Why Obama Gets to Talk

[James Brody]

Audiences define who is at the podium. There follows here an assembly of maybes...

1) Dinichism refers to the fact that men evolved in the presence of women and women evolved in the presence of men. (Or in the case of frogs, males and females). There will be synchrony (Kuramoto, 1984/2003; Strogatz, 2003) between them, there will also be differences (Buss, 1994).

2) Males are typically the explorers, of greater strength, and more ready to die for a woman, a friend, a valley, or a flake of gold. Women are more cautious and consider a wider range of influences before taking action. And I rarely hear of a woman jumping on a grenade to save her companions although such has probably happened sometime. It can be said that men explore closer to chaos, women closer to order. Another metaphor is that men - sometimes thrown out of Brit and Aussie prisons - were on the first boats to the New World, especially in the south and west. Women and accountants were on the second ones except to New England where they were likely on the first.

3) Life makes order from chaos (Kauffman, 1995; 2000) and genomic imprinting may be one mechanism by which it works. That is, maternal imprints tend to make a smaller placenta and protect the mother from fetal demands for sugar and oxygen and to be more involved with the cerebral cortex, retina, and olfactory tissue. (These things mediate interconnectivity.) Paternal imprints contribute less to the neocortex but more to the striatum, the hypothalamus, muscle mass, dental enamel, and, in some studies, brown fats (Burt & Trivers, 2005, Chapter 4). Paternal imprinting also contributes to nest-making by the female as well as her retrieving pups and nursing them. (Pups? Yes, this is largely mouse data but it may say something about why women with great skin, hair, and boobs decorate ads for expensive sports cars and motorcycles. And why women's parents spend fortunes getting them brighter teeth that could be false claim about her willingness to have children and to care for them. That brightness should also raise her social standing in comparison with other women...but I digress.)

4) In stable environments (K-selection), maternal imprints may dominate. In turbulent or novel environments (r-selection), paternal imprints may dominate. In rough times, expect more males, more impulsiveness, and more surly conduct (Kanazawa 2005, 2006; Kanazawa & Vandermassen, 2005). Such inputs should affect males more than females since males are more varied than females on nearly any trait measured. (Female imprints, oddly, may exert a regression-to-the mean effect on size, talents, and impulsiveness.)

5) A theory has been offered, one backed by data from head injuries, tachistoscopes, and scanners, that one function of the right cortex is to handle novelty and turn it into order (Goldberg, 2001; 2006). (This may account for evidence that right injury is more devastating to infants, left damage more devastating to adults: infants, after all, are making routines, adults already have them made.) Such appears to be true for words, music, and motor sequences. The right side also is associated with higher arousal and negative affect: a bias that could favor handling changes in climate and the people who live next door.

The left, according to the same pages in Goldberg, seems to be an administrative assistant that manages familiar situations and executes familiar reactions to them. Again true for words, music, and motor sequences. The left, where dopamine is slightly more plentiful than norepinephrine, is also associated with positive emotional reactions: what is familiar often makes us happy until it makes us bored. In the most simple terms, the left handles patterns that exist, the right arranges patterns that did not exist before.

6) There is another kind of change. Scanners show, that with age, the frontal cortex slows down while the rear areas remain active. There is also a shift from right to left. Thus, younger minds will be more "creative" not necessarily in language but in three dimensional tasks. (This is especially true for young males who usually have a prominent swelling in the right frontal areas, a "Yakovlevian Torque. Thus, despite lots of affirmative action and gender preference for females, the hardest math class at Harvard still graduates males almost always if not always. And it is still true, that if you're going to "make it" in math or science, you need to do it before you are 30!)

Where am I going? Oh. The election.

1) Given stable environments, feminization should occur for males and, possibly, masculinization for females. Birth rate drops, men talk more and fight less; women become more competitive in academic and vocational settings. (Females are now the majority in classes that are rule-defined, including medicine, and in university graduation and in middle management. Publishing a book often requires passing inspection by female editors!) Secularism dominates religion but becomes a search for one more way to masturbate, a disconnect from the future, and a prelude to the death of individuals and cultures.

2) In science, politics, or war, there may be a long search for talented right-siders. First, maternal imprints have lessed the number of Yakovelevians of either sex and second, there are layers of the senior and verbally seasoned, again of either sex, who pile up between the "young-and-restless" and command responsibility. Lincoln took a while to find Grant, the Brits took forever to move Churchill to command, and likewise for Bush who sorted through layers of ineffective military bureaucrats who followed rules and spoke carefully. (David Petraeus seems to have both parts of his mind active and, therefore, to be especially unlikely!)

We have:

- Three senators running, none of them with significant executive experience. (In several senses, the left dominates the right!)

- The American public judges them on debate and promises; past accomplishments are few for two of the three.

- Testosterone influences jaw width in males and correlates with perceived mate value. One candidate, with the least executive experience but the most promises, has a tiny jaw (like my own!). The second has a slightly wider jaw and promised to "obliterate Iran." The third has a massive jaw and substantial executive experience but he's older and may have lost some of his right frontal prowess. Number Three, however, gains advantage because we face wars and he barks the best! So did Churchill. So did Grant and Sherman.

- As Steyn (2006) points out, other peoples are young, restless, nasty, and behind us on the demographic transition. Toynbee would have predicted our collapse because of our disconnect with religion. I tend to agree but see religion as a symptom rather than as a primary cause for our collapse. Goldberg's model about the shift of cortical dominance with age should predict that societies make more laws but fewer wars when they get older not because of "wisdom" but because of the number of old people in them.

Thus, Obama talks and swarms of young women and eggheads listen instead of demanding that he has done something besides running for president. They choose him - as if a mate - on the basis of activity level, verbal quickness, kindness, and a presumed ability to influence young women and eggheads in other nations. However, global players - as meaured by slogans, fecundity, and missile-making - are less mature and, therefore, more willing to swarm, use nastier weapons, and make children to replace those they plan to lose.

Complications:

- The Kuramoto Effect - similarity and mutual influence produce more synchrony as similarity and mutual influence increase. Starvation, climate change, meteors, earthquakes, drought and heat, and invasions favor swarms, fundamentalism, progressivism, and the followers of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. (Individuality fades and people become particles when they swarm. They can, under swarm conditions, be described sometimes with math from Fermi-Dirac and sometimes that from Bose-Einstein. Can two social workers occupy the same space? Hell yes. Cut off their funding and forty opinions immediately become one! On the other hand, there is at least one physicist who cautions me that Kuramoto may have very limited generality)

- My left and right cortex (and yours!) evolved from Darwin, Raff, and Kuramoto: Duplicate, compartmentalize, vary, and test (Raff, 1996; Luo, 2008). Thus, the challenges faced two million years ago probably exerted selective effects on different parts of the ancestral brain. Similarity would favor synchrony between the structures in the left and right hemispheres but once a split occurs, each partner will respond to unique challenges. Thus, the stuff that handles words and reasons, feelings and actions, will sometimes be coherent and sometimes out of phase. (Not a problem: Livnat & Pippinger, 2006, argue that an optimal brain may consist of conflicting agents. So does Richard Lewontin, 2000.)

- Read Goldberg, 2006, for "maybes" and limits to the left/right data and interpretations.

- The parental imprints literature may have been sketched in a paragraph by Austin Burt & Robert Trivers (2005, 124) "...can be "…expected to act early in development, on starkly different degrees of relatedness, and to have profound ramifying consequences for juvenile growth and survival. By contrast, later kinship interactions may select for effects that have little to do with size but a lot to do with behavior, brain physiology, interactions with others, and internal psychological conflict."

From Brody (2008): "There are details in this plot, revealed mostly by mice but perhaps still relevant because mice and humans have such similar DNA. Women abort to save themselves, men complain when they do. In a similar but less extreme manner, mothers resist fetal demands on their blood sugar and blood pressure and limit placental growth. At the same time, her genes possibly encourage her offspring's ability to find and maintain social connections when she contributes to its left forebrain and striatum, retina, nose, and parts of its vomeronasal organ. (Burt and Trivers, 2005; Keverne, 2001; Goos and Silverman, 2001; Keverne, Fundele, and Nevison, 1996)

"Males, often mice and sometimes men, with serial mating relationships tend to treat a female partner as if she were part of a temporary, r selected environment: "use her up and move to another one." He obtains not only a more competitive offspring but also takes maternal resources away from the offspring that other males might harvest. He must move strategically, using only a few seconds and a few genes in one sperm, in order to inspire and defend his offspring for the rest of its life.

"The male's imprinted genes, when unopposed by those of the mother, show up most in his offspring's muscle, cartilage, skeleton, dental enamel, and (in some studies) quickly-metabolized brown fat. (Burt and Trivers, 2005) They also show up in the hypothalamus—a small mass that sits just above the roof of the mouth, next to and slightly above the pituitary gland. The hypothalamus includes the medial forebrain tracts that conduct the business of eating, drinking, fighting, and mating. Furthermore, areas of the hypothalamus regulate oxytocin and vasopressin, somatotrophin, thyroid-stimulating hormone, ACTH, follicle-stimulating hormone, and luteinizing hormone. His imprinted genes tend to make larger offspring but ones with lower brain weights at birth because their cerebral cortex is smaller. (Goos and Silverman, 2001; Keverne et al, 1996; Li et al, 1999)

"Debates between imprinted genes extend into postnatal behavior and cross several generations. That is, mothers nest, nurse, and carry roaming offspring back home but do so, often, with no help from the male. Her willingness is apparently a function of male-imprinted genes that she carries from her own conception. Fathers, in serial relationships rather than in completely monogamous ones, press for sons with larger size, strength, and self-interested initiative and very likely, for daughters willing to nest, nurse, and fetch the kids back home and to advertise these assets accordingly. Mothers try to make a little cooperator out of the savage that dad wants. It could be that her scrimping on assets tends to make later children, sons or daughters, on average, a little more rebellious and a little more homely. Her surrender to dad suggests not only larger, stronger sons but also daughters that are more attentive to their own children and, very possibly, more physically attractive."

JimB

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