This is an interesting piece on autism and genius. What, in less enlightened times we used to call “idiot savants”, or people who have autism and related conditions but have a certain genius in other areas of life. One thig that is very interesting is the way that it proves the basic contention of our EQSQ personality tests, that there is a link between certain sorts of brains and enjoying or working in certain subjects.

The finding has emerged from a study of autism among 378 Cambridge University students, which found the condition was up to seven times more common among mathematicians than students in other disciplines. It was also five times more common in the siblings of mathematicians.

To remind you of the basic theory, there’s a spectrum of brain types, female, through balanced, to male. Males will be much more interested in systems and less so in people and their emotions than female. We say that the male brain is “systemising” and the female empathic.

Those with autism have an extreme form of the male brain: that’s the hypothesis anyway. So, if you can work out, via our tests linked above, which brain type you have you can then start considering how you should get educated….clearly you want to do something you’re suited for, where you can excel, but it’s also useful to work out where you might be able to brush up on things that you might find difficult.

They go on to discuss this finding….it’s in logic a little like homosexuality. If there;s something (like autism or being gay) which makes it less likely that you’ll have children then we assume that it’ll not persist (as long as it has a genetic cause) in the population for very long. For those who don’t have children don’t pass on their genes.

However, the one exception is when some or many of those who carry the genes gain great reproductive success from it, even if others lose such success. For example, it could be that in a group of siblings that all carry similar genes, in some it might express as homosexuality, in others as greater desire for sex…which, before contraception would indeed likely lead to more children.

(Note, please, that I’m not saying that story is true, only that some put it forward as a hypothesis.)

Here, with autism, it might be that the things that make one a great mathematician, or musician, or engineer, or research scientist, are caused by the same genes that cause autism: perhaps it depends upon developmental triggers, say, testosterone in the womb (as some assert) which defines which comes out, the talent or the autism. That’s a rough sketch of the current argument, at least, about the connection between autism and genius.

If confirmed, it could explain why autism - a disability that makes it hard to communicate with, and relate to, others - continues to exist in all types of society. It suggests the genes responsible are usually beneficial, causing the disease only if present in the wrong combinations. “Our understanding of autism is undergoing a transformation,” said Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the autism research centre at Cambridge, who led the study.

“It seems clear that genes play a significant role in the causes of autism and that those genes are also linked to certain intellectual skills.”

Quite. And I think this is a very interesting point, the first part of which I’ve not seen before.

Temple Grandin, 61, was diagnosed with autism as a child and is now professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University. She said: “People with autism have played a vital role in human evolution and culture. Before computers it would have taken someone with an autistic-type memory to design great cathedrals, while scientists such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein show every sign of having been autistic. The world owes a great deal to those who design and programme computers, many of whom show autistic traits.”

And are they taking the research further? Indeed they are:

For Baron-Cohen the next step is to find the genes linked with autism; he is working with Professor Ian Craig of King’s College to scan the DNA of hundreds of autistic people - and of mathematicians.

Actually, I think that this is a great example of science in action, the scientific method. Come up with a hypothesis and then try and design experiments that allow you to disprove that hypothesis. As long as you don’t get results that does disprove it then you keep going, looking for other ways to disprove it. The more times you try to do so without shooting down the idea the stronger your proof of the idea is.

Baby brain is real! I never thought I would actually find someone telling us this in public.

Craig Kinsley, professor of neuroscience at the University of Richmond, Virginia, said he believed the same results applied to humans. ‘Pregnant women do undergo a phase of so-called baby brain, when they experience an apparent loss of function,’ he said.

There are those who won’t be all that happy at the idea that pregnant women do indeed suffer some cognitive disruption during the process. Hopwever, it appears that there’s a reason for it too.

‘However, this is because their brains are being remodelled for motherhood to cope with the many new demands they will experience.

‘Many benefits seem to emerge from motherhood, as the maternal brain rises to the reproductive challenge. When the going gets tough, the brain gets going.

‘The changes could last for the rest of their lives, bolstering cognitive abilities and protecting them against degenerative diseases.’

The results of this reprogramming don’t stop there either:

Studies on animals including rats and primates found mothers become much braver, are up to five times faster at finding food and have better spatial awareness than those without offspring.

All part of turning you into “SuperMom” obviously.

This is a very interesting piece about the differences between male and female writers.

The men just think that it’s a matter of typing it out, of getting something down on paper, while the women rather insit upon having something to say, something important to say, something where they have the knowledge about what is going on.

I’d certainly say there’san element of truth in the contention, given that I myself am quite happy to write on anything at all and most of the women writers Iknow will insist on actually knowing about the subject before starting.

Hmm, perhaps that’s not the wisest thing I’ve ever actually admitted in public, is it, you might go back and check my writing!

Anyway, here’s her point:

My caller saw no need for any of this. With the chutzpah of the privileged young male, he believed he could bypass it all and still produce something for which the public would be duly grateful. In fact, there’s only one way of writing a book in these circumstances: you deliver a manuscript that is all about you, with Africa as a picturesque backdrop to your macho derring-do.

I realised that my conversations with aspirant writers, and there have been dozens, had one thing in common: they all involved the male of the species. Africa is full of female reporters who tramp through Darfur’s refugee camps and grit their teeth during Mogadishu firefights. Yet not one of these indomitable females has ever called me for the Quick Guide to Successful African Book Writing. I think I know the reason. It’s the same one that ensured I tried my hand at being an author only after 16 years of journalism. Women probably see an Africa book as featuring Africa first, their own exploits second. They fear they know too little, have nothing original to say. Even in this neo-feminist era, they have a sneaking suspicion they are not worthy.

Now as to the truth in detail of this, rather than it only being her won impression, I’m not sure. But I should point out that the writer is Michela Wrong who has written “In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz”, possibly the best book on Equatorial Africa of the last few decades.

I’m pretty sure I also know the name of the male writer she was unhappy with, a certain Tim Butcher, whose much less good book I’ve also read. Still a good book, just much less so than hers and for all the reasons she gives. He goes on an adventure knowing very little about the place whereas she wrote about somewhere she had been reporting from for more than a decade.

The gender gap is, in at least one way, actually widening in modern societies.

No, we’re not talking about the gender pay gap, which is shrinking everywhere. Nor are we talking about the gender gap in legal rights, or opportunities, or in what it is that men and women are either allowed or encouraged to do.

No, all of those gender gaps are shrinking, some slower than others, to be sure, but they are shrinking.

But the gender gap in personality traits is widening. We might call it that Mars versus Venus sort of thing, or refer to our own EQSQ personality tests. Things about competetiveness, nurturing behaviours, cooperation: those things which we see as being typically male or female are becoming more obvious as markers of whether someone is indeed male or female.

Which is exceedingly odd when you think about it. If we’re all getting ever more freedom (which we are, most especially freedom from want) then wouldn’t we be growing more alike? Freed from the very rigid gender role allocations of only one or two generations ago, why should we be becoming less alike?

To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

It is a puzzle but here’s my take on it (there are other ideas in the linked article too).

At root the argument is between those who say that gender attributes are simply part of being human. Have ovaries and (on average, of course) and you’ll be cautious, nurturung and so on. Have testes and you’ll be adventurous and competitive. The other side are saying that these are all social constructs.

Now there is a way to combine these two views and to also explain the above evidence, that we are becoming less alike as we become freer.

That these attributes are indeed inherent, but they can be socially modified. And it’s the 8,000 years of an agricultural society which was the unnatural modification of those innate attributes.

Thus, as we in a wealthy society regain many of the freedoms that our hunter gatherer forefathers had, those innate attributes aren’t modified quite so much as they were by the societal structure we had in the interim.

It’s well know, for example, that hunter gatherer societies has higher calorie intakes than our farming ancestors. That they had a great deal more leisure time. That they were more egalitarian. These are all things which are happening in our own societies now (sure, egalitarian income distributions we don’t have, but we’re a lot more egalitarian in opportunity). So why shouldn’t, freed from the restrictions of an agrarian lifestyle, the innate differences between the sexes flourish?

Now here’s something I hadn’t known:

Scientists have found that both men and women who had lower levels of the hormone vasopressin find it difficult to stay in a long-term or monogamous relationships.

So that man or woman known for spreading it around rather more than might be quite seemly (say, Samantha from Sex and the City) can claim that it’s nothing to do with their morals at all. It’sthat they are in fact disabled, vasopressin deficient…or in the more modern manner of constructing such tags, differently vasopressed?

I’ll have to see whether, if the opportunity to do the straying presents itself of course, whether my wife will buy that particular argument.

The other suprise was this.

Alcohol depletes testosterone in men, and therefore can inhibit their performance. But it speeds up testosterone production in women. Testosterone controls sex drive in both men and women.

The debilitating effect beer can have on male performance I am of course all too aware of. Any and every male who drinks of course is. But what I hadn’t known was that alcohol has the opposite effect on testosterone production in women. Finally, now I know the answer to one of the great mysteries of life.

Why is that men always try to buy women drinks?

Not, as I had previously thought, so as to get them drunk enough that they’ll succumb, not just to get those beer goggles working, but to increase their testosterone levels and thus their very desire for sex.

Amazing what you can learn on the internets, isn’t it?

A lot of effort is expended in trying to work out whether there is in fact a homosexuality gene. The efforts come from all sides of the question too. There are those who want to insist that it is purely learnt behaviour (ie, that there’s nothing “natural” about it) so that it’s OK to discriminate against gays (or even attempt to “cure” them). Then there’s the other side of that argument actually looking for it, so that they can say that it is natural, just part of human variation, so the former group should simply shut up and allow people to get on with it.

There’s also the more esoteric puzzle, for if such a gene exists why is it still present in the human population? It’s not as if being attracted to people you can’t have children with is likely to encourage the passing on of your own genes now, is it?

This looks like an interesting answer to the whole question:

Bisexual men might have their “hyper-heterosexual” female relatives to thank for their orientation.

Previous work has suggested that genes influencing sexual orientation in men also make women more likely to reproduce. Andrea Camperio Ciani and colleagues at the University of Padua, Italy, showed that the female relatives of homosexual men tend to have more children, suggesting that genes on the X chromosome are responsible. Now the team have shown that the same is true for bisexuality.

“It helps to answer a perplexing question - how can there be ‘gay genes’ given that gay sex doesn’t lead to procreation?” says Dean Hamer of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the work. “The answer is remarkably simple: the same gene that causes men to like men also causes women to like men, and as a result to have more children.”

Sexual attraction

The researchers asked 239 men to fill out questionnaires about their families and their past sexual experiences. On the basis of their answers, the men were classified as heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual. The results showed that the maternal aunts, grandmothers and mothers of both bisexual men and homosexuals had more children than those of heterosexual men.

Camperio Ciani emphasises that, rather than being a “gay gene”, this unidentified genetic factor is likely to promote sexual attraction to men in both men and women. This would influence a woman’s attitude rather than actually increasing her fertility, making her likely to have more children.

Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist and writer based in West Hollywood, California, describes this as a sort of “hyper-heterosexuality” and explains how it would help to ensure that homosexual behaviour was passed on through the generations. “The positive effect of an X-linked gene on female fecundity tends to outweigh the negative effect of the gene on male fecundity.”

Now I’m hesitant to say that something is correct when it’s based on a sample of fewer than 300 people but given that it is an appealing explanation. For genetics and evolution are more complicated than most of us think. It’s entirely possible for there to be some genetic variation which is of benefit to most who receive it and yet lethal to a minority’s chances of passing on their own genes. As long as, at the population level, that gene succeeds, then it will continue to propagate.

The best example I know of to explain this is sickle cell anaemia, something prevalent in those of West African ancestry. When both parents carry a specific mutation and pass it on to the child then sickle cell anaemia is the result. But why should a disease that kills before maturity (in most cases) presist in the population? Because possession of only one of the genes, rather than the two which cause the disease, protects against certain types of malaria. That protection against malaria vastly outweighs the rarer problems of sickle cell anaemia. (I think I’m right in saying that it’sa recessive gene and that therefore, even when both parents are carriers, only 1 in 4 of children will, on average, get the disease. One in four will also not get the malaria protection. Thus the gene itself, at the population level, leaves one child in four no worse off, two vastly better of through protection and one much worse off by disease. Of such crude calculations are genetics built.)

There’salso a certain dark humour in the point that wisespread possession of this anti-malarial gene is what led to the entire slavery experience and the cross Atlantic trade but that’s another matter.

If it is true that the homosexuality gene (or rather, the combination which leads to it) is beneficial to the females of the line in their fecundity and that benefit is greater than, at the population level, the narrowing of the fecundity of the men than yes, it will indeed continue down through the generations.

There’s also agoodreason to think of why the effect works too. For far fewer men than women have children anyway. Almost all women (until recently that is) would have children while it’s thought that only 40% of men that ever lived did. The constraint upon population size was always therefore female fecundity, not male.

If we want to go off into the realms of purest speculation we might also think about how this would work the other way around. If there were a similar and opposite set of genes for lesbianism then we would expect this to be rarer. For if female fecundity, rather than male, was the limiting factor, then something which limited female fecundity is more likely to drop out of the population than something which limits male.

And yes, lesbianism is indeed thought to be less prevalent in modern societies than male homosexuality.

A key trend in modern society is the rise of assortative mating. It explains so many diffferent things that people complain or worry about.

Briefly and simply what we mean by “assortative mating” is that, to a much greater extent, like is marrying like. No, we’re not making some sly joke about gay marriage here, rather, that looking along many of the different fault lines that divide society, more people are marrying those who are like themselves than used to be the case.

Marriage used to come pretty much from within that group of friends and family that one knew. Maybe from high school even: but things have, as we know, rather changed. We’re all marrying later, we’re more likely to marry someone we met either at work or college, thus we’re more likely to marry someone who has been pre-selected to be like us anyway.

If we marry someone from work, it’s likely that it will be someone who works in the same field as us: so if there is anything genetic that makes one likely to be an engineer, or a nurse, then it’s likely that this whatever it is will be fortified in the next generation. This is pretty much Simon Baron Cohen’s view of the rise in autism. Certain characteristics (roughly measured by our EQSQ personality tests) do indeed make you more likely to be in one job or profession than another and that like marrying like (say, systemisers marrying systemisers) reinforces those traits and thus we get that rise in autism (which he describes as a form of”super systemiser”).

But this isn’t the only such fault line. Assortative mating has also been used to explain the divergence in houshold incomes in the country. We are marrying later, as above and we are meeting out prospective mates at college or work. So we who go to coeelege are choosing our mates from that pool of people who have also gone to college. Or lawyers and other professionals are choosing from a pool of other similar professionals.

Thus we see the rise of the two professional household: and of course its side effect, the rise of the no professional household. This, whatever is happening to individual incomes, whatever is happening to he wage distribution or inequality in general, is going to have a very large effect on the household income distribution.

Further, given that we calculate the inequality rate from household distributions (because that is the way the tax data we use is collected) then it’s highly likely that we will be overstating the effect of economic changes upon inequality, rather than the more social aspects such as assortative mating. As, indeed, many economists try to point out.

What’s prompted all of this is a snippet of information from the TaxProf blog:

A key finding of the report is the partner status of full-time faculty:

• Academic Partner:  36%
• Employed, Non-academic Partner:  36%
• Single:  14%
• Stay-at-Home Partner:  13%

That is assortative mating for you: professors are marrying professors. It’s one thing if, say, someone earning $60 k a year marries someone earning $30k or so: but when there’s two $60k salaries in the same household that’s a household income up in the top 10% straight away. But more importantly, these figures give us an actual number for how prevalent assortative mating is.

There’s nothing wrong with it of course: we certainly wouldn’t want to change people’s behavior either, or even try. But it is a powerful explanation for many of the changes which are going on in society.

About the only divider which I know of which isn’t leading to more such assortative mating is race: there are many, many, more inter-racial marriages than ever before, an excellent outcome as it gives us the hope that the issue of race will, over the generations, simply dissolve away.

OK, so we find once again that the male and female brains have (slightly) different structures.

Men and women show differences in behaviour because their brains are physically distinct organs, new research suggests. Male and female brains appear to be constructed from markedly different genetic blueprints.

The differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages inside them are so great as to point to the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two, according to recent neurological studies.

OK, now that’s part of our own theory around here. We go on to point out that simply because soeone is XX that doesn’t mean that they’ll have a female brain, or that someone XY will have male. It’s a probability that the former and latter will, not a certainty. But this research leads to a much larger point:

Professor Jeff Mogil from McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, who has demonstrated major differences in pain processing in males and females, puts it even more forcefully. He is astonished that so many researchers have failed to include female animals in their studies. “It’s scandalous,” he said. “Women are the most common pain sufferers, and yet our model for basic pain research is the male rat.”

Looks like a number of female rats are in for a torrid time of it but that’s something we really ought to do, don’t you think, whatever PETA says about it.

There’s an excellent journal out there which collects the reults of improbable research. This particular story doesn’t belong there at all: it belongs in one about believable research. Another way of putting this might be that the result is blindingly obvious to anyone who knows anything at all about sex.

So, using various cleverly constructed experiements the researchers tried to work out whether being flirted with by those apparently available made men and women react differently. The answer was yes.

Men who were flirted with seemed to have less connection with their own pre-existing relationship. They were less likely to forgive a transgression by their partner for example.

However, women, when flirted with, were more likely to forgive their man such mistakes: evidence that they became more committed to their relationship the more temptation was put in their path.

We can all make up a number of possible explanations for this behavior. The traditional evolutionary one, that men are more likely to be interested in spreading it around than women are. Or perhaps a slightly subtler version of the same thing: that men are indeed more likely to wander and the refusal to forgive trifling mistakes was a method of building up the excuse bank, the justifications for why he might be right to stray.

However, my own theory is a great deal less complex and accords much better with my own experience of the world. Men are easily pleased creatures so the risks of switching from one woman to another, from one sequential monogamous relationship to another are fairly low. Finding a decent man is however a rather more difficult prospect….this might be because of the quality of men in general or it might be because women are a little pickier, this makes no difference to the logic here….thus women once they’ve got someone Mr. Half-Right are reluctant to give him up for what they know the average quality of the others in the available pool is.

If you like, for men there are indeed many more fish in the sea while for women there’s only a few with the requisite piscine qualities and an awful lot of pond life floating around them.

This might not be the most amazing discovery ever you know: men and women have (in general) different attitudes to one night stands.

Many women are left unhappy in the aftermath of casual sexual encounters, a survey has revealed.

Just under half of women who answered the internet poll, published in the journal “Human Nature”, said they felt it had been a bad idea.

Four out of five men, in contrast, said they were happy with a brief fling.

That’s not a finding that would shock the proverbial maiden aunt, I’m sure. That men and women will have different attitudes to casuaal sex is pretty much insisted upon by the main evolutionary theories: that given the investment that women have to make into childbearing as opposed to the minimal involvement that a man can have, we’d expect women to a great deal more picky about their partners and how well they know them before getting down to the old rumpy pumpy.

One report on this rather missed the distinction:

Eighty per cent of men enjoy casual sex because it satisfies their prehistoric instinct to breed.

Erm, no. Men and women feel exactly the same instinct to breed: that’s something that’s inherent in being human for we are all, after all, descended from those who did breed. The point is that the method of having the next generation makes much greater demands upon women that it does upon men (in the purely physical sense that is: child support laws have rather changed the equation in the modern world). There are also many fewer chances for women to breed than men: in theory a man can have hundreds of children while the upper bound for a woman is somewhere between ten and twenty (with exceptions, of course).

So we expect women to be much more choosy about who they have children with: and while we’ve now got decent contraception, there’s still a great deal of hard wiring from those hundreds of thousands of years when we didn’t.

The academic leading the research said it showed that there was no evolutionary advantage for women in one night stands.

That’s the correct interpretation: there is an advantage for men and not one for women. Thus the different feelings aabout such sexual encounters.