mating intelligence [cont.]

two chapters by keller and shaner et. al. discuss the nature and importance of fitness indicators, the role of the brain as a mental fitness indicator and the implications of their theory in mental disorders such as schizophrenia.

consider a male peacock who invests considerable amount of energy in making a big shiny tail to display ostensibly during courtship. the cost of this investement alone can be seen as an indicator of this particular male's overall fitness, such as ability to produce a lot of color pigments, maintaining the size and shine of the tail and mental and physical agility to avoid predators at an increased risk of being spotted. on the other hand, a male peacock who cannot afford to invest in such a tail due to low fitness will have a much drabber tail. the tail of a peacock is thus a typical fitness indicator. the characteristics of such indicators are as follows:

1) high variance in measurable parameters, so that presumably it is easy for the chooser sex to pick from - the whole point is for the trait to be an indicator
2) variance correlates with underlying fitness
3) potential mate prefer th high fitness extreme
4) the trait is heritable
5) the trait is more conspicuous in the sex being chosen

this seemingly plausible argument runs into the "lek paradox", i.e. the contradiction between high sexual selection pressure and high variance. should all female peacocks prefer pretty tails, such genes will prevail and all male peacocks should have pretty tails, hence variance should be low. the resolution to this paradox comes from the speculation that fitness indicators, no matter how single-gene dependent to start with, inevitabily becomes polygenic because other traits have to coevolve to accommodate for the change in the indicator trait. e.g the peacock needs greater agility presumably to compensate for the more cumbersome tail. a polygenic trait inevitably becomes a bigger target for mutation accumulation due to the multiple genes involved, which leads to high variance. so the logic is that intensive sexual selection predicts a development of the trait into a polygenic one, which predicts the increase in its variance.

the above might be familiar to all of you who read evolutionary psychology and the likes. the developmet that the MI researchers want to bring home is that the human brain and its elaborate cognitive funcions such as language and creativity is an indicator for fitness. female preference for male brain power leads to the rapid selection of better brain genes. like other fitness indicators, intelligence, especially mating intelligence, is polygenic, prominently variable in males and heritable.

what's particularly interesting is that the authors suggest that mental disorders are serious failures of mating intelligence. schizophrenia is used as an example. in the analogy to peakcock tails, schizophrenia is like a drab tail, and it indicates mental unfitness, especially in mating. the onset of schizophrenia coincides with the start of reproductive period in humans, and it remits with the end of reproduction. it highly predicts mating failures and results social stigmatization. it is recently found to be polygenic, with many common develomental genes being the target for mutations discovered but not any schizophrenic switch genes. it is ostensible in male humas, the chosen sex and its development is sensitive to environmental factors that affect fitness.it is therefore merely the low end extreme of mating intelligence.

this led me to wonder about autism, which is clearly a spectrum of disorders with polygenic causes. however, it is not likely to be related to mating intelligence, because it is a childhood disease. as i wondered, i reached a section in shaner et. al. which actually discusses autism. they think that autism is an indicator of weakness in potential mating fitness not for mates to see, but for parents. very much like young birds who look better might get more parental investments, autism displays genetic unfitness that might prevent parents from investing limited resources in the affected child.

mating intelligence

so i'm half way through this book mating intelligent-sex relationships, and the mind's reproductive system, a collection of reviewish articles on the emerging concept of mating intelligence, meant to be used as a psychology text book on human mating behaviour, especially the decision making process involved. i have never read a psychology book before, so this is was particularly interesting for me. (also because of my inherent interest in mating and sexual behaviuor in general, but you already knew that.)

the editors glenn geher and geoffrey miller want to bring home the point that intelligence in mating, as in optimisation of mating related decisions, should really be studied as an intelligence that stands on its own right alongside general intelligence and emotional intelligence¹. this book looks at two things. first how intelligence affects the decisions people make in mating. second how sexual selection of intelligence happens. so far i'm still reading about the cognitive ability of handling mating, i.e. the former.

whether or not we agree that mating intelligence could be coined as a novel concept, a few things were quite interesting to know (in addition to the obvious, that men prefer young and attractive women, and women prefer rich and powerful men):


1) a big portion of several articles talk about the relationship between mate choice and mate tactic for long and or short term matings. penke et al especially interestingly discussed the role of self assessment in mating tactics, the so called mate value sociometer². turns out, males are more affected by mate value sociometer, i.e they are more sensitive to their own mating value. the logic goes as follows: females are always choosy, because they are the limiting factor in this whole mating thing. because of the risk of pregnancy, females prefer long term mating to short term mating, and because of the higher risk involved in short term mating, they might have even higher condition preference for short term mating. males when given the opportunity will like to do variety short term matings. but because of the selectivity females have for short term mating partners, trying to engage a female for short term mating becomes a socially risky behaviour due to costly rejections. so only very few males with very high mating values should attempt it and the others will form avoidance behaviour. it is here where the ability to judge his own mating value and behaving adaptively becomes extremely important for males, but not females.

2) norman p. li brought up a point (a very side point): testosterone impairs the immune system, which if compromised in development results in a lack of bilateral facial symmetry, therefore women look for men who exhibit both masculinity and facial symmetry, indicating the presence of exceptional genes despite the presence of large amounts of testosterone³. i searched for primary literature, only to find roden et al (2004)⁴ reporting in increase in t cell activity with removal of androgen by castration in male mice. didn't find anything more significant. nevertheless it's an interesting thing to think about.

3) another interesting thing norm li talked about (i think this is more of the main point of the article) is that although physical attractiveness in females and status in males are the primary attractive traits to the opposite sex, they both exhibit typical diminishing-marginal-return pattern from an economics point of view, i.e. "going from below average to average increases acceptability more than going from average to above average did", and these are the only traits that exhibit such patterns, among many other desirable traits. the thing is that each sex sizes up one of these two traits in the opposite sex first, then they consider other factors. when the mating budget given to one is low (such as low mating value of oneself) then one is likely to put high priority on physical attractiveness in a female or status in a male. but when budge is high, one adaptively puts higher priorities on other traits. in this way physical attractiveness and status are used in mate selection much like gre scores in grad school admissions. high scores don't help as much as low scores hurt.

4) the article written by maureen o'sullivan on deception describes roles of deception in long term and short term mating. she descries romantic love as not only a cognitive construct but a form of self-deception to keep a long term pair bond going⁵. i quote:
"for example, murray and her colleagues (murray, holmes, bellavia, griffin & dolderman, 2002) demonstrated that people in enduring relationships saw their partners as more similar to themselves than they actually were. they termed this mismatch "egocentrism'. another name for it might be self-deception, believing that ones partner is a soul mate allows one to feel understood, which leads to satisfaction in the relationship which leads to its continuation."
it's refreshing to hear it from a theoretical point of view, although i have long suspected so about the make-believe nature of the construct of soul mates. o'sullivan also talks about the willingness of the lied to partner to believe in the lies, quoting geoffrey miller (2006, personal communication)⁶ "there may be an adaptive binary switchh from total trust to totaly mistrust, with no finess paoff for being in an in-between-state of semi-trust" between partners.

5) possibly altruism evolved in the same way other useless things did, such as artistic ability and sense of humor, designed as traits to attract mates, much like the ostensibly invested in but not practical in any sense peacock's tail. ?

that's it so far.

------------------------------
works cited

1. geher, miller and murphy. mating intelligence: toward an evolutionarily informed construct. 2008.

2. penke, todd, lenton and fasolo. how self-assessment can guide human mating decisions. 2008.

3. li. intelligent priorities: adaptive long- and short-term mating preferences. 2008.

4. roden et. al. augmentation of t cell levels and responses induced by androgen deprivation. 2004.

5. o'sullivan. deception and self-deception as strategies in short and long-term
mating. 2008.

6. miller. personal communications. 2006.

same old story

here i am again, stuck in some airport. being stuck at an airport so frequently happens to my loner trips that it has become a necessity of some sort. somehow orbitz booked the two flights (bos-ord, ord-pvg) 12 hours apart, and didn't make it connecting. so i had to check out my luggage and wait outside at departure. where there's only a starbucks some equally overpriced snack shop. and after i wondered around for about 15 min, i only managed to find one spot where there's a combination of a chair and a power outlet. and unfortunately this spot is on a different level from the one that contains the starbucks. so crippled by my luggage, i had to stick with one coffee for the night.

ORD sucks.

around me nothing much is happening, cos it's christmas. i had expected more people around here, cos of the nyt articles making big deals out of people stuck at ORD. not very many of them it seems, or the congestion has been eased. after i sat down, i spent half an hour explaining the specs of my computer to a night guard,who was surprised to find out that my laptop was a laptop not a dvd player and henceforth asked about processing speed etc. then i bought myself 24hrs of internet as a xmas present, i started to get used to the surrounding. i'm sitting on a bench that has i guess acrylic painting all over it, painted by chicago teenagers in gallery37, a program of "after school matters". two benches away, a young african american man is sleeping soundly, and next to his bench, a blonde girl is watching some movie. the escalator on my right is moaning very loudly.

ok i give up on this stream of consciousness thing.

peisner

recently i went back to listening to the soundtracks that preisner wrote for kieslowski(the three colors and the double life of veronique). my obsession has caused my brain to be saturated with nothing but the same melodies in all sorts of instrumentation.

listen to this concerto he wrote for veronique, pretending to be the fictitious 18th century dutch composer Van den Budenmayer. it clearly couldn't have been written in the 18th century, the sound is too modern, don't you think?

since i found the full length version

水木年华

蝴蝶花



爱是什么

DBS/FOTF aftermath

here is an excellent analysis of the DBS/FOTF episode by Mohan.

Patient H.M.

Patient H.M. died at 82 yesterday after contributing to memory research by being a life long research subject.