South Of Heaven

I wonder if I should have tried this.

Probably not.

Capuchin monkeys have what at first glance appears to be an odd habit: they urinate onto their hands then rub their urine over their bodies into their fur.

Now scientists think they know why the monkeys "urine wash" in this way.

A new study shows that the brains of female tufted capuchins become more active when they smell the urine of sexually mature adult males.

That suggests males wash with their urine to signal their availability and attractiveness to females.

Details of the finding are published in the American Journal of Primatology.

A number of New World monkey species, including mantled howler monkeys, squirrel monkeys and the few species of capuchins, regularly "urine wash", urinating into the palm of the hand, then vigorously rubbing the urine into the feet and hindquarters.

Several hypotheses have been put forward as to why they do it, including that it may somehow help maintain body temperature or allow other monkeys to better identify an individual by smell.

Most studies into the behaviour have been inconclusive.

"But one study reported that when being solicited by a female, adult males increased their rate of urine-washing," said Dr Kimberley Phillips, a primatologist at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, US.

Sex and bones

Giving "boner" a whole new meaning.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have discovered that the skeleton acts as a regulator of fertility in male mice through a hormone released by bone, known as osteocalcin.

The research, led by Gerard Karsenty, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Genetics and Development at Columbia University Medical Center, is slated to appear online on February 17 in Cell, ahead of the journal's print edition, scheduled for March 4.

Until now, interactions between bone and the reproductive system have focused only on the influence of gonads on the build-up of bone mass.

"Since communication between two organs in the body is rarely one-way, the fact that the gonads regulate bone really begs the question: Does bone regulate the gonads?" said Dr. Karsenty.

Dr. Karsenty and his team found their first clue to an answer in the reproductive success of their lab mice. Previously, the researchers had observed that males whose skeletons did not secrete a hormone called osteocalcin were poor breeders.

The investigators then did several experiments that show that osteocalcin enhances the production of testosterone, a sex steroid hormone controlling male fertility. As they added osteocalcin to cells that, when in our body produce testosterone, its synthesis increased. Similarly, when they injected osteocalcin into male mice, circulating levels of testosterone also went up.

Conversely, when osteocalcin is not present, testosterone levels drop, which causes a decline in sperm count, the researchers found. When osteocalcin-deficient male mice were bred with normal female mice, the pairs only produced half the number of litters as did pairs with normal males, along with a decrease in the number of pups per litter.

Though the findings have not yet been confirmed in humans, Dr. Karsenty expects to find similar characteristics in humans, based on other similarities between mouse and human hormones.

If osteocalcin also promotes testosterone production in men, low osteocalcin levels may be the reason why some infertile men have unexplained low levels of testosterone.

Okay. Science has proven it.

Here you go, women. Right here. And maybe too much testosterone in the womb may contribute to autism.

A new study from Utrecht and Cambridge Universities has for the first time found that an administration of testosterone under the tongue in volunteers negatively affects a person's ability to 'mind read', an indication of empathy. The findings are published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition, the effects of testosterone administration are predicted by a fetal marker of prenatal testosterone, the 2D:4D ratio. The study has important implications for the androgen theory of autism (testosterone is an androgen) and confirms earlier rodent research that shows that testosterone in early brain development organizes the activation of the very hormone in later life.

Professor Jack van Honk at the University of Utrecht and Professor Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge designed the study that was conducted in Utrecht. They used the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' task as the test of mind reading, which tests how well someone can infer what a person is thinking or feeling from photographs of facial expressions from around the eyes.

Mind reading is one aspect of empathy, a skill that shows significant sex differences in favour of females. They tested 16 young women from the general population, since women on average have lower levels of testosterone than men. The decision to test just females was to maximize the possibility of seeing a reduction in their levels of empathy.

The researchers not only found that administration of testosterone leads to a significant reduction in mind reading, but that this effect is powerfully predicted by the 2D:4D digit ratio, a marker of prenatal testosterone. Those people with the most masculinized 2D:4D ratios showed the most pronounced reduction in the ability to mind read.

Jack van Honk said: "We are excited by this finding because it suggests testosterone levels prenatally prime later testosterone effects on the mind."

Simon Baron-Cohen commented: "This study contributes to our knowledge of how small hormonal differences can have far-reaching effects on empathy."

The new study has several important implications. First, that current levels of testosterone directly affect the ability to read someone else's mind. This may help explain why on average women perform better on such tests than men, since men on average produce more testosterone than women.

Second, that the digit ratio (2D:4D), a marker of fetal testosterone, predicts the extent to which later testosterone has this effect. This suggests testosterone levels in the womb have an 'organizing' or long-range effect on later brain function. Finally, given that people with autism have difficulties in mind reading, and that autism affects males more often than females, the study provides further support for the androgen theory of autism.

What's important to investigate

Here.

Commercials that were too hot for the Super Bowl

Here.

Lucky broccoli.

Obvious, but interesting nevertheless

It's not quite a duh moment, but that's because the scientists did a lot of research. And what did they find? That polygamy was better for men for passing along genes than it was for women. That is, it was better for the men with multiple wives. But it was lousy for guys without much wealth who couldn't afford a woman. And polygamy was bad for wives in polygamous households for passing along their genes. For every additional wife a woman in a polygamous household averaged one less child.

So there you have it. Polygamy was fine for the guy with multiple wives, but not so for the wives or poor, single guys.

Sodomy in Afghanistan

 
One of the byproducts of keeping your women under wraps and making heterosexual behavior damned near impossible, is that the urges eventually manage to work their way out in other forms. From Asia Times:

Social scientists attached to the Second Marine Battalion in Afghanistan last year circulated a startling report on Pashtun sociology, in the form of a human terrain report on male sexuality among America's Afghan allies. The document, made available by military sources, is not classified, just disturbing. Don't ask, don't tell doesn't begin to qualify the problem. These are things you didn't want to know, and regret having heard. The marines got their money's worth from their Human Terrain adjuncts, but the report might have considered whether male pedophilia in Afghanistan has a religious dimension as well as a cultural one. I will explain why below.

Most Pashtun men, Human Terrain Team AF-6 reports, engage in
sex with men - boys - in fact, the vast majority of their sexual contacts are with males. "A culturally-contrived homosexuality [significantly not termed as such by its practitioners] appears to affect a far greater population base then some researchers would argue is attributable to natural inclination. Some of its root causes lie in the severe segregation of women, the prohibitive cost of marriage within Pashtun tribal codes, and the depressed economic situation into which young Pashtun men are placed."

The human terrain team responded to scandalous interactions between Pashtun fighters and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops, some reported with hilarity by the media. An article in the Scotsman of May 24, 2002, reported, for example: "In Bagram, British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat – being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers. An Arbroath marine, James Fletcher, said: 'They were more terrifying than the al-Qaeda. One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours. They go about hand in hand, mincing around the village.' While the marines failed to find any al-Qaeda during the seven-day Operation Condor, they were propositioned by dozens of men in villages the troops were ordered to search."

Another interviewee in the article, a marine in his 20s, stated, "It was hell. Every village we went into we got a group of men wearing makeup coming up, stroking our hair and cheeks and making kissing noises."

The trouble, the researchers surmise, is "Pashtun society's extremely limited access to women," citing a Los Angeles Times interview with a young Pashtun identified as Daud. He only has sex with men, explaining: "I like boys, but I like girls better. It's just that we can't see the women to see if they are beautiful. But we can see the boys, and so we can tell which of them is beautiful."

Many of the Pashtuns interviewed allow "that homosexuality is indeed prohibited within Islam, warranting great shame and condemnation. However, homosexuality is then narrowly and specifically defined as the love of another man. Loving a man would therefore be unacceptable and a major sin within this cultural interpretation of Islam, but using another man for sexual gratification would be regarded as a foible -undesirable but far preferable to sex with a ineligible woman, which in the context of Pashtun honor, would likely result in issues of revenge and honor killings."

How prevalent are homosexual relations among Pashtuns? The researchers note that "medics treated an outbreak of gonorrhea among the local national interpreters on their camp. Approximately 12 of the nearly 20 young male interpreters present in the camp had contracted the disease, and most had done so anally. This is a merely anecdotal observation and far too small of a sample size to make any generalizations regarding the actual prevalence of homosexual activity region-wide. However, given the difficulty in procuring such data, it may serve as some indicator."

Through Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel The Kite Runner, Western audiences caught a glimpse of what the military team calls "an openly celebrated cultural tradition. Kandahar's long artistic and poetic tradition idolizes the pre-pubescent ‘beardless boy’ as the icon of physical beauty. Further, even the newly re-emerging musical nightlife of southern Afghan cities idolizes pre-pubescent boy performers, whose star status lasts only as long as their voices remain immature."

"Kandahar's Pashtuns have been notorious for their homosexuality for centuries, particularly their fondness for naive young boys. Before the Taliban arrived in 1994, the streets were filled with teenagers and their sugar daddies, flaunting their relationship. It is called the homosexual capital of South Asia. Such is the Pashtun obsession with sodomy - locals tell you that birds fly over the city using only one wing, the other covering their posterior - that the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors in Mullah Omar mobilizing the Taliban," the report adds.

Although the Taliban discouraged open display, it "should not be viewed as free of the culture and tradition of homosexuality of the Pashtun world of which it is a part" the authors add.

"Men who take on a halekon [young male lover] often attempt to integrate the boy into their families by marrying him to a daughter when the boy is no longer young enough to play the 'beardless' role. This maintains the love relationship between the father and son-in-law which inevitably makes difficult the establishment of a normal relationship with the wife," the human terrain Team explains.

The team's results are striking, but they place too much emphasis on the weirdness of Pashtun tradition and give too little attention to the broader role of homosexuality in Islamic (and especially Sufi) culture. What scholars now consider the Golden Age of Islamic love poetry, the Persian high middle ages, made homosexual pederasty the normative mode of love. While Petrarch wrote sonnets to Laura and Dante longed for Beatrice, their counterparts in the canon of Islamic poetry, Hafez and Rumi, wrote of their infatuation with young boys.

Afghanistan's own Sufi poet was the 17th-century bard Abdul Rahman Baba, of whom little is known except that he is said to have eloped with a young boy named Mujnoon. He is generally portrayed as a premature flower-child dedicated to peace and love; that must be what the Taliban thought as well, for they placed a bomb in his tomb in March 2009. According to the limited available criticism of Rahman's work, his Pashto poems are closely related to the Persian style of Rumi.

The prevalence of homosexual pedophilia in classical Islamic poetry, Persian as well as Pashto, suggests that the human terrain team may have missed an important dimension, namely the religious. In a study entitled Sufism, Sodomy and Satan published in this space August 12, 2008, I argued:

Sufi pedophilia cannot be dismissed as a remnant of the old tribal practices that Islam often incorporated, for example, female genital mutilation. Genital mutilation is a pre-Islamic practice unknown in the ancient and modern West. Even though some Muslim authorities defend it on the basis of Hadith, no one has ever claimed that it offered a path to enlightenment. Sadly, pedophiles are found almost everywhere. In its ascendancy, Sufism made a definitive spiritual experience out of a practice considered criminally aberrant in the West. But pederasty as a spiritual exercise is not essentially different in character from the furtive practices of Western perverts. As the psychiatrists explain, pederasty is an expression of narcissism, the love of an idealized youthful self-image.

All forms of contemplative mysticism involve the danger that the object of adoration into which one dissolves might turn out to be one's self. It sounds well and good to seek God in the all, that is, no place in particular. The trouble is that if one tries to dissolve one's self into the all, one's self becomes part of the all. The lover cannot distinguish himself from the all. The self and the all are the same, and one loves one's self. There is no other in Sufism, only your own ego staring back in the carnival mirror of mysticism. The adept does not worship a God who is wholly other - YHWH of the Hebrew Bible or Jesus of the Gospels - but a younger and prettier version of himself. In that respect, pedophilia in Afghanistan may have a distinctly religious motivation.

And you thought things were hard in your neck of the woods.

 

Feminism versus equality

Here is a fascinating column about why the majority of people believe in equality for women but find the label "feminism" icky.

So for successfully pushing my buttons—a difficult task, I should say—I’m going to give Nagoski here her two minutes of lackluster fame. According to her blog (rather fittingly summed up by the title “Sex Nerd”), Nagoski is a Massachusetts-based sex educator/feminist who, judging by her unflattering write-up of my post (“Misogyny and Cervical Mucus in Scientific American”) wants people to talk about cervical mucous as the glorious compound it is. To her, my acknowledging getting blue in the gills at the thought of some intrepid laboratory workers dipping their microscopes into the lukewarm, two-day-old vaginal secretions of strangers was somehow outrageously sexist of me. Nagoski thus refers to me as an “anti-feminist.”

You have to read the whole thing. It's funny at times, and enlightening.

"My name is Antoine"

Pickup lines work better with the right soundtrack.

Guéguen and Jacob were part of a research team that had already shown how romantic music played in a flower shop led to male customers spending more money. This time the researchers used questionnaires to pinpoint agreed-upon neutral and romantic songs. They chose 'Je l'aime à mourir', a well-known love song by French songwriter Francis Cabrel, and the neutral song 'L'heure du thé', by Vincent Delerm. A group of young women separate from the main study rated 12 young male volunteers for attractiveness, and the researchers picked the one rated closest to 'average' to help with the experiment.

The researchers then set up a scenario where the 87 females each spent time in a waiting room with background music playing, before moving to a different room where the experimenter instructed her to discuss the difference between two food products with the young man. Once the experimenter returned, she asked them to wait for a few moments alone, and this gave the 'average' male a chance to use his standard chat up line: "My name is Antoine, as you know, I think you are very nice and I was wondering if you would give me your phone number. I'll phone you later and we can have a drink together somewhere next week.'

The love song in the waiting room almost doubled Antoine's chances of getting a woman's number -- 52% of participants responded to his advances under the influence of Francis Cabrel, whereas only 28% of those who had heard the 'neutral' song by Vincent Delerm offered their details.

"Our results confirm that the effect of exposure to media content is not limited to violence and could have the potential to influence a high spectrum of behaviour," says Guéguen. "The results are interesting for scientists who work on the effect of background music on individuals' behaviour."

The results also add weight to a general learning model proposed by Buckley and Anderson in 2006 to explain the effect of media exposure. Their model states that media exposure in general, and not only aggressive or violent media, affects individuals' internal states, which explains why prosocial media fosters prosocial outcomes.

Why did the music have this effect? It may be that, as shown in earlier research, the music induced positive affect (in psychological terms, affect is the experience of feeling or emotion). Positive affect is associated with being more receptive to courtship requests. Alternatively, the romantic content of the song may have acted as a prime that then led to displays of behaviour associated with that prime. In either case, further research is needed before the researchers will commit to wider generalisations on the targeted use of love songs. But if you're a hopeful single, awareness of the background music certainly won't do any harm.

Parallel Universe

Saturday we went over to Girlfriend’s mom’s house to help sort through things. Judy’s sister needed help with some papers to settle her mom June’s estate, and since Girlfriend has made her living as a legal secretary it was right in her wheelhouse.

After going through the papers we moved to their mom’s bedroom, which was filled to the ceiling with those plastic storage tubs. Many of them were filled with yarn. A whole wall stacked with tubs full of yarn. Apparently, Judy’s mom had at one time planned on doing a lot of knitting. And there were tubs full of fabrics. I guess she also had planned on doing some sewing. There was a lot of clothing with the tags still on it. She bought them but she never wore them. Lots of shoes too. Mom was a bit of a packrat towards the end.

Duchess, the family dog, kept on getting into the middle of things. She’s the sweetest pit bull I’ve ever met, but she constantly needs attention. And she’s always barking. She’d come up to where you’d be working, get right in front of you, and then bark at you. If you petted her, she’d quiet down and wag her tail. Her tail is thick and hard and when she’s really happy that tail is like a bullwhip. It can bruise your shins. After you gave her attention her she’d go over to someone else and start barking until that person petted her. She'd work her way around the room and in a few minutes she'd be back to you. Eventually someone figured out to put her in another room and close the door so we could continue to sift through the occupation layers without interruption.

Girlfriend took some fabric. There was lots of very pretty cloth. We loaded up the car. Auntie Rosemary, who arrived in the middle of the excavation of the bedroom, had brought over a couple of pies, so we sat down after the work and everyone had some slices. I started out with the banana cream pie and then had a slice of the apple pie. Then it was the time for looking at old pictures. In her day June was a looker. There was a black and white photo of her in shorts, sometime after WWII, kind of posing on a blanket with a big smile. Probably smiling at her late husband taking the picture. Maybe they were on a picnic. Nice legs. There was another photo from when June was around forty. Judy was in the picture next to her and looked really young and quite gorgeous in that one.

We all had more tread on us back in those days.

When we got home a little fabric turned out to be a whole bunch of those heavy tubs which we lugged upstairs to one of the empty bedrooms. I tried to talk Girlfriend into sewing me a slave boy outfit a la Aladdin so that I could dance erotically for her, but she demurred. I guess a sixty year-old man doing a truncated version of the twist in a costume worthy of the Folsom Street Fair wasn’t that appealing to her, so why encourage me?

We got some Chinese takeout for dinner.

+++

Sunday started cold and foggy, and for a short stretch in the morning it was even drizzly. The winter rains just continue to hang on this year. Not a happy way to start out the day. Girlfriend’s kids are up in Portland so her life’s work wasn’t around to celebrate Mother’s Day with her. Just a sixty year-old man willing to do the twist for her.

Midday we went over to San Pedro Park for a walk. We parked in the church parking lot. Locals know to do that to save money on parking inside the park. The sign in front of the church read: “Happy Mother’s Day”.

We’re an older couple, and often our patter is pretty much snark. Pointing out the sign in the church parking lot I announced that there ought to be a Guy’s Day. She said, Oh, a day when you leave up the toilet seat and pee on the floor? That’s every day.

In my defense it’s not every day.

It was humid and surprisingly warm, and it was a little tougher going than it usually is. Walks are good for talking about things, or even talking about nothing. It was on a walk along the beach a couple years ago that I explained to Judy that the lyrics to “Shaft” didn’t go “He’s a cop who killed a man/but no one understands him but his woman” but rather “He’s a complicated man,” although if I recall correctly John Shaft killed a number of men throughout the Shaft series. Today I imparted the wisdom to her that the title to the song “In A Gadda Da Vida” was originally “in the Garden of Eden” but that the singer so poorly enunciated the lyrics that they changed the title. As proof I offered the line from the song, “Oh won’t you come with me and walk this land,” this land being Eden. Girlfriend wasn’t convinced by my logic but did not dispute the original intent of the song.

I commented how cute she was in that picture with her mom. Then I said it was too bad I hadn’t run into her when I first got to San Francisco in 1974. She said she’d graduated from high school that year, but that she’d skipped a grade and was only 17. That would have been problematic, me being 23.

Well, maybe a year or two later, I said.

Did you have all your hair back then?

Of course, I said. Why’d you ask?

Just checking, she said. I think she was screwing around with me. After all, she’d seen pictures of that good-looking blonde guy from back then.

You would have caught my eye, she said a little later.

I don’t know if it was the overcast day or what but there was a little bit of sadness in the air.

At one point Girlfriend said, This isn’t the best Mother’s Day I’ve had.

I felt bad. Maybe I wasn’t such good company. Maybe my snark wasn’t so much funny as grating. Or maybe she was still ticked off at me because I was hogging the TV and watching the Giants’ bullpen blowing a lead.

Or maybe sometimes you just can’t be responsible for making the one you love happy. Sometimes we’re just not in such a great mood.

It was overcast.

When we got near the end of the walk and were approaching the end of the trail I reverted to reality. I said that if we’d met back in the seventies she wouldn’t have had her daughters and I wouldn’t have had my girl, presuming we’d fallen in love and married. It would have disrupted the space-time continuum. You know, wormholes and parallel universes and all.

We got to the street and headed over towards the church parking lot. Well, I suggested, maybe we could have met in 1976 for a quickie. Do quickies disrupt the space-time continuum?