The Science of Love

Sometimes, listening to all the science podcasts that I enjoy, little themes emerge. This week, a group of stories about the science of love were on several podcasts.

There was another theme that also showed up this week, which I didn't intend to talk about. These were stories about Charles Darwin, spurred on by the 200th anniversary of his birth. However, the passle of Darwin stories did include a love story. Darwin agonized over marrying because he knew his love was a woman of faith and his newly discovered theory of evolution could be seen as defying religion. He delayed publication of the theory for years for his wife's sake, and the loss of a daughter pulled them closer in a way that allowed him to publish his theories. His wife retained her faith while Darwin's faded, and they stayed deeply in love and produced several children. There are now some 70 great grandchildren of the couple, many being sought out from time to time to comment on the latest controversy over the battle between religion and evolution.

There were 3 different stories that seem somehow strangely similar that came out at about the same time, I heard them over my iPod all within a two day period.

One says that they discovered that the same hormone that bonds a parent to a child also bonds the parents together. I'm not sure how scientists figure things like this out, but we do know that many of our emotions are swayed or reinforced by (or result in) chemicals being produced by our endocrine system. In trying to figure out what those chemicals are, scientists are trying to understand and quantify what we always assumed was just something you experience. The story immediately made me question what happens if you don't have a stable mate, do you still have a strong bond with the child? Then I remembered a story that I heard about a month ago where this woman admitted to not really loving her oldest daughter very much. She had been in terrible fights and quarrels with the girl's father around the time the girl was born, and she admitted that the girl reminded her of her ex and she just really didn't care for the girl that much. A heartbreaking story, but also one that gives a possible scientific explanation for what she was saying. On the other hand, this news provides support for all the times when a woman wanted to have a baby to strengthen a faltering relationship. I imagine, when flooded by the hormones of bonding when the child came, that this probably actually works sometimes, as ridiculous and ill-advised as I've always considered the prospect. It also makes you wonder if you could concoct a love potion from the hormone?

The second story was about how vocal pitch changes during the fertile part of a woman's cycle, and studies show that men find women more attractive when listening to their voice during that time. They said that a woman's vocal pitch changes noticably when most fertile. This has obvious benefits from an evolutionary standpoint, making women more likely to attract a mate or cause a mate to initiate intimacy during a time when it's most productive. It also made me think about one of my favorite aspects of one of my favorite books. In Dune by Frank Herbert, the highly trained Bene Gesserit sisterhood used a form of vocal discipline called The Voice. Through manipulating their vocal qualities, they could invoke strong reactions in the people they were talking to. Besides making them attracted to the women, they also could stop their actions and sway their minds, but that's a different tenor of the idea. The recent research shows that Frank Herbert's fantasy idea actully has scientific merit.

The third story was the results of some scientific studies of the mating habits of spiders. One throwaway comment about the study was a mention that the spider spins a special web for mating, which reminds me of people decking out their apartments for a romantic evening, or birds making special nests to attract a mate. The shocking and strange part of the study was that some male spiders break off their male parts (they never said penis, so I'm wondering if it's not fair to equate this to a penis, but think of it instead as some kind of stinger-like appendage) during sex with the female. The scientific comment on this phenomenon was that this insures that the spider is the father of all the babies from that female, as the broken off appendage prevents the female from being fertilized by other males. You cannot help but anthropomorphize the story and imagine what would happen to a human male if this were the case. As I said, shocking! One of the stories (I heard this from more than one source) mentioned that the female often eats the male after the act is over. I'm sure there are many humans out there that can relate to this in a symbolic manner. We use the term "Man-Eater" and have the phrase "eat my heart out" so maybe we are harkening back to the love acts of our spider friends.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Genghis: Lords of the Bow

Book Review with Spoilers! Beware!

I just finished reading Genghis: Lords of the Bow by Conn Iggulden. It's a historical fiction novel, part of his Conqueror series on the life of Genghis Khan. I've listened to both books in audiobook form. The first book, Birth of an Empire had a better narrator.

This book starts after Genghis unifies the tribes and defeats the Tartars. This is the conquest and defeat of the Chinese empires.

Mongol life is an illustration of survival of the fittest. There is a constant emphasis on standing up to harsh conditions or any adversary. They learn to use the bow from a very young age and ride horses with a skill that your average cowboy could not approach. The ability to accurately shoot arrows from the back of a horse with precision is the key to their striking power. The sword skills and resulting violence are peppered through the story.

While the novel is fiction, and we certainly have no dialog of what was said, or even a record of what was done on a day to day basis, we do know that the broad outline of Iggulden's book is correct. Genghis was illiterate, but he dictated his story, which was written down and copied. No versions survived in the native Mongol language, but Chinese translations survived and still available. I've done some online research to see if Iggulden's story holds true to what we know about Genghis Kahn, and so far it seems to be perfect. Iggulden mentioned that he had read the translated autobiography.

The third book in the series is out, but I haven't picked it up yet. This is where he starts to go west. We all remember the stories of Genghis Khan from history class where he invaded and defeated all the land right up to Europe, and then stopped. You never hear about the earlier part of the story, where he defeats the Chinese, nor do you hear about the origin and youth of the conqueror.

I was looking forward to seeing the many surprises that the part of the story that includes his drive into the Middle East and toward Europe. I thought I was more familiar with this story, but instead of finishing his book and doing research to compare the story to the history, this time I got online and read the history first.

Genghis Kahn and his Mongol "horde" were totally brutal. The histories talk about the scope of his conquests and the tactics he used, but they also tend to catalog his atrocities. He was famous for being able to quickly transport his army into an area and deploy for battle instantly, but he was also a master of intelligence, deception, and terror. He rarely went on a conquest without sending out extensive spies to determine the lay of the land and the local politics. He used fake retreats all the time, which drew his enemy out of protected positions where they could be annihilated by the more mobile Mongol horse archers. He would usually allow some people in a sacked city to escape into the next place he was headed, so that the traumatized survivors would spread fear in the next target city. He would also use massive groups of captives pushed out in front of the main body as a buffer. The defenders would use up all their bow and crossbow ammunition killing their own people before the Mongols would even get within range.

Each time they won, they would kill most of the population, except artisans, craftsmen, engineers, or young men of military age that were not yet in their enemy's army. Sometimes he would stack the heads of the people in huge heaps outside of the cities he sacked.

His son took Hungary and Poland, and had plans to go all the way through Europe to the Atlantic, if it had not been for the fact that he died and the remaining Mongol tribes did not work together again.

I highly recommend the book and look forward to reading the next in the series. I would warn people that it tends to make violence seem normal, or at least justifiable. It's a strange way of thinking to be exposed to.

Vicariant Event Speciation

I was listening to a lecture on Macroevolution. It's an iTunes U class from UC Berkeley, Bio 1B: General Biology - Spring 2008, by Feldman, Slatkin, & Resh. Why pay for college when you can listen for free? If all you want is to know about it and don't need the degree, it's great.

I'm not sure which Professor gave this lecture, it's number 24 in the series, and talks about how species change.

One concept that he was going over was vicariant events, where an established population is split by some geological or climatic event, and then the newly separated populations change over time to the point where they would not even interbreed with each other.

It struck me that this is like culture in America right now. Not sure what the event is, whether it's 9/11 or just the way life and technology are changing, but the conservative versus liberal divide in this country is almost like this vicariant event divergent evolution that was described in the lecture. Is it possible for mental differences to actually divide a people to the point that they are incompatible?

Don't Do the Dew

I am a recovering Mt. Dew-aholic.

I was drinking 4 or 5 a day, and getting these weird headaches and cold/allergy like reactions to the drink.

There is a combination of slowly creeping up symptoms, denial, and caffeine addiction that allows you to ignore the situation and continue to dose yourself with a concoction that is harming you. At least this is how I would describe my situation.

It's been 9 days since I've had any Mountain Dew. I switched over to iced tea to stave off the caffeine withdrawal, and just have high fructose corn syrup withdrawal.

I do think the sugar was part of what was bothering me, but I did have a friend ask me if it was the Yellow Dye #5.

I saw this strange little story on the web a few days ago, that I could not find again when doing the research for this story. It was a feel-good piece (partly) because while the main story featured how crappy the dental health of these people in rural West Virginia is, the response was that some charity was fixing up everyone's teeth. Typical happy ending: see how pretty they all are with their new smiles! Yea! Not really news, more of a puff piece.

However, the before pictures make it more of a nightmare. These people had huge brown circular holes in the fronts of their teeth. Cavities that had been going untreated for years. I remember thinking, don't they ever brush their teeth?

The other thing I noticed was that the piece casually showed that everyone was drinking Mountain Dew. I mean everyone. They had little kids drinking it, and teenagers having it with lunch, and everyone everywhere slamming it down.

I'm thinking about the fact that these are all Appalachian Mountain people drinking Mountain Dew, and suddenly, I remembered something from my youth. Mountain Dew used to have hillbillies on the bottles. Is this just irony or coincidence that the modern day victims of this drink's sugary side effects are the original marketing tool used by the drink?

I found out that Mountain Dew was originally invented and distributed from the Tennessee mountain regions, and that the hillbilly reference was from the fact that Moonshine used to be called Mountain Dew. It was supposed to be an answer to 7-Up. When Pepsi bought it, they eventually dropped the hillbilly motif, and then became a pioneer energy drink with snowboarding Gen-Xers as their modern theme.

It looks like the drink is getting back to its roots, as well as the roots of the teeth of its fans.