hips and guns

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2008/12/03/hourglass-figures-we-take-it-all-back.aspx
"Hourglass Figures: We Take It All Back"
by Sharon Begley
December 3, 2008
Newsweek

The article discusses new research into the trope that a .7 waist:hip ratio is evolutionarily and (consequently) aesthetically ideal shape for women. The gist of it is that men only prefer that shape in societies in which women are economically dependent on men. Moreover, hormones of the androgen family (including testosterone) lead to both higher waist:hip ratios, as well as increased stamina, strength, and competitiveness. This perhaps explains the difference in preferences across societies. Frankly, I think this is a nice piece of analysis - it doesn't get bogged down trying to fight a nature vs. nurture style fight. It combines perspectives from biology, evolution, sociology, and economics.

Of course, take this all with a grain of salt:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/the-gun-show-loophole-revisited
"The 'Gun-Show Loophole,' Revisited"
by Catherine RampellDecember 1, 2008
The New York Times

Here, we have an example of a first analysis of whether gun shows result in crime - which may have appeared very convincing and scientific - but which in fact appears to be flawed, once we take a closer look at the facts. But then again, maybe even the new analysis is not final. For example, the new analysis discusses the fact that it is a long time between when most guns are sold and when the are recovered by law enforcement after being used in a crime. But isn't the more important statistic the time between sale and use? Moreover (as the authors of the new analysis are right to point out), it is entirely possible that a more fine-grained analysis, conducted with better data, might result in some correlation or other between gun shows and gun crime. After all, not all gun crimes are the same.

(To return to the first article - the link between economic dependence, testosterone, and competitive fitness is a rather tenuous and speculative one. DIY: How would we go about testing that?)

So consider this: the first article remarks, offhand, that a lot of young women, upon hearing that the .7 ratio was ideal, ran off to check their own measurements. Why would that be? Why is it so important, on a personal (rather than a policy, perhaps) level what people in general find attractive? (In other words, we have to be careful with what we believe, and also with how we respond to the "facts" or facts).

anthropological originalism

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16182-deepvoiced-men-not-guaranteed-to-impress.html
"Deep-Voiced Men not Guaranteed to Impress"
by Ewen Callaway
December 3, 2008
NewScientist

I'm not as interested in the content of the study, as I am in what is said here:

"A new study among African hunter-gatherers found that women who were nursing a child prefer higher-pitched male voices than fertile women who had not recently given birth.

The Hadza - hunter-gatherers native to northern Tanzania - have limited exposure to the mass media. Cut off from the daily bombardment of advertisements, pop songs and newscasts that's typical in much of the world, they were an ideal population in which to study innate sexual preferences, says Coren Apicella, an anthropologist at Harvard University and leader of the study.

"They're also an evolutionarily relevant population - they live like we lived 200,000 years ago," she says. "Most of our psychological preferences probably evolved when we were hunter-gatherers.""

I'll take these a paragraph at a time. The first paragraph is the lead-in, the hook, the interesting sound bite. What is interesting (and perhaps not surprising) is the way it masks some interesting qualifications to the study. First of all, the preference was "slight." Second, the fact that non-nursing mothers had no preference is not clear.

The weird thing about the second paragraph is that it implies than a non-Western culture is cultureless. I would say: sure, these people aren't "bombarded" by Western media, but surely they have a culture - stories, ways of going about, images of what is good and bad and beautiful and so forth? So in what sense are their preferences to be considered "innate." Morevoer, why would we even be interested in how sexual preferences are absent a culture - given that we are so immersed in culture? Wouldn't any such results be almost irrelevant to our situation?

The last paragraph seems to imply that humans have been, more or less, constant in nature since our time in Africa 200,000 years ago. But research indicates that evolution can move much faster than that (consider the Grants' research on Darwin's finches); and indeed, studies show that humans have continued to evolve in the past 200,000 years. So who's to say whether our "innate" psychological preferences evolved then?

(None of this is to say that culture can form humans into whatever it wants. It is practically a necessary truth that humans are a result of both nature and nurture.)