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ISHE 2006: Intimations of Yoshiki Kuramoto
(The abstracts can be found at www.ishe.org.)
For students: ISHE has several prizes of several thousand dollars plus transportation for the best student papers. There were five awards for the Detroit meeting. More information on the ISHE site. The next ISHE Congress is in Prague (but maybe Bologna), August, 2008. Thanks to Glenn Weisfeld (ISHE President) and his wife Carol, especially to Carol, not only for leading the Detroit Congress but also for realigning my confusions, even about times, places, and the size of poster board. I am neither so organized nor so smart as once upon a time. ---------- I'm a seeker but an isolate and almost ignored Glenn Weisfeld's announcement of the Biennial Congress of the International Society for Human Ethology to be held in Detroit. ISHE was created in 1972, meets every two years at sites in Europe and North America, and carries the preoccupations of Tinbergen, Lorenz, and Hess into the future. Adaptive function, immediate cause, development across the life span, and evolutionary history must be sewn together. The membership list comes to about 175...globally. These folks not only study mate choice but talk about genes as factors in international relations, the heritability of IQ, or the inclusive fitness of terrorism. They appear to be more open to ideas of statistical physics than seems true of HBES. Ethology's modern icons such as Karl Grammer are nurturing but can be abruptly dismissive of an impulsive idea. They also like you to notice the small details in nature rather than spend time on hypotheticals. As an Oxford pediatrician remarked at lunch: "I don't waste time on things that can't be proven." Despite their extraordinary abilities, the ISHE members were consistently the nicest, easiest to engage bunch that I have ever met. (My ambivalence about attending vanished at registration.) Academic degrees were not on name tags and first-name was the rule. And despite the Detroit site, Americans may not have been the majority. Austria, Holland, Germany, the UK, and the Czech Republic probably accounted for about half of the approximately 100 in attendance. Also throw in some Canadians and one Israeli! And in regard to original thinking and quality of work, many of the presenters were not only damned nice but also damned bright and damned determined. They also have some impressive toys and use them well. With a few exceptions, American science was usually no better than the American men's soccer team. My chauvinism whimpered, circled three times, and died... Highlights: Ullica Segerstrale spoke about William Donald Hamilton. My impression already was that Hamilton, a rebel, a bit schizoid, and maybe a little bipolar, was nonetheless a genius who provided a theoretical foundation for social behavior, sex ratios, and even the evolutionary value of sex. She gave a fine talk, I will treasure her book once it appears in 2007 from Oxford University Press. And Ullica shocked my socks: she recognized my name and sometimes visits this forum! Randy Nesse considered the theories and fly boxes where we put a client and links between where we put him and how we treat him. Evolution might provide one such bridge. The topic is important: every shaman tells a different story but many of them offer similar recommendations for any one client. Nesse may be right about evolution, I use it all the time in my own office stories. I suggest, further, that the client defines what we do as much as the reverse! And some concepts from Barabasi and from Kuramoto, via Steven Strogatz, may be more useful than models from ChuckD and JohnB. I later lunched in the dorm cafeteria with Nesse when Mike McGuire joined us. (Nesse is a fresh pie on a kitchen window sill. And the company he attracts likes him forever!) Mike asked about my interests and I stared at my shoes and mumbled "Stu Kauffman..." Mike cut in, "Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute? He sends me email!" Eye contact: "Ohmigod, can I touch you?!!" McGuire is tall, silver-haired, lean, mirrored sunglasses, and prefers to drive a pickup truck! He wanted to see my paper on emergent networks and later offered some encouragement. He's a hell of a nice guy or else I did something pretty good or maybe both. (McGuire and Troisi wrote a marvelous book, Evolutionary Psychiatry. McGuire went to Africa, fed Prozac to subordinate vervet males, and watched the druggies become kings! But only if there were females in the group! Higher serotonin levels were associated with more "affiliative behaviors" with females who had a vote in who moved up. I think Clinton knew this...) Steven Suomi: my reason for driving 10 hours...Suomi noted that humans and rhesus are "weed species" that thrive anywhere and that of all the many kinds of macaque, rhesus, like humans, are heterozygous for an allele that regulates serotonin availability. Short alleles are associated with impulsive, aggressive nasty little bastards who are usually chased from the troop by packs of adult females and left to die. Further, the impulsive rhesus are usually delayed on infant scales of development. They are not only reactive, they are also a little delayed. Further, separating infant rhesus from their mothers, feeding them formula, and rearing them with peers heightens impulsiveness and leads them to "drink alcohol like sponges." An environmental component: Impulsive mothers tend to have impulsive children and need help with their first offspring. But, insert a nurturing aunt as a substitute mother and the offspring normalizes even though her alleles are no longer than they were. The same kind of aunt sometimes leads not to death but to leadership roles for the hyperactive males. She has the time-honored job of detecting which of us is worth her investment. Nasty individuals and nasty settings often make each other. Genes and environments tune each other into synchrony: Kuramoto applies. More later... A great finding: David Rowe noted that higher testosterone causes problems mostly in the socially disconnected males, unmarried, with erratic work histories, and of lower social class (SES has substantial contributions from IQ). Suomi's rhesus perhaps demonstrate a similar interaction. I had earlier noticed two large studies that confirmed Trotter's two-hundred-year-old hypothesis: attenuated breast feeding predicts adult alcoholism. I chased Suomi without mercy when he tried to escape for coffee and asked him about possible roles for omega 3s. He remarked that fish oil supplements in the infant formula "washed out" the differences between experimental and control monkeys. There may be K and r-selection patterns in personalities as well as in environments - Burt & Trivers make a similar speculation in Chapter 5 - and, still again, consider Kuramoto: genes make environments and the two players move each other into resonance. Karl Grammer: a chipper hypomanic, dedicated to his students, and willing to say, "It won't work." He may be right but Grammer may also wash out the mediocre and kiss-asses when he provokes the student. Science is both an exploration and a fitness contest, one not for the lazy or easily discouraged. And not a mere ticket to a good job and a better seat at holiday dinners. There is every incentive for the best aunts and uncles to limit their investment in slackers or fools... One of Grammer's projects adds facial and postural companions to the verbal directions from a robot. The nominal goal is to make the robot less annoying when it tells park visitors what to do. So he probably tells his funding sources! His implicit goal is to use robotics to understand foundations of normal human conduct. (A familiar gambit: Herb Barry, III, once told pharmacologists that he used well-understood behaviors to analyze complex drug effects but psychologists that he used well-understood drugs to analyze complex behaviors. Same study, two audiences.) Grammer also wants to find embedded communication that cannot be used for deception, stuff so phylogenetically old that it operates without conscious direction but predicts future conduct. There are surprises. Grammer showed film clips of strangers moving into "sync." University students, a man and a woman, strangers to each other, were left with each other in front of the cameras. Hair flips by her led to fidgeting by him. If he made a remark and she laughed, he felt better although he couldn't say why. Lots of laughs and hair flips predicted more of the same and long walks together in the park immediately after the session. In a variation, the guy rated a girl's solo dancing from a distance of about 4 feet. He held a small sign up in his left hand that identified the experimental session. An inspired snoop noticed that the sign twitched and the computer found that it twitched more if the dancer were ovulating! So much for hidden ovulation, so much for some of our stories about mate guarding. By fidgets and laughter, we move into partnerships and we do it more readily when an egg rolls down her chute. I asked at break if Grammer were aware of Kuramoto: a smile, "Yes, he visited us at Blefield!" "Excellent." There was no need to say more. Yoshiki Kuramoto about 30 years ago developed a formal proof that similar, loosely linked oscillators will always move into synchrony. This holds for pendulums, runners, automobile traffic, cardiac neurons, crickets, and fireflies. Lovers, like friends, can be oscillators, too... So can shrinks and clients: Erwin Geerts and his team filmed depressed clinic patients and scored not what was said but whether the client and interviewer showed parallel body movements. The less the sync, the slower the recovery and the greater the probability of relapse! No surprise...if fitness and health are associated with connectedness, with the ability to move into synchrony with another oscillator (a husband, friend, kid, a stranger on the bus, or your doctor), then depression disconnects those partnerships and advertises problems with fitness. Could also line up Geerts's work with research that predicts divorce as a function of hostility. (How many MH difficulties advertise problems with sync? And is this a better anchor for diagnoses than statistics or complaints?) Phil Rushton...fascinating guy, nearly lynched for a decade when he insisted that Blacks have lower IQs for genetic reasons. The numbers continued to arrive, however, the mobs dispersed, and there are no rope burns on Phil's neck. (It was a near thing...he took as much crap as Ed Wilson and for similar reasons. It was probably an instinctive thing. See below on regression-to-the-mean.) Mate preference is influenced most by characteristics that are not only similar but also have a substantial contribution from heritability! In the case of IQ, g is more heritable and more influential than scores for specific abilities. Rushton also argued that randomly chosen co-ethnics often have relatedness roughly equal to first cousins. We fight for reasons of inclusive fitness! Phil has a long paper in Nations and Nationalism, well-written, lots of data from multiple sources. (Heritability for psychopathology also loads significantly in mate choice: not sure what Phil would say.) ------------ My Rant About The Mideast: I pulled this segment three hours after posting it. The topic deserves more than I gave it. More later... ------------ Frank Salter: Wealth stays in families far longer than customary genetic analyses predict. That is, old money rests in old hands. I wonder about two contributions to his puzzle: first, Rushton's comments that mate choice is more strongly influenced by heritable characteristics. The management of money might be heritable and if there is a question of retaining resources instead of acquiring them, some of the contribution might come from mothers who are selectively recruited into wealthy families. Second, IQ is usually forced into a Gaussian distribution. The bell curve, however, is apt to be a fundamental distortion of information that better fits a power law. Power laws describe emergent organzations and recognize higher frequencies of extreme scores at both ends. Power functions might increase our ability to sort people on the basis of their smarts and enhance our formal measures of the heritability of g. Gaussian g may not be the best clue for our ability to find minds of similar complexity and partner with them. Possibly a good doctoral project for one of Salter's students... Eibl-Eiblsfeldt, short and tanned, an oak that still takes pictures at age 78. "Eibl" traveled the world and his photographs, augmented by work from Paul Ekman, demolished blather from Boas and Meade that emotional expression is a cultural artifact. He used a modified Leica that shot at right angles to the direction that he faced. (He still has the Leica.) I have his book on human ethology: it's huge, fascinating, convincing, and filled with pictures taken without the subject's permission! Do it today in New York City, bent lens or not, and you would be arrested, fined, or sued. And nobody would publish your work... Coolest research technique (probably should have its own ISHE award, especially if divided by the reciprocal of oney spent!): Jay Feierman lives in the American southwest and watched Mexican TV in order to learn Spanish. (He did this improbable thing for ten years after each day's work treating bipolars.) He punched a button on his remote whenever an attractive female went through a sexual display. Ten years produced 160 hours of tape, selected down to about 12 minutes of clips. He played back each woman's eye and body movements x5 so it was easier to take notes. The movements were funny in themselves and made more so because the nearest male was completely out of sync, as if thinking, "What IS she doing?" No analysis, no statistics, just a lot of fun! Tinbergen would have loved it... The Russians: a matriarch and a pair of students with interests in finger lengths and cultural heritage. They did thorough work both in Russia and in Africa and got a mix of results. An aside: There was a marvelous jazz trio at the banquet and the bass player was a Black lady who was a little taller than her imposing instrument. I sipped a Guinness and fantasized about Marina's using her tape measure to check knuckle lengths. And how would the performer, drunk or sober, react to Marina's odd requests and Russian accent? ISHE students...an ethological fact: beautiful women in the King of Prussia Mall swarm near Niemann Marcus but not Sears. Female graduate students at conferences do an adaptive when they hang with guys who can underwrite trips to Niemann Marcus. I remember Buss's squad at my first HBES in Davis, California. I would have known David to be alpha by the glamour of his escorts. Within ISHE, Karl Grammer is on top for reasons that might also have influenced McGuire's lemurs but without Prozac! That is, Karl appears to have resources and seems affiliative. The beauty of the East Europeans, however, suggests that American science is in real trouble. One of Karl's students also mentioned that women have better complexions and show more skin when ovulating. If so, then the entire Czech group was ovulating and so was one of the Russians. The women, thank whatever gods may be, also appeared to enjoy being Darwinian products: for example, a fellow noticed an empty seat beside a redhead but two cups of tea in front of her. "Is someone else sitting here?" "No, they're both mine. I didn't want to run out." Gotta track that kid through a mall...maybe Feierman will bring a camera... JimB Copyright, James Brody, 2006, all rights reserved. Last edited by James Brody; August 14th, 2006 at 01:13 AM.. |
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Re: ISHE 2006: Intimations of Yoshiki Kuramoto
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