A Paradox in the Politics of Science

Has anyone else noticed this irony: that a lot of the people who reject well-grounded science (evolutionary theory, climate change, etc.) hold exactly the same stereotypical ideas about gender that pop up repeatedly in evolutionary psychology? Obviously many of the denialists have religious reasons for rejecting sound science, while evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists are overwhelmingly secularists. Yet they share the idea that men are the pursuers, women the pursued; that men are naturally dominant; that homosexuality is somehow aberrant.

Strange bedfellows, huh? Logically, we can be pretty sure no one working in the field of ev psych or sociobiology believes in creationism. These are disciplines that have spawned some of our most outspoken atheists. Many of these scientists them see their work as progressive, in fact. Many believe their research exposes the roots of human nature, allowing us to mold a kinder, more ethical society. In The Caveman Mystique, Martha McCaughey portrays this impulse as a quasi-religious reformist zeal that arose as practitioners of ev psych and sociobiology moved into the void left by the post-Darwin decline of religion.

To be fair, ev psych and sociobiology often look more regressive than they are because the media skews their findings to match existing gender stereotypes. However, the actual science is still too often rife with speculation and gendered assumptions (as figleaf shows today in a smart post on how these assumptions skew findings). And so it meshes all too easily with the stories that religious fundamentalists tell about our gendered "nature."

On the flip side, I'd be interested to know if there's a subset of creationists who also embrace ev psych. Seems to me that the "ev" part of it would be anathema to them. But otherwise the "psych" half would work pretty well for them, if they could only find a way to compress it into the past 6000 years.

Hard-Wired to Dehumanize?

There's a bit of a kerfuffle about a new study by Susan Fiske of Princeton that, according to the Guardian, shows men are hard-wired to objectify women. Young male volunteers were shown images of women in bikinis and their brains were scanned with MRI to measure their responses. Their scans showed activity in regions of the brain normally activated when using tools.

As Vanessa at Feministing points out, while the study corroborates a long-standing feminist contention - that ubiquitous images of scantily-clad female bodies encourage the objectification of women - arguments for the hard-wiring of men's responses can hurt women more than help them:

[S]uggesting that men are hardwired to objectify women is really dangerous, and for obvious reasons. Simply taking naked women out of the picture (figuratively and literally) is not going to resolve the problem, and implying that "men can't help it" will just be used to contribute to the same sexist customs and rape culture that we're fighting against.

However, even the Guardian's exceedingly shallow reporting reveals that the studies' findings are more complicated than that. Only men who scored high on a questionnaire measuring basic sexist attitudes had MRI scans indicating a lack of empathy toward the women whose images they viewed:

In the final part of the study, Fiske asked the men to fill in a questionnaire that was used to assess how sexist they were. The brain scans showed that men who scored highest had very little activity in the prefrontal cortex and other brain regions that are involved with understanding another person's feelings and intentions. "They're reacting to these women as if they're not fully human," Fiske said.

(Source: The Guardian)

Hmmm. In other words, the MRI revealed what parts of the brain remain dormant when a man fails to perceive another person as a human. But does that prove hard-wiring? Perhaps, but only after years of socialization. The research subjects are college students. Their brains are the product of two decades' worth of learning about how the world works. The brain is an amazingly plastic organ, and its functions are not all inborn; they are shaped in response to environmental stimuli. The fact that not all men responded the same - and that objectification correlated with sexist attitudes - undermines the interpretation that all baby boys will inevitably grow up to regard women as objects. Upbringing and society must play a role.

How solid is this research? Figleaf frets that there's no original study available online to back this up, and he's right: the study has only been presented at a conference (the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago), and it's not yet published in any journal. So we can't dissect it properly.

On the basis of a report in the National Geographic, however, we can pinpoint some of the study's limitations: It was small, with only 21 experimental subjects. It only looked at hetersexual men (no women were tested at all). And all of the subjects were college students, which means that the sample would not measure responses of men at various stages of learning over their life course.

In one respect, the study is actually more disturbing than either Vanessa or figleaf notes (again, because the Guardian article was so flimsy). The sexist subjects didn't just regard women as tools to their pleasure; they went beyond mere objectification in to a much scarier realm. This comes out in how The Independent described the study's findings:

The study focused on a region of the brain called the medial pre-frontal cortex, just above the eyes, which, when activated seems to damp a man's tendency to express hostile sexist thoughts about women, Professor Fiske said. Men who express the strongest sexist tendencies tend to have a less active medial cortex. It becomes decactivated in men who are the most hostile to women, but only for women in bikinis, she said.

"So basically they are particularly likely to treat these women as objects, at least that is the interpretation of the data we have so far. It is a preliminary study but it is consistent with the idea that they are responding to these photographs as if they were responding to objects rather than people."

It was "shocking" to find that the pictures of scantily clad women deactivates the medial pre-frontal cortex, Professor Fiske went on. "The only other time we've observed the deactivation of this region is when people look at pictures of homeless people and drug addicts who they really don't want to think about what's in their minds because they are put off by them."

In other words, subjects prone to sexism didn't just objectify women; they dehumanized them.

That's a crucial distinction. We all objectify people we don't know well but find attractive. Women do this too: We look at someone and think to ourselves, "Yummy!" That's not a response to someone's stellar character or personality. But there's a big difference between one-dimensional appreciation of sexiness and reducing the object of your lust to less than human. It's only the dehumanizing response that nurtures rape culture and other potential violence.

A Kiss Is Just a Kiss? Men, Women, and Oxytocin

Kissing kittehs from I Can Has Cheezburger?

One of the hallowed traditions of Valentine's Day is polishing up all the old chestnuts about men, women, and romance. So when I saw a headline in yesterday's Columbus Dispatch proclaim "Kissing a stress-buster for both men, women," I was pleasantly surprised not to get a rehash of the usual stereotype - that girls and kissing go together like, well, love and marriage, while boys view kissing as a necessary step toward getting what they really want. Which of course nice girls like me wouldn't want. Right?

The study behind the article - led by Wendy Hill, a professor of neuroscience at Lafayette College - didn't stop at busting just that one stereotype:

Kissing, it turns out, unleashes chemical changes that ease stress in both sexes and encourage bonding in men, though not so much in women. ...

In an experiment, Hill explained, pairs of college students who kissed for 15 minutes while listening to music experienced significant changes in their levels of oxytocin, which affects pair bonding, and cortisol, associated with stress. Their blood and saliva levels of the chemicals were compared before and after the kissing.

Both men and women had a decline in cortisol after smooching, an indication their stress levels declined.

For men, oxytocin levels increased, indicating more interest in bonding, while oxytocin levels went down in women. "This was a surprise," Hill said.

But what a cool surprise! For the past few years, conservative hand-wringers have told us that young women are screwing around like bonobos, and that oxytocin - the bonding chemical - sets them up for heartbreak. Women produce more oxytocin than men, and therefore our biochemistry programs us to be devastated emotionally by casual sex. Or so worry scolds like Laura Sessions Stepp. (In lieu of a direct link to her, here's a critical overview of her argument at Campus Progress.)

While I don't share Stepp's concerns that young women are permanently messing up their lives through casually hooking up with guys, I do think that brain chemistry matters. Oxytocin provides a pretty compelling explanation for the instability of friends-with-benefits relationships. And it's true that women produce more of it.

I've just never been convinced that only women are vulnerable to our hormones and biochemistry. After all, most men eventually want a committed relationship. I've wondered if men's pair-bonding impulses might be more sensitive to low amounts of oxytocin, much like women's libidos are more sensitive to low amounts of testosterone. I'm not a biochemist, so all I can do is speculate, but I'd love to see a study on this.

Conservative fretting about women's unique vulnerability to the emotional hazards of sex doesn't hold up well to scientific evidence suggesting that men, too, might be wired to feel that sometimes, a kiss is not just a kiss. (No word on whether a sigh is always just a sigh. The experiment was conducted in a student health center, so frankly, I'm amazed that any love chemicals were measurable.)

Not a Frigid Wench after All

Photo by Flickr user elisfanclub, used under a Creative Commons license.

When I read Madame Bovary for a college seminar on history as viewed through the nineteenth-century European novel, my professor - a witty, slightly arch gay man - waggled his eyebrows and asked us what we thought Flaubert meant when he said that Emma Bovary's predecessor, the first Mmme. Bovary, had cold feet in bed.

Well, I understood it all right. As an otherwise warmblooded young lady, I just didn't care much for the implications. Maybe it's a souvenir of having grown up in North Dakota, but my feet are cold nearly all the time. So are my hands. I've been known to wear wool slippers even in July.

Now, nearly a quarter century later, science has finally come to rescue me from these intimations of frigidity. As Kate Wighton reports in The Independent (via Alternet), we are basically tropical critters, and that leads to a host of problems at higher latitudes:

Our extremities dictate how hot or cold we feel; the temperature in our hands and feet varies widely compared with that of our organs. If our hands or feet are chilly, we'll feel cold. Most of our biological temperature sensors are located in the skin, and we have four times as many cold sensors as hot sensors. Our heightened sensitivity to cold makes a chilly draught invariably feel more uncomfortable than a warm breeze.

And women really do feel the cold more than men, but this is because they are better at conserving heat than men. Mark Newton, a scientist at W.L. Gore, the company that makes Gore-Tex, and a researcher at the University of Portsmouth, explains: "Women have a more evenly distributed fat layer and can pull all their blood back to their core organs."

(Read the whole thing here.)

From this, Wighton concludes: "So there is literal truth in the old saying cold hands, warm heart."

Or is it really a warm heart after all? Flaubert was correlating those cold feet with entirely different "core organs." Then again, "cold hands, warm nether regions" doesn't pack the same punch - unless you go with the sort of Anglo-Saxonisms that don't generally appear in family newspapers.

Either way: Did you hear that, Emma Bovary?

Wighton also reports on a recent Yale study that found we're apt to behave more warmly when our bodies are comfortably warm. We conflate psychological and physical warmth.

I'll buy that. Right now, I've got a hot water bottle, my woolly slippers, a black velour turtleneck over my long-sleeved T-shirt, and a cozy warm laptop. (I worried about reports of the MacBook Pro overheating before I bought it, but this time of year computer heat is more a feature than a bug.) I just talked to my mom in California. My kids are finally asleep. My thermostat is at 70 degrees F. If I get any warmer I'll turn into a skinny white Oprah.

Lady in Red

Here's how to become invisible to men: Turn 35 and have a baby or two. (Never mind the MILF stereotype; an actual real live baby is not generally a major attractant to random men.)

Here's how to become visible to men again: Clothe yourself in red.

Or so say scientists at the University of Rochester who've found evidence that men are more attracted to women who are either clad in or surrounded by the color red.

To quantify the red effect, the study looked at men's responses to photographs of women under a variety of color presentations. In one experiment, test subjects looked at a woman's photo framed by a border of either red or white and answered a series of questions, such as: "How pretty do you think this person is?" Other experiments contrasted red with gray, green, or blue.

When using chromatic colors like green and blue, the colors were precisely equated in saturation and brightness levels, explained [researcher Daniela] Niesta. "That way the test results could not be attributed to differences other than hue."

In the final study, the shirt of the woman in the photograph, instead of the background, was digitally colored red or blue. In this experiment, men were queried not only about their attraction to the woman, but their intentions regarding dating. One question asked: "Imagine that you are going on a date with this person and have $100 in your wallet. How much money would you be willing to spend on your date?"

Under all of the conditions, the women shown framed by or wearing red were rated significantly more attractive and sexually desirable by men than the exact same women shown with other colors. When wearing red, the woman was also more likely to score an invitation to the prom and to be treated to a more expensive outing.

The red effect extends only to males and only to perceptions of attractiveness. Red did not increase attractiveness ratings for females rating other females and red did not change how men rated the women in the photographs in terms of likability, intelligence or kindness.

(See the whole press release here.)

So I'll go out on a limb here and say yes, independent Kittywampus research confirms this. Of course, our scientific standards are low - one data point will do ya - as befits the walnut-sized feline brain.

When I was on my way to the Berkshire Conference last summer, I experienced something that hadn't happened to me since my kids were born. I had a middle seat on the airplane. On either side of me were attractive men in their early to mid fifties. Both seemed interested in flirting with me. Not that I was looking for it - and mind you, I was on my way to a conference with 99% female attendees, so even if I'd been single, I doubt I would have been in that mode. But it was interesting and, okay, gratifying to not be invisible.

It's funny; when you're young, unwanted male attention ranges from annoying to threatening, but when it disappears altogether, that too is a harsh insult.

So maybe it's just that I'm a veritable man magnet (ha!) and my superpowers were unleashed as soon as I didn't have my two kids in tow.

Or maybe it's that I was wearing red. This combination, to be precise, which includes some of those nice yellows that attract garden pests (and that the researchers apparently didn't test).


(Bear in mind, I wasn't doing my fake ballerina pose on the plane.)

For what it's worth, my two young sons love this red and gold combination too, so maybe the red preference starts really early, in that stage of childhood innocence where they just know they love bright colors, and they love their old mama, and the two things together are irresistible.

So I'm on board with the University of Rochester scientists' findings. But I really balked at how they were reported in the media. The report I initially read - from WTAE in Pittsburgh - said this, again echoing the press release:

"Our research demonstrates a parallel in the way that human and nonhuman male primates respond to red," they wrote. "In doing so, our findings confirm what many women have long suspected and claimed: that men act like animals in the sexual realm. As much as men might like to think that they respond to women in a thoughtful, sophisticated manner, it appears that at least to some degree, their preferences and predilections are, in a word, primitive."

(From the report at WTAE Pittsburgh.)

Ha! We knew it! Men are just beasts!

(Sigh. Deep, exasperated, frustrated sigh.)

Look. I'm plenty willing to believe that men are animals. I'm just not willing to believe that women are somehow higher. Put women up on a pedestal, and we're guaranteed to fall down.

I was all ready to blame the scientists for signing on to these assumptions when I decided to track down the original study, which appears in the latest Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (full text available for a fee here; I used my library access). Their article shows that the university's public relations people and the media share the blame for catering to stereotypes, while the scientists appear to have been scrupulously evenhanded:

As much as men might like to think that they respond to women in a thoughtful, sophisticated manner, it appears that at least to some degree, their preferences and predilections are, in a word, primitive. Women, however, may have little room for phylogenetic pride, as it is possible that they respond to male red in a manner similar to that of nonhuman female primates. In several species of primate, red is displayed most prominently in dominant males (Setchell & Dixson, 2001), and females appear to be particularly attracted to male conspecifics showing red (Darwin, 1874; Waitt et al., 2003). Interestingly, women find dominant men highly attractive (Rainville & Gallagher, 1990; Sadalla, Kenrick, & Vershure, 1987), especially during ovulation (Gangestad, Simpson, Cousins, Garver-Apgar, & Christensen, 2004), and it may be that women perceive red on men as a dominance cue with amorous implications. We have recently begun to examine the question of women’s response to a “gentleman in red” (which, it is important to reiterate, is independent of the question of men’s response to a “lady in red”) and have acquired preliminary evidence that a display of red on a man indeed increases his attractiveness to women. Thus, at least with regard to red and sex, it seems that neither men nor women will be able to rightfully claim the evolutionary high road.

(Andrew J. Elliot and Daniela Niesta, "Romantic Red: Red Enhances Men’s Attraction to Women," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2008, Vol. 95, No. 5, 1150–1164; quotation from p. 1161)

In other words, we're all animals. I'm cool with that.

In fact, I'd love to see the researchers take a closer look at women's affinity for pink and purple. Sure, those are classic sparkle pony and Barbie colors. But in us hairless mammals at the top of the food chain, aren't pink and purple also sex colors par excellance?

Just coincidentally, my husband is wearing a red fleece jacket this evening. Yum ...

The Visible and the Invisible

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

No, this isn't a post about the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, though I ripped off his title. It's about some really cool science news: Researchers now have the tools to make you invisible. Not just hide you from radar (in case you were worrying about that; I know I was) but really, truly, sci-fi-fantastically invisible.

The AP reports (via the Columbus Dispatch):

Researchers have demonstrated for the first time they were able to cloak three-dimensional objects using artificially engineered materials that redirect light around the objects. Previously, they only have been able to cloak very thin two-dimensional objects.

The findings, by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Xiang Zhang, are to be released later this week in the journals Nature and Science.

The new work moves scientists a step closer to hiding people and objects from visible light, which could have broad applications, including military ones.

People can see objects because they scatter the light that strikes them, reflecting some of it back to the eye. Cloaking uses materials, known as metamaterials, to deflect radar, light or other waves around an object, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream.

Metamaterials are mixtures of metal and circuit board materials such as ceramic, Teflon or fiber composite. They are designed to bend visible light in a way that ordinary materials don't. Scientists are trying to use them to bend light around objects so they don't create reflections or shadows.

(Source: Associated Press)

If these cloaks actually became widespread beyond the military sphere, they would radically change our perception of space and embodiment. If you saw someone before you, you could be pretty sure they were for real. But empty space might be empty ... or might conceal another person. Our ideas of privacy would be radically transformed. So would the opportunities for outdoor sex.

So here's my question. If you had an invisibility cloak, what would you do with it?

I made the mistake of telling my kids about this story, in a vain effort to stave off pre-bedtime meltdowns, and now they naturally want an invisibility cloak for Christmas. The Bear says he'd use it to play hide and seek. The Tiger said, "If you was a little kid, you could walk around alone." I asked him if he really meant that - I still have waking nightmares of him running away in crowds, which really only ended this summer - and he said yep, he would like to get around without having to hold onto any grow-mutt (aka grown-up).

I'd like to have an invisibility cloak so I could listen in on the goofy things the kids say and believe when they don't think the grow-mutts can hear. Like the time the Bear and a couple of his friends were talking about what would happen if your brain was too big and your head exploded.

If you had an invisibility cloak, what would you choose to do with it?

Babies, Biology, and Ideology

Photo by Flickr user JeremyHall, used under a Creative Commons license.

For feminists and women's health advocates, it's not exactly news that the life sciences aren't quite the beacons of objectivity that they purport to be. Even so, a study released today on the risks of pregnancy over age 40 is startling in how its conclusions are totally warped by ideology.

Published in the Journal of Women's Health, the study - "Pregnancy Late in Life - A Hospital-Based Study of Birth Outcomes," by Ali Delpisheh et al. - concludes that fetal risks rise sharply after about age 40.

Background: Pregnancy in older women is of great relevance, particularly in developed countries where many women experience pregnancy late in the childbearing age.

Methods: A hospital-based data analysis of 9506 delivery records from 1998 to 2003 at the Liverpool Women's Hospital was undertaken to assess pregnancy outcomes in older women of reproductive age.

Results: Overall, 2.4 % of mothers were >40 years of age (advanced), 5.6% were <20 style="font-style: italic;">followed a U-shaped curve with nadirs in the middle age classes. ... [my emphasis]

Conclusions: Pregnancy in older women is associated with adverse birth outcomes, particularly in primigravidas. Increased health promotion is required to highlight the risk of adverse birth outcomes in women who become pregnant for the first time in the late childbearing years.

So, okay. We already knew that pregnancy becomes riskier for both mother and child as the mother grows older. But first, note that the data follow a curve. Women don't suddenly drop off a cliff after age 40. If you go to the full-length study (available for free in .pdf format) you'll see that it really is a U-shaped curve.

Second, and more importantly: The data in the full text of the study clearly show that by all three measures (low birthweight, preterm birth, and small for gestational age), the babies of young mothers - defined here as less than 20 years old - fare just as poorly.

Yet the intro and conclusion of this abstract fail to even hint that extreme youth could be just as problematic as advancing age. Indeed, given that adolescents outnumbered the older gals by a ratio of 5 to 2 in this study, their babies' health problems represent a greater public health problem and an even larger contribution to human suffering.

Moreover, this study was conducted in Great Britain, a nation with universal health insurance. In the United States, the rate of complications among very young mothers is likely to be higher yet because they are less likely to be insured than the older crowd. In the United States, furthermore, complications of prematurity among uninsured adolescent mothers mean that 1) taxpayers will foot much of the bill for the NICU, and 2) those adolescent mothers will suffer financial worries along with the emotional rollercoaster of caring for a baby born too soon. Having watched friends deal with significant prematurity, I know I'd struggle even at my "advanced age." How much harder would that be if you, the mother, were only 16 or 18!

Now why would careful scientists fail to highlight the second half of their findings? Could it be that the cultural anxieties about women deferring marriage and childbearing have spilled into the hospital and lab, too? Because I honestly see no other reason why the abstract (which is all many doctors and journalists will read) should omit the sufferings of adolescents. The way the problem is currently framed, it plugs right into a discourse of blaming women for first establishing a career before starting a family, while ignoring the real physical risks of very early motherhood.

A Sniffly Penalty for Parenting "Right"

Photo by Flickr user James Jordan, used under a Creative Commons license.

So you had a baby. You breastfed for a year (well, ten months, because he was losing interest and you were ready to get your body back). And you waited until he's six months to introduce solid food (well, five months, because he was watching your spoon move with such lust!). And you did all of this "right" - well, by the book, anyway - because your baby's dad has wretched allergies and you wanted to spare him the same fate.

And now? It turns out you did it all wrong:

Delayed introduction of cow's milk and other food products is associated with a higher rather than lower risk for atopic manifestations in the first 2 years of life, epidemiologists in the Netherlands report in the July issue of Pediatrics.

They note that one of the most widely recommended allergy prevention strategies is delaying the introduction of milk and solid foods into the infant's diet. However, there is little scientific evidence to support this advice.

To investigate, Dr. Bianca E. P. Snijders, at Maastricht University, and her colleagues analyzed data from a prospective birth cohort of 2558 infants. Mothers completed questionnaires at 34 weeks of gestation and at 3, 7, 12, and 24 months postpartum regarding food exposures, allergy manifestations, and confounders. Blood samples were collected from the infants at 2 years of age for determination of sensitization.

After adjustment for duration of breastfeeding, sex, exposure to tobacco smoke, maternal characteristics, and family history of allergy, delay in the introduction of cow's milk products beyond 9 months significantly increased the risk of eczema (adjusted odds ratio 2.29).

(Source: Reuters Health via Medscape, free registration required; article also available at revolutionhealth.com without registration; the study is published in Pediatrics 2008;122:e115-e122.)

Translating back from science-ese: Wait too long to diversify your kid's diet and you could more than double his or her chances of living with allergies.

Of course breastfeeding is still a good thing. But women have been made to feel guilty for introducing solid foods "too soon" and for not "exclusively" breastfeeding for "long enough." All of those are spongy terms that seem to shift with the winds of changing medical fashion.

That baby of mine - the one who watched my spoon like a tennis match - was the Bear. He's had the sniffles this week. I've wondered if he might be showing some mild allergies, since he didn't otherwise seem sick. I still don't know. But at least now I'll stop wondering if his sniffles has any relation to those carrots that he wore so cutely all over his face as a plump and happy five-month-old. Of course, he wanted them earlier. Maybe he was right?

It's funny how I wrote nearly a hundred pages in my dissertation on what a crock "expert" advice can be - and yet I'm one of the biggest suckers for it.

Is Fruitful Sexy?

Photo by Flickr user klikomatic, used under a Creative Commons license.

Men get turned on by women who look fertile. Fruitful is sexy. Or at least that's the story we get from the popularized versions of evolutionary psychology: Men like large, firm breasts, a narrow waist, and curvy hips because it's this combo of traits that signals high fertility.

Okay. I know plenty of men who like smaller breasts just fine. That fact alone exposes the simplemindedness of this theory.

But let's grant the above premise. Even so, I poked a couple more gaping holes in this theory just in the time I needed to take a shower this morning. (I do my best thinking in the shower - maybe because the spray wakes up my brain, or maybe just because the kids usually leave me alone for five minutes. Too bad I can't take my laptop in there.)

So ... if fertility really determines sexual attractiveness ... then:

1. Why is menstruation almost universally subject to taboos? After all, it's a necessary precondition for fertility, and as such it ought to be celebrated! Men ought to consider it sexy! And yet - it's not just seen as totally un-sexy, we women often feel less feminine during our period.
2. Why the heck would anyone consider a supermodel attractive? The theory requires curves. Most supermodels don't have 'em - at least not lower than their ribcage.
3. Why have men historically preferred virgins? Why not prefer women who've already shown they can conceive and bear a child? Yes, I know that popularized ev psych paints men as competitors who want to avoid supporting another man's spawn. But assuming a man just refuses to do that, why wouldn't he prefer to try to impregnate a woman who's proven her reproductive "fitness"?

Hmmm ... maybe that last point explains the MILF phenomenon?

Yeah, I realize these are slightly goofy arguments. That's what comes from accepting a goofy premise. That's the penalty for taking seriously ideas that aren't fruitful; they're just plain fruity.

Healed It on the Grapevine

Photo by Flickr user Greg_e, used under a Creative Commons license.

Following up on yesterday's gambling post, I'll admit there's one vice (other than coffee) that I do occasionally indulge. But science is increasingly casting doubt on how much of a vice wine actually is, and there's more good news about the red stuff this week. Note, though, that this is only preliminary research that hasn’t yet been tested out in actual female wine lovers:

New research from the University of Nebraska Medical Center shows that resveratrol, a natural substance found in red wine and red grapes, can suppress the formation of estrogen DNA adducts.

Although breast cancer formation involves a multitude of steps, most are fueled by increased estrogen. It collects and reacts with DNA molecules. Resveratrol, which is also sold in extract as a dietary supplement, prevents the formation of the adducts. It also suppressed two other known risk factors for breast cancer.

“We believe this could stop the whole progression that leads to breast cancer down the road,” said the study’s lead author Eleanor G. Rogan, Ph.D.

The amount of resveratrol found in one glass of red wine is enough to suppress the DNA adducts. The study was conduced in laboratory cultures and will need to be confirmed in larger human trials.

(Source: Ivanhoe)

Now, I’m sure the media will cloak this study in the usual caveats: The researchers said one glass, not one bottle. They only found helpful effects from red wine – not white wine, not martinis (more’s the pity). If you burn out your liver, avoiding cancer is kind of a moot point. I think most of us get that - and those who don't, generally aren't very susceptible to reasoned arguments anyway.

But these findings are interesting – and surprising – in light of recent research that showed even moderate drinkers to be at higher risk for breast cancer, regardless of the type of alcohol consumed. This effect appeared only for those cancers that feed off of estrogen - the same types that resveratrol promises to possibly interrupt. I’d like to know whether the beneficial effect of resveratrol outweighs the deleterious effect of the wine’s alcohol – a question that can only be answered in human trials.

The study that implicated alcohol as possibly promoting breast cancer did look at actual human beings, but it doesn't seem to have analyzed red wine separately. An earlier study that did so found that red wine offered no advantages. But adding to the confusion, red wine consumption has consistently been found to correlate with lower cardiovascular risks. A problem for all such studies is that it's hard to separate out other lifestyle factors, though it's reasonable to assume that a moderate wine drinker may have other habits that are healthier than someone who prefers mostly hard alcohol. Also, most of these studies can only prove correlation, not causation.

Such questions are hard for us laypeople to sort out because the American media still tilt puritan when it comes to drinking, especially where women are concerned. Reports on the health benefits of red wine are always spiked with warnings, as if the reader might otherwise proceed directly to the nearest liquor store – article in hand – and thence to the gutter. Similar research findings are treated more even-handedly in the German media, for instance – but that’s a culture where women aren't presumptively sluts and bad mothers if they have a drink, and where even obstetricians allow an occasional glass of wine in late pregnancy.

Until the implications of this latest study are clarified, I think the take-home message is the same as it’s been for quite a while: Moderate drinking – especially of red wine – has some benefits. It also carries some risks. If you don’t enjoy red wine, you shouldn’t choke it down. If you do, then here’s to your health. After all, pleasure is a huge part of living a healthy and good life.

The Melody of Language

I've been interested in language acquisition ever since my first baby started to talk. In keeping with the theme of this blog, one of his very first words was "mau," referring to Grey Kitty. In fact, "mau" predated "mama." I didn't care bit. I thought watching him learn language was one of the coolest parts of parenthood.

That changed with my second son. I was just as excited about him learning to talk - but it didn't happen for a very long time. Worry displaced joy. At age two, when most kids are combining three words into crude sentences, the Tiger had just a handful of words. He didn't even say "no." Now, three years later, he's mostly caught up, following a little speech therapy, a lot of terrific help from a support group online, and the simple passage of time. And believe me - he has learned to say no!

So I was fascinated when Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily (Science Blogs) reported recently that music apparently helps in language learning. A research team headed by Daniele Schön had students learn a set of six nonsense words; it took them 20 minutes to learn where one word ended and the next began. Schön's team then mapped each of the six words onto a unique pitch. They found that the musical association dramatically increased learning. (Their abstract is here; since the full text of their article is not accessible on the Web, the following graphs are courtesy of Dave Munger's post.) The graphs show the test subjects' accuracy after seven minutes of hearing the nonsense words paired with a unique musical note:

Munger observes:

The dotted line in each graph represents the average score for all listeners, and each square is the average score for an individual listener. As you can see, in the speech-only experiment, listeners did no better than chance. But in the second experiment, nearly everyone did better than chance, and the average score was 64 percent correct -- significantly better than chance performance. Simply associating each syllable with a musical note improved performance.

But in real songs, syllables aren't always matched with the same notes. Sometimes different syllables get the same note, and sometimes the same syllable is sung with a different note. In a third experiment, Schön's team allowed the notes to vary with each syllable. Again, listeners could identify words at a rate better than chance (though they weren't as good as in the second experiment).

Schön and her colleagues don't go so far as to argue that music is a requirement for learning language, but they do make the case that the extra information provided in music can facilitate language learning. They also suggest that other information, like gestures, might be equally helpful for learning a language.

But there is additional evidence suggesting that music plays an important role in language. Similar areas of the brain are activated when listening to or playing music and speaking or processing language. Language and music are both associated with emotions. And of course, we know that children -- especially small children -- really like music. This study offers another bit of evidence that the link between language and music may be a fundamental one.

The cool thing about this, from my totally anecdotal persepctive, is that I saw exactly this in the Tiger's language development. (I should be embarrassed that every time I cite something from Science Blogs, I end up sullying it with non-scientific thinking. I guess I'm not embarrassed enough to desist.)

The first time I heard my Tiger utter multiple words, he was singing "Ring around the Rosie." He'd hum the first part, then repeat the last line over and over:

Ash-ah! Ash-ah! Da da dow!!

Granted, that's the sort of phrase that only a parent can appreciate - especially when it's on endless repeat. But the cool thing is that the tune helped him put the syllables together when he couldn't otherwise get beyond single-syllable utterances. He was maybe two-and-a-half at the time. Equally great, I was able to understand him, thanks to the melody. (He has a great natural ear for music, and that was apparent long before he was talking.)

All fired up, I took this information to our speech therapists. Oddly, frustratingly, they didn't know what to do with it. Now, it seems to me that Schön's research suggests fruitful new approaches. Though I'm no longer in the trenches with late-talking, and I'm not a scientific expert by any means, I am a tuned-in mother who learned a lot about how to encourage language. And I'm guessing that late talkers could really benefit from the therapist using more music - not just prerecorded songs, but melodies sung aloud to help kids acquire new vocabulary.

The photo shows my piano; that's me making noise at it.

Watermelon and Fireworks

Photo by Flickr user EricGjerde, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday, I waxed downright sanctimonious about the deeper meanings of the Fourth of July. But let's be honest: For most of us - me too! - the Fourth is about fireworks and food, not FISA and fear (no matter how much fun it is to indulge in silly alliteration).

Last night, we got to see the big display of fireworks in town - the only legal one, since I'm still in California and El Dorado County outlaws freelance fireworks. This policy predates the recent wave of wildfires since much of the county is a forest fire waiting to happen. Given how dry California is, the prohibition ought to apply to the whole state.

Since it doesn't, though, we had a big family celebration on the third at my brother's house (he lives in a county where fireworks are legal) and that's the show we'll all remember. As fireworks displays go, this one had a real kinship with the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Nothing was allowed to go airborne. But my brother-in-law provided hilarious patter and the kids loved waving sparklers in the air. The show's grand finale was something called the "Dixie Delight," which whistled, sprayed multicolored sparks skyward, and then seceded from the Union. (I'm not sure if this name is a bizarre marketing ploy or some Chinese manufacturer's notion of what Americans want. For all I know, it is what many Americans want.)

As for food, we had the usual American fare, including vast amounts of watermelon. You may have heard that watermelon was in the news a few days ago, with scientists at Texas A&M claiming it may have Viagra-like effects.

Beneficial ingredients in watermelon and other fruits and vegetables are known as phyto-nutrients, naturally occurring compounds that are bioactive, or able to react with the human body to trigger healthy reactions, [Dr. Bhimu] Patil said.

In watermelons, these include lycopene, beta carotene and the rising star among its phyto-nutrients – citrulline – whose beneficial functions are now being unraveled. Among them is the ability to relax blood vessels, much like Viagra does.

Scientists know that when watermelon is consumed, citrulline is converted to arginine through certain enzymes. Arginine is an amino acid that works wonders on the heart and circulation system and maintains a good immune system, Patil said.

"The citrulline-arginine relationship helps heart health, the immune system and may prove to be very helpful for those who suffer from obesity and type 2 diabetes," said Patil. "Arginine boosts nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels, the same basic effect that Viagra has, to treat erectile dysfunction and maybe even prevent it."

While there are many psychological and physiological problems that can cause impotence, extra nitric oxide could help those who need increased blood flow, which would also help treat angina, high blood pressure and other cardiovascular problems.

"Watermelon may not be as organ specific as Viagra," Patil said, "but it's a great way to relax blood vessels without any drug side-effects."

(Source: Texas A&M press release via Eurekalert)

Revere at Science Blogs' Effect Measure debunks this claim by noting that Viagra and its chemical cousins (Cialis and Levitra) don't just dilate blood vessels, they keep them open by interfering with an enzyme, phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5), that normally counteracts the effects of nitric oxide, causing the vessels to constrict again. Revere says:

Watermelon isn't a PDE5 ihibitor. It has a an ingredient that participates in the formation of NO (nitric oxide). So does pornography. It would have been more accurate to say that watermelon may have a pornography-like effect than that it has a Viagra-like effect.

But hey, that's no small thing! Finding a substance that enhances libido and eases arousal has been the holy grail of research on a "female Viagra" for women whose sexual responsiveness is flagging. This is both medically and politically tricky, as I discussed a few months ago. But imagine if one's libido could be amplified something as innocuous as watermelon - which won't cause headaches or blue vision, like Viagra does. You wouldn't need a prescription and you wouldn't have to order it from shady online pharmacies; you could just visit your local farmer's market.

Anyway, I think it is our patriotic duty this weekend - when we'll be eating lots of watermelon anyway - to test out this hypothesis, in the least scientific ways possible. Who knows? Maybe watermelon isn't just a preliminary to the fireworks; maybe it can help bring them on.

P.S. Notice to all PDE-5 spammers: Your comments will be deleted. Watermelon farmers are welcome to respond, however.

Infinite Loops

Recursive blanket flower by Flickr user gadl, whose work totally rocks. (I used another gadl image in an earlier post.) Used under a Creative Commons license.

Warning to actual computer experts: The following is a mix of muddled memories that both oversimplify and distort the way programming works just so I can make a silly metaphorical point about my children at the end. Don't say you weren't warned.

So, back in the early to mid-1980s, when I was going to college in the Silicon Valley, pretty much everyone took a class in computer programming no matter how talented or clueless we were about computers. It was just what you did. The language we learned was Pascal, and though I've hardly ever heard about it since then, it's still considered a good starter language for picking up the basics of programming (or so says Wikipedia).

Being exceptionally clueless about my future, I took not one but two programming classes. About all that stuck is an ability to create nifty "if" statements in Excel spreadsheets that automatically convert a numerical grade into a letter grade and vice versa.

Conceptually, two ideas are still with me: recursion and infinite loops. They somehow got hard-wired through marathon late-night programming sessions, which were inescapable because time on the mainframe was strictly limited except between 2 and 6 a.m. (The mainframe! It took up a room the size of my house.)

Recursion is just a mindblowingly crazy weird idea: stuff nested inside of other stuff, like a programming version of Russian matryoshka dolls. There are more formal - and no doubt better - definitions of recursion, but the cat below will give you the basic idea. (Unless, of course, you're an actual computer person, in which case you're probably scoffing at me, as you should. But hey, you were warned back in the first paragraph.)

Recursive cat by Flickr user raincrystal, used under a Creative Commons license.

Recursion is one of those things that makes a lot more sense right after a Grateful Dead show. As it happens, when my recursive program was due in the winter of 1985, I spent the evening at a show in Oakland (it must have been part of the Chinese New Year festivities) and then came home and started the program around midnight. It was done before the sun came up and worked perfectly on the first try.

The other concept that's endured for me is the infinite loop. Programs use loops to perform an action repeatedly. They normally stop obediently when the specified task is finished or a desired condition is achieved. For instance, if you search Google for Kittywampus, it searches until it's got the results and no longer. (I have no clue what sort of algorithm Google uses or if you can even call it a loop, but the point is, the search is finite.)

An infinite loop is one run amok. It doesn't stop tidily but keeps on going, usually because the programmer screwed up somehow. It doesn't know when it's time to stop. (One way it differs from recursion is that a recursive program or function knows when enough is enough.) I created at least one of these, too, although that was (obviously!) not part of any assignment.

These days, I have one big infinite loop in my life, and I'm mostly at a loss about how to stop it. That loop is a never-ending squabble function.

My two boys - who can be so sweet, smart, and empathetic - spent the winter squabbling ferociously. It starts predictably in the morning with the Tiger deliberately making annoying noises at the breakfast table (aka the "breskit table") and the Bear using his bossiest voice to order him to stop. It ends only after they've argued over whose turn it is for a piggyback ride from their dad up the stairs at bedtime.

The quarreling escalates massively whenever they have friends over, particularly when the Bear has a playdate and the Tiger wants to join in. The Bear wants to play big kid stuff; the Tiger wants to be part of it, even if it's only by crashing the party and trying to plant sloppy kisses on all the other kids. I understand that they both have legitimate desires and needs, but so far compromise only leaves both pissed off.

I'm actually not beating myself up about this too much. I think both his dad and I try to be fair; we try not to intervene constantly, but we also try to teach them that compromise is the only alternative to misery. (Of course, I'm grateful for any words of wisdom from anyone who's handled this more successfully!)

The proof that this is an infinite loop came a couple months ago when I told the Bear to pick up some underwear he'd left lying on the floor. He balked. The Tiger said, "I want to pick up the underwayer!" The Bear said, "No, I will!" and a tug-of-war ensued - over underwear and who would get to pick it up!

For an infinite loop, the only thing I know to do is reboot. But with kids, it's not at all clear where the on/off switch is located. I'd RTFM, if only I had one.

What's working right now: spring! Now that the kids can be outdoors without suffering frostbite, I'm mercilessly kicking them out into the yard. Yep, the Tiger tried launching a kissing attack outdoors, too, but on the whole they've been a lot kinder to each other. And that makes me even happier than the flowers bursting out.

Recursive stained glass by Flickr user gadl, just because I love it. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Twin within a Twin

Here's a news item with no redeeming political significance - just something that irresistibly drew my amazed, not-quite-horrified attention. (I do have a pretty thick skin about such things, having spent hundreds of hours of my life with old German gynecology books, which loved the lurid and weird, especially with illustrations to match.)

First off, the little girl involved is going to be fine, otherwise I wouldn't be rubbernecking. Here's what the AP reported (via the Columbus Dispatch):

A 9-year-old girl who went to hospital in central Greece suffering from stomach pains was found to be carrying her embryonic twin, doctors said Thursday.

Doctors at Larissa General Hospital examined the girl and surgically removed a growth they later discovered was an embryo more than two inches long. ...

Andreas Markou, head of the hospital's pediatric department, said the embryo was a formed fetus with a head, hair and eyes, but no brain or umbilical cord.

Markou said cases where one of a set of twins absorbs the other in the womb occurs in one of 500,000 live births.

The sheer weirdness of this is right up there with chimeras. Except that chimeras aren't exactly unusual; in recent years, evidence has emerged that "microchimerism" - where a mother and fetus exchange a few cells via the placenta - is quite common. And that - much more than this two-in-a-million event - poses a challenge to our notion that we are all completely distinct, separate, autonomous individuals, genetically and otherwise.

It also makes me glad that the tummy bug that's been making the rounds here this week - and hit my Bear tonight - is really just a bug and not, say, a whole 'nother human causing the bellyache.

Gratuitous garden porn: Because sometimes that brutal wench, Mother Nature, is unaccountably kind. These tulips in front of my house finished blooming a week or so ago.

Sex and the Smart Girl

This is the penalty for clicking on stupid headlines like "SEX BOMB: Smart ladies have worse sex" at Yahoo's new Shine portal for "women's news." (As if men don't care about the sort of sex their female partners have!) I felt compelled to read the silly thing and then debunk it. If your stupidity tolerance is low today, go read a nice thick novel or even the sports pages. You've been warned.

So a German "study" has ostensibly found that smart women are less likely to have an orgasm. Among survey respondents, 62% of those who completed college-entrance requirements reported trouble coming, versus only 38% of those with less education.

Okay, here comes the scalpel. First, Shine's source on this - that bastion of classy British journalism, the Sun - interpreted the findings for us:

Brainy babes find it harder to have an orgasm – because they are too busy thinking, a study claims.

This is why I spent all those years honing my German skills! So I could be thinking about which verbs are regular and irregular and which nouns get declined, instead of coming like a bonobo! No, wait, I learned German for just this moment, so I can read the original crappy study and tell you why the Sun's report is even more crapalicious.

The German report at the "lifestyle website" beQueen asserted no explanation at all, at least as far as I could see after reading through a whole lot of drivel. BeQueen just reported the stats. But in a game of transnational Telephone, the Sun's interpretation got picked up and smeared all over the Web.

Of course, the next problem with the so-called study is the definition of "smart," again as it's been reported. The study didn't ask about some proxy for intelligence such as IQ. It asked about educational attainment. Obviously that has some correlation with smarts, but it's a loose one, especially in Germany, where social class still shapes young people's educational options to a remarkable extent, mostly due to cultural expectations. There are still plenty of bright young working-class women who don't pursue a college-entrance degree because they and their families set their sights lower.

Note, too, that we're not talking about really high levels of education. The survey distinguished only between the equivalent of an American high school diploma with college-prep coursework, and lower levels of attainment. A very solid majority of American women would fall into the "too educated" group for purposes of this study. The poor frigid gals in question are not a bunch of Ph.D.s, though even if they were - I'm at least one data point that suggests there's no negative correlation between excess education and, um, capacity for pleasure.

Another issue is the study's sample. It was plenty large - over 2000 respondents - but that means very little because it's not representative. Because the respondents were women who randomly chose to answer an online questionnaire, we actually have no idea how representative they were of German women as a whole. What if - for some reason - educated women tend to ignore such surveys as drivel unless they're motivated by frustration, say? Gosh, we don't even have a clue whether all of them were actually women!

Nor did the study have any way to obtain meaningful information on the women's male partners. Since people tend to pair up with their educational equals, what if the problem were educated male partners unable to turn off their thoughts or focus on their partners? What if the survey's real message is that educated men make lousy lovers? Of course, there's no evidence for that either, and I don't believe it for a minutes. But it's instructive that the media response to the beQueen survey has pretty well ignored the invisible men.

Then there's the name - beQueen! - which even by the standards of ludicrous German pseudo-Anglicisms is a real prizewinner. "beQueen ist die Online-Community, in der Frauen sich wie Königinnen fühlen können," says Burda, the mega-publisher behind it - "beQueen is the online community where women can feel like queens." That would be dorky even without the pretentious capitalization. I realize it might not seem immediately relevant to the study, but a name that moronic seems geared to drive away smart readers.

On top of all that, the survey is not confirmed by previous research, which is a decidedly mixed bag. According to Christine Whelan, an expert on single women, a Canadian study found results similar to beQueen's. However, a U.S. study found that educated American women are less likely to report coming every time but more likely to report that they come at least sometimes. An Australian study a few years back, which was larger and representative than beQueen in its sampling, found that greater education enhances women's capacity for orgasm.

Surveys like beQueen's pseudo-science is the sort of sexist pap that the media adores because it confirms so many people's prejudices. As Anne Fitzgerald at Yahoo's Shine points out,

it makes for the kind of story that's ripe for spinning into the quick and easy sexist stereotypes that make you angry (or should)--the uptight brain versus the dumbass blonde with her knees behind her ears, the frigid smarty pants versus the ditzy good-time girl, the pervasive idea that a smart, educated woman can't really enjoy sex, or talking about it or thinking about it ...

Fitzgerald notes that good sex thrives on imagination, creativity, and open-mindedness - all qualities that a decent education ought to develop. At the time the Australian study came out, Carol Lloyd at Salon similarly commented:

One obvious explanation is that educated, wealthier women aren't afraid to ask for what they want in bed. They are likely to be more liberal minded, less controlled by their partners, more open to a multiplicity of techniques and toys.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Women may still find power a turn-on in men (and that'd be a topic for a whole 'nother post). But if they have some real power, autonomy, and security in their own lives, won't they be more likely to pursue their own pleasures?

If you read German at all, you can still take the survey though your answers won't be included in the public results anymore.

The neighbors' rhododendron, shot by me - because flowers and sex are never a bad combination, so long as one's not being used as a bribe for the other.

Depo-Provera for the Kids

German condom/anti-HIV ad: "For young vegetables, too." I've seen this and others in the series posted publicly at bus and subway stops all over Berlin. Photo by flickr user compujeramey, used under a Creative Commons license.

I heard an extraordinary story this evening while I was serving on a panel on reproductive rights at my college. One of the other panelists was a young, smart, committed Americorps worker who's been dealing with foster kids. When she first started her job, a 14-year-old asked her if she could procure condoms for her. The girl had very little money and was afraid of getting busted for stealing them.

So my co-panelist said sure, I'll work on getting you some. But when she approached her supervisor, she was told, "What? you've got to be kidding. This girl has already had chlamydia. She can't be trusted with condoms. We'll put her on Depo-Provera."

When this boomeranged back at the girl, she protested that she didn't need birth control after all.

I don't know if the girl ever did get put on Depo-Provera, aka "the shot"; my co-panelist didn't ever find out. (And of course all of this is second-hand, but my co-panelist seemed pretty reliable, and a colleague of hers confirmed some of the details later in the evening.)

But boy, can I understand why she wouldn't want it. Just in case you've forgotten, Depo-Provera was highly controversial in the 1970s and 1980s because it was tested on poor women, partly in developing countries, partly among American minorities, where free and informed consent was a virtual impossibility. The FDA kept it off the market for many years and provoked strong public opposition with its approval in 1992. How it morphed into a respectable form of birth control, I don't know; I was out of the country for most of the 1990s (though I did somehow get in on the Starr Report).

Depo-Provera has a much nastier risk profile than its hormonal cousin, the birth control pill. This starts with nuisances like nausea. If the pill makes you queasy, you can get off it and return to normal within a few days. If the shot makes you sick, you're stuck with it for three months, as my co-panelist pointed out. The emotional side effects are also harsh. The only person I knew who was on it suffered from serious mood swings - and no, I don't know why she stuck with it.

More seriously, a few years ago the FDA required a "black box" warning for Depo-Provera because it induces bone loss, which may be irreversible. What a perfect drug for a 14-year-old girl who might still be growing!

This is such a lousy idea that it's tempting to just rant at the social worker and call her evil idiot. And yet, I think if I do that, I overlook how overburdened that worker must be, with a swollen caseload and never enough resources. This region is quite poor and for reasons both budgetary and human, the temptation must be tremendous to do anything, everything, to stop yet another child from being born into the foster care system. Compliance is obviously another big selling point: a girl living in unstable circumstances might forget to take the pill, which is a non-issue with Depo-Provera.

And yet ... the idea that her history of chlamydia meant that condoms would be inappropriate? That is just Orwellian logic. What will she catch next time - maybe HIV? Adding to the sick absurdity, her infection didn't actually come from consensual sex; she got it from being raped.

What I don't know - and am trying to figure out - is how much power the state has to force or coerce girls in foster care to get the shot. Whatever power it has would presumably come from its parental role. Which raises a related question: Can a parent legally force his or her underage daughter to get Depo-Provera? If I find any answers (in comments here, or through my thus far fruitless googling), I'll let you know.

Dr. Caffeine

Meet Dr. Caffeine. He's a fuzzy little bird who emits coarse, cackling chirps and lives with my younger son, the Tiger. When I asked the Tiger how Dr. Caffeine got his name, both my husband and the Bear broke into gales of laughter. My addiction is not a closely guarded secret.

But today, I'm not laughing. I've had to quit my vices, though only temporarily. A couple weeks ago I came down with a ferocious UTI. (I refrained from posting on this, though I was smitten with the title "TMI about a UTI." Count yourself lucky, dear reader.) Ten days of double-strength Bactrim killed the bacteria, but I still had enough pain that after a nearly sleepless night, I decided Wednesday morning that I'd better google "bladder diet" and do whatever it took to heal.

It turns out that the bladder diet involves siphoning most of the sensual pleasure out of your life. (Please bear in mind that the experts don't even mention sex, since you'd have to be both masochistic and foolish to try it under these circumstances.) It forbids, in roughly this order:

caffeine
chocolate
alcohol
most fruit (including pretty much anything acidic)

Cigarettes are on the hit list too; lucky I don't smoke, or I'd really be pissed. (Pardon the really bad pun.) Otherwise, my vices are an almost-perfect match:

caffeine
alcohol
chocolate

How am I doing? I gave up alcohol without a blink. It helps that the kids have been unnaturally easy the past few days, or I might be craving a nice glass of wine. Chocolate - well, maybe it should rank before alcohol on my vice list, because I did cheat last night, but only for fear that the dark chocolate Toblerone my husband brought back from Germany would disappear before I even tried it. I'm drinking lots of water and taking cranberry capsules and an acid neutralizer called Prelief.

But oh, the caffeine. I'd intended to go cold turkey, from two cups of coffee and a Diet Pepsi down to zero. I haven't quite managed. The first day, I ordered a crushed-ice drink at a coffee shop, virtuously going for the white chocolate since it's actually not chocolate, only to realize after the fact that I was feeling much better. Suspiciously better. Yesterday I had part of a Mountain Dew; today I finished it off (but only about 4 ounces - does that count)?

It's a blessing I never tried heroin.

I've never understood why doctors seem to feel it's no big deal to cut out caffeine. I was told to do this years ago when I was handed a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome. But it's a major quality of life and performance issue for me. I'm sluggish and stupid without caffeine, I was then at the start of graduate school, and it was the one thing that seemed to give me any oomph while I was sick. So I reduced but didn't eliminate it. During pregnancy, I cut way back, partly because coffee repulsed me, but the only thing that seemed to help all-day morning sickness was saltines and a few slurps of regular Coke.

Contrary to public misperceptions, there's mounting evidence that caffeine is actually good for you. At Science Blogs, Chris Chatham of Developing Intelligence recently wrote that caffeine (in the form of coffee, which is also rich in antioxidants) may protect against Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and type 2 diabetes. Possible adverse cardiovascular effects can be balanced out, in his estimation, by a diet rich in flavonoids, which seem to be protective. In other words, since I eat my fruits, veggies, and soy, and I'm not at elevated risk for CVD, I see no reason to drink my coffee with a shot of guilt. I much prefer milk and sugar. (Flavonoids are also found in red wine, tea, and chocolate, which are momentarily verboten but otherwise count as health foods in my book.)

Of course, any addiction still comes with a price. I haven't had the typical caffeine-withdrawal headache. I haven't been more or less bitchy than usual. But I admit I'm feeling moronic. Cut out caffeine, and you chop about 10 points off my IQ. Maybe 30.

Chatham agrees that caffeine can enhance intelligence, but he might dispute my experience that it enhances higher-order reasoning:

Caffeine may increase the speed with which you work, may decrease attentional lapses, and may even benefit recall - but is less likely to benefit more complex cognitive functions, and may even hurt others. Plan accordingly (and preferably prior to consuming caffeine!)

In the rest of his post, which is pretty technical but worth the effort, Chatham lays out guidelines for getting the biggest cognitive buzz from your coffee buzz. The main trick is to consume it slowly but steadily. Sipping about 20 mg an hour is more effective than gulping down a large latte first thing in the morning. Adding a little sugar may further amplify caffeine's cognitive benefits.

(This has been a public service announcement dedicated to my students who are lurching into finals week.)

Apart from my stupidity, I'm grateful that this wretched diet seems to work. My pain is receding. I suppose I'll have to stick with this regimen for at least another week, cheating or not. But I just opened the coffee cabinet in the kitchen to get a cup for the Tiger, and out wafted the rich scent of seduction, awaiting that glorious day when Dr. Caffeine and I will resume our friendship as if we'd never had a falling out.

Disclaimer: This entire post was written in an undercaffeinated state. Be alert for errors, distortion, and muddled thinking. The author claims to be not fully accountable.

The Lunatic Is in My Head

After a long day of snow flurries, temperatures plunged just in time to clear the heavens for the total lunar eclipse.

My dear mate got a pretty good shot of it around 10 p.m. I did my part by serving as the tripod - or, as the Bear said, the "two-pod."


NASA did us one better but I doubt they had a chatty eight-year-old distracting them. The Bear was - shall we say - over the moon.

As for me, I can see how the encroaching black smudge turning to brown and then mottled copper would feed millennarian fantasies.

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
(Roger Waters/Pink Floyd - but you knew that.)

So far the apocalypse hasn't dawned, although today in class one of my students wanted to talk about a case of priapism caused by a megadose of Viagra, left untreated and leading to amputation. (Yes, it's apparently possible, though I was skeptical at first.) I guess that's close enough to the end of the world for a lot of folks.

Pointing Fingers at Testosterone

Yesterday during the break of one of my classes, my students got quite excited about a story I that appeared on Salon's Broadsheet. It examines the claim that the relative length of one's fingers reveals how one's brain works. According to Rutgers evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher, people whose ring fingers are long relative to their index fingers have more "male" cognitive capacities:

Women are "web thinkers" -- they are intuitive data-gatherers and long-term thinkers, she said. Men are "step thinkers" -- they are more analytical, linear and short-term processors. These differences are complementary, according to Fisher, and indicate that a business team balanced with men and women is ideal.

Fisher has made similar arguments about love (and profited from them - she's a consultant for the matchmaking service Chemistry.com). She contends that partners who are too similar will grow bored in the long run, and that the ratio of testosterone to estrogen in a person is one predictor of complementarity versus similarity.

To be honest, I think my students dug the finger-length thing because it was literally a hands-on experiment - or maybe because it was the next best thing to palm-reading. Next class, I should bring a Magic 8 Ball and see if I get the same outburst of enthusiasm. Or maybe a large caliper and see how phrenology goes over.

I'm still trying to sort out what's bunk and what's at least potentially solid science in Fisher's claims. It doesn't help that she started the speech that was reported on (originally by the BBC) by declaring she's "definitely not a feminist." I'm not sure what relevance that has. Does she want to make clear that she's practicing supposedly value-free science, even though she's arguing that businesses need more female managers? Being truly value free would be a heck of a feat for an anthropologist; none of us can avoid bringing own cultural baggage to whatever culture is under study. Does she want us to know that she's a very special kind a scientist, a sexy Queen Bee who made it to the top of her profession without any favors from those ugly old man-haters?

Or does she want to draw attention away from the fact that her conclusions mostly just echo the tired old Mars-Venus stereotypes? She says women are good multitaskers while men have laser-like abilities to focus. Women are empathetic, men analytical. Gosh, I think we've heard this all before.

There seems to be substantial evidence for the notion that fetal exposure to testosterone results in the ring finger being longer than the index finger. The idea that this "digit ratio" indicates roughly how much testosterone was present in the womb seems pretty uncontroversial. However, a twin study found that about genes accounted for about 70 percent of the ratio between ring and index finger, which suggests that prenatal exposure to testosterone may not be the whole reason for long ring fingers. I suppose genes could cause higher testosterone levels in the womb, in which case hormonal influences would still be a mediating factor, even if not the ultimate cause. At any rate, no one claims that the digit ratio is more than a rough mesaure.

What prenatal testosterone exposure means for gender and brain development is less clear, though. A relatively long ring finger has been linked to aggression and fertility in men, and to athletic ability in both men and women. Researchers have correlated SAT scores with finger length, too: higher math SAT scores go with longer ring fingers in both sexes, and higher verbal SATs with longer index fingers in girls. Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin to Sascha of Borat fame) has hypothesized that high levels of prenatal testosterone may be a cause of autism (which he describes as (extreme male brain), and so far his long-term research study seems to be bearing this out.

It's well-nigh impossible to judge how solid the evidence is for any of these conclusions, simply on the basis of media reports. I'm willing to suspend judgment and keep my eyes open for future finger-length evidence.

But I have a more fundamental criticism: Why do all such studies seem so intent on posing these traits as dichotomies? Why don't we acknowledge that someone can be good at both logic and empathy, analysis and synthesis?

I think my own abilities are pretty balanced. (Wow, one whole data point - now that's sound science!) But as one of my students pointed out to me, my ring finger is relatively long - but only on my right hand. So maybe I'm a freak of nature.

If so, I'm in good company. Yet another study found that male scientists tent to have negligible differences in the lengths of their second and fourth fingers. In other words, the guys in some of the most stereotypically male - and male-dominated - professions such as math and physics actually exhibit a more typically feminine pattern, suggesting a balance between estrogen and testosterone.

This doesn't mean testosterone and estrogen are irrelevant. It's just that they don't respect our stereotypes. And that means they're a whole lot more complex and marvelous than most of us recognize.