Atomic Nerds

Having gone into a thumbnail of the history of evolutionary theories of the advantage of sexual reproduction, the question as it stands nowadays is not “why sex”, but rather “why NOT” sex, for species that have entirely given it up* and gone to all-female lines of parthenogetically reproducing individuals.

When I initially set out with the idea of this post, I expected it to be very simple, and I turned out to be dramatically wrong. I will start out with the simple bit.

Both parthenogenesis in sexual species and especially completely parthenogenetic lines do share a common pattern, which is that they excel in a specialized niche as colonizers. Colonizing species are what you get first in an environment that has either recently had its previous ecosystem wiped out or has yet to be exploited; these species excel at rapidly moving in and filling what niches are available, but tend to eventually be out-competed by other species as the ecosystem matures. In some cases they may never be booted out due to poor habitat or general inaccessibility- for this reason islands don’t normally tend to have terribly complex ecosystems and harbor a number of species that would be outcompeted by mainland species- and often are, either over a very long period or a much shorter one if humans move in toting their mainland species with them.

Parthenogenesis offers an obvious advantage to a colonizer; there doesn’t need to be more than one of the animal in question to begin colonizing, the genotype that is successful enough to move into a harsh environment in the short term is probably a good bet to replicate rather than recombine and radiate rapidly into the entirety of the available niche, and their clean-slate situation is generally a perfect one for the short-term-strategy, high-payoff investor I mentioned in the previous post. Aside from colonizing islands, like the completely parthenogenetic Mourning Gecko of Hawaii (now declining as they are apparently outcompeted by a mainland species, the house gecko) and the parthenogenesis-capable Komodo dragons** of the Indonesian archipelago, this applies to any habitat that has been recently disturbed or is prone to recurring disturbance.

Most of the all-female lines of whiptail lizards (and there are several) seem to predominate in riparian areas of the southwestern US, which are prone to frequent destruction by flash flood. Aside from just washes, the southwest has a fairly long and recent history of disruption; human habitation, even by native Americans, was a little more than some of the environment could handle, and the Anasazi in particular turned a lot of forest into arid grassland. Combine this with the fire-dependent ecosystem of Ponderosa forest, and you have a rapidly changing environment in which a species that happens to be suited to the environment the changes create could spread very rapidly, more rapidly without sex than with it- we are in the middle of Ponderosa forest, surrounded by many canyons, and all of our little yellow striped yard lizards are of the local all-female race of whiptails.

This was where I expected the post to conclude originally: in a genus of lizards with many sexual species and many independently evolved lines of all-female parthenogenetic lizards, the parthenogenetic lizards win where the environment has either been recently disturbed or is constantly disturbed, and their sexual cousins win in more stable habitats where the advantages of sex have the chance to win the long game.

What I did NOT expect was to discover was that, in vertebrates, parthenogenesis is heavily associated with hybridization events to the point where the paper I eventually tracked down trying to figure out what on earth was going on asserted that all known vertebrate cases of parthenogenesis are associated with hybridization events, while a few more cases since then have emerged and don’t appear to have any link to any hybridization***.

Kearny makes the case that the hybridization is not incidental, but rather a hand-in-hand strategy with the parthenogenesis itself for species moving into a disturbed habit. He ties everything around glaciation events (which is, I suppose, why our local whiptails weren’t included), but glaciation is itself a very specific type of disturbance whose patterns can be geologically tracked and which tends to open up broad swathes of newly available, but inhospitable, habitat. He demonstrates that hybridization and gene flow from sometimes even multiple members of the same genus is associated with successful colonizing and radiating in disturbed/harsh territory even with sexual species.

This is where parthenogenetic lines- and both the geckos and the whiptails I’ve been talking about are known to have originated from multiple independent hybridization events- tie back into the portfolio-balancing theory of the advantage of sex. (He specifically cites Roughgarden coming to his conclusion, in fact.) Hybridization does not necessarily produce an intermediate result; it can be a tremendous dice-throw when it comes to the result, and there can be consequences like dwarfism or gigantism****, extreme color morphs, and other results dramatically different from both parent species; if sex produces a wide range of genes that work well in combination with each other within a species’s gene pool, hybridization means all bets are off with how well or poorly said genes will work in combinations that haven’t been fine-tuned by selection for the last million years.

For related species on the ragged edge of new potential territory, or coming back from a major environmental shakeup, they can be in the same relatively disadvantageous position: possibly a small population with a reduced gene pool and not particularly adapted for the new world order. Hybridization with the strange neighbors would result mostly in offspring that were even more poorly adapted- but for the few equally wild-card results that WERE, a parthenogenetic line would “fix” the new type not present in either population in a position of advantage as a colonizer. With low or no gene flow from the parent species (sometimes parthenogenetic species will occasionally be sexual outside the species), its advantage could persist without immediate dilution from either original, markedly less-well-adapted species.

Shuffle the cards, shuffle the cards… then run with the first really good hand you get.

*Given up sexual reproduction, that is. They still have sex. They are demonstrably more fecund when sharing a burrow or laboratory habitat with a mate, with whom they trade off taking the “male part”. They are unusual among reptiles and even within their own genus for this chumminess. No evidence of ice cream or “The L Word” has been found, however.

**Interestingly, the dragons are also unusual among reptiles and lizards in general in that they seem to form some kind of pair bond with their mates. I have no idea what this means but it’s worth noting.

***The Komodo dragons again, also some shark species, and also snakes. The snakes actually were discovered prior to the paper’s publication, though. I have no idea if its author simply hadn’t heard or discounted it because it did not result in a unisexual line. As a purely taxonomic footnote, the Varanid monitor lizards to which Komodos belong are arguably more closely related to snakes than to the geckos and whiptails, and they and the snakes share the same ZW sex-determination system, which is why Komodos couldn’t go fully parthenogenetic even if it were to their advantage to do so- all the offspring are male. Reptilia is one fucked up clade.

****Back to the dragons, so far as I could determine no hybridization event is known for them, and their likeliest ancestors include lizards as large or even larger than them… but they do stand out as quite odd among island colonizers for their sheer size. The predominating theory is that they began smaller and grew larger to exploit stegodonts and deer as a food source. Pure and rampant speculation, but food for thought.

I’ve been waiting for the ideal time to sit down and let this magically put itself together and it appears as though it is determined to remain a ball of constantly escaping and breeding snakes, so I will have to split this into multiple parts.

Awhile back I mentioned that I was working on a post about parthenogenesis in vertebrates and why asexual reproduction appears at all in nature against a background of relentless sexual reproduction, and got immediately and violently sidetracked by the fact that it was a much, much more complex subject than I expected and my chosen example genus particularly so. Then I found out while attempting to chase down answers that most of the leads I was looking for didn’t go much of anywhere because no one had yet gotten around to writing papers meant to address them. Hence the ball-of-snakes nature of the subject.

The “problem of sex” has been a perennial topic in evolutionary biology, because the seemingly intuitive argument is that it should be a significant fitness loss for an organism that has a genome good enough to get it to successful reproduction to them randomly shuffle not only its own genes, but then combine them with some equally randomized genes from some other organism. Yet, we know this genetic shuffling must actually be tremendously advantageous, because almost all species reproduce sexually, and even in groups like bacteria that normally reproduce by replicating themselves directly, a tremendous amount of horizontal gene transfer (as opposed to vertical, the fissioning and accumulating mutations thought “normal” for bacteria) has gone on- so much so that the earliest roots of the phylogenetic “tree” of life become impossible to disentangle because it’s impossible to tell what was orderly and clockable mutation and how much was useful genes disseminating by horizontal transfer.

The first solution to the problem of sex was Muller’s Ratchet, which proposes that sexual reproduction exists because otherwise asexual lines would slowly be crushed under an accumulation of deleterious mutations that line had no means to get rid of. The Ratchet does turn out to be a useful idea in some areas, especially with regard to accumulating mutations on regions of chromosomes that don’t undergo recombination in otherwise sexual species, but the discovery of widespread horizontal transfer between organisms previously thought to be completely clonally reproducing organisms renders it somewhat obsolete in terms of explaining the advantage of sex itself; why most species are sexual in the more traditional sense still remains a question to be begged, and before this discovery the existence of successfully asexual lines apparently many millions of years old would have been. Regardless, the entire concept when proposed as an explanation for sex itself also runs into the problem that sexual reproduction involves trading or rearranging genes- not actually eliminating them. If looked at purely from the perspective of deleterious mutations, an organism with a theoretical choice between cloning its successful self and recombining its genes runs just as much risk of picking up new bad traits from its partners as it does of having the new combination absent its deleterious genes.

The second dominant theory of sexual reproduction is the Red Queen Hypothesis. This idea boils down to the idea that the advantage of sex is that it allows organisms to rapidly evolve and compete with its predators, direct competitors, and parasites; everybody must have sex because everybody must evolve quickly or otherwise you will be left in the dust by those whose gain would be your loss. Parasites are the favorite example because they have much shorter generational timespans than their hosts and can evolve much more quickly; in this scenario, sex preserves genes that might not be an advantage now but might be in the next generation because the parasites had changed quickly. The logic of Red Queen has its utility, but it also has the exact same problem that Muller’s Ratchet had, which is that if the competition is that intense, an organism would have every bit as much to lose from the possibility of producing less-adapted offspring as more-adapted, and if the competition were really that intense sexual reproduction could make an awful lot of organisms instant losers, especially K strategists- species that put a tremendous amount of effort and resources into a few offspring rather than just a tremendous amount of offspring. To put it in human terms- and we are very specialized K strategists- it does your family’s fitness no good whatsoever if you survive a tuberculosis epidemic and none of your children do because their father wasn’t as well adapted and they took more after him.

A theory gaining currency (in part because at least one of its premises is mathematically sound, which is something that neither the Ratchet or Red Queen ever quite achieved to my knowledge, though I could be wrong) that Joan Roughgarden termed the “portfolio rebalancing” idea. In this version, the advantage of sexual reproduction isn’t in maximizing the fitness of deleterious versus advantageous genes so much as it is achieving a diversity of genes that work well in many different combinations and under different conditions. In investment terms, the difference between an asexual species and a sexual one would be akin to an investor who invests everything he has in things that are currently paying off highly now, and an investor who seeks to balance his portfolio among a multitude of different options, some currently very successful and others less so, though none unsuccessful- at least at the time of investment. The high-stakes investor, or the asexual organism, experience much more short-term success in that intuitive way that suggests asexual reproduction as the more fit model to us- but it is not a stable strategy. The moment something sufficiently important changes, the strategy may collapse, and the fellow with the balanced portfolio having all the sex may be in a much better position to recover and may even be in a position of new advantage. In some ways this is a more robust version of Red Queen as it identifies changing environments to the key to long-term evolutionary success, but positing varying genomes as mostly pretty good as opposed to a stark advantage-disadvantage view inherent in the deadly-treadmill model.

I’ll break off here as I smell dinner is nearly ready and I’ll have little time to write later on. More, specifically the conditions under which parthenogenesis become advantageous and why this same rebalancing theory has a surprising role in driving even asexual strategies, later.

So there’s a discussion over at Querencia about breed standards and their utility or lack thereof, that has me thinking again along the lines of what a “breed” actually is and how breeding should be approached. If you’ll recall I denounced the logic of closed registries some time ago as an inevitable population-genetics suicide pill, and there was some discussion then of how we should define dogs as a breed, if not by their parents and increasingly narrowing gene pools.

The most obvious reply to “closed registries are bad” was and is “if you just define any dog as a breed as one that kinda looks and acts like one, you’ll quickly lose all consistency and probably functionality as well”. This is true. As I pointed out in that post, inbred genetic disease problems and consistency of form and working ability are achieved by precisely the same mechanism: deliberately narrowing the gene pool. The upshot of the post after all the genetic discussion is that you can’t create a group of small-to-medium fast-moving dogs with consistently high aptitude for moving sheep around (or insert other breed form and function) without also accepting a higher rate of genetic disease than you would find in a population of randomly breeding dogs; it’s just that closing registries also closes a lot of the options breeders have to mitigate and do some repair work on those small, tailored gene pools they’ve created.

The line of logic this leads to, at least in regards to how dog breeding is accomplished in the majority of the Western world, is to rely more heavily on breed standards in making our definition of what a breed is. As John Burchard and Steve point out, standards have a great number of problems inherent in them as well, some of which are systemic in that human nature tends to err consistently in the same directions over time. Immediately in comments, the same family of counter-argument as the one above is presented: if we don’t have standards, then we immediately lose consistency, and the entire point of having breeds at all is consistency.

Well, yes. Even the most ardent working-dog devotees, the commenter points out, have a sort of overall shape and form of dog in mind when judging the worth of a dog and its potential contributions to a breeding program. But none of that detracts from Dr. Burchard’s point, which is that breeding to a written standard of questionable interpretation is what has lead to Bulldogs that can’t give birth or mate naturally and can’t survive heat for long, German Shepherds that look like recognizably normal canines from the shoulders forward and victims of severe scoliosis from the shoulders back, and Pekingese that can barely breathe because physiologically speaking, most of their snouts are in their throats. That standards have led to severe deformities being enshrined as “breed type” and actively bred for is inarguable: the evidence is struggling around the show rings every year. Not even the favored savior most frequently put forth, working ability, is any guarantor- the German-bred GSDs must pass a working test to be shown and bred, but as the photos show, have become every bit as deformed as their American counterparts. They merely dumbed down the tests to accommodate for dogs whose grotesque structures had finally compromised their ability to move enough to start failing, as Dr. Burchard notes.

What are these people thinking? Most surely it is not “I think it would be the best thing for the breed to cripple it”. Not, likely, of money- dogs that look like this don’t make such great candidates for milling out and selling to the public. Status? I’m certain it’s a motivation, but again, most people in breeding and showing are there out of love for the breed- ribbons are a nice thing to chase, but there are much cheaper and easier ways to go about status. I suspect, however, that the thought process begins with “an English bull dog is a dog with a skull that should be very large, and in circumference, in front of the ears, should measure at least the height of the dog at the shoulders. Viewed from the front, it should appear very high from the corner of the lower jaw to the apex of the skull, and also very broad and square. Viewed at the side, the head should appear very high, and very short from the point of the nose to occiput. The forehead should be flat (not rounded or domed), neither too prominent nor overhanging the face.” To borrow from one mangled breed’s current standard. Reading it does not directly suggest this- but it is what has resulted over multiple generations of breeders breeding for exactly what was prescribed.

And if they defend their results as what the breed is? Are these dogs descended from those in the original studbook? Yes. Do they fit the standard, are they not exemplifying the standard as directly as they can? Yes, they’re doing that too. The problem is, the standard is constructed around traits that described this animal as distinguished from all other dogs quite accurately… and over generations of a contest that compared bulldog to bulldog depending on how they distinguished in these traits from other bulldogs produced this animal. They have done nothing but create a bulldog that is most purely and essentially a bulldog as they understand the state of bulldogness to be- and love of bulldogs was the primary driver.

Work is not necessarily the cure, either. Work will be more consistent in weeding out dogs that are outright deformed, but a bird dog who cannot be sane unless he runs for miles and miles each day and wrecks his own frame through constant hard use (and yes, maybe because the frame was not that sound to begin with) is as much a dog who is suffering from what his breeding as wrought as one who cannot run for more than a few minutes because he can’t breathe very well to begin with. Likewise dogs that run their paw pads off because they are so stimulated by the prospect of doing whatever it is they fire so hard on that they don’t notice pain until major damage has already been done.

Likewise, such a dog can only exist in an environment in which the work is there for him to do- and the spaces for this kind of work are narrower and narrower with each century. Surely they and their work is worth preserving, but wanting a dog that makes a reasonable companion is by far the commonest modern motive in evaluating dogs, and far from an ignoble one. If work were the standard cure, what to do with vast swathes of breeds that WERE created specifically to be pleasant pets? It certainly wouldn’t move the desire for dog ownership exclusively to people whose particular monomanias make a field-bred hard worker a good choice. In terms of total pet owning homes, even if we could somehow exclude all idiots and irresponsible people, far more would be better off with a carefully bred Bichon Frise from a mindful show-and-nothing-but-show kennel than a terrier from working lines or a field-bred setter. They have no less reason to prefer a purebred to a mutt than a family that wants a dog for a specific job; they may want the dog to be consistently stable, consistently friendly, of a consistent easily managed size, and with a consistent coat that is nice to pet and maybe doesn’t shed so much dander. These are far from selfish or stupid desires or reasons to have a breed.

If you think I’m leading up to a better solution than standards, I’m not. Just because you point out deep and systemic problems in a given system doesn’t mean you have a much better solution. The best I can do is emphasize that when breeding any animal to create a consistent type, the first priority should not be endlessly chasing essentialism, but what makes this breed and what you want it to do- now, in the future, ten generations from now. We cannot eliminate the human qualities of politics and short-sighted terminology from standard-writing, but we can push within the culture to keep these concerns first and foremost. The degree to which individual kennel clubs and overall communities for breeds has done this has made a great deal of difference in how various breeds have fared over the century.

I would make a graph relating my time and energy levels as relating to my window of opportunity to write, with perhaps a second figure representing my priorities, but it would take too much time.

The groove I find my mind sinking into tonight has been created with the juxtaposition of this post by Ambulance Driver regarding his interaction with some sort of non-human taxa of English-speakers and the comments on this post about celebrity hatebag Mel Gibson’s latest caught-on-tape explosion at his ex-girlfriend should be enraging to me but instead are just filling me with dull depression. If you don’t wish to listen, and I sympathize with that desire because it’s nothing but ugly, the relevant portion of his series of remarks, aside from his earlier well-publicized proclamation that his girlfriend’s manner of dress would cause a pack of a very bad racial slurs to rape her, is the threat to take a bat to the side of her head and plant her in a rose garden.

What’s depressing about the comments is that a large number of them, perhaps even a majority, are about what a bitch slut skank gold-digging whore the girlfriend clearly is, and how she’s manipulated poor Mel into destroying himself by provoking him into the frothing rage caught on tape, and she doesn’t sound too upset, and who tapes a conversation anyway? They seem to be from, as you can imagine, men, who if pressed will admit that threatening to kill your girlfriend is inexcusable, but are extremely concerned to make sure everyone understands what a bitch this woman is and how she’s manipulating him into doing these inexcusable things in order to take his money and his child away.

I don’t know, maybe she is a gold-digger. Maybe she’s even a slut. Maybe she does plan to make sure he never sees his child again. Frankly after that performance, if it were my kid and I’d had the poor judgment to let Mel Gibson knock me up, I sure as hell would want to keep Mr. Bat-and-Garden you-deserve-rape away from a little girl. Maybe she did record that conversation in hopes of fucking him over forever.

How is that even at all relevant? If I record someone breaking into my house, do we have to hold an evaluation of my character and motivations before we can decide whether the breaker-and-enterer is just misunderstood?

Do these men regard frothing, out of control rage as an acceptable way to relate to someone if they feel betrayed by that person?

Do they think violent, over-the-top misogyny is a forgivable thing in a father of a daughter, who will herself someday grow up to be one of those bitches? Or just realistic?

Do they find threatening to maim and kill forgivable because they do it themselves when they are angry?

Do they think the bitch ever “earned” the beating, the rape- or the killing?

I am depressed because I suspect the answer, even if unarticulated, is yes. In which case my next question is why anyone thinks it surprising that people killed by their partners don’t flee or defend themselves until far too late- because apparently anything short of putting a bullet in him while he’s standing over you with an upraised axe, including withdrawing yourself and your children and withholding contact, is unjustifiable provocation.

Might or might not be able to get anything else today, but if nothing else here’s the VC.

One of the more fun ones for us to do, which probably means it’s one of the more random ones to actually listen to. To the extent we had a theme, it was new VCer and frequent commenter Tarb, who impressed us all by being willing to do this shit completely sober.

Not what I originally planned to post either today or yesterday, but I’m still running under some time constraints, so you’ll get your cloning, cross-species-screwing lizards another day.

So, lately the company that runs the world’s most popular online multiplayer computer game, Blizzard, has caused a stir large enough to be noticed outside the gaming world by announcing that from the next expansion forward, in order to post on their official forums, you must do so under your full name as connected to your account. Their stated logic is that this will reduce trolling and other incivil behavior by removing the “veil of anonymity”. I tend to suspect that their actual logic is related to some sort of undisclosed marketing contract or a plan to turn the Blizzard network of games into some kind of Facebook-like social networking system, but this is somewhat beside the point. If you follow the linked story, it regards a Blizzard employee who posted his own full name on the forum in which the player rage was in full tilt in order to prove that everyone was just being silly- and was rewarded for his hubris by having his telephone numbers, address, and pictures of his face being subsequently tracked down and posted within the space of five minutes. Blizzard is now sending a rather thoroughly mixed message as to whether the real-name policy will be suspended for employees, though they haven’t backed down on requiring it for players.

Chastity, a Warcraft blogger, has a rather good post up about why people are upset about this and why it’s not just wrongheaded of Blizzard but the logic itself is rather flawed. The gist of his post is that names aren’t neutral- posting under your real name doesn’t just put your personal details at risk, which few random people will be interested in, it also advertises your gender and ethnicity. This is all well and good if your name is Michael Jones, but it has a fairly major potential impact on how other people interact with you if your name is Juanita Ramirez or Mohammed Sri’vastra or Lashawn King. Assholes who enjoy being assholes will do so even without the cover of anonymity- especially if they are called something like Michael Smith which is effectively nearly as good as anonymity- and giving out extra details even implicitly often changes the character of their assholery and potentially makes targets out of those who otherwise would not have been.

Less specifically, it’s often pointed out that privacy is largely an illusion in today’s world. Up to a point this is true; anyone with a serious desire to know who either of us are can, and anyone who DOES know my real name can come up with a frightening number of personal details with very little relative effort and no laws broken. This is all true, but it is also not the point; whether true privacy is achievable is very nearly irrelevant to those of us who value the “privacy lite” of not using our real names in public forums.

Lots of bloggers blog under their given names. Stingray and I don’t. In part this is because we’ve been using these handles on the internet for so long (I think at least a decade in my case) that our real names are actually far less relevant as identifiers in the community we’re concerned with. When we went to the NRA con in Phoenix as bloggers, when we went to get our credentials the representative stared at us blankly when we tried to use our given names and only handed them over when we identified ourselves as LabRat and Stingray. Likewise, when we went to Blogorado, we got blank stares when we introduced ourselves by those names- they weren’t who we were, at least not to bloggers.

We are not really all that concerned with staying truly anonymous; not only are we aware that’s nearly impossible, we don’t really try that hard. Lots of readers have those names now, because we are fairly free with sending e-mails under those names. As to personal details, a lot of them are posted here- not enough to, say, identify Stingray’s direct employer or locate our street address, but we are not that difficult to find. We don’t mind. Most of the world is friendly or neutral, and we are equipped to deal with the bits that aren’t.

What we, and most especially I, are concerned with is remaining a very limited search string using those names. My own first and last name are uncommon enough individually that in combination, any search of me is certain to find ME and not thirty thousand other Americans that share my name; while I haven’t written anything I’d be truly concerned about having a potential employer or law enforcement official read, I’d rather stay without the entire body of my opinions, hobbies, and politics a Google string away. Part of that is just a general desire not to have the entire story of my life readily connectable to me via that method, but another part of it is real concern- I have at least one psycho in my life with a great deal of tenacity and deeply obsessive tendencies, and while this person could never find anything on me on the internet to do anything more serious with than harass me, I have been quite harassed enough and I’d rather not hand this person any potential further tools to do so whatsoever, even if it doesn’t really look like a tool- and harassment itself is a bad enough experience that I don’t think I’m irrational for wishing to avoid it.

And that’s really the crux of it. As Chastity observed of the comment wars in the Warcraft case,

And of course the comments at WoW.com are the predictable mix:

10% – People saying “this is a problem”
80% – Men saying “My Name is John Smith SEE YOU ARE ALL BEING STUPID”
5% – Women saying “Umm, actually guys it’s more complicated than that”
1% – Women saying “My Name is Jane Smith and I REFUSE TO BE A VICTIM and IF SOMEBODY STALKS ME I WILL SHOOT THEM WITH MY GUN”
4% – Men saying “See! Because that one woman said it was okay that means it is totally okay!”

Whether in the case of my own pet psycho or a totally new psycho that decided to make a hobby out of stalking or harassing, I could, in fact, shoot them with any one of my guns. I’m not afraid of humiliation, or legal liability, or even death, as remote a possibility of anyone taking a sufficiently homicidal interest in me would be. It’s that my entire philosophy of having guns meant for self-defense rather than making meals out of wildlife, and seatbelts in my car for that matter, revolves around minimizing the possibility of ever having to use them. I don’t WANT to shoot anyone with any of my guns, I don’t want to test my emergency driving skills, and on a much smaller and less consequential level I don’t even want to have a chat with some random person who went to high school with me on my tank gearing philosophy in one of my video games- and this does not make me a coward or a hysteric.

ETA: You’d think being one author of a blog that has two would make me more alert to who posts what at other such blogs… you’d be wrong. Fixed.

Real Life rolled a natural twenty and I need to go do something mindless, with a drink. Material tomorrow.

1. Get inquiring comment on earlier post. Make a happy note to yourself that that sounds like a lovely subject for a short, trouble-free little science post as a textbook example of the role of sex in evolution and why, outside of dated/limited Red Queen hypothesis, it is common and asexual reproduction is rare, why the exceptions happen. Cake.

2. Go to look up further detail on the lizard genus in question. Hybridization? Polyploidy? Wait, what does that have to do with it?

3. Look up another relevant lizard. Wait, what, their parthenogenetic offspring are always male? The whiptails are always female. Because the dragons are on a ZW system? Wouldn’t that mean different lizard groups are somehow on a different chromosomal sex-determination system?

4. Wow.

5. Okay, that’s cool, but not really that relevant, so let’s try polyploidy, hybridization, and parthenogenesis.

6. Awesome, exactly what I was after.

7. *note price tag* *frustration*

8. *beg friend with current logins to the Sekrit Science Club* *thank friend profusely*

9. *read* Gosh. *read* Really? *read* How the hell do I interpret that fig- oh. *read*

10. *note time and number of essential things still remaining to do that day* *frustration*

12. *compile process* *post*

It’s Friday, I’m on the run, and I wasn’t last night. That means Vicious Circle!

In a lengthy comment on my Chromosomal Radio post, commenter Geodykt pointed out that I am explicitly suggesting some fairly deep differences in communication style between the sexes, when previously I’ve been pretty unforgiving of articles designed around Decoding Woman Language or Man Language. I answered there- the bottom line reason I’m so down on the article I fisked is because it not only treats women as some sort of other species, but explicitly rests on the premise that the only form of meaningful interaction for a man with a girlfriend is sex, he’s entitled to sex, and the rest is just her screwing around to get stuff, but it deserves a longer treatment.

Yes, I do think there are meaningful and deep differences between men and women, some of which are no doubt rooted in biology, some of which are rooted in culture, and some of which are rooted in other aspects of socialization, like the way we effectively sort into two different camps of interaction from early childhood to puberty and then gingerly re-integrate. (I suspect this period combined with culture of birth is what creates single-gender “radio”- a long period of learned nonverbal signals and unspoken social mores that may not overlap at all.) The reason I’m so quick to question any and all products, books, articles, and the like that explicitly rest on the premise of “men and women are different, time to explain the differences so we can finally get something done” is that while it’s trivial to recognize that there ARE differences, the human urge to set things into neat categories leads to a tremendous amount of gender essentialism. It’s one thing to recognize that your wife/husband whoever is different from you in ways you may not understand, it’s another thing altogether to forget that you are close friends and you both speak English; the closer and more intimate the relationship, the more the right answer to a question or point of friction is not to figure out how the other person’s Man/Woman Nature is causing it, it’s to talk to them. Yes, communication can be difficult, especially when one or more of the people involved never really learned some advanced communication skills that a lot of people don’t because no one explicitly sets out to teach them, but making assumptions that turn out to be wrong is condescending at best and can be disastrous at worst.

This doesn’t just apply to relationships; a disturbing amount of the time, once you oh-so-bravely bring up the question of “are the sexes fundamentally different, perhaps in ways we don’t remotely understand”, the answer seems to be “yes and it’s biological and happens to line up really well with the gender paradigms of the 1950s”. To give an example, Larry Summers (late of the Obama administration) managed to get deposed as president of Harvard for remarking that the reason women are not found as often in higher levels of academics in math and science may be that women simply don’t tend to be as biologically equipped for math and science as men. He was pilloried for it.

From where I’m sitting, he deserved to be- but not because it was sexist in and of itself to suggest that men and women may be biologically different and even have (very) broadly different aptitudes across varying cognitive domains. It was for being a pure-and-simple sloppy thinker. YES, genetics and biology influence us across both temperament and personality; we should know this simply by the fact that we’ve managed to create different dog breeds that vary dramatically in behavior as much as they do in shape and form. However, humans are also the most profoundly cultural species on the planet; we literally require massive doses of cultural interaction to grow to adulthood and be sane and functional. To assume off the bat that a difference between human groups is genetic without seriously considering culture is just plain lazy as well as highly likely to lead anyone wrong.

No, he wasn’t wrong for the making the suggestion because it was sexist on its face- but to make such a suggestion without sitting down and pondering what exactly a person needs to do to achieve a high level of success in math and science was. For one, academic science requires a person to devote basically the entirety of their young adulthood to work, to the exclusion of much in the way of a family life- unless you can secure a partner willing to shoulder most of the load for you on the home front and be understanding about your relative absence. Does Larry Summers, or anyone else, think that there are no gender differences whatsoever in the pressure a man or a woman experiences to be the primary homemaker? Or, for that matter, in socialization to value career over family or vice versa? Or in remaining single to a certain age versus settling down at a certain age?

For that matter, he’s also off his nut if he genuinely thinks the only measure of your ability to succeed in academic math and science is your talent for math and science, even once you admit it’s also measured by your willingness to lock yourself in a laboratory until you’re at least thirty. I would invite anyone under this impression to walk up to someone on a university campus currently involved in trying to get tenure, or just retain their jobs with any prospect of career advancement, and tell them that success in academic science- tenure and the peer review system- is all about merit and that politics have nothing to do with it. I would also caution this person to pick a day when their subject is in good humor and more inclined to laugh in their face than to try and choke them with their shirt.

DO men and women differ broadly in their respective talents for math and science on a genetic basis? I have no idea. I do know that women rapidly achieved something much closer to parity of representation in another environment where you have to be scientifically inclined but the system is much less political and has much more defined endpoints for the “become a totally career-focused cavedweller” phase- medicine. You could continue to argue the point on the basis that medicine is less “mathy” and therefore not the same, and you might even be right, but the fact that Larry Summers apparently considered absolutely none of this before making a politically loaded statement means he deserves every bit as much contempt as any of his detractors who did nothing but shriek “SEXIST!!!” at any suggestion of biological differences between the sexes other than the obvious.

IQ testing and supposed cognitive differences between men and women, or for that matter among racial groups, suffer from a lot of similar problems, and other problems that have to do with the fact that while you can always be pretty sure that you’ve got your hands on discrete genetic differences between men and women, the same assumption is much less safe between racial groups. It’s well and good to presume that cognitive abilities and differing cognitive abilities among individuals, and perhaps among distinct genetic groups, exist. Good so far. It’s also fine to assume that there ARE some distinct genetic groupings even in a species as global and as inclined to intermix as humans. Also good so far. It’s an entirely other assumption that you can measure groups whose identification both in self and from outside is deeply culturally defined as though they represented genetically distinct groupings. “Black”, to pick an obvious example, describes the entire indigenous populations of the continents of Africa (which contains more genetic diversity within it than the rest of the world put together), Australia, which was genetically separate from the rest of the world for thousands of years, any and all mixtures thereof with any other population group on the planet that seems sufficiently melanistic, plus a completely unknown percentage of blends with other population groups that resulted from spending a couple hundred years as property with sex being one of the perks of ownership for a man. Latinos are even worse as a sample group, as the racial category exists specifically to describe an unknown blend of the entire indigenous gene pool of the Americas plus anything else, mostly European but not all.

It’s one thing to, say, measure the cognitive abilities of dog breeds, but when one of your “breeds” is “all shelter dogs of unknown history with black coats”, and another is “all other shelter dogs of unknown history with curly tails and erect ears”, and another might even be Border Collies with a twelve-generation pedigree, measuring them against one another as though they represented equally known and distinct genetic groupings will get you nowhere useful.

Compounding this difficulty is the nature of IQ testing itself, which tends to be spoken of as though it were a very known and consistent quantity but isn’t remotely. The traditional IQ test model, such as the Stanford-Binet, was designed with a very specific purpose in mind, which was *not* to give the tester a true assessment of the test-taker’s overall native intelligence- but rather to identify students that were deficient enough not to succeed academically with their peers. Not to scale all takers across all cognitive domains- to pick out children who, for whatever reason, could not succeed in school at their age level. Other tests were designed later for other reasons, but all of them until quite recently have focused on identifying *lack* of cognitive ability commensurate with whatever level of society/activity they would theoretically be participating in. Modern intelligence testing has produced a much broader variety of tests, some more and less “culture-neutral”, but they run into the problem that they are all massively inconsistent with each other. I’ve taken quite a few myself just to amuse myself, and apparently my own IQ varies as much as sixty points depending on which test you give me and what the author thought was a good measure of overall cognitive ability. Due to the variety of tests and historical practices, scores from children, adults, and many different tests are all too often treated as equivalent in the data from broad surveys of IQ results across the world…

If you present to me the idea that there may be genetically based differences in cognitive capacity, I’d say you were stating the obvious. If you then expound there may be measurable differences in cognitive capacity among distinct human genetic groups, I’d say go on. If you THEN tell me that the evidence for a specific theory of measurable difference between groups lies in results gained from studies in which the groups may not be perceptibly genetically distinct, the testing of differing methodology and not necessarily designed for the purpose used, and the results extremely variable not only across tests but from one test to another in the same subject, I’d tell you to go back to the fucking drawing board- and maybe make some equally devoted efforts to develop some hypotheses related to the common variable we CAN see and understand to be very powerful- culture.

In the end I’m in fundamental agreement with Eric Raymond even if we have rather radically different outlooks on The Bell Curve; it is extremely likely to be the case that there are differences in various kinds of capacities among different genetic groups and among men and women, and it will gain us nothing to slink around this idea in fear of what we might find out those differences might be, and perhaps much to find out what really is truth.

However, I think I’ve got pretty ample reason to put any such claims under the microscope, because as obvious is the truth that biology affects temperament and cognition and these things are heritable is the temptation out of bigotry, laziness, or honest good intention to lay a template of expectation over the whole investigation that obscures and renders worthless the results more often than not. For all that, the power and prevalence of socialization, deliberate and not, is every bit as obvious- and should always be investigated with equal rigor.

*If the author thought it was abstract reasoning and reading comprehension, I’m a genius. If the author thought it was math, I’m average. If the author thought it was spatial reasoning, I’m retarded- or, sorry, deficient. For reasons of language and cultural barrier, most “culture-neutral” IQ tests tend to be built on spatial reasoning. Perhaps we can expect equal degrees of variance among varying cultures and racial groups for spatial reasoning ability and perhaps not, but I’m pretty fucking leery of equating it with general intelligence. Maybe I just don’t want to be stupid?