The Ash Twins Blog

Prehistoric depictions of the female form in sculpture are remarkable for their exaggerated depiction of the breasts, buttocks, and vulva and their minimalist arms and head. The New York Times reports on the oldest-yet found of these strange libidinous artifacts:

No one would mistake the Stone Age ivory carving for a Venus de Milo. The voluptuous woman depicted is, to say the least, earthier, with huge, projecting breasts and sexually explicit genitalia.

Nicholas J. Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, who found the small carving in a cave last year, says it is at least 35,000 years old, “one of the oldest known examples of figurative art” in the world. It is about 5,000 years older than some other so-called Venus artifacts made by early populations of Homo sapiens in Europe.Another archaeologist, Paul Mellars of the University of Cambridge in England, agrees and goes on to remark on the obvious. By modern standards, he says, the figurine’s blatant sexuality “could be seen as bordering on the pornographic.”

From an NYTimes article this week:

[W]hen a student asked Mr. Obama to name the circuit judge he would most like to argue in front of, he named Richard Posner, a conservative. Judge Posner was smart enough to know when you were right, Mr. Obama told the class.

Fresh off the presses: Sherman, Haidt, and Cohn (2009) find that viewing images of cute and cuddly animals improves performance on the game “Operation.”

Infantile physical morphology—marked by its “cuteness”—is thought to be a potent elicitor of caregiving, yet little is known about how cuteness may shape immediate behavior. To examine the function of cuteness and its role in caregiving, the authors tested whether perceiving cuteness can enhance behavioral carefulness, which would facilitate caring for a small, delicate child. In 2 experiments, viewing very cute images (puppies and kittens)—as opposed to slightly cute images (dogs and cats)—led to superior performance on a subsequent fine-motor dexterity task (the children’s game “Operation”). This suggests that the human sensitivity to those possessing cute features may be an adaptation that facilitates caring for delicate human young. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

The bottom line: Scalpels with cute puppy pommels may improve surgical outcomes.

The first ant farm was introduced in 1929 and patented in 1931 by Dartmouth engineering professor Frank Austin. It appears that Austin built his ant farms for his own enjoyment because he did not go on to start a business around his idea.

In 1956, novelty toymaker Milton Levine was watching ants on the sidewalk when he asked his partner, Joe Cossman, “Why don’t we come out with some kind of observation toy so kids can watch ants at home?” They began selling “home ant habitats,” which comprised a plastic box, a bag of sand, and a vial of ants. These home ant habitats were immediately popular. Levine and Cossman eventually settled on a farm theme for their product, and they registered “Ant Farm” as a proprietary trademark. Ant farms are considered to be educational, fun, and relatively low maintenance. Over 20 million ant farms have been sold under the Uncle Milton brand name.

Interestingly, discussion of ant farms uniformly refers to the collective farm as a toy, rather than to the individual ants as pets. Ants appear to be too alien to our humanizing sensibilities to be treated as pets/friends the same way we treat dogs and cats. I would conjecture that ant farms fascinate children because it gives them the semblance of control over an ecological environment, similar in principle to the control over ecologies that would have ensured social and ecological fitness among evolving hominids.

Kanazawa (2006) makes another correct prediction from sexual selection:

The generalized Trivers–Willard hypothesis . . . proposes that parents who possess any heritable trait which increases the male reproductive success at a greater rate than female reproductive success in a given environment have a higher-than-expected offspring sex ratio, and parents who possess any heritable trait which increases the female reproductive success at a greater rate than male reproductive success in a given environment have a lower-than-expected offspring sex ratio. One heritable trait which increases the reproductive success of sons significantly more than that of daughters in the ancestral environment is the tendency toward violence and aggression. I therefore predict that violent parents have a higher-than-expected offspring sex ratio (more sons). The analysis of both American samples and a British sample demonstrates that battered women, who are mated to violent men, have significantly more sons than daughters.

Millet & Dewitte (2007) present evidence that altruistic behavior in humans is a costly signal of general intelligence:

Incurring a cost to help another organism does not seem to firt in the strict Darwinian framework. Many theories explaining various types of cooperation have been proposed in biology and economics (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003; Gurven, 2004) but a theoretical explanation of unconditional altruism (defined as benefiting others at a cost to oneself, Wilson, 1976) has remained elusive to date. . .

Costly signaling theory (CST; Grafen, 1990a, 1990b; Zahavi, 1975; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997) explains how individuals use costly behaviors to convey information about themselves. People may differ in the qualities that they possess, such as economic status or certain skills. These qualities may be partially concealed, while simultaneously being valuable to others. For instance, potential partners prefer an actor possessing a certain quality to an actor not possessing it. As a result, actors possessing an unobservable but desirable quality have an incentive to signal their quality to perceivers because perceivers are more likely to select them as a partner if they know their true type. However, actors not possessing the quality have an incentive to mimic the signal. Costly signaling theory provides a framework that explains how signals can be transmitted in a reliable way. Signal reliability is secured by making the signal costly and the signal-cost quality-dependent (Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997). Quality-dependence of the cost reflects the characteristic that the cost is smaller for individuals possessing the quality than for agents lacking it. Only those possessing the quality can afford the quality-dependent cost that the signal entails. . .

Altruistic behavior is costly by deWnition. However, it is less clear what quality altruistic behavior might be related to. Although unequivocal evidence for the link is still missing, some authors mentioned the possibility that altruism is related to intelligence and others reported data that seem consistent with our claim. . .

As mentioned above, Bliege Bird et al. (2001) found that some men of the Meriam spend their time turtle-hunting, which requires specific valued skills of the hunter. As hunting turtles is a relatively costly way of collecting food, it may serve as a costly signal of underlying qualities. Bliege Bird et al. (2001) proposed problem solving ability as one underlying quality that is needed to be successful at hunting: hunters with higher cognitive skills should be more successful at capturing turtles as they know better where they can find turtles, how exactly to catch them, etc. Providing turtles for a feast (an altruistic act) may serve as a signal for this underlying quality as the lower quality hunters are expected to fail more often on a hunt than high-quality individuals and as a consequence would not have the same success in providing turtles. Accordingly, unpublished data by Dewitte and De Cremer (2005) showed that students who had contributed much to group assignments had higher grades than those who contributed their fair share or less than their share. Furthermore, Van Vugt, Roberts, and Hardy (in press-b) recently suggested that altruism might signal intelligence as it may take brainpower to appreciate the long-term benefits of cooperation. . .

We organized a repeated public good game with four players, similar to the procedure by Millet and Dewitte (2006). Decisions were made simultaneously and involved contributing a certain amount to the provision of a public good. At the beginning of each round, all participants received an endowment of 40 points. In each round, they had to decide how much of the endowment they would invest in the public good or keep for themselves. Every point was worth 3.39 eurocent. All the points that were invested, were subtracted from their 40 points endowment. If the good was obtained (100 points, i.e., the provision point), 160 points were distributed equally across the four players in that round, irrespective of individual contributions. . .

Approximately 20 min after the game, participants received a computerized short-version of Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices IQ-test (RPM) (adapted from Verguts & De Boeck, 2002). They had to solve as many problems as possible in 15min. A recent review showed that the RPM-test is one of the best measures of general intelligence (Gray & Thompson, 2004). . .

Four participants were not considered for analysis because they did not comply with instructions. Of the remaining 169 participants 68 acted egoistically (42 men and 26 women), 59 cooperatively (41 men and 18 women), and 42 altruistically (26 men and 16 women). A two (sex) by three (public goods choice) factorial Anova revealed that RPM score was significantly affected by a main effect of public goods choice. Altruists scored higher on the RPM than egoists and cooperators. There was no difference between egoists and cooperators. . .

The evidence presented supports the possibility that unconditional altruism may serve as a costly signal of general intelligence because altruism is costly and is reliably linked to the quality ‘general intelligence’. Consistent with the Wnding that children’s intelligence predicts later socio-economic success better than parents’ attributes (Gottfredson, 2004), we assume that intelligence is an indicator of future resources. As a consequence, someone with high cognitive skills may be able to donate more in advance than someone with lower skills. As such, the cost of altruistic behavior could be quality-dependent.