Atomic Nerds

Guess what day it is today kids! It’s rag on the stupid science reporting day! Again!

(YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!)

Title of article: “Steaks and lamb chops calm stressed out men by bringing out caveman instincts”. No shit!

Women who want to calm down their husbands after a stressful day at the office should serve him a big steak, scientists said today.

I’m actually pretty sure that’s not what they said, but regardless this has to be one of my all-time favorite “scientists said”s going. It’s such a priceless gem of the “science says natural order perfectly encapsulated in 1950s gender roles” genre.

Contrary to popular opinion that a hunk of red meat may make men aggressive,

Show of hands: who reading actually held the opinion that red meat makes men aggressive?

Psychologists said they were shocked by research findings which show that far from bringing out the ‘caveman instinct’ in modern men, seeing meat lowers any aggressive tendencies because it reminds males of friends and family at meal time.

Women, as we know, do not eat meat, nor do they eat with their families. But they do serve it.

The researchers, from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, said seeing meat provokes a sense of non-agression that could be related to family feasting among the earliest humans.

Ways to check the validity of the meat = non-aggression hypothesis: see if you can achieve the same result with a picture of potatoes au gratin.

Lead researcher Frank Kachanoff admitted he was ‘surprised’ by the findings.

I can only suspect that lead researcher Frank Kachanoff was raised in one of those families where everyone skitters off to their rooms with their plates after getting themselves dinner.

He said the idea that meat would prompt aggressive behaviour makes sense as it would have helped our primate ancestors with hunting.

And now I know that the closest Frank Kachanoff has ever come to hunting is Elmer Fudd cartoons.

Look, Frank, the result is not all that counterintuitive. See, meat is what you get when you’re done hunting. Before you have meat it’s an animal. Seeing cows doesn’t make people notably aggressive either, for that matter; “aggression” isn’t actually that useful a response in hunting. Interest is- aggression would waste energy, especially for a predator that isn’t nearly as fast or as strong as its potential prey.

On a more serious note I’m not kidding at ALL when I think that at least three hunting trips in pursuit of large game, NOT in a “canned” hunt or over bait, should be a requirement before any biologist, anthropologist, or psychologist is allowed to publish a paper theorizing about how hunting shaped us. Because I have seen about seventy too many hypotheses actually published that could be refuted by a weekend in the woods.

Kachanoff believed that humans may therefore have evolved an innate predisposition to respond aggressively towards meat.

SERIOUSLY FRANK IN WHAT POSSIBLE UNIVERSE WOULD HAVING AN AGGRESSIVE RESPONSE TO YOUR FOOD BE ADAPTIVE.

What’s making me especially nutty is that the idea that people don’t automatically link their food and the activity related to its source based on fixed “caveman instincts” shouldn’t be unusual. All you’d need to do is observe the number of people that are not vegetarians and yet think hunting is “barbaric”.

He cited the fact that some sports coaches feed their players big hunks of red meat before a game in the hope of pumping up their aggression.

….IN WHAT ALTERNATE DIMENSION? WARNER BROTHERS?

Feeding players big hunks of red meat right before a game wouldn’t pump up aggression, it would fill their stomachs and slow them the fuck down. Eating big hunks of red meat doesn’t make you aggressive, it makes you sleepy. Because of basic goddamn biology.

Giving athletes big hunks of red meat for dinner is a good idea, because it’s big hunks of protein and athletes (and hunters) need it. Has anyone here ever actually heard of tanking up on meat right BEFORE the game cited as a good idea? I sure as fuck never have.

Images of a grunting or growling animal snarling at anyone who tries to take their meat away also reinforced the idea.

Images of Dad standing at the barbecue preparing the meat, then roaring viciously at the family and running to a corner while gnawing the steak and growling to himself probably helped too.

People != wolves. Hell, the popular image of wolves isn’t wolves. Meals among naturally formed wolf packs are pretty peaceful; it’s meals among a group of unrelated wolves thrown together in a captive exhibit that are fraught. Prisoners aren’t really known for their warm family meals either.

However, experiments led by Mr Kachanoff found that the opposite was true and that the sight of meat had a calming affect on males and made them less agressive.

He conducted psychological tests in which aggression levels were tested among 82 men who were asked to look at a variety of photographs, some of which featured cooked meat.

The volunteers were told they could ‘punish’ a colleague if he made a mistake during a simple sorting task involving the pictures.

Most of the time when conducting psych experiments, the real problem is constructing your test so that the volunteers don’t guess what you’re after and skew the results.

I somehow don’t think it was a problem in this design.

The researchers believed the pictures of meat would prompt the participants to inflict more punishments, but found the opposite was true.

Mr Kachanoff said: ‘We used imagery of meat that was ready to eat. In terms of behaviour, with the benefit of hindsight, it would make sense that our ancestors would be calm, as they would be surrounded by friends and family at meal time.

Well spotted.

I would like to run this experiment again, using hunting images.’ Mr Kachanoff said he was inspired by research on priming and aggression, that has shown that just looking at an object which is learned to be associated with aggression, such as a gun, can make someone more likely to behave aggressively.

He said: ‘I wanted to know if we might respond aggressively to certain stimuli in our environment not because of learned associations, but because of an innate predisposition. I wanted to know if just looking at the meat would suffice to provoke an aggressive behavior.’

This is an extremely modern outlook- the conflation of all acts technically classified as “violent” as fueled by a unitary trait called “aggression”. It’s also again betraying the point of view of someone who has never hunted and has no idea what it’s actually like. It reminds me of another crackpot evo-psych theory I once saw that men are less social than women because hunting is a “solitary” activity and gathering isn’t- again showing someone who has never hunted nor gathered.

In most societies at most times in our history, hunting is very profoundly a group activity; for a society without rifles or ATVs, any and all hunts of large game would be cooperative group activities. Gathering is less efficient when you have a lot of people grouped up tightly, whereas hunting is moreso. (It’s still a good idea to be in a group to gather for defense from predators, though.)

I can pretty much predict his results for him, based entirely on priming rather than evolution: those men in his study group who grew up hunting will associate images of hunting with group bonding activities and be less inclined to arbitrarily punish a colleague. Those men who did not and associate images of weapons primarily with violence in general will be moreso.

Evolutionary experts believe it is useful to look at innate reflexes in order to understand trends in society and personal behavior.

Good evolutionary theorists know that the first thing you do is check and see whether you have a good reason to suspect a reaction is actually an innate reflex. In order to do this you check your results across cultures, across historical examples, across backgrounds, across genders, and across as many possible human lines as possible. You also check for no-brainer known information, like “people associate mealtimes with family downtime”. To use the above study as an example, using a female control group would have told you a lot.

You don’t start with “here’s a bunch of flimsy stereotypes, they must be evolved innate traits”!

They said this latest research was important because it looked at ways society may influence environmental factors to decrease the likelihood of aggressive behavior.

Oh, okay. This is about “we’d all be more peaceful if we were vegetarians and no one hunted”. News to India, and for that matter the Inuit.

I decided to post before I finished reading the article, with the intent to fisk it as I went along and then wrap it up with a more serious treatment of the idea behind the research thinking it was mostly just a retarded reporter. But no, apparently this was built entirely on poor practice and misconception from the start. Never mind, it’s just stupid.

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