Dawkins embarrassed after death and subsequent resurrection

Maybe I have a weird sense of humor but I found the NewsBiscuit satirical article "Richard Dawkins embarrassed after death and subsequent resurrection" hysterically funny. A sample:

Confirmed atheist Richard Dawkins was forced onto the defensive yesterday after he died but subsequently rose from the dead in a miraculous resurrection, much like that of the son of God Jesus Christ.

‘There are a number of perfectly logical scientific explanations for what has happened’ he told journalists flocking to hear his story or just touch the hem of his clothing. ‘Although I was pronounced dead after the unfortunate incident on Friday, the doctors clearly made a mistake. The fact that there was thunder and lightning, and those around claim to have heard the sound of angelic voices is completely irrelevant.’

Read on...

(Via RichardDawkins.net)

More Infidelity

Talking about infidelity... New Scientist has a report on a recent study in Human Nature that concluded men are better at detecting infidelity than women, but that women are adept at hiding it. A paragraph or two:

"This adds to the evidence that men have evolved defences to detect their partner's infidelity," says David Buss at the University of Texas, Austin. He adds that it demonstrates a "fascinating cognitive bias that leads men to err on the side of caution by overestimating a partner's infidelity".

Andrews suggests that women have countered this by becoming better at covering up affairs. Complex statistical analysis of the data hinted that a further 10 per cent of the women in the study had cheated on top of the 18.5 per cent who admitted to it in the questionnaires, whereas the men had been honest about their philandering.

Infidelity

While society has always accepted that men engage in (or want to engage in) short-term sexual liaisons, women have sometimes been seen as 'pure' and entirely faithful. Evolutionary sexual psychologists, on the contrary, argue (pdf) that men and women pursue mixed sexual strategies, that is, are prone to engage in both long-term and short-term mating. Roughly speaking, the optimal strategy for a woman is to have a long-term relationship with the best mate she can attract but then, subject to an assessment of the risks, to have short-term sexual relationships with higher quality men (pdf). (Since the average woman is more likely to attract the highest quality men into a short-term rather than long-term relationship, she can often increase her fitness by engaging in extrapair copulations. If she can convince her primary partner to care for the children that (sometimes) result, so much the better). The optimal male strategy, on the other hand, is quite a bit more promiscuous: attract the highest quality mate possible to a long-term relationship (at least usually) and then, again taking account of risks, engage in as many extrapair copulations as possible, whatever the quality of the female involved. (As should be clear, I'm ignoring homosexual relationships for present purposes).

All of the above, however, is theory-driven and it leaves open the question of how prevalent infidelity is in the modern world. Determining the true incidence of infidelity is extremely challenging - not least because people find it difficult to admit to it - but we do have some idea. There is fascinating research, for example, showing that a not insubstantial proportion of children - at least 10% - are fathered in extrapair copulations. And a recent review of the literature found that infidelity occurs in about 25% of long-term heterosexual relationships in the United States. The latest is that the New York Times published a pretty good article summarizing some of the recent research and some recent trends, again in the United States. The most titillating finding is that there seems to be a trend towards greater female infidelity, but whether this is due to more honesty on questionnaires or more actual cheating is difficult to determine. What is clear, though, is that sexual fidelity is hardly universal and women are not necessarily less fallible in this regard than men. Obvious, perhaps, but many have denied it...

Carnival of the Africans #3

The 3rd edition of our very own blog carnival, the Carnival of the Africans, is out at Amanuensis. Posts that stood out: Pause and Consider on why the belief in bigfoot is stupid, Amanuensis on experimenter bias in economics and Botswana Skeptic on lying to an astrologer. My contributions to the carnival were "Neuroscience is the new wedge" and "Genius and Precocity".

Check it out, and send some link love its way!

South African Science Blogrolling for October

I've been trying to foster cooperation between South African, and indeed African, science bloggers for a while now. My initiative has been a modest success - there is a bit more communication going on, and the Carnival of the Africans has done fairly well. There is, however, some room for improvement... please participate in the carnival! And volunteer to host it! And, most importantly, let's all promote each others' blogs - including the SA Science Blogroll on your blog is a great way of doing just that. Better still, also create a blog post like this one listing all the SA Science Blogs; that'll be great for everyone's Technorati authority and Afrigator / Amatomu rank.

The updated blogroll for October:

• 01 and the universe
• Acinonyx Scepticus **New**
  
• Amanuensis
• Effortless Incitement
• Ewan's Corner
  
• Ionian Enchantment
• Irreverence
  
• Orion Spur **New**
• Pause and Consider **New**
  
• Pickled Bushman
• Prometheus Unbound
• Science of Sport **New**
  
• subtle shift in emphasis
• the little book of capoeira
• The Skeptic Detective
• Yet Another Sceptic's Blog

The latest on ovulation

There is now a pile of research demonstrating that the ovulatory cycle affects female preferences and behavior. Specifically, when ovulating, women find stereotypically masculine males more attractive, place a higher premium on confidence, fantasize about men other than their partners more often and so on. (See Gangestad et. al. [pdf] for a review). And, perhaps most memorably, Geoffrey Miller and colleagues demonstrated that lap dancers' tips are highest (pdf) when they're fertile. (Earning Miller and co an Ig Nobel).

The latest paper (press release here) in this area is by Martie Haselton and Greg Bryant at UCLA on how womens' voices become more high pitched and feminine during ovulation. The abstract:

Recent research has documented a variety of ovulatory cues in humans, and in many nonhuman species, the vocal channel provides cues of reproductive state. We collected two sets of vocal samples from 69 normally ovulating women: one set during the follicular (high-fertility) phase of the cycle and one set during the luteal (low-fertility) phase, with ovulation confirmed by luteinizing hormone tests. In these samples we measured fundamental frequency (pitch), formant dispersion, jitter, shimmer, harmonics-to-noise ratio and speech rate. When speaking a simple introductory sentence, women's pitch increased during high- as compared with low-fertility, and this difference was the greatest for women whose voices were recorded on the two highest fertility days within the fertile window (the 2 days just before ovulation). This pattern did not occur when the same women produced vowels. The high- versus low-fertility difference in pitch was associated with the approach of ovulation and not menstrual onset, thus representing, to our knowledge, the first research to show a specific cyclic fertility cue in the human voice. We interpret this finding as evidence of a fertility-related enhancement of femininity consistent with other research documenting attractiveness-related changes associated with ovulation.

Encephalon #57

The 57th edition of Encephalon is out at Mind Hacks. Highlights: PodBlack Cat on superstition; Songs From the Wood on the fascinating phenomenon of infantile amnesia; Sharp Brains with an interview with cognitive neuroscientist Michael Posner (about self-regulation and other topics); and Pure Pedantry on the neuroscience of hypothesis generation.

Great edition!

Picture: Science Worldwide

Talking of science in the developing world... New Scientist features a series of maps distorted to reflect some metric, like the proportion of rain falling in a certain area. The picture below shows the proportion of scientific papers published in 2001 by authors living in particular territories:


As you can see, the United States, Western Europe and Japan dominate, and Africa lags far behind. We have work to do...