The Geography of Faces

How much can you tell about where someone comes from, just from their face?

The other day I was in London and came across a group of young people in Muslim attire who were waving (or in some cases wearing) a particular flag. I thought it was the Iranian flag, but, I thought, they didn't look Iranian. They looked more like Somalis, but it certainly wasn't the blue and white Somali flag. I decided that maybe they were some kind of pro-Iranian demonstrators, but I later worked out that it was the flag of the unrecognised state of Somaliland.

This got me thinking about how reliable these "they look they're from..." judgements are.

Clearly on a basic level, we can usually tell which continent someone's ancestors were from, in terms of the familiar "races" of Europeans, Africans, East Asians etc. But what about shorter distances?


Could you tell, just from looking at them (and setting aside dress, hairstyle, jewellery etc.) whether someone was from Spain as opposed to France? Korea or Japan? Russia or Germany?

I can only speak for England, but there's certainly a vague but widespread belief that every part of Europe has a  distinct 'look'. In the past, people were very fond of talking about that kind of thing; today, we're rather embarrassed by the idea but the belief lives on.

I don't know, but I'd be very surprised if there weren't analogous beliefs in other countries.

But how accurate are these folk beliefs, really?

Supposing you were the world expert on human faces - or suppose you were a supercomputer with face-recognition software and access to Facebook's entire dataset. How accurately could you place someone's origins on the map, on average? To within 1000 km? 100? With what degree of accuracy? In an ideal world, could the ultimate face-placer judge someone as French vs German 75% of the time? 90%? Or only slightly better than chance?

I suspect that if you researched this, you'd find that a supercomputer could do very well, in most parts of the world, but that the majority of actual people are less accurate than they think they are.

Obesity: Are We Food Obsessed?

According to a Professor Greg Whyte, writing in the Independent, when it comes to obesity, we've got an unhealthy obsession with diet. There is -

an incessant diatribe of diet propaganda purporting to possess the panacea for health... [but] the focus on diet linked to the volume and make-up of calories we consume has overshadowed the importance of the critical half of the energy balance equation: physical activity.

Clearly weight is, to a first approximation, a matter of calories in (diet) vs. calories out (physical activity). For any given diet, whether you lose or gain weight is determined by how much exercise you do, and vice versa. There's no such thing as "overeating" as such, there's just eating out of proportion to your level of exercise.

But have we forgotten that? Do we talk about the diet side of the equation more? I ran a few searches on PubMed and Google for "obesity" + various other terms to try and find out and it looks like Whyte is right.

See the graph above.

There does seem to be an imbalance, with "food" and "diet" being much more popular than "exercise" and "physical activity", both in terms of the scientific literature (PubMed), and more generally (Google). This is just a quick analysis of course, but it does suggest that when it comes to weight and obesity, we are more interested in calories in, than calories out.

I wonder why?

Free Will: A Dangerous Idea?

The British Journal of Social Psychology has published a fiery rebuke to psychologists who argue that belief in free will makes people more ethical.

Recent much-publicized studies have claimed that scepticism about free will makes people behave less morally. "Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness" as the title of one of hese papers puts it.

In his article (free pdf), British 'independent researcher' James B. Miles says that these experiments are flawed, because they didn't distinguish between determinism (lack of free choice) and fatalism (lack of the ability to change events).

More fundamentally, though, Miles says that free will is used to justify things, such as punishment and poverty, that would otherwise be seen as scandalous -

Western law recognizes that the penal system is so harmful to the existing life and future opportunities of persons that to convict requires evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet libertarians provide no objective evidence whatsoever for the existence of free will, and therefore no apparent justification for the mass poverty and brutal punishments that belief in libertarian free will often brings with it. The leading legal theorist Stephen J. Morse freely admits that harsh prison conditions and execution are only morally tolerable where the presumption of free choice exists...

...In June 2009, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published research showing that up to 83% of Britons think that ‘virtually everyone’ remains in poverty in Britain not as the result of social
misfortune or biological handicap but through choice (Bamfield & Horton, 2009, p. 23; 69% of those surveyed agreed with the statement and an additional 14% were unsure but did not disagree.) Because of their belief in the fairness of ‘deserved inequalities’, such respondents were discovered to have become almost completely unconcerned with the idea of promoting greater equality while at the same time asserting that Britain was a beacon of fairness that offered opportunities for all...

...Free will may just be the primary excuse many use to legitimize a contempt for the poor that would exist independent of their professed belief in free will, but free will assertion nonetheless provides the ethical fig leaf for such contempt that would be far harder to rationalize (and therefore tolerate) without the myth of free will.

This is a polemical piece (remarkably so, for an academic journal), and clearly this is only one side of the story, but it's hard to deny that he has a point: there's a dark side to the belief in free will. If you doubt free will, and yet praise the myth of it, as some scientists seem to be doing, you need to accept that you're condemning some people (prisoners, most obviously) to suffer as a result "through no fault of their own".

Personally, I think the great majority of people do believe in free will and always will - the arguments against it have been around for millenia, they're as convincing as they'll ever be, and they haven't convinced most people, however irrational that might make most people. So I think the debate over belief in free will is academic; it's not going away.

 Miles JB (2011). 'Irresponsible and a Disservice': The integrity of social psychology turns on the free will dilemma. The British journal of social psychology / the British Psychological Society PMID: 22074173

Chicken Hawks

I wonder how many of the above Senators, all of which have announced their support of an attack on Iran, were ever in the military? It is so easy for these paper tigers to spend our blood, sweat, and tears, not to mention the innocent lives lost in such an act, when it's not their children fighting the battle, not their money paying for it, and not their lives on the line. (Our good Senator Lieberman had an educational deferment from the Vietnam War.)

They can't come together to fix anything, but they can come together to start another war. It's time to vote every single one of them out of office.

The Stigma(s) of Mental Illness

Fighting "the stigma of mental illness" is big business at the moment. But does "the stigma" really exist?

As I said back in 2010 :

There is a stigma of schizophrenia, and there's a stigma of depression, etc. but they're not the same stigma. We're told it's a myth that "the mentally ill are violent" - [but] no-one thinks depressed or anorexic people are violent. They think (roughly) that people with psychosis are. They have other equally silly opinions about each diagnosis, but there's no monolithic "stigma of mental illness".

Now a paper has come out which explores this idea in some detail: Stereotypes of mental disorders differ in competence and warmth. The title says it all : people have stereotypical views of people suffering from different mental disorders, but these stereotypes vary substantially.

The authors use the "Stereotype Content Model" framework, which despite the fancy name is very simple. On this view stereotypes are characterised by two dimensions, "competence" and "warmth". These are pretty self-explanatory. Warmth is whether you're seen as nice and friendly, or hostile and dangerous. Competence is whether you're thought to be good at it.

We all know that warmth and competence are distinct and indeed orthogonal concepts, and they crop up in other languages and in popular culture.

Anyway, in two Mechanical Turk online surveys of American adults, they first showed that respondants felt that "people with mental illness" were low on competence and (slightly) low on warmth, compared to other social and ethnic groups. That's similar to the ratings of the homeless, poor, and welfare recipients.

However in the second study, they asked about specific diagnoses, and this revealed a more complex pattern. I've shown the results above (colors are mine). There seemed to be four clusters. Mental retardation and Alzheimer's were perceived as warm, but incompetent; sociopaths and violent criminals were the opposite.

Schizophrenia clustered with homelessness and addiction in a worst-of-both-worlds category of low warmth and competence, while what could broadly be called "emotional" disorders, like bipolar, depression and anxiety, were rated more favorably. For what its worth, OCD was the least bad diagnosis.

These are interesting results. The only oddity about the method was that people weren't actually asked what they thought about these people; they were asked “In general, how much do Americans believe that..." This is, apparantly, standard procedure in this kind of stereotype research, but it seems a little strange to me.

Sadler, M., Meagor, E., and Kaye, K. (2012). Stereotypes of mental disorders differ in competence and warmth Social Science and Medicine DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.12.019

The Unconquered World

A thought struck me the other day: China is the only place in the world that has never been controlled by a European power, whether as a colony, protectorate, territory, mandate, etc.

Thinking about it a bit more I realized this is not quite true, but it's not far off. As far as I can tell (thanks Wikipedia) the following countries were never officially under European control. I'm including the USA, Australia, New Zealand and the USSR as "European". Note that I use the modern names of countries to refer to the territory that falls within their borders, even though it wasn't always called that.

Most of China
Thailand
Mongolia
Saudi Arabia (assuming the Ottoman Empire was not a "European power")
Bhutan
Nepal

Iran and Turkey make the list, unless you count Alexander the Great.

Japan and North and South Korea make the list unless you count the post-WW2 occupations.

All of these areas were under various forms of influence at different times, but they never formally lost their sovereignty to Europe. (Edit: Iran and Turkey removed because they were conquered by Alexander.) (Edit 2: Added Bhutan and Nepal which I missed before. Changed map to show special status of Japan, Korea, Turkey & Iran).

Disclaimer: I'm not a geographer; this is something I put together purely out of interest. It's quite likely that I've missed some. In particular I don't know anything about the small island nations. Please comment if you can correct this, it's a work in progress.

Prison Nation

Now, here is something to chew on - the big Wall Street firm Corrections Corporation of America wants to privatize all of the prisons - offering cash-strapped states a one time pay out. The only caveat - prisons must remain 90% full. 

Corporate America became interested in privatizing prisons when the war on drugs was in full swing and we were incarcerating all of those nasty pot smokers. There is big money in the war on drugs - many a career is kept afloat on that boondoggle.

Lets see, bloggers are now abandoning their blogs in droves due to government monitoring - our email is fair game, there are cameras everywhere, but we're still the home of the free, right? I just love feeling safe.

They must be expecting another big jump in numbers, despite a recent dip in prison populations, as the letter to buy the prisons went out to all 48 states. Could that bill that Obama quietly signed over the holidays, giving the federal government the right to incarcerate Americans without a trial, have anything to do with it? No, of course not....not in America, where corporations are considered people.

THRIVE

Over the last couple of years this site has discussed many issues. We've looked at how our police are becoming very militaristic, how evil corporations are using our food to genetically engineer seed that cannot reproduce, how a very small percentage of the population owns more than the vast majority, how the pharmaceutical companies are drugging our babies. But it hasn't been until now that I've watched something that put it all together and into perspective.

Most of us do not want to believe in conspiracy theories. We've been taught to laugh at them, to be very suspect of anything that requires secrecy as we've come to believe that it is impossible to keep everyone quiet. But when a few hold all of the cards that the rest of us use to get our information - it can be done.

While we were in Hawaii we visited an art gallery and proceeded to get into a deep discussion with its owner. He asked us if we had seen the movie Thrive, which we had not. He proceeded to tell us that we must watch it - that it was a movement and that most of his friends had not only watched the movie, but were actively using the website.

Well, I finally watched it today and I can honestly say it is very well done. I can see why most of the reviewers on Amazon gave it 5 stars. Not only does it link all the dots about how we've come to find our world in the place it is in, but gives solutions about how to get out of the seemingly impossible quicksand that we've found ourselves.

Our future depends on us waking up and seeing the world for what it is, but more importantly for what it could be. As Einstein reminds us - "we can't solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

This movie at least starts the conversation. You can rent it for $5 for 48 hours directly to your computer, or order the DVD from the Thrive site or Amazon.com. It comes in many languages - this is a world-wide phenomenon.

The Militarization of our Police

I have been very upset with the escalating violence with which our police are using on its citizens. Have any of you noticed that it appears more and more swat teams are being utilized for what used to be routine police business? That there seems to be an inordinate amount of brute force being used against ordinary citizens that are hardly a threat?

The Department of Education has its own swat team! In fact it raided a home in the middle of the night, rousing a man and his three daughters from bed at gun point because his ex-wife defaulted on student loans. The Department of Education said it was because of embezzlement and fraud. Embezzlement and fraud requires a swat team to terrorize a family in the middle of the night? The fact that his ex-wife hadn't lived there for over a year seemed to matter not.

A grandfather being thrown to the ground and knocked out in front of his grandson for allegedly stealing a video game? He denies stealing the game and said he merely stuck it in the band of his pants while grabbing his grandson to get him out of a Black Friday melee. He wasn't even followed to see if he was trying to leave the store with the item. I can't tell you how many times I've stuck something in my purse, or coat pocket while running after a toddler, only to take it out and pay for it at the check stand. Breaking this man's nose?

And then watching Anthony Bologna of NYPD pepper spray women who were defenseless and penned in by police tape. Or watching a peaceful group of college protesters get pepper sprayed for having a sit-in. Isn't that what our country is all about? Peaceful protest? Isn't that what separates us from all of those countries that are not free to do so??

Something is going on here. Something is not right.

Then we have the routinely used taser. Pregnant women have been tasered, children as young as six, the elderly, an out of control ten year old! People have been tasered at routine traffic stops, or for noncompliance with an officer. I guess if you have the audacity to ask any questions, you can be tasered. A 61-year old man was tasered and killed in North Carolina for not stopping on his bicycle. He had done nothing illegal. His wife said he probably didn't hear the command as he was hard of hearing.

Then there is the increasingly militaristic look to the police uniform. You routinely see the domestic cop dressed in camouflage, or a battle dress uniform, or full-on armour, toting an assault weapon for summits and protests. They drive tanks and military command centers. Then we have the law that is now before Congress that would allow the government to hold American citizens indefinitely, without a trial, if the government can accuse them of terrorism.

This is starting to feel very fascist.

Was Evita Lobotomized?

Eva Peron, or Evita, is perhaps the most famous woman in Latin American history. As the wife of Argentinian leader Juan Peron she was immensely popular. But she died at the age of just 33 from cervical cancer, after a two year struggle with the disease.

A new paper makes the startling claim that Eva Peron may have received a prefrontal lobotomy in the months before her death. The lobotomy is best known as a treatment for mental disorders such as schizophrenia, but according to Nijensohn et al, Peron was given the operation as a kind of pain relief.

The claim was first made in 2005 by Dr George Udvarhelyi, who worked as a neurosurgeon in Argentina before moving to John Hopkins in Baltimore. After his retirement, Udvarhelyi told the Baltimore Sun that he'd performed the operation.

The authors of this paper checked out the claims against his unpublished memoirs. It turns out that they've just written Udvarhelyi's biography, and managed to slip in a plug for their book. Indeed, this paper could be seen as a plug. But anyway.

The early 1950s were the golden age of lobotomy and it does seem plausible that if she had one, it would have been kept secret. But it seems that the only direct evidence is Udvarhelyi's testimony. The authors point to various facts that could be seen as consistent with it, like this memoir by a close friend:

“The illness continued to advance. I visited her one afternoon andwas shown a notebook belonging to her brother Juancito. There was a drawing of Evita with her head criss-crossed by scissors. The sinister image suggested that she was either crazy or brain damaged. I found her very thin, quiet, and deeply introverted”

But to be honest this is pretty weak. The authors also admit that in interviews with scholarly experts on Peron's illness, they were all surprised by the idea.

They then point to postmortem X-rays of Peron's skull which were made public in 1955 to prove that her corpse hadn't been burned (long story). These, they suggest, show evidence of the kind of burr holes that were used to insert the lobotomy tools -

And they say that a photo of her shortly before her death shows an "indentation at the coronal level" -

Hmm. Not sure what to make of those. Ultimately though, the authors admit that the only way to know for sure would be to exhume Evita and study her skull, but this is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Nijensohn DE, Savastano LE, Kaplan AD, & Laws ER Jr (2011). New Evidence of Prefrontal Lobotomy in the Last Months of the Illness of Eva Perón. World neurosurgery PMID: 22079825

Potential Personal Genomics

A while ago I wrote about how new findings in genetics could herald a new kind of "eugenics", based not around selective breeding to ensure that "bad" genes aren't passed on, but rather based on using fetal genetic testing to choose which variants enter the gene pool in the first place.

I said-

In the near future, we might be able to routinely sequence the genome of any unborn child shortly after conception

But I didn't realize that this may be really very near indeed. Two recent reports have shown that it's possible to sequence fetal DNA from a maternal blood sample. In one case it was used to diagnose a 35 week fetus with a genetic deletion on chromosome 12 seemingly associated with autism, developmental delay and shortness.

In this case it was inherited from the father (which is why they decided to test for it), but this approach could equally be used to screen for the de novo mutations that account for much disease, as I discussed in the last post.

This is big. Currently, the main way to get fetal DNA is through amniocentesis, i.e. inserting a needle into the womb. It's a substantial and not entirely safe medical procedure. A blood sample would be an order of magnitude cheaper and safer, but most of all it would be something you could do at home.

No longer would you need to go to a hospital and discuss everything with a doctor. You could take some blood, send it off anonymously to a sequencing company, and get the results in an email. It would take it out of the hands of professionals and open up a space for individual choice.

The cost of whole-genome sequencing has been falling exponentially and many think it will fall below the $1000 mark within a few years. Combine that with fetal DNA testing and we might see moderately well-off parents able to sequence fetal DNA within the next decade.


When this happens I think the personal genomics industry will suddenly become extremely "hot". At the moment you can sequence your own DNA for a few thousand $ if you want. The results may be interesting but they're of little obvious use. Whatever your genes are, you're stuck with them.

But as soon as we're talking about potential human genomes, it'll kick things up a notch. Media interest and political controversy is sure to follow. Personally I think it'll the debate will begin in earnest when we start seeing selective abortions on the basis of genes for "normal" variants rather than "disease" genes.

It's one thing to not want a child with blindness, or a high risk of leukaemia. But as a society I don't think we're ready for not wanting a child because they're predicted to be a B student rather than an A student, or brunette rather than blonde. At some point soon, though, we'll have to decide what we think about that.

Peters D, Chu T, Yatsenko SA, Hendrix N, Hogge WA, Surti U, Bunce K, Dunkel M, Shaw P & Rajkovic A (2011). Noninvasive prenatal diagnosis of a fetal microdeletion syndrome. The New England journal of medicine, 365 (19), 1847-8 PMID: 22070496

Srebniak M, Boter M, Oudesluijs G, Joosten M, Govaerts L, Van Opstal D, & Galjaard RJ (2011). Application of SNP array for rapid prenatal diagnosis: implementation, genetic counselling and diagnostic flow. European journal of human genetics : EJHG, 19 (12), 1230-7 PMID: 21694736

Occupy With Aloha

Photo courtesy of Yes Lab

For many of us who are becoming uneasy with some of the problems associated with Occupy Wall Street, the rapes, the degradation of community parks, the shootings, the fear that it will become a haven for some of society's most violent, what we are most uneasy about is the possibility that the message will be lost. The message - that 99% of our population has been forgotten, left out of the American Dream, while the other .09% has amassed the majority of the wealth of our great nation. That Wall Street used banks like casinos and we are left with the carnage of their greed, an economy on the brink of destruction. What is left for the rest of us is massive debt and jobs that are no longer in our country, but in foreign nations that do not have laws protecting the rights of their workers, thus enabling them to sell us their cheap products, while we borrow from those same countries to pay our teachers and fireman.

Our politicians very often come out of Washington much more wealthy than they were when they took their vows to honor the will of the American people. They often do this with inside information that the rest of the country does not have access to - just as Nancy Pelosi and her husband did with a credit card company. Soft corruption, honest graft. Insider trading in the stock market. Writing the rules so that they do not apply to themselves! Taking information learned in committee meetings and using it to make stock market trades. The rest of us go to prison for doing many of the things our politicians routinely do to line their pockets.

So when I found this post on Synchrosecrets, I asked Trish and Rob if I could repost it in its entirety. Here is one man's very brave stand for the other 99%.

WE ARE THE MANY, NOT THE FEW

Here’s an interesting twist in the Occupy movement.

Hawaiian recording artist Makana was supposed to play a luau Saturday night – November 12 – at Waikiki Beach for leaders at an annual summit that is putting together plans for a Pacific free-trade pact.  The Obamas and leaders of 21 economies from the Asia Pacific were present. Among the attendees were Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Security was apparently tight.

So there they are, these leaders, doing whatever leaders do at a private shindig on Waikiki Beach, and the young man who is supposed to play for the Hawaiian feast opens his jacket to reveal a t-shirt that reads, Occupy for Aloha. The five-minute song in the video is what he sang repeatedly for forty minutes. Here’s the refrain I love:

“We’ll occupy the streets, we’ll occupy the courts, we’ll occupy the offices of you, till you do the bidding of the many, not the few.”

The Recession and Death

The present economic crisis has led to more suicides in Europe - but fewer deaths in road traffic accidents.

So says a brief report in The Lancet. The authors show that suicide rates in people under the age of 65, which have been falling for several years in Europe, rose in 2008 and again in 2009, in line with unemployment figures. The overall effect was fairly small - 2009 was no worse than 2006. It still corresponds to a 5% annual increase in most countries. In Greece, Ireland, and Latvia the rise was about 15%.

That's sad but not perhaps very surprising.

What's interesting though is that road traffic fatalities fell sharply. In Lithuania, they dropped by nearly half, although they were very high to begin with, and in Spain and Ireland they fell by 25%.

This presumably reflects the fact that people are just driving less, and perhaps slower. We've got less money to spend on fuel, and fewer jobs and things to need to drive to.

The authors note that although fewer road deaths is generally a good thing, there's one downside - a shortage of donor organs for transplantation. Road accidents are a prime source of organs because they're one of the few times that young, healthy people die leaving most of the body intact.

Stuckler D, Basu S, Suhrcke M, Coutts A, & McKee M (2011). Effects of the 2008 recession on health: a first look at European data. Lancet, 378 (9786), 124-5 PMID: 21742166

The Ancients

I just got back from a holiday in Greece - hence the lack of posts these past two weeks. Normal service will now resume.

Greece, of course, is rich in history (if not money, at the moment) and the National Archaeological Museum is predictably impressive. One of the most striking artefacts I remember was a kind of miniature suit made out of pure gold leaf, complete with a little face mask with tiny eye holes. It was the death mask of an infant from Mycenae, buried about 3000 years ago and dug up in the 19th century.

That's fascinating of course. When you think about it, it's also tragic. This was someone's baby son or daughter. However, it's hard to feel sad over it. If that baby died in front of you, or even if it happened yesterday and you read about it on the news, it would be sad.

You'd even feel sad if it were an entirely fictional baby that "died" in a movie. But being so old, it's not sad, it's just interesting, which is why these things have ended up in museums.

Most of the best exhibits are grave goods, placed in tombs with the dead, in the belief that the deceased would be able to use them in the next world. One Mycenaean warrior was buried with his sword, the blade specially bent so as to "kill" it, and ensure that it would travel to the afterlife with him.

That's fascinating, and also rather weird. Killing a sword so its dead owner could use the ghost of it in heaven? Those crazy ancients!

When you think about it, that's a horrible thing to think. That guy was probably a war hero and that grave was the most solemn memorial his culture could erect to his memory. That was the Arlington, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, of his day. We could have let it rest in peace. But we put it in a museum.

My point here is not that we ought to stop doing archaeology because it's offending the memory of the dead. What's interesting is the fact that no-one would even consider that. We just don't care about the dead of 3000 years ago, except as historical data. Yet there'd be outrage if someone went into a churchyard and starting digging up the dead of 300 years ago. You wouldn't even stuck some chewing gum to a gravestone or use it as a seat.

So there are two categories of the dead. There's the alive dead, who are felt to be with us, in the sense that they have a right to respect. Then there are the dead dead, the ancients, who are of purely historical interest. The alive dead still have power - wars are fought over their memories, honour, property rights.

Eventually, though, even the dead die, and that's generally a good thing. The Hungarians, so far as I know, don't dislike the Mongolians because of the Mongol Invasion of 1237, although the Hungarians who died then would probably have wanted them to.

Fortunately for modern international relations, they're dead.

Men, Women and Spatial Intelligence

Do men and women differ in their cognitive capacities? It's been a popular topic of conversation since as far back as we have records of what people were talking about.

While it's now (almost) generally accepted that men and women are at most only very slightly different in average IQ, there are still a couple of lines of evidence in favor of a gender difference.

First, there's the idea that men are more variable in their intelligence, so there are more very smart men, and also more very stupid ones. This averages out so the mean is the same.

Second, there's the theory that men are on average better at some things, notably "spatial" stuff involving the ability to mentally process shapes, patterns and images, while women are better at social, emotional and perhaps verbal tasks. Again, this averages out overall.

According to proponents, these differences explain why men continue to dominate the upper echelons of things like mathematics, physics, and chess. These all tap spatial processing and since men are more variable, there'll be more extremely high achievers - Nobel Prizes, grandmasters. (There are also presumably more men who are rubbish at these things, but we don't notice them.)

The male spatial advantage has been reported in many parts of the world, but is it "innate", something to do with the male brain? A new PNAS study says - probably not, it's to do with culture. But I'm not convinced.

The authors went to India and studied two tribes, the Khasi and the Karbi. Both live right next to other in the hills of Northeastern India and genetically, they're closely related. Culturally though, the Karbi are patrilineal - property and status is passed down from father to son, with women owning no land of their own. The Khasi are matrilineal, with men forbidden to own land. Moreover, Khasi women also get just as much education as the men, while Karbi ones get much less.

The authors took about 1200 people from 8 villages - 4 per culture - and got them to do a jigsaw puzzle. The quicker you do it, the better your spatial ability. Here were the results. I added the gender-stereotypical colours.

In the patrilineal group, women did substantially worse on average (remember that more time means worse). In the matrilineal society, they performed as well as men. Well, a tiny bit worse, but it wasn't significant. Differences in education explained some of the effect, but only a small part of it.

OK.

This was a large study, and the results are statistically very strong. However, there's a curious result that the authors don't discuss in the paper - the matrilineal group just did much better overall. Looking at the men, they were 10 seconds faster in the matrilineal culture. That's nearly as big as the gender difference in the patrilineal group (15 seconds)!

The individual variability was also much higher in the patrilineal society, for both genders.

Now, maybe, this is a real effect. Maybe being in a patrilineal society makes everyone less spatially aware, not just women; that seems a bit of a stretch, though.

There's also the problem that this study essentially only has two datapoints. One society is matrilineal and has low gender difference in visuospatial processing. One is patrilineal and has a high difference. But that's just not enough data to conclude that there's a correlation between the two things, let alone a causal relationship; you would need to study lots of societies to do that.

Personally, I have no idea what drives the difference, but this study is a reminder of how difficult the question is.

Hoffman M, Gneezy U, List JA (2011). Nurture affects gender differences in spatial abilities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 21876159

The Sky is Falling!

Is it just me or does all the posturing and drama in Washington just feel a little like theater? There is all the fear that they make sure everyone is feeling - similar to having to buy the banks out or the world would come tumbling down. And then at the last minute they will make the deal hoping they look like avenging heroes saving the world.  In the end the only one that will feel the pain is the taxpayer.

Two years after the bank bailout and it is business as usual for the banks, Wall Street, and the politicians.

I'll think I'll pass on this particular Chicken Little scenario and pour myself a little glass of wine, put my feet up, and let them battle it out. I've decided that getting all riled up is just bad for my health and does nothing to change anything in the end.

Cheers!

Have a great weekend, everyone!