Federal Panel Defends Censorship of Bird-Flu Papers

In prehistoric times people matured later than they do today, so perhaps breasts started as a cue of adulthood, and therefore signaled the maturity required to (mate and) lactate rather than the capacity.    If so, once breast were established as a stimulating characteristic competition for the best mates may have selected for increasing size. 

In environments where people may have often gone hungry for much of the year, large breasts may have also signaled “has enough to eat”.  In an environment where some are hungry and others prosperous, women predisposed to larger breasts would be able to signal their prosperity sooner and to a greater degree.

Interesting male observations.  Female breasts DO enlarge during pregnancy and lactation; must signal something.  Also, there are many females with little or no fatty mammary tissue (flat chested), who may get teased while teens, but somehow get their man.  I go with pheromones and possibly other not yet known social factors, for quirky human behavior in sexual activity.

So humans are atypical primates in a number of ways: breast prominence, menopause, penis size, buttocks size, hairlessness, and the ability to found “medicine, law, philosophy, theology, and Chicago.”

Another thing: humans are atypical in their ability to spend part of the day discussing the matter. And to disagree, probably heatedly, before the day is out. Maybe I’m just overly impressed with Venus of Willemsdort (sp?), but has anyone ever contemplated painting a picture of a female nonhuman primate? Didn’t think so.

I always knew God had it in for my husband.

edwoof — “These organs grew exponentially when our ancestors significantly lost their aptitude to detect smell but gained in visual ability. … Therefore, we needed to advertise our sexual prowess in a way that could be seen rather than smelled.”
Great idea, except that that breasts increase in size when a woman is NOT fertile, which is when she is pregnant or breastfeeding. I feel like this idea still assumes that breasts = sex, which they don’t. You need an explanation that says why we might think that breasts = sex (which the authors’ explanations both do.)

The second and third explanations make some sense because they involve an explanation that disfavors making drastic changes, and in order for a breast to hold a lot of milk it needs to be a certain minimum size during lactation. However, I think most women can agree collectively to knock out the third possibility. A flat-chested woman always has an easier time running than does a woman with breasts. When that flat-chested woman gets bigger from lactating, the change is not THAT drastic, and it’s still easier for her to run around than it is for a woman with larger breasts, lactating or not. 

The article and accompanying comments all illustrate a real hazard that evolutionary biologists much guard against – adaptationism, or the tendency to try to find an adaptive value for every specific characteristic without regard to the concept of linkages. Stephen Jay Gould addressed this in an essay in Bully for Brontosaurus called “Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples”.  Sometimes characteristics appear because they’re a side effect of some other adaptation or development process and simply can’t be explained by a direct “just so story” of their own.  We’re more likely to reach for a direct adaptation explanation for any characteristic that involves human sexuality because we’re pretty obsessed as a species with it, and breasts fit right into that trend.  Perhaps for instance prominent breasts (which as noted are mostly fat) evolved as one of many convenient spots on the female body to store fat tissue (women have more body fat than men generally) and the adaptation is really more about storing fat rather than sex and there’s just something physiologically marginally more conducive to collecting fat right around mammary glands than other areas of the chest/frontal abdomen.

Oh. Okay, you got me. I was imprecise.

I meant, Has anyone–of whatever species–ever felt like painting a picture of a nude nonhuman primate?

You know, there are a lot of things that attract males and females within a given species, not all of them obvious. The individuals within a given species that tend to be more attracted to the opposite sex tend to pass on their genes more than those who don’t. Breasts are among the attractors. So are dinner and a movie. That’s why humans are distinguished by prominent breasts, more restaurants per capita than any other animal, and more theatres as well.

Something or other attracts male and female spingboks, chipmunks, frogs, koi, albatrosses, and fruit flies. The members of each species are descended from individuals that were attracted to each other. Individuals that weren’t attracted by whatever means didn’t pass on their genes. It’s an interesting question. Whatever it is that draws the male praying mantis to his “tonight’s the night” rendezvous with passing on his genes and avoiding old age, it apparently means as much to him as bosoms do to us. His problems make our mammary-obsession seem an almost harmless matter of taste.

Not to stomp on an interesting question, but in the broad, long view, something had to do the job. I wonder if the apparently built-in susceptibility to arousal is just waiting, like a potential allergy in reverse, to be stimulated by something. Female human breast prominence may be easier to “explain” than, say, black fishnet hose and spike heels. Why do some men react more strongly to breasts than others, sometimes leading to violations of normal behavior? Why do some men react to “artificial” stimulants more than others?

Not a simple question to answer. Or even to formulate.

The Master of the Magdalen Legend seems to have been one of those artists (brace yourself for the blast of philistinism) who didn’t know where a woman’s breasts were or who miscalculated the head:body ratio. (I know, Kenneth Clark could explain to me what’s going on.)

“My guess would be that female breasts are “sexualized” (they are, after
all, the most apparent sexual characteristics of a biologically adult
human female) by the vast majority of cultures in the world.”

I think your guess would be correct if you count people, but not if you count cultures. There are hundreds of cultures in sub-Saharan Africa in which breasts are not sexualized, hundreds more in Amazonia, in South East Asia, etc. The parallel argument we used to hear was that hips and buttocks were the most apparent sexual features of adult human females, signalling fertility; the issue here is to question whether a sexualized body part is also the body part that performs the largely unconscious task of reproductive semiosis.

The larger point is that if these arguments from evolutionary psychology — or whatever term they’re using these days — are valid, they must be valid for all human beings, not for “most” cultures or most people. If culture can change the sexual signalling of members of whole communities, then the biological just-so stories have no validity. The best we can say is that humans find a variety of ways to signal sexual receptiveness, fertility, etc, but we need to avoid the old fallacy of assuming that the way a physical feature is used by “most” people must be the function of that feature. Heads hold hats, but that is not really the function of heads…

Aha! Finally a topic I can sink my teeth into!

I believe more in a culture House of Representatives, I guess, than I do in a culture Senate, where every culture, no matter how big or how small, counts the same. Call me old-fashioned, but a culture fifty million strong over here, to me, counts for a lot more than a culture of sixteen people over there. (Actually, “I think your guess would be correct if you count people, but not if you count cultures” is pretty much a sophistry of the first water.)

“…if these arguments from evolutionary psychology — or whatever term
they’re using these days — are valid, they must be valid for all human
beings” is not only a cheap shot (“or whatever term they’re using these days”), it strike me, an anthropology outsider, as probably a ridiculous cheap shot. That for a tenet of evolutionary psychology to be valid it has to apply to every last man jack on the planet seems, on the face of it, absurd. Evolution, as I understand it, doesn’t have a captain at the controls, and operates in rather blunderbuss fashion, with all kind of weird, and fleeting, results.

I’m sure there’s a culture somewhere for just about any kind of “sexual signaling” you can think of, say a raised eyebrow causing instant erections in all the adult males in the tribe. But the mere existence of that culture (probably a tiny one, no?) wouldn’t disprove an idea from evolutionary psychology (“or whatever term they’re using these days”).

Something tells me I’ve stepped into the middle of an ongoing nature/nurture dispute between cultural anthropology (or whatever they’re calling it these days) on the one side, and physical anthropology and biology on the other. I anxiously wait further clarification from Prof. Barash (or whatever he’s calling himself these days) or the entry of that tough-minded frequent commenter, ol’ Prof. Foster (a.k.a. jffoster) into this thread.

It’s not a cheap shot at all. Claims about how human beings function as a species should hold up to species-wide scrutiny. The issues that Prof. Barash is raising about human breasts are issues about humans as a species; if a hypothesis derived from theoretical frameworks such as evolutionary psychology turns out to be false in a subset of human communities then the hypothesis is false. Simple Popperianism, I acknowledge, but I think it’s a valid point. (Your comment about “every last man jack on the planet” is kind of introductory biology – biologists understand clearly the need to distinguish intra-species variation from species-wide evolutionary traits. That doesn’t prevent biologists from identifying species level features.)

The problems get more complex when we move to psychological phenomena; keep in mind that psychologists often rely on freshman Psych 101 classes to find subjects for testing hypotheses, and the extremely small variation among members of such a test group is nonetheless considered a reliable mix of different kinds of subjects. It’s no wonder that for years models of human psychology looked suspiciously like American college freshmen. A whole field of cultural psychology has emerged as a reaction to this, and tries, among other things, to distinguish what is universal at deep levels of human cognition or affect from what is contingent upon social and cultural context.

And that’s one reason why we count cultures, not individuals. Some societies have been extremely reproductive, producing hundreds of millions of living individuals, but they skew the statistics in studies of biology/culture interactions.

Yes, you have tapped into a long-running ‘nature-nurture’ debate, but your proposal, if I understand it correctly, that we don’t need to consider difference and variation because there’s always a culture where…. is not an accurate statement of the issues. Difference and variation help to demarcate phenomena that are primarily biological (e,g, adult human females menstruate) from phenomena that are largely cultural (e.g. according to some
religions, menstruating women cannot enter churches). Problems often arise when over-zealous adaptationists try to generalize contingent cultural phenomena to universal species level traits, and counter examples are a perfectly appropriate means of testing such hypotheses. It’s trickier when evolutionary psychologists tackle behavioral traits – a recent example I read was on the evolutionary benefits (yes, benefits) of post-partum depression – but subjecting such hypotheses to cross-cultural tests is a valid and common next step.

But both are true.

Good Morning, Counsellors Piper and Goxewu,
 
    Read I did Barash’ post original Sunday night I think but wasn’t in CHE yesterday and have just a little while ago seen this discussion.  I feel a bit like the Hon. Rhys (I think he spells it Rece) Davis, the Presiding Judge of the Court of the Final Verdict (with opposing Counsellors Lou Holtz and Mark May), but having more courage than good sense, grant certiori to the invitation to step in.  One of the major contentions here seems to be that of what counts as an exception and what is the unit of analysis and of sampling, and I’ll try to stay with that and not deal with the particular proposals of Poster Original Barash. We ought however keep Barash’ first caveat lector in mind, that this and his next several columns are about what we don’t know, and that these just-so stories are meant to initiate thinking, investigation, and discussion, not the final explanatory wraps up.

   Analogies, like just-so stories, are even more useful, provided we appply them appropriately and don’t take them too far. I particularly liked Goxewu’s  Senate v House of Representatives one.    Let’s look at a case less, er sexy, and less likely to be laden with other bagage.  Some years ago in my beginning Linguistics class about a third of the way through the term,  the order of relative clauses and the nouns they modify, their heads, was under examination. Many languages, like English, have the order [[N], Rel ]  
 
      I read a book.
      [the book [(which/that) I read.....] ] 

while many others, like Turkish and Japanese, have the order  [ [Rel [ N]]
 
  Japanese:   Boku wa     hon    o                yonda.     
                        I    topic    book dir. obj       read   
    
                      [ [ Boku ga yonda ]  hon ]        
                      [ [     I     subj   read  ]   book ]

 Turkish:       (Ben)   kitap   okudum.    
                          I        book     read

                 [ [    [Benim) okuduğum ]        kitap ]       
               [  [  (my)      read-having-my]       book  ]
 
We note that the Basic Word Order (BWO) of the normal declarative sentence in English is (Subject, Verb, Object)  SVO while that of Japanese and Turkish is SOV.   Now it turns out there is a strong statistically significant association between  BWO  and the order of relative clauses and their head nouns.  Languages with BWO  as OV (Turkish, Japanese, and many many more) typically have the left branching order   [ [rel [ N].   VO languages (English and many many more) have the right branching order  [N] [rel ] ], (where “right and left” represent time after or before. 

    I was fortunate enough to have in that class a student who was studying Chinese and who was also awake and she noted correctly that Chinese is SVO but usually has the order in relative constructions of  the left branching  [ [ rel [ N].   She was quite correct and here is an example:

Mandarin:    [ [   wŏ gěi    ni      de                  [shū ] 
                     [ [ I   gave you  linked clause]  book]
                      ‘ [book [(which) I gave you] ] ‘
 
I agreed with her and added that Haka Chinese and Cantonese also are SVO and have  the very exceptional left branching relative clauses.  Another student in the class said,

 “Well, isn’t that a pretty big exception?”
Me:  “How so?”
Student: “Well, several hundred million people speak Chinese.”

Here are some data from a large sample in the WALS, The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures.
      BWO              VO                   OV
    Rel N                      5                    109
    N  Rel                  370                     96
  (Other  176)
 
Three of the 5 very exceptional languages in the upper left cell (cell a) are Mandarin, Haka, and Cantonese – languages with hundreds of millions of speakers.  The other two are Bai, a Tibeto-Burnan language in China, and Amis, an Austronesian language spoken on Formosa (aka Taiwan), either or both of which may have borrowed the Chinese pattern.

      But Chinese (in all three cases) counts no more than Bai or Ansi.  The unit of analysis is the language, not its speakers, or how many there are.  The answer to the student’s question of whether Chinese wasn’t a “pretty big exception” has to be “No.”.   Mandarin, Haka, and Cantonese, closely related of course, are only three of five.

     There were 176 languages in the sample, the “(Other)” above, which could not be classified. Some allow either order with no evidence as to which, if either, was the predominant or preferred order.  Others have head-internal relative clauses:

       [the which book I read].  
 
The vast majority of these are OV in Basic Word Order.  There is however an exception. Kutenai (NW Pacific Coast) is in fact VSO (like Arabic, Ancient Hebrew, Maya, Chinook, Welsh, Gaelic, and many Polynesian languages) but it has head-internal relative clauses.

                Died a woman.   ‘A woman died.’
               died [the whom woman Mike saw]  
              ‘The [woman [whom Mike saw] ] died.’

Now Kutenai has only a small number of speakers, a few hundred at most, I think.  But it is just as significant but no more so to the claim that languages with unusual complex noun modifiers are OV than Chinese is to the claim that  order of relative clauses and their head nouns is strongly associated in human language with the basic word order of Verb and Direct Object.  Clearly it is Goxewu’s Senate part of his analogy which must operate here or else we shall miss a whole host of valid and scientifically significant generalizations.  Chinese counts the same as Chinook or Kutenai.  It gets one vote, or in this case, three, since there are three Chinese languages which do it. (Which raises another problem of whether we are getting independent cases, but we’ll let that pass for now. If we counted only 1 Chinese language, then the Cell (a) in the above table would be (3) instead of (5) and a Fischer Exact Probability Test for getting such a small number in that cell would show a very high risk of missing a relationship not due to chance if we ignored it. )
 
This case is pretty clearly cultural – children learn the languag(s) spoken around us. But note that most languages give children consistent right branching structures (VO, N rel…) or consistently left-branching structures (OV, rel N).   Note that in the English sentence above,
 
              The [woman [whom Mike saw] ] died.  
 
the relative clause modifies and follows its head noun woman.    But note that since this clause modifies a subject, there are two verbs together, the first going with the subject of the relative clause, Mike, and the second going with the further away subject of the entire sentence and head of the relative clause, woman.    That is, the relative clause is nested or center-embedded within the whole sentence.   Make up a sentence with several of these and you’ll quickly have a sentence which is grammatical but almost impossible to understand without pencil and paper.   In left branching languages OV, rel N, like Japanese,  strings of relative clauses that modify subjects give easily understood sentences, each relative clause being added to the left, but strings of relative clauses modifying objects rapidly produce sentences that are grammatical but which can’t be understood.    Languages that have consistent right or consistent left branching structures reduce the chance and frequency of nested, or center-embedded sentences, and thus put fewer impossible demands on humans’ abilities to process several levels of corss-referenced material.    Careful and cross-linugistic study of these very differences in languages then leads to the conclusion, independently supported, that human nervous systems and mental processing systems are virtually identical the species over.   Had we counted our unit of analyses as speakers rather than languages, we would have missed it.
 
The best evidence is that human endocrine, digestive, reproductive, and nervous and mental processing systems are virtually identical the world over.  One cannot explain variables in terms of a constant, although constants may limit the range of variability of variables.  Most adult humans have for physiological and genetic reasons trouble digesting milk; most adult humans in societies whose cultures have a dairying tradition do not.  Here we look for a cultural explanation interacting with biology to account for a digestibility variable.   All societies have members in the 12 – 20 age range.  I.e. all human populations have teenagers.  Many however do not have adolescents, and adolescence as a separate phase of life is by no means due only to raging hormones, which all humans have, but was actually a cultural “invention” – development is a better word, of fairly recent vintage. Somebody did a book on this in America a few years ago—sorry I can’t give the reference; Barbara Piper may know of it. 

Sexual attraction is of course a general fact, with apparent exceptions here and there, of human biology.   But just as we get “guidance” from our respective cultures on how to fall in love, we apparently also get input from them on the range of characteristics we are apt to find sexually attractive.   Barbara Piper should be completely exonerated and acquitted of the charge of “cheap shots”, and if we are to learn how and why human societies and cultures vary, we are going to have among other things, to look at human societies and cultures, and treat them as our units of analysis.  For some things, number of practitioners doesn ‘t matter.  However, for some it may, and it is not always easy before careful analyses to see in advance which things those are.

Barash’ series is about the develolpment of some of these characteristics.  Explaining how things got to be the way they are is not necessarily an explanation of why they continue that way, where they do.   I am not, er abreast of the cultural anthropological literature on various sexual attraction characteristics, and I expect Piper knows more of that than I.   We generally suppose that present day, or ethonographic present  band level foraging societies (hunters/gatherers) are more like the societies of our paleolithic ancestor humans than the more complex societies at the tribal, and certainly at the chiefdom and state levels.   Pronounced breasts I presume developed early in the species’ evolution and was a characteristic among humans of paleolithic societies, and it may be that they at one time, their relative sexual attractiveness was randomly distributed over individuals among all human populations, and then later got modified as cultures differentiated.  Barbara, do you have any data on the range of sexual attractiveness characteristics in foraging societies?

Unlike other apes, female bonobos have prominent breasts year-round, although, like humans, they become much more prominent during pregnancy and lactation. There seems to be a correlation between more prominent breasts and bipedalism among bonobo groups, and they frequently have sex in the missionary position.

Because they are fun.

Women who are underweight are unable to bear children, but that should also work for most mammals. Hurm. 
A way to tell the difference between women and the really pretty men?

Who cares?  As long as they exist, let us be happy.

It might be useful to consider well accepted visual clues to human “fitness” and “beauty”. When one does, symmetry figures prominently. The symmetry of features is responsive to both genetic and environmental quality. Correspondingly, symmetry of features (esp. facial) is a strong predictor of perceived beauty. Breasts, in a naked species, are well suited to signal symmetry. Perhaps one should try not to focus too narrowly on sexuality. This notion actually has the virtue of being suitable to generate hypotheses: would prominent asymmetrical breasts fair better or worse than small symmetrical breasts . . .

Temperature regulation, perhaps? 

Did the American Association of Sociobiologists have an in-camera meeting, at which somebody said, “They’re on to us! We’ve got get a new identity”? Is that how sociobiology become “evolutionary psychology”?

The point of “or whatever name she’s using these days” was not to call out Barbara Piper for using aliases to fool people, but rather to illustrate her similar aside, which she applied to a serious point of view in biology and anthropology, feels when applied to her, an undoubtedly serious person.

I always thought breasts were used to communicate age. The larger they are they more they sag with time, and the more of an indicator it is to the male of the age of the female. Since age and fertility correlate nicely, its one of the most important things to know about a potential mate. Not sure how you could go about testing this theory. How do other species know each others age? Can they smell it? Do they even care?

I would refer readers who are unfamiliar with Steven Jay Gould’s paper on the Spandrels of San Marcos to give it a read.  He addresses the folly of Barash’s adaptationist storytelling.  Are there no better evolutionary biology commentators out there for the “Chronicle” to publish???

Where did that wonderful picture come from, David?  I like it, but it is anatomically incorrect.

My compliments for your usual wonderful and thought-provoking post.

Bill Gleason

Women have large breasts when not lactating so that men will talk to them. 

Dave, love your accompanying photo of Mary the mother of Jesus nursing her son.

Is there a picture out there of Mohammed’s mother nursing him?  I hope we can add such pictures son to similar articles about women and (again) valorize a polyvocal multiculturalism.  Dave, even if you can draw only stick figures, you could do it yourself!  That would be pretty cool.  

I am always fascinated by the way that those discussing such matters never look at the habits of stone-age aboriginals and how they live. 

To wit, there is a very practical convenience of great evolutionary significance to large breasts.  They can be pulled on, hard, until they can be flipped over  the mother’s shoulder. That way, she can carry her baby on her back and feed that child while working hard. This is not hard to find in anthropological literature. But this only works if they are large enough in the first place. 
I will also note that those masses of fatty tissue also provide a blood reservoir. In many places, women are preferred to dive for food. And when they dive, the breast (as well as other fatty tissue) is compressed. The deeper they dive, the more blood is forced out of the breasts. It’s a significant amount. 

I first started thinking about this when looking at pictures of Annelie Pompe a deep diver. I think it helps for making many dives. 

And last, much of evolution is simply drift. Anything that can survive will be propagated. Entirely random things do just fine if they are not deleterious. 

One of the most frequent comments I have received, and am still struggling with, is about my lecture notes. My lecture slides (for 1st to 3rd year biology courses) do not contain a lot of text. This is to encourage them to listen to me during lectures, rather than read text on slides, and to actually attend lectures. Obviously I still haven’t found that sweet-spot between too little and too much text. 

I just “Liked” all of the posted comments.  Yes, students’ evaluations of teaching are imperfect and they are easily misused.  But, reading them at the end of each semester always led to some nugget that informed my teaching the next semester.  I appreciate your insights.  Thanks to Ryan for starting this.  

I compromise on the text issue by posting publisher’s slides (if available) on Blackboard and posting slides I’ve used in previous classes. Then students can download and annotate all they want (and a few do) during the time they read the textbook and can bring those slides to class. Then, you could present as you’ve done.

I am very fortunate because I teach only graduate level courses. Among other things, this offers me the opportunity to engage my students in a discussion at the end of the course concerning assignments, readings,and course topics and sequencing.  This discussion is extremely helpful to what I learn about the effectiveness of my approach and allows me to make a variety of adjustments to aid student learning.  This year I learned that students prefer and I benefit from breaking larger assignments into chunks.  They get the benefit of formative feedback they can use along the way and I benefit because it eases my grading burden.  This approach is a better replication of what they will find in the world of work, where it is permissible to consult with peers, get feedback and advice, and work on a project over time.

I’m an adjunct math instructor and I teach college algebra and precalculus.  One reiteration I noticed in my evaluations was the lack of examples that did not already appear in the textbook.  I listened and began using other examples during my lectures.  The students responded very well to this change.  I believe my students will benefit from the evaluations of previous students.  Learning is a lifelong process, even for an educator!   

I am tasked with crunching evaluation data, and what many of you have eloquently stated so far I have seen in the comments section.  It does shock me when students make comments like “it would make students happy if . . . ” because it seems to me that professors are not in the business of making students happy –  they teach, and that doesn’t mean they will always make you happy.  
Question for all of you: many of you have stated that you do receive some really good constructive feedback.  In the data sets I have processed so far, I haven’t seen any really good information that someone could use.  I would appreciate knowing in what ways you ascertain that information from the students.  Most of the time, students use the evals for griping about lab space (rightfully so) or other matters that, at least at this time, we cannot control.  Especially since we send data to our adjuncts (they only see comments about them individually, not about anyone else), I would like to ensure that everyone is receiving constructive feedback, and not feedback about whether or not they are liked or disliked with no feedback.  Thank you.