Science Can Explain the Origins of Conflict

Don Herbert, the B-24 bomber pilot who flew combat missions with the Fifteenth Air Force in World War II, flying out of Italy, to all us old folks will always be the guy who found something useful to do after the war.  He was Mr. Wizard.

 

Watch Mr. Wizard first aired on NBC on March 3, 1951 – with Don Herbert as Mister Wizard.  In the weekly half-hour show Don Herbert played a science hobbyist and you remember the routine – every Saturday morning a neighbor boy or girl would come to visit.  The boy was always “Jimmy” for some reason.  Mister Wizard, your ideal strange but harmless and oddly useful neighbor, always had some kind of laboratory experiment going that taught something about science.  The experiments seemed impossible at first glance, but then you were told you could do them at home, so you did.  And whatever he demonstrated worked just fine.  You really could “try this at home” – and science was cool.  Here’s a sample, on simple thermodynamics.

 

The show was a winner – by 1954 it was being broadcast by ninety-one stations.  The show moved from Chicago to New York on September 5, 1955, and NBC produced five hundred forty-seven live broadcasts by the time the show was canceled in 1965.  By 1965 there were fifty thousand Mr. Wizard Science Clubs in North America.  The show was cited by the National Science Foundation and the American Chemical Society for increasing interest in science, and Herbert won a Peabody Award.

 

But the show is long gone.  Nickelodeon tried a three-times-a-week faster-paced version of the show, developed by Don Herbert – Mr. Wizard’s World – with seventy-eight episodes from 1983 to 1990, but that was a bust.  The “revival” was produced in Canada, in Calgary.  Maybe that was the problem.  Don Herbert passed away June 12, out here in Bell Canyon, a private, guard-gated community at the western end of the San Fernando Valley, just across the line in Ventura County, a place for the very wealthy. See the note on his passing at Mr. Wizard Studios.

 

Ah well, times do change.  There’s nothing like his show now – Bill Nye the Science Guy, the show that ran on PBS from 1993 through 1997, was pretty cool, but it just wasn’t the same thing.  And no one much likes science these days.  Science itself is in some political disrepute.  See Skeptic Magazine here –

 

There’s a war going on – and not just the one in Iraq. This conflict may not get as much media play, but it could have just as great an impact on our safety, national prestige, and long-term economic health. It is a war over the integrity of science itself, and the casualties are everywhere: career scientists and enforcement officials are resigning en masse from government agencies, citing an inability to do their jobs due to what they see as the ruthless politicization of science by the Bush administration.

 

Mr. Wizard had no political agenda.  He was just curious about how things worked.  Our president and his administration are proudly not curious about much at all – they’re just sure and decisive.

 

And popular science itself has changed – wrapping your head around the concept of the event horizon of a black hole was hard enough, in spite of Star Trek and such, but when you had to consider string theory and that eleven or more dimensions business, it seemed best to just throw up your hands and register Republican.  Yeah, you understood evolution in school, and it seemed to make sense, and to be solidly supported by massive evidence, but what’s the point in arguing that business again and again?  No one is changing his or her mind.  If the majority wants to teach all kids in public school that the earth is only seven thousand years old and the Grand Canyon is irrefutable evidence of Noah’s Flood, and men rode dinosaurs like in the Flintstones, that’s fine.  You can move to another country if you don’t like it.  Face the demographic reality.  Most Americans prefer saying what is complex cannot really be understood – God just created it so why think about how it works?  You want to argue with that?

 

So popular science devolves in questions of evolutionary psychology – that’s the safe area of evolution inquiry.  And there you can consider remarkable puzzles.  In fact, some are really fascinating, like the current issues.  Women really are better than men at shopping.  And they really do prefer pink.  And it is possible that these facts are connected.

 

Fascinated yet?  We no longer have Mr. Wizard to look into this, but we do have Ed Yong at the site “Not Exactly Rocket Science” (subhead – “Science for Everyone”) discussing this in Why Are Women Better at Food Shopping Than Men?

 

No, wait.  Before you go there check out this BBC science item –

 

Studies show that, on average, men are better than women at mentally rotating pictures of three dimensional objects (the 3D shapes task) or judging the slope of a line (the angles task).

 

But scientists note that women outperform men at other tasks. For example, women are more likely to spot which of a group of objects has been moved to a new position (the spot the difference task).

 

It’s not fully known why men and women perform differently on spatial tasks.

 

Studies have concluded that men tend to pay more attention to the way their surroundings are laid out, which may explain why they generally score better on tasks like 3D shapes and angles. Researchers have also found that, on average, men are better at finding compass orientations and rely on mental images of three dimensional spaces to find their way.

 

Women were more likely to notice landmarks, which could be linked to their higher scores on the spot the difference task. Research has shown that women are more likely to use memorised routes and landmarks to stay on track.

 

Okay, your own experience may have shown you that this is true, if you’ve ever been married and on vacation in a rental car.  Do you go uphill and east to get back to the motel, or do you look for the red barn by the white house?  One Marcia Collaer, a behavioral neuroscientist at Middlebury College in Vermont, says that the link between the angles task and navigation ability is not backed up with empirical evidence, but it is worth considering, probably because it seems there must be something there.

 

That something could be this –

 

One theory is that modern humans are still very similar to their prehistoric ancestors. In early times men spent lots of time hunting in unfamiliar territory where landmarks were less useful. Women, on the other hand, spent more time close to home foraging for food and they may have relied more on landmarks to find their way around.

 

And that is what Ed Yong explains, reviewing current experimental research backing that up.  Earlier he has done something similar with Are Women More Talkative than Men?   Not true, exactly.

 

Mr. Wizard never covered such topics, but then his original fans are all now in their sixties, confused by the oddness of what theoretical science has become, and depressed by events in Washington, where the God-folk now control what used to be the realm of science – the parts of the government that decide things about medicine and climate and even what gets posted on the signs in the national parks.  Why you argue with the wife on some road in the Adirondacks at dusk on a Tuesday afternoon in July may bear more scrutiny.  And it is less depressing.

 

You might even find yourself taking the Sex ID Test –

 

Get a brain sex profile and find out if you think like a man or a woman.

See if you can gaze into someone’s eyes and know what they’re thinking.

Find out why scientists are interested in the length of your fingers.

See how your results relate to theories about brain sex.

 

It’s pretty cool – and guys, they don’t ask you if you love Broadway show tunes.  It’s more complicated than that.  Some researchers say that men can have “women’s brains” and that women can think more like men.  Consider Margaret Thatcher and Alan Alda.

 

And you then might be ready for what’s in the latest issue of The Economist – Sex, Shopping and Thinking Pink

 

This is an item that covers current research on the idea that the brains of men and women are, indeed, different.  And we’re talking real differences.  Yes, women really are better than men at shopping.  And, yes, they really do prefer pink. And, surprisingly, it is possible that these facts are connected.

 

The shopping matter is something worked out by Joshua New and his colleagues at Yale.  That would this group.   The business about females preferring the color pink was worked out by Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling, at Newcastle University in England.  Their research is documented here.  What connects them, as the Economist notes, is that “in the division of labor that forms the primordial bargain of human hunter-gatherer societies, it is the men who do the hunting and the women who do the gathering.”

 

The Yale study is interesting, as the Joshua New team had to find what passes for the equivalent of hunting and gathering these days.  No one does either any longer.  In order to test any hypothesis, the best they could come up with was behaviors while shopping at a farmers’ market.  That would have to do.  So you start with the considerable evidence that men are better than women at solving certain sorts of spatial problems – remembering the locations of topographical landmarks, not any particular landmark’s visual appearance.  And if it is possible that such skills may have been important in the past for man-the-hunter, who needed to be able to find his way round the landscape, and that woman-the-gatherer developed some sort of complementary skills not shown by males, then those latent but different skills may still persist – and explain a lot.

 

So we get this –

 

Dr New used the market to test two hypotheses. The first was that women remember the locations of food resources more accurately than men do. The second was that the more nutritionally valuable a resource is, the more accurately its location will be remembered.

 

To prove these conjectures he recruited 41 women and 45 men and led each of them individually on a merry dance around the chosen market. In the course of this peregrination, each participant visited six of the 90 food stalls in the market. At each of those stalls, participants were given a piece of food to eat. They were asked their preference for the taste of the food, how often they ate that food in normal life, how attractive they found the stall and how often they had made purchases from that stall in the past. After visiting all six stalls, they were taken to the centre of the market and asked to point toward those stalls, one at a time, using an arrow on a dial. In addition, they were asked to rate their own sense of direction.

 

So what happened?  On average, women were nine degrees more accurate than men at pointing to each stall.  If you have to walk any distance, those nine degrees are a significant deviation.  And this was not, New noted, because those women had more experience of visiting the market than the men had.  And the women did not rate themselves as having a better sense of direction than the men.  Both the men and women agreed the men were better at navigating.  New has the notion that these results show women are better than men at the particular task of relocating sources of food.  One might conclude that while men are better at navigation in general, “women’s minds are specialized for their ancestral task of gathering the sort of food that cannot run away.”

 

Take THAT, Mr. Wizard!  There is an evolutionary basis for why you’re arguing with the wife in the rental car.  You are thinking spatially, in three dimensions, as you’ve been hard-wired to hunt, and, as her hard-wiring is different, she’s looking to spot the differences in visual landmarks based on a concept of a given route.  You should each chill out.

 

But then the Yale study gets really interesting, as The Economist explains regarding that kind of food that cannot run away –

 

That such food is in a different mental category from the one occupied by general landmarks was suggested by the answer to the second hypothesis. The higher the calorific value of the food sold by a stall, the more accurately Dr New’s volunteers were able to point towards it. And that result applied to both sexes, though women still did better than men.

 

How much the participants liked the food did not have an effect on this accuracy. Indeed none of the secondary attributes of the food or stall in question (taste preference, the frequency of an item in a volunteer’s normal diet, the appearance of the stall and how often a volunteer used that stall in daily life) were found to affect pointing accuracy. Only the calorific value of the item in question was relevant.

 

Well, that’s very survival-primitive, isn’t it?  But that lead to the study on pink things – the Hurlbert and Ling study in Current Biology.

 

They used colored patches flashing on a computer screen to find the preferences of their set of volunteers – men and women of British and Chinese origin in their early twenties.  And they found that that people of different sexes and from different continents did not differ in their color preferences much at all – except for one surprise.  Among both the British and the Chinese, women preferred reddish hues such as pink to greenish-blue ones.  Among men it was the reverse.  The cultural cues didn’t matter.  It was the same for the Brits and the Chinese.  This was very odd.

 

Of course anatomical sex is binary, but as everyone knows (see Margaret Thatcher and Alan Alda) mental “gender” is not.  So to see how masculine or feminine the brains of their participants were, Hurlbert and Ling had them take the Bem Sex Role Inventory (much like the Sex ID Test above), and test which asks about personality traits more often associated with one sex than the other.  The result was the more “feminine” a brain was, no matter whose body it inhabited, the more it really liked red and pink.

 

All this then suggests a biological, rather than a cultural, explanation for color preference.  Hurlbert and Ling have the idea that their results may be somehow connected with the fact that the color of many fruits is at the red end of the spectrum.   And you see where that leads.  An evolved preference for red, pink and related shades – particularly in contrast with green – would be a real advantage to those who gather such things, the gatherers – the women.  The hunters really don’t care.  This adds a whole new layer of meaning to Molly Ringwald in that movie Pretty in Pink – and to this production number (video clip), Kay Thompson in Funny Face.  Who knew?

 

Don’t you miss Mr. Wizard?  Science can be fun again.