologist named Reinjier De Graaf (pictured), precisely distinguishing between vaginal lubrication, which facilitates intercourse, and female ejaculation, which is tantamount to seminal emission. "This liquid was clearly not designed by Nature to moisten the urethra (as some people think)," wrote De Graaf, describing the "pituito-serous juice" sometimes excreted around the time of female orgasm. "The ducts [from which they arise] are so placed at the outlet of the urethra that the liquid does not touch it as it rushes out."

Fast-forward to 1952, past the historical hordes of women secretly ejaculating in mass confusion, and we arrive at the offices of German-born gynecologist Ernest Gräfenberg, who, while the contributions of De Graaf and others are often overlooked, is credited with "discovering" an erotic zone on the anterior wall of the vagina running along the course of the urethra. Ernest, in other words, is the one who first christened your "G-spot" with his article, "The Role of Urethra in Female Orgasm." In their review of his discovery, Korda and her colleagues report how Gräfenberg observed masturbating women expelling fluids from their urethra with orgasm "in gushes." Since this never occurred at the beginning of sexual stimulation, but rather only at the acme of orgasm, the physician concluded that its purpose was more for pleasure than for lubrication. "In the cases observed," wrote Gräfenberg:

…the fluid was examined and it had no urinary character. I am inclined to believe that ‘urine’ reported to be expelled during female orgasm is not urine, but only secretions of the intraurethral glands correlated with the erotogenic zone along the urethra in the anterior vaginal wall.

It wasn’t until 1982, in fact, that female ejaculate was first chemically analyzed. If it’s not urine, and it’s not semen, then what, exactly, is it? After all, according to an interview study (pdf) published by Amy Gilliland of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, most female ejaculators report "copious" amounts of fluid being released around the time of orgasm, enough to "soak the bed" or "spray the wall" or have their partner scream in terror and misunderstanding. So it’s rather odd that we still don’t have a name for this substance that 40 percent of women report having produced liberally at least once in their lives. (I’m just stating the obvious, no need to name it after me.)

Nearly all studies have shown a chemical dissimilarity between urine and female ejaculate—in fact, there are commonalities with male seminal fluid. You might recall from a previous article that only a small portion of semen contains sperm cells, the rest is a batter of psychotropic concoctions. Yet for many women, urine isn’t entirely absent from the emission, either. Most female ejaculators, left to their own devices and without access to scientific information, describe their own explorations of the mysterious material. Some describe it as thick and viscous, or salty, others as watery and odorless. "No research has been done in this area for over 20 years," laments Gilliland, "and we still do not have an answer satisfying to most sexologists as to what female ejaculate fluid is or where it is manufactured."

Part of the trouble in investigating the phenomenon under properly controlled scientific conditions, however, is the fact that it doesn’t particularly lend itself to laboratory investigations. Many women report needing to be intensely aroused, as well as very relaxed, to ejaculate at orgasm. So, although the clearest picture of what’s happening down there would come from rigorous methodological studies, the trouble is that subjecting self-reported female ejaculators to a barrage of invasive electromyographic laboratory techniques designed to stimulate their clitoris and evoke ejaculation kind of kills the mood.

This is something that a team of Egyptian researchers learned the hard way recently. After attaching multiple electrodes to the genitals of 38 healthy young women, as well as using vaginal and uterine balloons to measure pressure, and then stimulating the women to orgasm using electrovibration, they didn’t find a drop of ejaculate, only vaginal lubrication. They could only surmise that foreplay might have done the trick. By contrast, a team of Czechs did manage to evoke "female urethral expulsions" in 10 women under laboratory conditions back in 1988, but these women, unlike those in the more recent Egyptian study, had a self-reported history of frequent ejaculation.

In many ways, then, our best understanding to date of female ejaculation comes from the reports of female ejaculators themselves, many who, sadly, are just as clueless as their partners who believe they’re making love to an inconveniently incontinent woman. But we do know from the chemical assays at least this: although it may have traces of urea, female ejaculate is not urine. Many of the women interviewed by Gilliland recounted that, after several humiliating episodes at this unexpected outburst of fluid, they’d since taken to voiding their bladders before having sex, yet still they ejaculated prodigiously. In fact, six of the thirteen women in the study had never even heard of female ejaculation prior to reading the study description; they just assumed they were "abnormal" and that they’d been urinating.

For most ejaculators, it doesn’t happen every time an orgasm occurs, only infrequently. But this is in stark contrast to Masters and Johnson’s dubious 1966 assertion that female ejaculation is only an urban legend. Although some women were fortunate enough to find partners that enjoyed their ejaculations—partners would be right to assume, after all, that they’re triumphant lovers if they can actually bring a woman to ejaculate—most had, at least at first, felt deep shame at the thought of "peeing" on a misunderstanding partner. In some cases, this translated to self-imposed celibacy and, not surprisingly, strained relationships.

Education, of course, is key. One participant in Gilliland’s study described the transformation in her husband after he understood her ejaculation was a sign of her extraordinary sexual arousal—her reaching this stage showed how much she desired him, rather than reflecting something negative:

Before he’d say, "I don’t want pee on me," or "Can’t you go to the bathroom before sex?" Now he feels it’s attractive and he’ll say, "Squirt me!"

The good news is that women, eventually, seem to conceptualize their ejaculations in increasingly positive and empowering ways over the course of their lives. I’m very sympathetic to Gilliland’s position when she concludes that, "Overall, it is the effect of ignorance about female ejaculation that should arouse us to action, not just scientific curiosity." I don’t think that was an intentional pun on her part, by the way, but you do see how difficult it is to avoid them sometimes.

Yet still, and please don’t call me callous, I’m left enormously curious about the science. Why do only some women ejaculate and not others? What, if any, was its role in human evolution? And why—just look at you now—is it is such a giggle-inducing, fetishistic topic? Science has a long, wet, slippery challenge ahead indeed.

And should you have the urge to email me a "special" link after reading this–really, no thank you.

About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

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

pride n. A high, esp. an excessively high, opinion of one’s own worth or importance which gives rise to a feeling or attitude of superiority over others; inordinate self-esteem.

pride , n. Arrogant, haughty, or overbearing behaviour, demeanour, or treatment of others, esp. as exhibiting an inordinately high opinion of oneself.

These definitions clearly sit astride religious notions of pride being one of the Seven Deadly Sins . To many Christians, pride is the worst sin of all because placing oneself above others conflicts with spiritual egalitarianism. From a scientific perspective, at least, we can safely dismiss the God-hewn conjectures of pride being essentially evil, since there is no evil in essence, and there almost certainly is no God . Now, if embracing "gay pride" were done simply for the slap-in-the-face-to-religion effect, I’d be all for it. Yet unfortunately—and to my continued bewilderment—there are many gay people who are religious, so this account doesn’t seem to hold much water. And of course, atheists, too, tend to dislike those with "an inordinately high opinion" of themselves.  

In fact, a team of University of British Columbia psychologists led by Jessica Tracy would note that the foregoing definitions of pride are actually referring to a particularly ancient, evolutionarily derived subtype, which they refer to as hubristic pride. Tracy and her colleagues have argued that hubristic pride evolved to promote and sustain dominance, with the emotional engines of conceit and arrogance motivating individuals to scale the social hierarchy, which translates to genetic fitness. Laboratory participants induced to feel hubristic pride display increased aggression, hostility, and manipulation—all tactics of a tooth-and-nail pathway to social dominance that is based primarily on fear rather than respect. It’s not terribly surprising, in this light, that individuals who are more prone to exhibiting hubristic pride tend also to be more disagreeable, neurotic, narcissistic, are less conscientious and have a history of poor relationships and mental health problems.

So when it comes to the expression "gay pride," hubristic pride doesn’t seem to be implied. I’ve no doubt that some gays and lesbians probably do believe, for some odd postmodernist reason or another, that they are inherently superior to straights. But gay or straight, anyone who actually believes that social status can be calculated on the basis of what their genitals unconsciously respond to should be dismissed just as swiftly as those who believe that God has a sore spot for pride. In any event, for the most part, hubristic pride appears to be the emotional antithesis of the feelings meant to inspire gay individuals during Pride Week. After all, these are people that have been "culturally victimized" by an overwhelmingly oppressive heterosexist society, one that has systematically devalued and derided them as deviants for as long as they can remember. Developing in such a society is emotionally crippling and poisonous to one’s self-esteem; it’s not exactly a recipe for creating hubris and an inflated ego.  

I wonder, then, if perhaps there’s another OED definition that better reflects the true spirit of "gay pride." Perhaps one of these, for example:

pride , n. The feeling of satisfaction, pleasure, or elation derived from some action, ability, possession, etc., which one believes does one credit. Chiefly in to take (a) pride in.

pride , n. A person of whom, or thing of which, any person or group of people is proud; that which causes a feeling of pride in its possessor; (hence) the foremost, best, or most distinguished of a class, country, etc. In pride and joy: a cherished person or thing.

Interestingly, these alternative definitions map onto another evolutionarily derived subtype of pride as identified by Tracy, one that she refers to as authentic pride. Unlike hubristic pride, which is associated with conceit and arrogance, authentic pride is fueled by feelings of confidence, accomplishment and success. It’s basically the "good type" of pride and is correlated positively with socially desirable personality dimensions, such as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and high self-esteem. While hubristic pride motivates biologically adaptive, but often socially discouraged, tactics of aggressive self-promoting in achieving dominance, and this may work particularly well for those who would otherwise be seen as replaceable, authentic pride offers a gentler, friendlier route to this very same social success. In an article last year in Evolution and Human Behavior, psychologist Joey Cheng, along with Tracy and Joseph Henrich, speculated about the adaptive function of authentic pride. As opposed to the dominance-scaling purpose of hubristic pride:

…the subjective feelings of confidence and accomplishment that occur in authentic pride experiences may provide the mental preparedness for attaining prestige; these feelings may also serve as a psychological reinforcement for socially valued achievements, given that authentic pride arises from accomplishments attributed to unstable, controllable behaviors, such as effort and hard work. [Italics added.]

I’ve called out the final section of this description in italics because—at least according to these authors—such prestige-based, authentic pride emotions are the product of doing rather than simply being . In other words, a useful way to understand the difference between these two subtypes of pride, as reflected in both the dictionary definitions and the evolutionary psychologists’ classifications, is that the first type is undeserving (that someone feels better than others "just because," a belief in essential entitlement) and the second type is deserving (that someone feels valued by others because they have done something that merits the positive attention of society).

Now, as far as I know, I haven’t done anything—at least deliberately so—to render my brain attracted to penises instead of vaginas. So "gay pride" under the guise of authentic pride seems just as problematic to me as it does for hubristic pride. We can’t have it both ways. Either we elect to see ourselves as being "born this way" and not of our own making, which would limit our sense of pride to the hubristic subtype ("I’m better than you because I’m gay"), or we must submit to the intellectually impaired among us and contend that we’ve chosen this “lifestyle” for some commendable reason. Otherwise, pride for either being (hubristic pride) or doing (authentic pride) runs into major conceptual problems when it comes to our sexual orientations. I’m no more proud of being gay than I am of being Caucasian, of having type I diabetes, of being 5’7"—okay, in heels—or of having abnormally stocky hands for a man my size. Like being gay, these are simply the unassailable, biologically-based facts about me, and what is, is. I had nothing to do with these things, and I’m not proud of any of them. But, and here’s the real kicker, so listen up, the absence of pride is not shame.

There is, alas, at least one OED definition that perhaps reflects the intended usage of the expression "gay pride" and that seems to resonate with its connotations. It’s this:

pride , n A consciousness of what befits, is due to, or is worthy of oneself or one’s position; self-respect; self-esteem, esp. of a legitimate or healthy kind or degree.

This type of pride is implied when, say, a sick old man refuses to use the bedpan because he’s "too proud," or when we’re forced to "swallow our pride" by apologizing to someone who doesn’t deserve it. In other words, without involving any self-aggrandizing or demanding any particular accomplishment, this feeling occurs when we have an accurate sense of our value in society and our self-esteem matches that estimation.

I can almost get on board with this variation of the term when it’s applied to "gay pride"—I know my gay history, Pride Week’s connections to the Stonewall Riots of June, 1969, I know my value as a human being, and I’ve also had a generous slice of antigay bigotry directed at me—right at my forehead, in fact. Not long ago, for example, some teenagers in a Belfast park threw hotdogs at my partner and me while screaming about "faggots!" and "bathhouses!" I couldn’t quite make it all out through the thick Northern Irish brogue, and my comprehension was probably disrupted by my fear arousal response, but it didn’t sound friendly. (I must say, though, the hotdogs added a rather romantic symbolism to the trauma.) I suppose the only problem that I have with this form of "gay pride"—and it’s substantially less of a concern than the other two forms, I should add—is it rests on the assumption of a largely mythical, collective gay identity. In my everyday life, and unless you bring it up, being gay is about as salient to my self-concept as is my having brown hair or driving a Honda; I don’t feel—wait for the gasps—a particular affinity with other gay people just because they’re gay. I might want to have sex with other gay men, sure. We’ve got that much in common. But anything else, well, there just simply aren’t any shared psychological traits that bring us together in some intrinsic brotherhood.

On the one hand, I understand the need for forging supportive alliances with other gays and lesbians, for exerting change through collaborative, organized effort and by sheer strength in numbers. Such efforts have, in fact, resulted in significant, positive change, and that’s really the only way to get things done in a sociopolitical sense. On the other hand, however, it is so patently obvious that LGBT—for God’s sake, I really do hope that someday that acronym will go away, it conjures up a BLT sandwich in my head every time I use it—anyway, it’s so patently obvious that prejudice on the basis of people’s uncontrollable patterns of genital arousal, just like any other uncontrollable biological verity, such as the color of one’s skin, is a human rights issue. Our very need to even have "gay pride," to celebrate "Pride Week" through main street parades festooned with drag queens, leather daddies, and dykes on bikes, is such a pathetic reflection of what we think we should and shouldn’t be proud of as human beings that I’m afraid I just can’t muster up the requisite "gay pride" to feel this way.

Still, I’ll be on the sidelines watching the floats and all the pretty boys go by, marveling and salivating at the lurid excesses that invigorate the very same stereotypes that we spend the rest of the year fighting against.  

Image: David Goehring on Flickr.

About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

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.

The old saying that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is not just your worldly aunt’s favorite euphemism—it also happens to be true. My dog, Gulliver, and I, for instance, would probably have trouble getting on the same page about which is more attractive—that demure, two-year-old bitch down the road with an immaculate pedigree, or the airbrushed twenty-four-year-old-coed on this month’s cover of Playboy. To declare that one of us is “right” and the other “wrong” exposes the evolutionary error in trying to classify attractiveness in objective terms. It doesn’t matter how handsome he is—and he is quite handsome, I should say—but if Gulliver preferred supermodels to Shih Tzus, this wouldn’t be a very wise strategy from the mindless perspective of his genes. Likewise, and although there are more zoophiles out there than you may be aware, a heterosexual man of my age that finds canines in heat decidedly more attractive than fashion-industry supermodels would also run into severe problems in perpetuating his genes. I realize no female from any species would be sexually appealing to me, but that’s beside the point, just as is Gulliver’s status as a eunuch. Incidentally, Kanazawa also once crunched the numbers to conclude that gay men are uglier than straight men. (He’s obviously never heard of Bel Ami.)

Now, when it comes to “race”—a deeply flawed concept and term, since there are only minor heritable differences between human groups and these negligible differences reflect a fairly recent history of reproductive isolation—America and many other Western nations have shamefully demeaned, enslaved and oppressed non-Whites for centuries. But remember, centuries are fractions of milliseconds on Darwin’s clock, and whichever epidermal color has the upper hand today wouldn’t necessarily have it that way in another place and time. In fact, the deck of natural selection would have been stacked heavily against the melanin-impoverished people in sun-baked, southern Africa for a long time after our species’ initial appearance on the human stage there. For our African ancestors to have found someone of lighter skin (and lighter hair and eyes) more attractive than someone with a comparatively darker complexion may not have been as catastrophic as their being attracted to members of another species, but it still would have been a rather unhealthy strategy in terms of their overall genetic success. The paler one is, after all, the more susceptible he or she is to developing deadly melanomas and other skin-related ailments due to everyday sun exposure, and this is especially true for people living close to the Equator, where photoprotection has always been—at least since humans lost their fur—vitally important for survival.

Interracial dating is a mating scenario, however, that our ancestors simply would never have encountered. Cases of albinism in ancient Africa would have occurred just as they do today, but they wouldn’t have been frequent enough to significantly alter the gene pool. Furthermore, these albinos would have run an extremely high risk of developing skin cancer; and African albinos today face horrible social obstacles and are severely ostracized—unspeakably so, in many nations. But the critical point here is this: the phenomenon of very light and very dark people coexisting in a single geographic space is an evolutionarily novel development for our species.

This is because variations in skin color reflect many millennia of unobservable changes occurring within geographically circumscribed human populations, changes resulting from our species’ slow and partial migration out of Africa and its subsequent settlement and adaptation northward into the chillier, foreign terrain of Asia and Europe. Among other physical changes, the selection pressure for darker skin relaxed under those gloomy Baltic skies; there’s even evidence that nature began to instead favor genetic variants of pale skin in the lowest solar-radiating conditions, since reduced melanin levels actually promoted Vitamin D-absorption during those long, bleak winter months. Having lived in Northern Ireland for the last five years, I can assure you of two things: the sun is a rare sight in Belfast, and Black people rarer. (Probably as rare as a ginger Irishman in Zimbabwe.)

But back to attractiveness, if we insist on discussing race and beauty in evolutionary terms, it’s critical to understand that our perceptions are moulded not only by natural selection at the species level, but also at the individual level with our unique experiences, such as early erotic encounters, cultural ideals communicated to us through media, interactions with family and friends, and so on. This doesn’t mean that culture fills our big, blank-slate brains with invented notions of beauty willy-nilly; it clearly operates within a constrained evolutionary framework. For example, it’s an empirical question, but I suspect if you raised a kid on a desert island and inundated him with sexualized images and positive attitudes regarding a newly idealized female form—say, women with primordial dwarfism or ladies in their eighties—with men lusting over these females and women clambering to the salons to look just like them, the child would become a “sexual deviant” as an adult, preferring females of average height and somewhat younger women. In other words, yes, culture plays an obvious and important role in defining idealized beauty for people in a given society, but there are also obvious, evolutionarily defined limits to its powers of suggestion.

When it comes to skin color and the societal friction that characterizes race relations, the most plausible evolutionary account is that we consciously or unconsciously exploit this surface cue as a way to rapidly demarcate ingroup and outgroup members. It is abundantly clear that, since time immemorial, human societies have waged wars and been in conflict with other neighboring groups competing for the same limited resources. In the ancestral past, even the slightest physical, behavioral, or linguistic difference between camps would have served as a heuristic to help determine who was “one of us” and who was “one of them.” Again, evolutionarily, people of different skin colors would not have come into contact in the same geographic space (the divergent evolution of melanin-producing cells between human populations meant that, for the vast majority of our ancestral history, our ancestors would have never seen or known of another person with a skin color dramatically different from their own), other signals included accents and dialects, customs, gaits, fashion styles, and so on. In Northern Ireland, racism is subtly exuded by people trying to suss out the Protestant versus Catholic countenance of surnames, neighborhoods, word pronunciations, and facial features. One of the most startling pieces of evidence demonstrating the innateness of ingroup favoritism, reported a few years ago by psychologist Katherine Kinzler of the University of Chicago, is that, regardless of their nationality, ten-month-old infants actually shun adult playmates with foreign accents and prefer to interact with native speakers.

So it’s only in recent centuries, when the human animal found itself rather suddenly face-to-face with those of an entirely different hue, that this especially salient cue triggered our species’ more general pre-existing mechanism for ingroup- and outgroup-member demarcation. Being “color blind” is a beautiful idea, but unfortunately our retinas are sensitive to light of different wavelengths, and our visual systems cannot help but to process the color of people’s skin. My little eight-year-old nephew, Gianni, who lives in a fairly rural area in Ohio that is disadvantaged of ethnic diversity and multiculturalism, was telling me the other day about “this black girl” at school whom he was quite fond of. My sister, listening in, corrected him, noting that the girl was, in fact, Indian. “Fine,” he started over, “this brown girl …” (To which I gave him an emergency lesson in the etiquette of racial discourse). He’s clumsy with his politically correct language, granted, but he’s also quite smitten with this girl, which I see as a very positive sign for his future race relations—and love life.

Actually, many sociologists believe that the best barometer of a society’s race relations lies in its practices regarding interracial romantic relationships. And on this note, the dynamics between Blacks and Whites are still embarrassingly rocky here in the U.S. In an article published last year in the Journal of Black Studies, Richard Lewis and Joanne Ford-Robertson of the University of Texas reviewed the interracial marriage trends between the years 1980 and 2006. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, these authors found that, although the percentage of interracial marriages rose significantly over this twenty-six-year period, from 3% of all marriages in the US in 1980 to approximately 8% in 2006, this change is owed primarily to increases in the frequency of legal unions between Hispanics and non-Hispanics.

“It is interesting to note,” write Lewis and Ford-Robertson:

… that the percentage of interracial marriages not involving a Black spouse has increased from 69% of all interracial unions to nearly 78% over the investigation period. During the same period, the percentage associated with Black/White marriages made up 26% of all interracial marriages in 1980, and they declined to less than 18% by 2006. [italics added]

Even after accounting for changes in racial composition of the population, the least common of all the many different possible configurations of interracial marriages were those that included an African-American partner. Precisely why Blacks are not intermarrying with other races more frequently remains the subject of considerable controversy. Although public attitudes regarding interracial relationships have been on the upswing ever since 1967, when the Supreme Court struck down the last sickly anti-miscegenation laws, and such relationships are now perfectly legal, Black-White relationships, especially, are still extraordinarily rare in our society.

When they do occur, it’s much more often a Black men with a White woman, rather than the reverse. This pattern is often interpreted within a sociological theory of “upward mobility”—as a strategic means for Black men to obtain status in an implicitly color-graded society such as the US. Numerous investigators have examined the many difficulties encountered by those in interracial relationships, challenges stemming from nasty racial stereotypes involving sexuality, hostile societal attitudes, and disapproval by family and friends. Hunter College sociologist Erica Chito Childs, for example, went more than skin-deep in her analysis of many Black women’s disdain for Black men seeing White women. “For single young women,” writes Childs, “a Black man’s choice to be with a White woman is seen as a specific betrayal of Black women because the decision to date interracially does not mean just choosing White women but also rejecting Black women.”

Childs cites several young "angry Black women" and their thoughts about interracial relationships:

* “Blacks just like to see other Blacks, especially Black men who are successful, to stay Black, to be with a Black woman … It’s just about respecting and applauding those who don’t go interracial.”

* “I don’t know how or why someone could ever get over the racism of Whites to date a White person.”

* “As a Black woman, it is difficult enough to have to deal with Whites who [act] as if [Black] is inferior, but it is even harder to have your own men act like White is better and systematically choose White women over you; it is hard not to get angry because it feels as if no one values your worth as a woman.”

Certainly, the terrible residue of the embattled relationship between Blacks and Whites in this country, when combined with the evolutionary factors described previously, remains a major hurdle—indeed, our strained past may well be the main obstacle in our moving beyond the staid, monochromatic dating economy as it’s reflected in the census data. Still, there are also many legitimate biological questions—not only sociological ones, though they’re of course central to these discussions—that do remain. Many social scientists, for instance, believe that the “I’m just not attracted to those of other races” defense is only a thinly veiled form of symbolic racism. Yet it also seems plausible to me that, racist or not, this comment does in fact represent many people’s true sexual arousal patterns.

That humans tend to be homogamous creatures—orienting romantically and sexually toward prospective partners who resemble us physically—is well-established in social psychology. Ask yourself this: When you look at porn—and I’m talking to you, grandmotherly readers of Scientific American—do you stick with your own race, or do you prefer another? There are certainly individual differences in this regard. I, for one, find myself hideous and prefer those who look the least like me as possible. My partner, Juan, is Mexican. Actually, I’ve never thought of it quite this way before, but I can count the number of men I’ve been with on one hand; each digit, starting with my thumb, represents an Asian, an Indian, an African American and a Latino. We’ll save my pinkie finger for that White gentleman from Cambridge.

But I’m an anomaly. One study by Hungarian psychologist Tamas Bereczkei and his colleagues even found that, when their parents’ faces were morphed unknowingly with that of a stranger’s, people judged the morphed image as being significantly more attractive than the face of the stranger alone. For women, the more emotionally supportive the father had been in her childhood, the stronger her attraction to adult males that physically resembled him. Especially interesting was the fact that adult females who’d been adopted in early childhood showed this effect for their adopted father, which led the authors to posit a model of sexual imprinting occurring during early development. “These results,” reason the authors, “suggest that mate choice depends on physical and emotional exposure to the opposite-sex parent, as the sexual imprinting model predicts. In accordance with this theory, individuals shape a mental model of their opposite-sex parent’s appearance and search for a partner who possesses certain traits.” Given that so many American children, of so many races, have such minimal—if any—positive interactions with adults of other races, it’s not terribly difficult to extrapolate Bereczkei’s sexual imprinting model to the pathetic interracial marriage statistics we see today.

Unfortunately, because it’s such an incendiary and emotionally laden topic, and because egregious missteps by sensationalists such as Satoshi Kanazawa frighten off those who might conduct controlled, rigorous studies that are informed by genuine curiosity rather than racism (that is possible, of course), we know nothing—absolutely nothing, zilch, nada—about the development of people’s sexual attraction to those of other races, how this connects to contemporary race relations in the US, and least of all how these factors can be understood within an evolutionary framework.

Image: from This Next

About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

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.

Now, you may not think that such tedious biological details would be fodder for a moral quandary, but you underestimate our species’ massive confusion when it comes to understanding how its coveted free will articulates with its genitalia. Consider the case of a young Frenchman whose sleep-related erection was interpreted by another man as a sign of sexual interest but, swore the former, was nothing of the kind. As described by a group of investigators at the Annual Meeting of the French Sleep Research Society in 2001, the 24-year-old heterosexual male awoke to his horror with painful anal lesions. Although he had no conscious recollection of any such incident occurring, this led him to deduce that he must have been raped during the night. "The legal medical examination indeed reported on visibly recent tears of the anal margin," confirmed the researchers.

Then comes the sobering whodunit. What was especially disquieting is that the man’s boss had slept over the night before. The two had earlier been lounging in the pool and roasting together in the sauna. There was absolutely no evidence of date rape drugs, but alcohol, as it so often does in the south of France, flowed with relatively gay abandon that evening, and so the straight employee, being a gentleman, had invited his employer to sleep it off on his sofa while he retired to the mezzanine. Apparently, however, it was the employee that slept particularly hard that night, not the inebriated boss. The older man admitted readily that of course they’d had sex overnight, and he could only assume that his colleague’s erection, combined with the fact that the other didn’t resist as he mounted him, suggested that he was a consensual partner. (You thought you were a deep sleeper—imagine the somnambulistic fortitude required to snooze through your first anal penetration.) While the courts tried to sort it all out, the alleged rapist was imprisoned for two years, until finally a judge decided that both men were more or less right and the accused should be set free.

This is but one of many curious examples of sex and law intertwining. In recent years, the related phenomenon of sexsomnia ("sleep sex") has witnessed periodic public interest through a spate of high-profile cases, stories that have in turn motivated intriguing academic research on this little-known subject. Even Alfred Kinsey, the grand archivist of carnal facts, while spending a considerable deal of time on the subject of "wet dreams" and nocturnal orgasms in both sexes, didn’t mention how some people act out sexually during their sleep.

Unlike the aforementioned case of the sleeping employee being the passive, immobilized recipient in unwanted intercourse, it’s the sleeper that instigates the trouble in bouts of sexsomnia. Although researchers don’t yet have an exact figure on the frequency of this parasomnia, most specialists believe that it’s probably fairly common. Nearly all people who exhibit recurrent sexual acts while sleeping have a history of sleepwalking. In fact, many experts believe that sexsomnia is simply a variant of sleepwalking, which affects 1 to 2% of adults, and this is how it’s presently classified in the main diagnostic manual, the International Classification of Sleep Disorders, Revised. Most people do not seek out clinical treatment due to either their ignorance of the condition or embarrassment, and oftentimes their sexual ‘automatisms’ are innocuous enough—such as fugue-state masturbation, weak pelvic thrusts or steamy pillow talk. (More on the concept of automatism in a moment.)

In a 2007 issue of Brain Research Reviews, however, psychobiologist Monica Andersen and her co-authors [pdf] investigated all case studies that had, at that point, been published in the literature, and they attempted to piece together some common denominators underlying sexsomnia. They found that the most common precipitating factors of sleepsex are sleep deprivation, stress, alcohol or drug consumption, excessive fatigue, and physical overactivity in the evening. Being male and under the age of 35 is also a major factor; furthermore, when women do lapse into this altered nocturnal state, their actions tend to be comparatively innocent, moaning and masturbating rather than, like male sexsomniacs, fondling and grinding whatever is unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of their bed that night.

One of the most extraordinary things about sexsomnia is that the sleeping person’s inappropriate behaviors are sometimes directed at people that, during their waking lives, are not particularly arousing to them. In a 1996 issue of Medicine, Science and the Law, psychiatrist Peter Fenwick describes the case of an allegedly heterosexual male cadet who was court-martialed for homosexual assault after he’d crawled into bed with another soldier and caressed that private’s privates. The case was dismissed after the court accepted that the absence of an erection in the accused—sexsomnia may or may not involve erections—meant that it was unlikely that the episode was "purposeful," but instead just a bizarre sleepwalking incident. (I’ll refrain, but there’s a clever Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell joke just waiting for you.) Another example of atypical homosexuality in sexsomnia involved a 16-year-old who walked into his aunt and uncle’s bedroom one night and began molesting his adult uncle.

Erections, as I hinted at earlier, complicate matters for the judicial system. One notorious case garnering international media attention, and as reviewed recently [pdf] in Current Psychiatry by a group of sleep researchers from The Cleveland Clinic, centered on a 30-year-old landscaper named Jan Luedecke, who drank far too much at a wild croquet party in the Toronto suburbs one night back in 2003 and fell asleep on a couch. "Some time later," explain the authors, "he approached a woman who was sleeping on an adjacent couch, put on a condom, and began sexual intercourse with her." From her terrified perspective, the woman awoke to discover that her underwear had been removed and a glassy-eyed Luedecke was trying to rape her. She pushed him off, ran to the washroom, and returned to find him standing there bewildered. Luedeke, who had an established history of sleepwalking behaviors, was acquitted after University of Toronto psychiatrist Colin Shapiro testified for the defense that the accused was in a dissociative state when the incident occurred and therefore he was not consciously aware of his actions.

Difficult legal cases such as these hinge entirely on the demonstrability (or at least strong probability) of an automatism—a crime committed during sleep. This is a concept for which Fenwick provided one of the clearest definitions:

An automatism is an involuntary piece of behavior over which an individual has no control. The behavior is usually inappropriate to the circumstances, and may be out of character for the individual. It can be complex, co-ordinated and apparently purposeful and directed, though lacking in judgment. Afterwards the individual may have no recollection or only a partial and confused memory for his actions.

In other words, sexsomniacs are basically lascivious zombies. There’s presently no way to determine with absolute certainty if the phenomenon, when invoked as a defense, was really the cause or just a really convenient alibi. Still, certain criteria (detailed sleep pattern data from a nocturnal polysomnography, or PSG; sleepwalking and sleep-related sex in the past; known trigger factors, such as intoxication, fatigue, and stress; timeline of the alleged assault, since episodes typically occur within two hours of sleep onset during non-REM sleep; amnesia for the event; no attempt to conceal or "cover up" the incident, but instead confusion) can at least aid a jury in its decision-making. It’s tempting, to say the least, to be skeptical that a sleepwalker could act so purposefully as to fiddle successfully with a condom wrapper yet be conscious as an orthopteron, but London sleep researcher Irshaad Ebrahim reminds us that sleepwalking behaviors are highly variable and can be very detail-oriented, citing people preparing meals and eating, driving motorbikes and cars, even riding horses, all while getting a good night’s sleep.

For those for whom sexsomnia has become a serious problem, in a legalistic sense or otherwise, the good news is that it responds well to pharmaceutical intervention. Just a small dose of benzodiazepines—most notably clonazepam—before bedtime seems to do the trick for most. You might want to consider this if you’ve shown a history of sexual violence during sleep or, say, you’re a frequent sleepwalker and there are children in the home. (Several cases have, in fact, involved very unsettling child abuse charges being filed against alleged sexsomniacs.) But sexsomnia can be a problem even for those who live and sleep alone. After five years of waking up several nights a week with ejaculate mysteriously between his fingers, one 27-year-old was distressed to realize that he was a somnambulistic masturbator. The poor man broke two fingers when his nocturnal alter ego tore off the restraints he’d used to avoid moving in bed.

There are also those, I should point out, whose sex lives have actually benefited courtesy of their sexsomnia. Schenck and his coauthors review several such cases, including a woman who "reported infrequent and hurried sex with her [awake] husband, whom she described as distant and reluctant during wakefulness." This lady found that "nocturnal sex was more satisfactory, even if associated with bruises at times."

So, in closing, how do you determine if your partner’s overnight prurient poking is thoughtless or thoughtful? This is the very question that prompted me, several nights ago, to write this article. Apparently, snoring during sex is a good sign, and something that the partners of many sexsomniacs mention as occurring, quite out of the blue, during even the most complicated sex acts. It occurred to me also that zombified nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) episodes may be distinguished from actual conscious sexual arousal by the presence or absence of, oh what to call it, "penile flicking." (That’s not a technical term, but since I dredged the depths of the literature in vain trying to find the proper term for this voluntary lateral, up-and-down movement of the erect penis through the clenching of the cremaster muscle [Ed. correction: as a reader noted, this movement is effected by the pubococcygeus (PC) muscle, not the cremaster. Thank you.]—oh c’mon, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about—please permit me a little poetic license.) I always thought such penile flicking responses must serve some communicative signalling function in our species, but apparently nobody has thought to study it from an adaptive perspective. Imagine that.

Anyway, could a sexsomniac use his social cognition to deliberately communicate a message of sexual interest by flicking his penis at his partner? It’s probably not a failsafe NPT detector, but I suspect not. And bear that helpful hint in mind in the days to follow, since God only knows the coming apocalypse will deliver its share of sex-crazed male zombies—a lot of randy gay ones too, according to Family Radio.

Image: Paul Delvaux: The ‘Sleepwalker of Saint-Idesbald’ (1897-1994) (from)

About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

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.

I don’t know why she chose Mother’s Day of all days for such a lachrymal task as this, but she did have a tragedian air to her—one, I might add, that was well-deserved given all she’d been through. Before she was forty, she’d had a mastectomy from breast cancer along with several long bouts of chemotherapy. This was followed by cancer in the other breast a few years later and another mastectomy. Within the decade, my parents would have a sudden and bitter divorce, and within a few months of the divorce, just as she was "getting back on her feet," she was dealt another heavy blow, diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer, more surgeries and seven more embattled years of chemotherapy. She died—begrudgingly—at just fifty-four.

It’s a very sad story, needless to say, and unfortunately one that is shared by too many other loving and wonderful mothers who will not be with us on this Mother’s Day. The fact that I was conducting my PhD research on people’s afterlife beliefs at the time of her death stemmed almost entirely from the many theoretically inspiring and insightful conversations I had with her as she tried to imagine her own afterlife. (She leaned towards scientific materialism but she wasn’t an atheist and had an "open mind" about the whole affair, I think it’s safe to say.)

Among the more unpleasant aspects of this tale—both for her at the time and for my siblings and I still now—were the gloomy logistics of arranging her burial. What sticks out in my mind most of all from that Mother’s Day of 2000 is the image of my mom with her trembling hands flipping through an L. L. Bean-looking catalogue handed to her by a pleasant enough but benumbed funeral home director. It was a rather hefty booklet filled with glossy images of all the latest models of caskets, vaults, urns, catafalques, headstones and other new products then in funerary vogue, this particular collection especially suitable for middleclass cadavers. Since she died near Fort Lauderdale wanting to be closer to her own mother, she found herself in a part of the country especially profitable to the death industry, the area being a geographic hub of the elderly.

The whole affair that day left a bad taste in my mouth. There was something so plastic, so slick, so "commercial" about this business of death that—much like the rest of an overdeveloped South Florida where this bland, freeway-hugging cemetery is laid—felt much too cold to me. Modern cemeteries, with their zero lot lines, perfectly manicured hedgerows and identical-looking headstones, have become eerily similar to the suburbs; or perhaps the suburbs have become eerily similar to cemeteries. Either way, what bothers me most of all is that, looking back, it didn’t have to be like this.

Death is rarely pleasant, of course, no matter how one’s body is disposed of. But in recent years, I have become increasingly interested in green burial, a blanket term that refers to any "alternative" funerary practice in which the deceased is buried in a biodegradable casket or shroud, often in nature preserves and without embalming preservatives (fluids that keep a corpse pretty, usually just for viewing purposes) that dramatically slow down and disrupt the natural decomposition process.

Although it’s the subject of continuing debate and the actual health implications remain unclear, these embalming chemicals may become contaminants as formaldehyde and other potentially carcinogenic agents are absorbed into the soil and groundwater. Green burial advocates have cast the issue almost entirely in terms of avoiding the staggering environmental impact of traditional burial. Consider that before this year is over, Americans will bury 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid, 90,272 tons of steel (caskets), 2,700 tons of copper and bronze (caskets),1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete (vaults),14,000 tons of steel (vaults), and 30-plus million board feet of hardwoods (much tropical; caskets). And don’t forget about the countless of acres of land bulldozed over for these bald landfills of synthetic human remains.

Cremation isn’t much an improvement over things. Going up in smoke may use fewer natural resources than traditional burial, but it also consumes a significant amount of fossil fuels. According to a statement by the Trust For National Legacies, Inc., a nonprofit land conservation organization working to drive the sustainable growth of green burial practices in the Midwest, "… you could drive about 4,800 miles on the energy equivalent of the energy used to cremate someone—and to the moon and back 83 times on the energy from all cremations in one year in the U.S." There’s also the non-negligible problem of mercury being released into the atmosphere whenever a person with amalgam dental fillings is cremated.

These environmental concerns alone make green burial a no-brainer to me. But as a psychologist, and one that’s also had a negative personal experience with burying a loved one in the traditional manner, I think our conception of death and burial needs a serious rethink. Let’s close the lid on those anonymous, revenue-driven, laminated cultural practices of commercial burial that we’ve all become so complacent with. There’s got to be a better way to go about it than what we’ve been doing all these years. And green burial of one specific form, which I’ll outline soon, is a win-win.

Although the idea of green burials in wildlife preserves or park-like settings is not new, and it’s likely a desirable prospect for certain future dead soul who’d prefer absolute oblivion, it seems to me that this is not going to appeal to most individuals because we human beings tend to have a pressing need for "symbolic immortality." This was a term coined by the cultural anthropologist Ernst Becker in his book, The Denial of Death (1973), but which has since been empirically elaborated by scientists working on terror management theory. The basic idea behind the construct of symbolic immortality is that cultural artifacts that survive the individual’s literal death while also containing some reminder of the person’s special existence can meaningfully reduce human death anxiety.

There are many nuances to terror management theory and this construct, but the important point to mention here is that a sense of symbolic immortality can be obtained by concrete markers of prosperity, anything from benches in the park with dead people’s names etched in gold, to graffiti on boxcars, to initials carved into a tree, to headstones in a graveyard. So while conventional cemeteries may be unnecessarily gloomy, they do at least satisfy this psychological need for people to remain embedded, even if just symbolically by way of lifeless granite headstones, in the immortal culture. If the green burial industry is ever to take off and begin appealing to more people, I suspect that this is one key issue—physical memorializing—that advocates are going to need to address.

It seems to me that one way to solve this problem while remaining true to the central philosophy of green burial is to have people buried beneath a specific tree—a little sapling of your choice nourished by your decomposing body beneath. In favorable soil conditions, a non-embalmed body, skeleton and all, can rot away entirely within about 15 to 25 years. But many trees species, let’s not forget, can live for many hundreds of years (some thousands). Imagine that on making final arrangements at the funeral home some day, you and your loved ones were able to choose from among a wide variety of co-habitable tree species to find just the right tree to suit your fabulously unforgettable being—this instead of flipping through a catalog filled with caskets, coffins, and crypts as my mother found herself doing. Not only will your death nourish a new life, but you’re also saving another tree, the one that would be sacrificed for your sake in the shape of a mass-produced coffin with plastic handles.

In addition to offering a healthy dose of symbolic immortality, this form of specific-tree burial would tap into another central aspect of our psychology. In recent years, researchers have found that human beings operate with a strong essentialism bias. We tend to reason implicitly, and often explicitly, as though a person’s unobservable "essence" is transmitted through physical contact with that individual. You’d probably cringe to think of wearing a child molester’s eyeglasses, or a serial murderer’s laundered tee-shirt, but have trouble articulating precisely why donning such material causes you so much aversion.

Likewise, you may have your deceased grandmother’s wedding ring or the old jersey of your favorite football player stashed away somewhere, and these objects are coveted because they’re so intimately linked to these adored individuals. In the present context, let’s say that you buried your beloved dog beneath a rose bush in your garden. If you’re anything like me, you’d have a special affinity for that particular rose bush over others, and it would be especially unpleasant should, say, someone uproot it and dangle it before you.

Now picture an entirely new brand of cemetery, a planned, verdant, protected land tended by trained arborists and filled not with row after row of bland, lifeless, crumbling headstones, but instead row after row of living trees. Each tree, selected for regional appropriateness and other suitability factors as advised by arborist staff, would symbolize a unique human existence. (Not to get carried away, but perhaps a plaque or marker might be added too, enhancing the symbolic immortality element, but aesthetics would of course vary.) These aren’t simply trees planted in memoriam of the dead, but leafy chimeras through whose veins absorbed individual human lives.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that even if one doesn’t believe in some ethereal or religious version of the afterlife, it’s rather difficult to escape the cognitive illusion that the unobservable essence of each person has been somehow gradually transmuted into his or her individual tree. Two massive walnut trees growing side-by-side with interlocking branches seem somehow more than mere trees when we learn that they’re actually growing upon what was once a husband and wife who lived centuries ago. There’s no shortage of idyllic essentialist images like this—grandchildren climbing up their great-grandfather’s limbs, children who’d been sickly in life now bursting with the blazing colors of autumn, beauty queens forever fragrant with immaculate cherry blossoms, stillborn infants now magnificent oaks. It would take some time, of course, for this human arboretum to fully mature. But what’s the rush?

In fact, our species’ notorious difficulty in imagining our own psychological nonexistence is yet another cognitive factor that makes this particular form of green burial appealing. This is a topic that I’ve described at length before, but the basic idea is that, since we have no proper analogy for the stateless state of death (we can’t recreate consciously in our heads what it "felt like" to be under general anesthesia, or prior to our conception, or even during last night’s dreamless, non-REM sleep) the closest we can get to mentally grasping what it will be "like" to be dead inevitably reifies the stateless state of nothingness.

With specific-tree burial, this simulation constraint principle of the afterlife finds a nonreligious, or even religious, outlet. For example, you might not believe that you’ve been literally reincarnated or reborn into the tree, but in envisioning its growth and rejuvenation year after year through all the socially active centuries of human affairs lying ahead, it’s still rather difficult to refrain from attributing some of your own emotions to this living character of the tree.

So these are the thoughts that occupy me with the approach of this year’s Mother’s Day. It would sure be nice to hug an eleven-year old palm tree in Florida this weekend.

About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

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.

If this sounds like roundabout "psychobabble" ripped straight from the pages of Erich Fromm’s classic anti-existentialist screed Escape From Freedom, it’s important to bear in mind that today’s psychologists have convincing data to stand on. In an article published last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Kay and his co-authors report findings from a set of four studies designed to test the hypothesis that the relationship between God and government in human cognition is, conceptually, a "hydraulic" one: whenever the level of perceived control from one of these external sources falls, faith in the other source will inevitably rise.

In the first study, the religious and political attitudes of Malaysian university students were probed two weeks before and two weeks after that country’s 2008 general election. "We predicted," write the authors, "that before the election, participants would perceive more instability, show less of an inclination to defend the legitimacy of their government, and demonstrate higher beliefs in the existence of a controlling God compared to after it." And this is precisely what they found. Still, because this was a correlational study (it’s possible, for instance, that an unknown factor between these dates intervened) the authors could not draw any causal inferences.

So, in their second study, the investigators had Canadian university students read one of two fictitious articles about the Canadian government—basically, either that it was "unstable" and on the verge of collapse, or that it was in better shape than ever. Those students who’d been randomly assigned to the unstable government condition evidenced a significantly greater belief in a controlling God than did those who had just read about the Canadian government being in remarkably good order.

Empirical sleuths, of course, must always play Devil’s advocate. Perhaps the threat of an unstable government does more than unthread the safety net of perceived control; it may also undermine people’s national identity, therefore driving people to God as an alternative source of meaning rather than as a substitute of control, per se. But the authors were able to rule out this alternative account in a third study, which showed that creating the impression of an unstable government increases only people’s beliefs in a controlling God; it has zero effect on their belief that God is a source of meaning.

In the final study, Kay and his colleagues showed that the trick works the other way around too: participants who’d read a fake Science article arguing that, should an entity like God even exist, it would still be impossible for it to exert any control in the universe, ranked their country’s political system more favorably than did those who’d just read an oppositely-worded story about God’s potential reach in human lives.

Government instability isn’t the only source of religion, the authors acknowledge, but it may be more potent a faith factor than we’ve previously realized.

About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

Two columns ago

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."

I did give fair warning in my original post, I should say, that Gallup’s theory was sure to provoke just these types of defensive, emotion-addled responses, that it was "likely to boil untold liters of blood and prompt mountains of angry fists to clench in revolt." And this it did, such as in the above cases. PZ Myers, by contrast, was disappointed that Gallup’s work didn’t deliver the much-anticipated "throb of adrenaline" that I’d promised him. I can try to deliver for Myers this time, but I did add the caveat, did I not, that "it’s the best—the kindest—of you out there likely to get the most upset."

After swiftly dismissing the expected lunatic fringe (any non-sarcastic mention of Sodom and Gomorrah would qualify as such), there was still a coterie of unhappy responders to my post, the vast majority from a corner that readers might not expect to be so opposed to Gallup’s arguments—evolutionary biology. Between the disciplines, it’s no secret that many evolutionary biologists have a "problem" with evolutionary psychology, holding its practitioners in almost the same regard as creationists. "Ugh," wrote one Pharyngula commentator, "[e]volutionary psychologists make the rest of us look bad. I have to smile and make nice when we pass in the faculty lounge. It brings me great pain." What Christ-like behavior indeed.

To get at the heart of their problems with Gallup’s theory, and to try to better understand this animosity over evolutionary psychology and why it’s so often hailed as the country cousin of their own discipline, Gordon Gallup has agreed—rather nice of him, given the tone—to respond to these biologists’ concerns.

BERING: Let’s address the elephant in the room. It’s embarrassing for me to even ask this of you, since the answer is so obviously "no" to me. Is your theory a justification of your own homophobia?

GALLUP: A lot of people think that if a person has a theory it’s a window unto their soul. I have lots of theories. (See CV (pdf).) I have a theory of homophobia, I have a theory of homosexuality, and I have a theory of permanent breast enlargement in women, just to mention a few. So that would make me a homophobic, homosexual who is preoccupied with women’s breasts. I am not homophobic and I’m not homosexual. My only interest in homosexuality and homophobia is to use evolutionary theory to generate evidence that may shed new light on what have heretofore been poorly understood phenomena.

BERING: Evolutionary biologists, but also non-specialists, casually deride evolutionary psychology as generating "just-so stories." Jon Wilkins, for example, of the Santa Fe Institute, reminds us that, "plausibility is NOT scientific proof." Likewise, Yoder layers his critique of your work with references to Brother Grimm fairy tales. Larry Moran of the University of Toronto, writes, "Why is it that respected evolutionary psychologists think these just-so stories are an important part of their discipline?"

How has this just-so-story rhetoric affected your research, and what, in your view, are the implications of this type of Gouldian-era language for the discipline as a whole?

GALLUP: Just as the title of my 1996 reply to John Archer implies, everything in science boils down to a matter of evidence. I have never taken the position that plausibility is a substitute for evidence. My 1995 paper along with my reply to Archer is based almost entirely on evidence. It is interesting how my critics tip-toe around the fact that my approach is based on a testable hypothesis, and how they go out of their way to side-step the fact that the data we’ve collected are consistent with the predictions. Whether it is politically incorrect or contrary to prevailing social dogma, is irrelevant. In science, knowing is preferable to not knowing. Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they’re open. If I were a homosexual, I’d want to know about these data.

While we’re on the topic of "just-so stories," one of the comments on the SciAm blog argues that all of my 1995 findings could just as easily be subsumed by a simple concern about child sexual abuse. But if that were the case, then why in the third study did the level of concern about a child staying overnight at a friend’s house in the presence of the friend’s homosexual parent, flip flop as a function of whether there was a match between the sex of the child and the sex of the homosexual parent? Homosexuals don’t have a monopoly on child sexual abuse. Heterosexual matches also pose a risk of child sexual abuse!

BERING: One common complaint lodged against evolutionary psychology is that its methods, which typically do not track the claimed fitness benefit, are inadequate for testing its hypotheses. PZ Myers, in surveying your homophobia studies, writes:

They know nothing about heritability, they’ve shown nothing about differential survival or fecundity … Is this to be the fate of evolutionary psychology, that it shrivels away into irrelevancy as its proponents overhype (sic) feeble, pathetic data sets?

Myers is, of course, notorious for such over-the-top statements—like the Jim Bakker of New Atheists, a caricature of sweat, histrionics and stage glitter, he sees religious conspiracies as often as evangelicals see the Devil. But Yoder also complains that your work fails to "mention evidence of heritability or a fitness benefit to homophobia." (Rob Kurzban explains, importantly, how Yoder bungles the term heritability in reference to evolved adaptations: "If Yoder is right [about the definition of heritability], someone needs to update Wikipedia. And all the biology textbooks.")

So how do you respond to these concerns that evolutionary psychology, with its focus on modern behaviors and decision-making, ignores genetics?

GALLUP: Assertions that evolutionary psychologists know nothing about heritability and fail to relate their findings to survival and fecundity are naïve and unfounded. As detailed in a series of recent reviews, people with faces judged to be more attractive are more fertile. Men with attractive faces have higher quality sperm, men and women with attractive faces live longer, they are healthier, and have better immune systems. A recent study based on over 10,000 people shows that those with attractive faces do in fact have more children. Both men and women with fewer deviations from bilateral symmetry (low fluctuating asymmetry) are mentally, physically, and genetically healthier, and more fertile. Guess what? They also have more attractive faces.

We’ve shown that a person’s voice is also related to fitness. Just as people with more attractive faces are more symmetrical, the same is true for people with more attractive voices. The sound of a person’s voice conveys information about their gender, age, body configuration, hormonal status, when they lost their virginity, how many sex partners they’ve had, their propensity for infidelity, whether they are on birth control pills, and whether they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle.

There are many other well-documented proxies for fitness. Evolutionary psychologists have found that women with hourglass figures (low waist-to-hip ratios) are rated as more attractive, and it’s been shown that these women are healthier and more fertile. They also have more attractive voices.

Grip strength (pdf) is another compelling case in point. Individual differences in grip strength predict recovery from surgery, morbidity, joint impairment, bone density, fat-free body mass, muscle mass, disability and morbidity, protein loss, and even the risk of dementia. Grip strength is not only heritable, but men with high grip strength scores also have more attractive faces and, would you believe, more attractive voices.

While we’re on the subject, heritability and heritable are not always the same. Rather than being an index of whether a trait is inherited, heritability is a measure of the proportion of individual differences in the expression of a trait that are due to underlying differences in genes. With the exception of a pair of identical twins, heritability is always greater than zero. No one has ever done a selective breeding experiment and failed to find an effect, and that includes behavioral traits.

Now, what about homosexuality? For most of human evolutionary history, exclusive homosexuality would have been tantamount to a ticket to reproductive oblivion. Even today, adult male homosexuals who also engage in heterosexual intercourse are the exception rather than the rule. If homosexuality were only heritable, it would have disappeared long ago. In the context of our discussion of homophobia, what would have been the fate in future generations of genes being carried by parents who went out of their way to encourage and engineer homosexual lifestyles among their children? Enough said? Not quite. What causes homosexuality? Heterosexuality does, both literally and figuratively. Unless you’ve been conceived through artificial means, everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation, owes their very existence to the heterosexual activity of their parents.

BERING: The most controversial aspect of your theory is that gay adults can influence a child’s developing sexuality, increasing their adult arousability to same-sex partners. Homosexual offspring, you argue, would normally be detrimental to overall genetic fitness; even bisexual offspring would be so, all else being equal.

Some animal models demonstrate how specific developmental experiences are linked to adult sexuality (for example, rat pups that nurse from dams whose teats are sprayed with a citral scent have difficulty ejaculating as adults during intercourse with any female that isn’t similarly lemony smelling), but much less is known about the precise role of early childhood experiences in shaping adult sexuality. We do, however, know that there is not a straightforward genetic pathway, as evidenced by the fact that, in some cases, only one member of an identical twin set is homosexual. Can you expound on this issue of "sexual imprinting"?

GALLUP: In contrast to women, men have what amounts to a monopoly on paraphilias and kinky sex. This is consistent with the idea that there may be a critical period following the onset of puberty that leads to sexual imprinting in males. This can be used to generate a number of testable predictions. Sexual experiences that occur before or after the critical period ought to have little or no lasting effect on sexual orientation. With parental homophobia, evolution doesn’t always result in perfect outcomes. As evidenced by the 1995 data from the third study, parents show a generalized concern for young children that are perceived to be impressionable.

According to an imprinting model, prepubertal boys who are sexually molested by older males should be relatively unaffected in terms of their sexual orientation. I would also predict that heterosexual men sent to prison and coerced into same-sex relationships with other inmates, ought to resume heterosexual lifestyles on being released. There are data that show that being sent to all male boarding schools increases the incidence of homosexuality; I would predict that this effect would be conditional upon whether they were in such schools when they went through puberty. As detailed in my 1996 reply to Archer, we’ve collected data from male homosexuals that show that most gay males don’t report getting a clear sense of their homosexual orientation until they have their first same-sex postpubertal sexual experience. I would also expect other "sex object choices," such as fetishes, to be tied to sexual experiences males have in association with sex shortly after the onset of puberty.

BERING: You claim, citing several older datasets, that homosexual men are more likely to have sexual relations with children and adolescents than are heterosexual men. In an email exchange with Ray Blanchard, perhaps the world’s leading scholar on the study of "erotic age orientation," he confirmed that a major analysis of penile responses indeed shows that, "homosexual pedophiles constitute a disproportionate number of pedophiles." But he also adds an important caveat, which is that most homosexual males are teleiophiles—attracted to adults—and they are no more attracted to children than are heterosexual teleiophiles.

Hence the confusing language in popular summaries of this analysis, such as Alice Dreger’s, "Do gay men have more sexual interest in children than straight men do? No. And we have lab studies to prove it." That’s correct. However, it’s important to understand that she and Blanchard use "gay men" to refer to homosexual teleiophiles only, excluding from this category those attracted to prepubescent or pubescent boys. Blanchard clarified for me: "Neither of us uses ‘gay’ as a synonym for ‘homosexual.’ We use ‘gay’ as a synonym for ‘homosexual teleiophile.’ He’s also non-committal about your theory but leans toward skepticism, largely because of the following:

Homosexual pedophiles are rarely detectably effeminate; in contrast, homosexual teleiophiles often are. Homosexual pedophiles become soccer coaches; drag queens generally do not. The degree of separation might not be perfect, but it could be good enough for natural selection, which doesn’t have to get it right every single time. Therefore separating children from the most visible homosexual men, which is probably what happens, would have no adaptive value whatsoever.

How do you reconcile these observations with your theory?

GALLUP: The evidence reviewed in my 1996 response to John Archer shows that the incidence of gay males who have sex with minors—although these are likely to be postpubertal age—is far higher than Blanchard suggests. There is also evidence that shows that the propensity to have sex with minors is positively correlated with promiscuity among homosexual males. Unlike heterosexual pedophiles, homosexuals who have sex with minors target young postpubertal victims. Although they rarely admit it, heterosexual males experience sexual arousal to photos of young postpubescent females as well. Homosexuals are merely expressing a generalized evolved male strategy that puts a premium on youth. Unlike a man, a woman’s capacity to reproduce following puberty is inversely proportional to her age.

BERING: Finally, if you were to conduct a follow-up study today, what, if anything, would you do differently? What questions remain unanswered in your mind, and how do they relate to the ostensibly positive shifts in attitudes regarding gays and lesbians since your original theory formation?

GALLUP: With the help of a transfer student from Taiwan, the surveys used in my 1995 paper were translated into Chinese. When this student returned to Taiwan several years later, she was able to replicate all of the effects I reported in a sample of native Taiwanese college students. While this doesn’t prove the results are a cross-cultural universal, it certainly implies that they aren’t an artifact of Western culture.

Several years ago, following a talk I gave on homophobia, a colleague who was there sent me the following anecdote which shows how the results of our research on hypothetical parenting questions have real world implications, and suggests how these evolved mechanisms operate below the radar:

My husband has a former student who is gay. He and my husband still collaborate and the student comes here to work on papers once or twice a year and he stays at our place. The three of us have spent quite a bit of time talking about the student’s life–he has a steady partner, and both of them continue to ‘cruise’–and my husband’s never seemed at all bothered by it. The first time the student came to stay after our son was born my husband was incredibly aggressive with him–verbally and physically. At one point, my husband was outdoors and the student, my son and I were in the kitchen. The phone rang. It was for my husband, so I went outdoors to let him know. He immediately got on my case for leaving the baby "alone." That night, I talked to my husband about your ideas about parent’s attitudes towards homosexuals and he was pretty shocked. He said he had felt very uncomfortable with the student around and didn’t understand it, because he had never been upset before. My husband has two daughters and he said it never bothered him when the student was around them and that the student had babysat for them on any number of occasions. Clearly, he feels quite differently about it now, although rationally he’s not worried about the student.

Before anyone accepts the unfounded assertions that my work is an attempt to somehow demean and diminish homosexuality and promote homophobia, they should read my 1995 paper. If you do, you will learn that the theory also predicts that even homosexuals ought to be homophobic under certain circumstances.

Contrary to the claim that most evolutionary psychologists make evolutionary biologists look bad, it’s my critics who haven’t bothered to read the literature and should know better, that make themselves look bad.

***

Bering here, to address an important issue in closing. Yoder, along with Forbes’ blogger Will Wilkinson and Scienceblogs’ Mike the Mad Biologist found fault with my decision to popularize Gallup’s obscure, dated research: "Why on Earth would Bering dredge up Gallup’s adaptive fairytale a decade and a half after it was published, if it was baseless to begin with?" [Is there some secret induction ceremony I should be aware of in which biologist yearlings must swear an oath to their stodgy supervisor to endlessly echo this generic just-so-story mantra?]

My answer is two-fold: First, simply because it is not baseless. I don’t agree with Gallup on all of the details (for example, he gives too short shrift, I think, to heritable individual differences in the potential for sexual imprinting and homosexuality). As I emphasized in my original post, Gallup’s 1995 study is imperfect, as all early-stage research endeavors are, and indeed his findings are not without alternative explanations (incidentally, however, not a single one of these critics—Myers, Yoder, Wilkinson, Wilkins, or Morgan—actually engages with Gallup’s specific findings, but instead simply brush off the data as "bad science" or "ridiculous"). But Gallup’s findings are the only data available, and they do indeed, as he says, support his hypotheses. Never did I—and never, ever, anywhere, do I—use the word "prove." Psychological science is cumulative, and whether homophobia constitutes an adaptation remains an open question. (Hence the question mark after my title, "Natural Homophobes?"—re-billed as the sensationalized "Darwin Hates Fags").

Second, perhaps Yoder, a gay man like me, I gather, lives in a happily cloistered, academic, professional world with kind intellectual friends and colleagues whose stomachs no longer turn—or do they?—when happening upon two men or two women cuddling and kissing; perhaps this privileged social ambience has created in him the impression that homophobia is "obviously" a socially-learned, cultural bias, since it has indeed gotten better even over the short course of our own lives.

But, and I’ll stand by this claim, with the possible exception of artificially populated communities such as certain neighborhoods in San Francisco, there is not a single human society on this planet—and there probably never has been, even in ancient Greece, even among the Sambia of New Guinea—where two men can share a romantic kiss and embrace, especially in the presence of children, without meeting palpable disapproval. If you doubt this, go out on Main Street and try it; notice how many parents quickly shuffle their children away or, among gay-friendlier parents, watch how their faces are frozen with indecision about how to handle this scene so that it complements their humanitarian views. (I couldn’t persuade my partner, Juan, to conduct this experiment with me, so, intrepid gay souls, please do report back.) And if it’s all social learning, it’s curious, is it not, that children all over the globe must be explicitly taught not to be homophobic, not the other way around; antigay attitudes in sixth-grade boys seem as naturally emerging as language acquisition in infants. Exceptions are rare; so rare, in fact, that they make national headlines.

I, for one, would like to know why this aversion to gay people is, always has been, and always may be, so endemic to our species. Evolved social biases—in whatever form they take—can only wither away the more by shining a mercilessly bright light of science on them. If this reveals unsavory blemishes, such as the stereotype that gay men are pedophiles, so be it. Some are—and as Blanchard’s data reveal, homosexual males are in fact overrepresented in this category. Most aren’t. As I’ve said before, data don’t cringe; people do. The fear among gay men of being branded as pedophiles or "hebephiles" is understandable, given the moral climate, but it is also a cowardly, self-serving nod of approval for us to dehumanize other social undesirables. "Well, I’m gay, but at least I’m not one of them!" But of course not all such individuals are child molesters. I’m very much of the same mind as Blanchard about this, when he writes that, "they cannot be blamed for what they feel, and they should be supported for the constant self-restraint they must exercise in order to behave ethically."

So, I’ll continue to dredge up any old theory, no matter how meager the supporting data, that—with revised methodologies and growing conceptual nuance—can inspire other researchers to better understand why human beings who, through absolutely no fault of their own, aside from the fact that their genitals happen to leaven or lubricate in statistically atypical fashion at the sight of a penis or vagina, are all over the world, right now, being beaten, derided, driven to suicide and murdered.

About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

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.

In reality, the game was a little more complicated than this. There were secretly two balls, one in each box, and we had decided in advance whether the children were going to get it "right" or "wrong" on each of the four guessing trials. At the conclusion of each trial, the child was shown the contents of only one of the boxes. The other box remained closed. For example, for "wrong" guesses, only the unselected box was opened, and the child was told to look inside ("Aw, too bad. The ball was in the other box this time. See?"). Children who had been randomly assigned to the control condition were told that they had been successful on a random two of the four trials. Children assigned to the experimental condition received some additional information before starting the game. These children were told that there was a friendly magic princess in the room, "Princess Alice," who had made herself invisible. We showed them a picture of Princess Alice hanging against the door inside the room (one that looked remarkably like Barbie), and we gave them the following information: "Princess Alice really likes you, and she’s going to help you play this game. She’s going to tell you, somehow, when you pick the wrong box." We repeated this information right before each of the four trials, in case the children had forgotten.

For every child in the study, whether assigned to the standard control condition ("No Princess Alice") or to the experimental condition ("Princess Alice"), we engineered the room such that a spontaneous and unexpected event would occur just as the child placed a hand on one of the boxes. For example, in one case, the picture of Princess Alice came crashing to the floor as soon as the child made a decision, and in another case a table lamp flickered on and off. (We didn’t have to consult with Industrial Light & Magic to rig these surprise events; we just arranged for an undergraduate student to lift a magnet on the other side of the door to make the picture fall, and we hid a remote control for the table lamp surreptitiously in the experimenter’s pocket.) The predictions were clear: if the children in the experimental condition interpreted the picture falling and the light flashing as a sign from Princess Alice that they had chosen the wrong box, they would move their hand to the other box.

What we found was rather surprising, even to us. Only the oldest children, the seven- to nine-year-olds, from the experimental (Princess Alice) condition, moved their hands to the other box in response to the unexpected events. By contrast, their same-aged peers from the control condition failed to move their hands. This finding told us that the explicit concept of a specific supernatural agent—likely acquired from and reinforced by cultural sources—is needed for people to see communicative messages in natural events. In other words, children, at least, don’t automatically infer meaning in natural events without first being primed somehow with the idea of an identifiable supernatural agent such as Princess Alice (or God, one’s dead mother, angels, etc.).

More curious, though, was the fact that the slightly younger children in the study, even those who had been told about Princess Alice, apparently failed to see any communicative message in the light-flashing or picture-falling events. These children kept their hands just where they were. When we asked them later why these things happened, these five- and six-year-olds said that Princess Alice had caused them, but they saw her as simply an eccentric, invisible woman running around the room knocking pictures off the wall and causing the lights to flicker. To them, Princess Alice was like a mischievous poltergeist with attention deficit disorder: she did things because she wanted to, and that’s that. One of these children answered that Princess Alice had knocked the picture off the wall because she thought it looked better on the ground. In other words, they completely failed to see her "behavior" as having any meaningful connection with the decision they had just made on the guessing game; they saw no "signs" there.

The youngest children in the study, the three- and four-year-olds in both conditions, only shrugged their shoulders or gave physical explanations for the events, such as the picture not being sticky enough to stay on the wall or the light being broken. Ironically, these youngest children were actually the most scientific of the bunch, perhaps because they interpreted "invisible" to mean simply "not present in the room" rather than "transparent." Contrary to the common assumption that superstitious beliefs represent a childish mode of sloppy and undeveloped thinking, therefore, the ability to be superstitious actually demands some mental sophistication. At the very least, it’s an acquired cognitive skill.

Still, the real puzzle to our findings was to be found in the reactions of the five- and six-year-olds from the Princess Alice condition. Clearly they possessed the same understanding of invisibility as did the older children, because they also believed Princess Alice caused these spooky things to happen in the lab. Yet although we reminded these children repeatedly that Princess Alice would tell them, somehow, if they chose the wrong box, they failed to put two and two together. So what is the critical change between the ages of about six and seven that allows older children to perceive natural events as being communicative messages about their own behaviors (in this case, their choice of box) rather than simply the capricious, arbitrary actions of some invisible or otherwise supernatural entity?

The answer probably lies in the maturation of children’s theory-of-mind abilities in this critical period of brain development. Research by University of Salzburg psychologist Josef Perner, for instance, has revealed that it’s not until about the age of seven that children are first able to reason about "multiple orders" of mental states. This is the type of everyday, grown-up social cognition whereby theory of mind becomes effortlessly layered in complex, soap opera–style interactions with other people. Not only do we reason about what’s going on inside someone else’s head, but we also reason about what other people are reasoning is happening inside still other people’s heads! For example, in the everyday (nonsupernatural) social domain, one would need this kind of mature theory of mind to reason in the following manner:

"Jakob thinks that Adrienne doesn’t know I stole the jewels."

Whereas a basic ("first-order") theory of mind allows even a young preschooler to understand the first propositional clause in this statement, "Jakob thinks that . . . ," it takes a somewhat more mature ("second-order") theory of mind to fully comprehend the entire social scenario: "Jakob thinks that [Adrienne doesn’t know] . . ."

Most people can’t go much beyond four orders of mental-state reasoning (consider the Machiavellian complexities of, say, Leo Tolstoy’s novels), but studies show that the absolute maximum in adults hovers around seven orders of mental state. The important thing to note is that, owing to their still-developing theory-of-mind skills, children younger than seven years of age have great difficulty reasoning about multiple orders of mental states. Knowing this then helps us understand the surprising results from the Princess Alice experiment. To pass the test (move their hand) in response to the picture falling or the light flashing, the children essentially had to be reasoning in the following manner:

"Princess Alice knows that [I don’t know] where the ball is hidden."

To interpret the events as communicative messages, as being about their choice on the guessing game, demands a sort of third-person perspective of the self’s actions: "What must this other entity, who is watching my behavior, think is happening inside my head?" The Princess Alice findings are important because they tell us that, before the age of seven, children’s minds aren’t quite cognitively ripe enough to allow them to be superstitious thinkers. The inner lives of slightly older children, by contrast, are drenched in symbolic meaning. One second-grader was even convinced that the bell in the nearby university clock tower was Princess Alice "talking" to him.

Princess Alice may not have the je ne sais quoi of Mother Mary or the fiery charisma of the Abrahamic God we’re all familiar with, but she’s arguably a sort of empirically constructed god-by-proxy in her own right. The point is, the same basic cognitive processes—namely, a mature theory of mind—are also involved in the believer’s sense of receiving divine guidance from these other members of the more popular holy family. When people ask God to give them a sign, they’re often at a standstill, a fork in the road, paralyzed in a critical moment of existential ambivalence. In such cases, our ears are pricked, our eyes widened, our thoughts ruminating on a particular problem—often "only God knows" what’s on our minds and the extent to which we’re struggling to make a decision. It’s not questions like whether we should choose a different box, but rather decisions such as these: Should I stay with this person or leave him? Should I risk everything, start all over in a new city, or stay here where I’m stifled and bored? Should I have another baby? Should I continue receiving harsh treatment for my disease, or should I just pack it in and call it a life? Just like the location of the hidden ball inside one of those two boxes, we’re convinced that there’s a right and a wrong answer to such important life questions. And for most of us, it’s God, not Princess Alice, who holds the privileged answers.

God doesn’t tell us the answers directly, of course. There’s no nod to the left, no telling elbow poke in our side or "psst" in our ear. Rather, many envision God, and other entities like Him, as encrypting strategic information in an almost infinite array of natural events: the prognostic stopping of a clock at a certain hour and time; the sudden shrieking of a hawk; an embarrassing blemish on our nose appearing on the eve of an important interview; a choice parking spot opening up at a crowded mall just as we pull around; an interesting stranger sitting next to us on a plane. The possibilities are endless. When the emotional climate is just right, there’s hardly a shape or form that "evidence" cannot assume. Our minds make meaning by disambiguating the meaningless.

This sign-reading tendency has a distinct and clear relationship with morality. When it comes to unexpected heartache and tragedy, our appetite for unraveling the meaning of these ambiguous "messages" can become ravenous. Misfortunes appear cryptic, symbolic; they seem clearly to be about our behaviors. Our minds restlessly gather up bits of the past as if they were important clues to what just happened. And no stone goes unturned. Nothing is too mundane or trivial; anything to settle our peripatetic thoughts from arriving at the unthinkable truth that there is no answer because there is no riddle, that life is life and that is that.

Image credit: Barbara Aulicino, in American Scientist

(Author’s note: Some of the foregoing material is excerpted, with edits, from my new book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life.)

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.

As Archer notes, most evolutionary research on homosexuality involves trying to locate its fringe gene-enhancing benefits. This homosexuality-is-adaptive-too approach complements a growing tolerance for gay individuals, such as, happily, myself. Gallup comes at things from a very different angle, instead asking why there is such disdain for gay people to begin with and—although cultures may vary in their relative degree of tolerance or practice of homosexual behaviors—why no cultures actually endorse exclusive, lifelong same-sex relationships.

The Gallup-Archer debate hinges on a multi-study empirical report by Gallup. In it, he aims to test his hypothesis that negative attitudes toward homosexuals is a function of parents’ implicit concerns that their children’s sexual orientation is malleable. Formulated originally with Susan Suarez in 1983, Gallup’s idea involves the following central prediction:

So-called homophobic reactions should be 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.

Remember, adaptive behavior is behavior that simply favors genetic replication. So just as being cuckolded results in maladaptive, unprofitable parental investment in someone else’s biological offspring, gay offspring—even your own biological child—are less likely to reproduce, and are likewise genetically costly. There are caveats. Just as a stepchild can contribute to one’s genetic success in indirect, non-reproductive ways—for example, by helping to raise your younger biological offspring, their half-siblings—gay offspring can do the same. But Gallup’s is an all-else-being-equal argument, and it makes sense in strictly biological terms. "In its simplest form," he clarifies, "parents who showed a concern for their child’s sexual orientation may have left more descendants than those who were indifferent."

Gallup’s position rests on a set of assumptions about the development of sexual orientation, assumptions that are in fact challenged by Archer. We’ll get to Archer’s criticisms eventually, as well as Gallup’s responses to them. But first, let’s have a look at how Gallup went about testing his hypothesis that homophobia stems from unconscious, gene-driven, parental concerns.

In his first of four studies, Gallup administered a survey to 167 self-identified straight undergraduate students—males and females—a survey designed to gauge the student’s "degree of discomfort" in interacting with homosexuals who held different jobs. Importantly, these occupations varied along one dimension: the extent to which the job entailed interaction with children. Included were nine sample occupations—three that afforded a high degree of contact with kids (teacher, school bus driver, medical doctor) and six that provided moderate to low contact (lawyer, construction worker, bank teller, pilot, mechanic, sales clerk). As predicted, the degree of discomfort was significantly correlated with the likelihood that persons in these categories would come into contact with children.

Intriguingly, hypothetical gay medical doctors elicited the most discomfort among the participants, an unexpected finding that Gallup sought to better understand in his second study. "There are at least two ways to interpret the greater discomfort expressed by respondents concerning homosexual doctors," he writes:

One possibility is that medical doctors have privileged access to children’s genitals in the context of conducting routine medical examinations, and therefore might be perceived as posing a more serious threat to a child’s developing sexuality. An interesting alternative interpretation concerns the prospect of contracting [HIV] from a homosexual doctor through nonsexual modes of transmission (e.g., blood, hypodermic needles).

In the second study, all of the characters were doctors of various kinds, physicians varying in the extent to which they would have intimate contact with children (pediatrician, child psychiatrist, general practitioner, cardiologist, brain surgeon, gerontologist). When left uninformed about the doctor’s sexual orientation, participants expressed the most discomfort about the prospect of interacting with those who had "invasive" techniques, such as the brain surgeon. But the picture changed dramatically when they were told the doctor was gay. Contrary to the HIV-exposure hypothesis, which should have produced little to no differences in attitudes toward the different gay doctors, it was the opportunity for intimate contact with children that correlated with discomfort. The participants were significantly less comfortable about the idea of interacting with gay pediatricians and general physicians than they were for the other types of gay doctors. In fact, gay brain surgeons, associated readily with infectious material, elicited the least aversion.

Gallup’s third study was even more revealing. Imagine, undergraduate participants were told, that you had a son or a daughter, either an 8-year-old or a 21-year-old, who was invited to spend the night at a friend’s house. On a scale of 1 ("not at all upset") to 4 ("very upset"), how upset you would be, as a parent of this hypothetical child, to learn that the friend’s mother or father was gay? The participants expressed most concern when their imaginary younger child was exposed to same-sex homosexual parents (young sons being around the friend’s gay father; young daughters being around the friend’s gay mother). This was especially pronounced (mean concern = 3.3) for male participants thinking about their imaginary eight-year-old son (compared to 2.3 at the thought of him being around a lesbian). These very same male participants didn’t seem to mind the prospect of their 21-year-old son being exposed to their friend’s lesbian mother (1.6), or even for this older imaginary son spending the night around their friend’s gay dad (2.3). So, the participants’ homophobia didn’t seem to be moralistically generalized to the "gay lifestyle" but instead it emerged specifically in terms of their folk beliefs about children’s sexual impressionability.

Gallup’s final study replicated his basic findings with a broader sample. Nearly two hundred people from the Albany area, varying along a wide range of demographics (age, sex, religiosity, education, number of gay friends) were polled on a "Homosexual Reproductive Threat Scale." Participants responded to statements such as, "I would feel uncomfortable if I learned that my daughter’s teacher was a lesbian," "I would feel uncomfortable if I learned that my neighbor was a homosexual," and so on. As you might expect, variables such as sex (males being more negative) and religiosity predicted homophobia. But parental status was independently correlated with negative attitudes to gays and lesbians, too; and this effect was especially salient for the males in the survey. Fathers with young children were the most homophobic.

A year after Gallup published his theory of homophobia, Archer critiqued it in the same journal. "I shall argue," he writes, "that there is perhaps too great a willingness to assume that the sorts of human behavior with which we are familiar today can necessarily be viewed in adaptive terms." Archer rightly notes, in fact, that the best predictor of adult sexual orientation is gender nonconforming behavior in early childhood. So Gallup’s central position that homosexuality occurs via "seduction" of (especially male) children is flawed. Rather, says Archer, "the link between pedophiles and male homosexuals is one that has been encouraged by media depictions of all those with nonheterosexual orientations as deviant."

Not so fast, Gallup reacts to this media conspiracy claim:

Although the incidence of heterosexual pedophiles exceeds that of homosexual pedophiles by a factor of about two to one, individuals in the population at large with a heterosexual orientation outnumber those with a homosexual orientation by about 20 to 1. Thus, although there are fewer homosexual than heterosexual pedophiles, the proportion of homosexual pedophiles is considerably higher than that of heterosexual pedophiles. Homosexual pedophiles also tend to be highly promiscuous. [In 1987], the mean number of victims of heterosexual pedophiles was 19.8, whereas among homosexual pedophiles the average number of victims was 150.2. Because they have more victims, homosexual pedophiles have a correspondingly greater likelihood of being apprehended, and this might account for their disproportionate representation among those arrested for sex crimes.

Furthemore, Gallup never claims that being seduced by a gay pedophile is the only path to homosexuality, nor that—obviously—"turning gay" is an inevitable outcome of being molested by an adult of the same sex. Instead, he argues, in the ancestral past, such developmental experiences would have led to statistically more homosexuality outcomes than would the absence of such encounters, and thus there was a selection bias for homophobia, apparently exacerbated by becoming a parent.

Recent evidence offers some support for Gallup’s model: men—but not women—who were sexually abused as children by same-sex adults are more likely than non-abused males to have homosexual relationships as grownups. Most researchers believe that there is something like a "sexual imprinting" process that occurs in early development, which may help to explain this, as well as fetishism and paraphilias. Note also that some of the most virulent homophobia today can be found on the playgrounds, which is consistent with the sexual imprinting model. Children and teen’s stubborn reluctance towards tolerating gays and lesbians may itself be an adaptive proscription orienting them away from same-sex experimentation. Gallup points to data showing that boys whose first masturbation experiences are around other boys are more likely to be homosexual as adults than are those who are alone.

Archer favors an alternative evolutionary theory of xenophobia (hatred of outgroup members) to account for Gallup’s findings. Gays, he argues, have been homogenized into stereotypical pedophiles because of media biases, just as racist British people refer to anyone of certain Asian origin—whether from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or Pakistan—as "Pakis." Xenophobia would have been an adaptive strategy in the ancestral past, says Archer, given the ever-present threat of social dissidence within groups and also the invasion of other groups.

But, replies Gallup, this still doesn’t explain the data in hand. "How can xenophobia," he counters, "account for the fact that college students who have yet to become parents feel more uncomfortable about the prospect of being in the presence of a homosexual teacher than a homosexual construction worker or airline pilot? Similarly, how would an appeal to xenophobia explain the fact that students report feeling more uncomfortable about the prospect of being in the presence of a homosexual pediatrician or general practitioner than a homosexual brain surgeon?"

And this, as I mentioned, is pretty much where the debate ends. I’ve revived this fifteen-year-old discussion in the hopes that it might spark new research. Gallup’s work is intriguing, his theory sound. Yet his studies are imperfect, the data remain un-replicated, public attitudes have changed (dramatically, in the US) and other cultures may differ in response to homophobia manipulations. One thing that is important to keep in mind, however, is that societal changes in attitudes toward homosexuals may not mirror people’s implicit biases. Today’s answers may very much sound like the voice of gay-friendly 2011 but, as any social psychologist knows, you can’t always trust what people tell you as reflecting their private attitudes. (They may not even be aware of these themselves.) So researchers today would have to be very clever in probing for what have rapidly become socially inappropriate feelings.

Sometimes, science can be exceedingly rude—unpalatable, even. The rare batch of data, especially from the psychological sciences, can abruptly expose a society’s hypocrisies and capital delusions, all the ugly little seams in a culturally valued fable. I have always had a special affection for those scientists like Gallup who, in investigating highly charged subject matter, operate without curtseying to the court of public opinion. And, before anyone does so, what an absurd, spineless suggestion for science to refrain from engaging in any intellectual inquiry, from exploring theoretical possibilities, because we fear what we may learn about ourselves. It’s the devils we don’t know that we have the most to fear. That Gallup’s ideas could be championed by antisocial conservatives to promote further intolerance against gays is inevitable, perhaps; but if it’s any consolation, it should also have them doing a bit of navel-gazing, seeing that their hatred is just an artifact of their godlessly evolved minds.

About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

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 …

Now, without reaching for your nearest Google search bar, name a single gay male stand-up. The only one I could come up with is Ant. Who? Sure, there are plenty of gay male comedic writers behind the scenes, and also character actors on comedy sitcoms, but in terms of heavy-hitters in the world of comedy, lesbians put us gay males to shame. (By the way, now you may Google away, which will tell you that Ant is that guy from Last Comic Standing.)

It’s all rather curious indeed, because although there are over four million LGBT Americans, we’re still relatively rare specimens, hovering at around 2-3 percent of the total population. Yet, you wouldn’t know this by crunching the gay numbers among the comediennes’ roster. Although no hard stats are known to exist for the respective orientations of comediennes, the proportion for that group is at least anecdotally much higher. It would be easy enough to brush off this peculiar fact with some casuistic postmodernist explanation, such as saying that disenfranchised groups find empowerment through humor. But if this were the case, then where are all the big-name gay male comedians? For that matter, where are the armies of visually-impaired stand-ups, the rank and file of popular little-people comedians, the overrepresentation of paraplegic humorists with their own HBO comedy specials? Many other stigmatized demographics, after all, outnumber lesbians in the general population.

I’d be misleading you by saying that science has a clear answer to this profound mystery. There is, however, a compelling theory that may or may not help to shed some light. Let me preface this by saying that psychological science deals mainly in terms of statistical probabilities, not proof theorems (individual differences are normal and expected). Still, one of the hottest findings to emerge from contemporary humor research is the fact that while both men and women say that they value a "good sense of humor" in potential partners, the two sexes mean vastly different things by this. Men prefer women who find them funny ("humor receptivity"), not funny women per se ("humor production"). Women display the opposite trend in their dating preferences. These were the basic findings reported in a 2006 issue of Evolution and Human Behavior by psychologist Eric Bressler and his colleagues.

The authors interpret these data, and similar data, by drawing from psychologist Geoffrey Miller’s ideas about the evolution of humor. Miller has argued that ancestral males’ ability to produce entertaining humor demanded a set of heritable cognitive skills, including intelligence and creativity, and thus was a hard-to-fake signal of genetic quality. Due to the sexes’ differential investment in reproduction (just at a coital level alone, about 90 seconds versus 9 months), women would have evolved to be more receptive to signs of genetic quality than males. Men, meanwhile, would have been on the lookout for women who responded positively to their humor.

Researchers who study homosexuality have discovered that the brains of many lesbians were over-exposed to male hormones during prenatal development, influencing not only their adult sexual orientation, but also masculinizing other behavioral and cognitive traits in which there exist innate sex differences. This is not true of all lesbians, but it is especially true for those who exhibit male-typed profiles. So it is not implausible that some lesbians’ courtship strategies would largely mimic opposite-sex-typed patterns, including a differentiated capacity for humor production that attracts female attention. This would not be a conscious strategy, it must be emphasized, and indeed this is what many critics of evolutionary psychology repeatedly fail to realize. So, for heaven’s sake, don’t mistake this as me saying that lesbian comics go on stage just to score chicks. Gene replication is simply a mechanistic means to an end; if it works, it works. Many evolutionary psychologists, including Miller, believe that our minds are often just epiphenomenal interpreters.

It’s noteworthy also that so many successful comediennes are on the "butch" rather than the "femme" side of the scale (this even applies to those who aren’t lesbians, such as Brett Butler, Janeane Garofalo and Whoopi Goldberg), leaving one to wonder how much currency this evolutionarily informed theory of humor may in fact have.

About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).