Theory: the inverse relationship between warfare and homicide

That whole myth about hunter-gatherers being peaceful and non-violent probably got its start because hunter-gatherers tend not to be as good at organized warfare as the Germans.

Homicide is an act of disorganized impulsive passion; warfare is an act of organized dispassion; the two are inverse of each other. Thus we see the highest homicide rates in the world’s least developed countries, and the lowest rates in its most developed countries.

 

Note that it is not an absolutely perfect correlation; many Latin American or Caribbean countries have higher homicide rates than even less-developed countries in Africa, but broadly speaking, the pinks and reds are poorer than the blues. (Russia excepted, ‘cuz Russia.)

Also, as you may recall:

Share of violent deaths, non-state societies vs. state societies

Countries involved in the world’s biggest wars:

WWI:

Nuclear stockpiles or programs by country:

(South Africa used to have nukes, but they got rid of them before the end of Apartheid.)

Here’s another graph that makes the size of the arsenals clear:

Source: SMTKS

And here’s another graph that says about the same thing, but is a wonderful example of how to display data:

Source: SMNTKS

I’m pretty sure this graph means we’re all going to die.

And likewise, space programs by country:

Also a nicely done graphic.

You might have heard about India’s space program:

Test launch of India’s GSLV Mk III

But have you heard of the Congolese space program?

To be fair, it’s more “One guy with a rocket-building hobby” than a real space program, but I understand where he’s coming from. Rockets are cool.

The point of all of these maps and graphs is that homicide rates tend to be highest, both today and throughout history, in the places with the lowest levels of social organization/complexity.

Even in our own society, convicted criminals are overwhelmingly lacking in the ability to handle complexity. It looks like they aren’t really all that much more retarded (note: PDF) than the general population (the truly intellectually impaired are often pretty highly supervised and lack the ability to execute many crimes, but are often victims of violence,) but they are drawn disproportionately from the dumber half.

According to respondents in the AR15.com forum thread “Cops and Lawyers – What percent of criminals/clients are retarded?” (Note: I know nothing about this forum or its reliability)

“Not retarded per se. My personal experience is most criminals stopped developing emotionally at about 3 or 4. They live life for the moment, think only of themselves, have no impulse control, can’t control their emotions, throw temper tantrums when they don’t get their way, can’t think past the next 10 minutes, don’t understand consequence, etc……. They are basically little children in adult bodies. Of course, most 3 or 4 year olds are better behaved than the average criminal, but you get the point.”

“I found that better than 90% of them were functionally illiterate, so when they say reading is fundamental, they aren’t kidding!”

“With the advent of welfare, it became profitable to squirt out children.It relegated men to the status of semen injectors. No men, no fathering. down the spiral 40 odd years and we’ve got multiple generations of female children “raising” children.
The results aren’t retarded, they are more like Comanches or Lakota, they have regressed several thousand years.
It is painful to watch good officers try to “reach” these kids. Watching with an unsympathetic eye, it is plain that most of these kids don’t even understand what the officers are talking about.
That’s the brutal truth that no one wants to face. These kids aren’t just lost-they are damned in our society.”

Recall our discussion back in Two Kinds of Dumb–just because someone has a low IQ, doesn’t mean they are retarded. But anyone who is illiterate (in our society) with the emotional maturity of a 3 or 4 your old is not very bright or capable of thinking through the results of their own actions.

The art of killing large numbers of people, by contrast, requires organization. One guy with a pointy stick might kill a few dozen guys who don’t have pointy sticks, but one guy who convince a thousand other guys to stand next to you with their pointy sticks, and you get this:

Source: Chapleton

The Romans didn’t conquer an empire by poking barbarians with pointy sticks; they did it by organizing themselves into an unstoppable war machine.

Armies do not generally fund themselves; they depend upon a vast support structure producing weapons, food, transportation, shelter, technology, etc. The bigger the army and more advanced the weaponry, the bigger the support structure has to be. Nukes take far more people to produce than pointy sticks, from the farmers making the food to feed the scientists working out the details to the structural engineers building the research labs to the guys building the rockets or planes to drop the bombs.

Complex organization requires large numbers of people working in close proximity without punching each other; it requires that people be able to suppress their own personal desires in pursuit of the group goal. All of this requires being less violent, less impulsive, and less inclined toward murdering each other.

Time Preference: the most under-appreciated mental trait

Time Preference isn’t sexy and exciting, like anything related to, well, sex. It isn’t controversial like IQ and gender. In fact, most of the ink spilled on the subject isn’t even found in evolutionary or evolutionary psychology texts, but over in economics papers about things like interest rates that no one but economists would want to read.

So why do I think Time Preference is so important?

Because I think Low Time Preference is the true root of high intelligence.

First, what is Time Preference?

Time Preference (aka future time orientation, time discounting, delay discounting, temporal discounting,) is the degree to which you value having a particular item today versus having it tomorrow. “High time preference” means you want things right now, whereas “low time preference” means you’re willing to wait.

A relatively famous test of Time Preference is to offer a child a cookie right now, but tell them they can have two cookies if they wait 10 minutes. Some children take the cookie right now, some wait ten minutes, and some try to wait ten minutes but succumb to the cookie right now about halfway through.

Obviously, many factors can influence your Time Preference–if you haven’t eaten in several days, for example, you’ll probably not only eat the cookie right away, but also start punching me until I give you the second cookie. If you don’t like cookies, you won’t have any trouble waiting for another, but you won’t have much to do with it. Etc. But all these things held equal, your basic inclination toward high or low time preference is probably biological–and by “biological,” I mean, “mostly genetic.”

Luckily for us, scientists have actually discovered where to break your brain to destroy your Time Preference, which means we can figure out how it works.

The scientists train rats to touch pictures with their noses in return for sugar cubes. Picture A gives them one cube right away, while picture B gives them more cubes after a delay. If the delay is too long or the reward too small, the rats just take the one cube right away. But there’s a sweet spot–apparently 4 cubes after a short wait—where the rats will figure it’s worth their while to tap picture B instead of picture A.

But if you snip the connection between the rats’ hippocampi and nucleus accumbenses, suddenly they lose all ability to wait for sugar cubes and just eat their sugar cubes right now, like a pack of golden retrievers in a room full of squeaky toys. They become completely unable to wait for the better payout of four sugar cubes, no matter how much they might want to.

So we know that this connection between the hippocampus and the nucleus accumbens is vitally important to your Time Orientation, though I don’t know what other modifications, such as low hippocampal volume or low nucleus accumbens would do.

So what do the hippocampus and nucleus accumbens do?

According to the Wikipedia, the hippocampus plays an important part in inhibition, memory, and spatial orientation. People with damaged hippocampi become amnesiacs, unable to form new memories.There is a pretty direct relationship between hippocampus size and memory, as documented primarily in old people:

“There is, however, a reliable relationship between the size of the hippocampus and memory performance — meaning that not all elderly people show hippocampal shrinkage, but those who do tend to perform less well on some memory tasks.^[71] There are also reports that memory tasks tend to produce less hippocampal activation in elderly than in young subjects.^[71] Furthermore, a randomized-control study published in 2011 found that aerobic exercise could increase the size of the hippocampus in adults aged 55 to 80 and also improve spatial memory.” (wikipedia)

Amnesiacs (and Alzheimer’s patients) also get lost a lot, which seems like a perfectly natural side effect of not being able to remember where you are, except that rat experiments show something even more interesting: specific cells that light up as the rats move around, encoding data about where they are.

“Neural activity sampled from 30 to 40 randomly chosen place cells carries enough information to allow a rat’s location to be reconstructed with high confidence.” (wikipedia)

“Spatial firing patterns of 8 place cells recorded from the CA1 layer of a rat. The rat ran back and forth along an elevated track, stopping at each end to eat a small food reward. Dots indicate positions where action potentials were recorded, with color indicating which neuron emitted that action potential.” (from Wikipedia)

According to Wikipedia, the Inhibition function theory is a little older, but seems like a perfectly reasonable theory to me.

“[Inhibition function theory] derived much of its justification from two observations: first, that animals with hippocampal damage tend to be hyperactive; second, that animals with hippocampal damage often have difficulty learning to inhibit responses that they have previously been taught, especially if the response requires remaining quiet as in a passive avoidance test.”

This is, of course, exactly what the scientists found when they separated the rats’ hippocampi from their nucleus accumbenses–they lost all ability to inhibit their impulses in order to delay gratification, even for a better payout.

In other word, the hippocampus lets you learn, process the moment of objects through space (spatial reasoning) and helps you suppress your inhibitions–that is, it is directly involved in IQ and Time Preference.

 

So what is the Nucleus Accumbens?

According to Wikipedia:

“As a whole, the nucleus accumbens has a significant role in the cognitive processing of aversion, motivation, pleasure, reward and reinforcement learning;^[5][6][7] hence, it has a significant role in addiction.^[6][7] It plays a lesser role in processing fear (a form of aversion), impulsivity, and the placebo effect.^[8][9][10] It is involved in the encoding of new motor programs as well.^[6] …

Dopaminergic input from the VTA modulate the activity of neurons within the nucleus accumbens. These neurons are activated directly or indirectly by euphoriant drugs (e.g., amphetamine, opiates, etc.) and by participating in rewarding experiences (e.g., sex, music, exercise, etc.).^{[11][12] …}

The shell of the nucleus accumbens is involved in the cognitive processing of motivational salience (wanting) as well as reward perception and positive reinforcement effects.^[6] Particularly important are the effects of drug and naturally rewarding stimuli on the NAc shell because these effects are related to addiction.^[6] Addictive drugs have a larger effect on dopamine release in the shell than in the core.^[6] The specific subset of ventral tegmental area projection neurons that synapse onto the D1-type medium spiny neurons in the shell are responsible for the immediate perception of the rewarding property of a stimulus (e.g., drug reward).^{[3][4] …}

The nucleus accumbens core is involved in the cognitive processing of motor function related to reward and reinforcement.^[6] Specifically, the core encodes new motor programs which facilitate the acquisition of a given reward in the future.^[6]

So it sounds to me like the point of the nucleus accumbens is to learn “That was awesome! Let’s do it again!” or “That was bad! Let’s not do it again!”

Together, the nucleus accumbens + hippocampus can learn “4 sugar cubes in a few seconds is way better than 1 sugar cube right now.” Apart, the nucleus accumbens just says, “Sugar cubes! Sugar cubes! Sugar cubes!” and jams the lever that says “Sugar cube right now!” and there is nothing the hippocampus can do about it.

 

What distinguishes humans from all other animals? Our big brains, intellects, or impressive vocabularies?

It is our ability to acquire new knowledge and use it to plan and build complex, multi-generational societies.

Ants and bees live in complex societies, but they do not plan them. Monkeys, dolphins, squirrels, and even rats can plan for the future, but only humans plan and build cities.

Even the hunter-gatherer must plan for the future; a small tendril only a few inches high is noted during the wet season, then returned to in the dry, when it is little more than a withered stem, and the water-storing root beneath it harvested. The farmer facing winter stores up grain and wood; the city engineer plans a water and sewer system large enough to handle the next hundred years’ projected growth.

All of these activities require the interaction between the hippocampus and nucleus accumbens. The nucleus accumbens tells us that water is good, grain is tasty, fire is warm, and that clean drinking water and flushable toilets are awesome. The hippocampus reminds us that the dry season is coming, and so we should save–and remember–that root until we need it. It reminds us that we will be cold and hungry in winter if we don’t save our grain and spend a hours and hours chopping wood right now. It reminds us that not only is it good to organize the city so that everyone can have clean drinking water and flushable toilets right now, but that we should also make sure the system will keep working even as new people enter the city over time.

Disconnect these two, and your ability to plan goes down the drain. You eat all of your roots now, devour your seed corn, refuse to chop wood, and say, well, yes, running water would be nice, but that would require so much planning.

 

As I have mentioned before, I think Europeans (and probably a few other groups whose history I’m just not as familiar with and so I cannot comment on) IQ increased quite a bit in the past thousand years or so, and not just because the Catholic Church banned cousin marriage. During this time, manorialism became a big deal throughout Western Europe, and the people who exhibited good impulse control, worked hard, delayed gratification, and were able to accurately calculate the long-term effects of their actions tended to succeed (that is, have lots of children) and pass on their clever traits to their children. I suspect that selective pressure for “be a good manorial employee” was particularly strong in German, (and possibly Japan, now that I think about it,) resulting in the Germanic rigidity that makes them such good engineers.

Nothing in the manorial environment directly selected for engineering ability, higher math, large vocabularies, or really anything that we mean when we normally talk about IQ. But I do expect manorial life to select for those who could control their impulses and plan for the future, resulting in a run-away effect of increasingly clever people constructing increasingly complex societies in which people had to be increasingly good at dealing with complexity and planning to survive.

Ultimately, I see pure mathematical ability as a side effect of being able to accurately predict the effects of one’s actions and plan for the future (eg, “It will be an extra long winter, so I will need extra bushels of corn,”) and the ability to plan for the future as a side effect of being able to accurately represent the path of objects through space and remember lessons one has learned. All of these things, ultimately, are the same operations, just oriented differently through the space-time continuum.

Since your brain is, of course, built from the same DNA code as the rest of you, we would expect brain functions to have some amount of genetic heritablity, which is exactly what we find:

Source: The Heritability of Impulse Control, Genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity: a meta-analysis of twin, family and adoption studies

“A meta-analysis of twin, family and adoption studies was conducted to estimate the magnitude of genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity. The best fitting model for 41 key studies (58 independent samples from 14 month old infants to adults; N=27,147) included equal proportions of variance due to genetic (0.50) and non-shared environmental (0.50) influences, with genetic effects being both additive (0.38) and non-additive (0.12). Shared environmental effects were unimportant in explaining individual differences in impulsivity. Age, sex, and study design (twin vs. adoption) were all significant moderators of the magnitude of genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity. The relative contribution of genetic effects (broad sense heritability) and unique environmental effects were also found to be important throughout development from childhood to adulthood. Total genetic effects were found to be important for all ages, but appeared to be strongest in children. Analyses also demonstrated that genetic effects appeared to be stronger in males than in females.”

 

“Shared environmental effects” in a study like this means “the environment you and your siblings grew up in, like your household and school.” In this case, shared effects were unimportant–that means that parenting had no effect on the impulsivity of adopted children raised together in the same household. Non-shared environmental influences are basically random–you bumped your head as a kid, your mom drank during pregnancy, you were really hungry or pissed off during the test, etc., and maybe even cultural norms.

So your ability to plan for the future appears to be part genetic, and part random luck.

Happy 200 Posts! Come join the party

It’s a sedate party, I admit. But the canapes are delish.

There are two themes to this fairly open thread: How I Came to Be Me and Your Favorite Posts

It’s funny, but way back when I began typing little theories about human behavior into my graphing calculator during highschool math, I had no idea that the whole topic matter was taboo. Actually, I didn’t even believe in evolution back then–at least, I was pretty sure that evolution was a thing that Christians were not supposed to believe in. Nebraska Man and all that, you know. So I didn’t think of my theories as having anything to do with evolution, just “things that made sense.”

I remember one of them, on the symbolic/physical importance of sharing food among friends. For me to take some of my food and give it to you both helps ensure your continued existence, and decreases my my chances of existing. To give a friend a french fry or cookie from one’s own lunch tray was a sign of valuing the friend’s life enough to be willing to risk a threat to one’s own life to help the friend. This was the symbolism, I wrote, underneath both the importance of ritual food sharing with strangers–bread and salt in Russia, the inviting of people to tea or dinner–and more elevatedly, Eucharistic communion itself: the giving of Christ’s literal life, blood and body in the breaking of bread and giving of it to his disciples, ensuring their lives continued by ending his own.

Years later, when highschool days had largely faded from my mind, I was reminded rather vividly of this essay when a new Jewish friend promptly escorted me to their home and set out a kosher dinner, a good portion of which was bread.

Since this is my party, help yourself to the metaphorical bread and salt, wine and cheese. Or coffee, if you prefer.

But back to our story. I somehow passed highschool bio and got into college, despite being more or less a Creationist, where I did all of the normal college things. Alas, college is wasted on the young. Eventually I read a book on human evolution and decided that the book sounded a lot more sensible than that anti-evolution video they’d shown us once in Sunday School. The last chapter of the book–sadly, I no longer remember the title–wasn’t about bones and teeth and people trying to figure out which skeletons were hoaxes, but the evolution of human families in which grandparents exist. Now, sure, all that business about australopithecines sounded reasonable enough, but that last chapter blew me away: a complex emergent behavior / idea-thing like a family could also have been created by evolutionary adaptation.

At the time, I considered myself a liberal of the most upstanding character. I did all of the good liberal things–feminist, pro-trans, fat acceptance, LGBQ friendly, Pagan friendly, anti-war, anti-meat, anti-racism, anarchist, etc.

Then came Facebook and similar systems. Since I like debating politics, I tried to write entertaining essays for my friends, and promptly lost most of my friends. I also got kicked out of my feminist community for some trivial bullshit–I think I posted a response to another poster in the wrong section of a message board.

Now, I am not stranger to internet flame wars, but by this time, the whole business was starting to grate. Friends who were basically on the same side of the political system ought to be able to discuss political details without antagonism or declaring that the other person is secretly evil. At the very least, there ought to be some trust that your friends have good hearts and are trying hard. But I lacked some of the meta-level understanding of what was going on in liberalism necessary to safely traverse these waters–for example, I thought pretty much all liberals accepted evolution as true. It turns out that they only believe in evolution when conservatives are around. Among themselves, they deny that humans have “instincts” or that gender exists, and insist that the application of evolutionary theory to the study of human behavior is actually evil.

Then something major happened: I had a kid.

I lost friends over that, too, but I realized several important things:

1. Childbirth is absolutely horrific.
2. There is no possible way the differences in the amount of energy/risk men and women entail to reproduce could not cause different evolutionary pressures that would lead to different optimal mating strategies.
3. Feminist claims that parents teach their children gender roles are total bullshit.
4. Gender is mostly nature, not nurture.
5. Natural childbirth is a horrible idea (for the record, c-sections are also horrible and the recovery is worse.)
6. People politicize a bunch of issues that should not be politicized.

Something non-political also happened: the baby got sick. After a week of especially sleepless nights, I figured out what was wrong and how to fix it. I remember that moment, the sudden energy that came over me: NO ONE was going to stand between me and helping my child.

When feminists speak of “empowering” women, this is the feeling they mean. The feeling that you will do whatever the hell it takes to accomplish your objectives, and no one and nothing will stop you. I don’t think you can “empower” someone. It comes from within. It comes from the evolutionary urge to protect your children.

As it turned out, no one got in my way and everyone was actually super-helpful and the whole business ended well, with a happy, healthy child. Luckily my husband is an upstanding fellow who loves his children, too. But helpfulness is not one of life’s givens.

Around this time, the whole SJW movement was picking up steam, and the “privilege” concept became an unexpected sticking point. I thought the idea was basically nonsense, and said so. I later came across a conversation between–I thought–a friend and one of my best friends. “EvolutionistX isn’t worth talking to,” said the best friend.

I didn’t break up with liberalism. Liberalism broke up with me.

It had become increasingly obvious to me that the people in these feminist and SJW communities weren’t just wrong on a few issues, but that many of them were deeply psychologically disturbed, and the politics had become a cover/excuse/justification for not getting help and dealing with their issues. Many of them, to be frank, were disconnected from reality, and pointing out that physical facts contradicted them (I don’t mean totally controversial theories like evolution, but just basic stuff,) resulted in anything from banning to death threats. Unfortunately, the memeplex was becoming increasingly dominant, infecting communities that had nothing to do with politics and were officially apolitical.

By this point, I’d learned to just keep my mouth shut, and found some new things to do with my time. My husband introduced me to Jayman’s blog, and I read every word of it. Same for Evo and Proud, the sadly defunct Neuropolitics, and West Hunter. These guys are awesome. I learned so much anthropology I hadn’t learned in anthropology class, without the post-modern bullshit and constant negativity that had infected academia. I was still vaguely afraid of talking, but at least I had some good reading material.

Shortly after, I beheld, with terrifying clarity, the abyss. Suddenly I understood why liberals hate HBD and ev psych.

My break with the left came over an obscure case: protests surrounding the death of Marshall Coulter, a teenager who climbed over a homeowner’s 6-foot fence at 2 am and then got shot in the head.

The elites will always defend the bullies.

Now, I understand that there are some innocent excuses for being in someone’s yard at 2 am, like being so drunk that you think you’re at your own home when you aren’t, or jumping a fence for a dare, with no intention of committing any harm. But it remains, like driving 120 miles per hour or poking bears, an activity that I regard has having a very high chance of killing you, and you should not do if you do not accept those risks. You certainly do not blame the bear for eating you after you poke it.

Likewise, if you act like you are breaking into someone’s house in the middle of the night, the natural and only reasonable consequence is that home owner (or resident) kills you.

Salon weighed in, with an article about what a sweet kid Marshall was.

Protestors weighed in, claiming that Marshall was just an innocent kid who hadn’t done anything wrong and didn’t deserve to die, demanding that the homeowner (who was being charged with attempted murder) be, well, charged with attempted murder.

In fact, Marshall already had a criminal past before he got shot in 2014:

• October 2009: disturbing the peace
• November 2012: criminal trespassing
• December 2012: disturbing the peace
• December 2012: burglary of an inhabited dwelling
• March 2013: possession of stolen things and theft
• April 2013: possession of marijuana

Ironically, the police had actually been discussing Marshall as a possible suspect in a string of recent burglaries the day before he was shot trying to burglarize someone’s house.

The attempted homicide charges were only dropped against the homeowner because Marshall recovered enough from the bullet in his head to get arrested for three more crimes:

During the Trayvon Martin case, I had understood how someone could hear the story of a teenager walking home with a pack of Skittles and think that a great injustice had been done. This case had no such ambiguities. I realized the left had abandoned liberalism, in every traditional sense of the word. This was not about freedom; this was an explicit denial of the right of self-defense against someone intent on harming you, at least if you were white and they were black.

Every betrayal suddenly made sense. The meta-politics became clear. I felt like I finally understood everything, and I leapt into the abyss.

Around this time, my husband found Moldbug’s Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, and I wandered into Slate Star Codex. All of the words I’d been holding in began spilling out, in a torrent, so I made this blog.

A friend of mine (if you’re reading this, hi!) had kept telling me that life is too short to worry about assholes. If I had to walk on eggshells around my other “friends,” then they weren’t my friends and I should get new friends.

Sage advice.

So here we are, 200 posts in, and people actually like my blog.

Thanks for reading, guys. I hope you like the next 200 posts.

 

I’m going to open up the floor. Tell me your stories, ask questions, or just chat. And if you feel like it, tell me your favorite posts for inclusion in the sidebar.

disgust vs. aggression vs. fertility (part 4 of a series)

(See also: Part 1, Yes, Women Think Male Sexuality is Disgusting; Part 2, Is disgust Real? and Part 3, Disney Explains Disgust.)

So I made some graphs:

Log. graph of homicide rates vs. fertility rates

Graph of homicide rates vs fertility rates (data from the Wikipedia)

Take your pick. They’re the same graph, except the top graph has the homicide rate on a log scale and the bottom on a linear scale, because Honduras’s homicide rate is kind of off the charts.

I couldn’t fit all of the labels onto the graphs, but since most of the countries group by region, you can still figure out roughly where most of them go. The lower left hand corner, low fertility and low homicide, is filled with dots from East Asia and Western Europe. The central-middle-bottom section, of moderate birthrates and below-average homicide rates, has the Muslim countries. The far right–high fertility and medium violence–is mostly African. (Note that Angola and Gambia’s labels have been footnoted at the bottom of the graph.) And the upper left–high violence but moderate fertility–is Latin America. (The high homicide rates are one of the reasons I oppose unfettered Latin American immigration.)

While there is a positive relationship between violence and fertility, this is clearly not the whole story. Just eyeballing the log graph, it looks like a curved line would fit the data better than a straight line, but that’d require polynomial or quadratic regressions and we don’t really need to get into that much detail.

Rather, I suspect that just considering cleanliness explains the graphs: cleaner people are more easily disgusted by other people, and so have fewer children than their aggression levels would predict.

I haven’t found great data on overall “cleanliness” or “disgust rates,” but it appears that Latin Americans are some of the world’s cleanest people:

From the Atlantic, “How Often People in Various Countries Shower“

Brazilians shower nearly 12 times a week, and Mexicans wash their hair more than anyone else.

By contrast, the French and Russians are positively disgusting. (I’m giving India and China a pass here due to limited running water in their countries.)

Here’s another graph, showing similar numbers:

My personal experience with East Asians (Japanese, Taiwanese, etc.,) also suggests that they are cleaner overall than Americans. These countries appear to have been hit with a double-whammy–very clean and low aggression–driving down the interest in sex so far that 60% of girls aged 16-19 claim to be uninterested in sex or even despise it, and even 40-50% of married people haven’t had sex in the past month. They’ve even got a phrase for it, “sex disgust syndrome.”

I don’t find Japanese fertility rates concerning, just because Japan really does need fewer people and the sex-inclined Japanese will quickly replace the non-sex inclined ones, so the issue will work itself out naturally. (And at any rate, I am not really in any position to go telling the Japanese what to do with their own society.)

In our own society, though, I am concerned that decreased monogamy (more “hooking up” via apps like Tinder and Grindr, etc.) is leading to more, not less female concern about male sexual aggression, with all sorts of unfortunate side effects.

(See also: Part 1, Yes, Women Think Male Sexuality is Disgusting; Part 2, Is disgust Real? and Part 3, Disney Explains Disgust.)

Disgust part 3: Disney explains Disgust

(See also: Part 1, Yes, Women Think Male Sexuality is Disgusting; Part 2, Is disgust Real? and Part 4, Disgust vs. Aggression vs. Fertility.)

So today I was reading the picture book version of Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out, which is about a little girl and anthropomorphized versions of her emotions, and happened upon this quote:

“And of course, Riley needed Disgust’s good taste to avoid being poisoned, both physically and socially. Disgust helped Riley steer clear of anything and everything she found repulsive, from horrible food to rotten people.” [bold mine]

The accompanying picture is of a toddler refusing some icky vegetable. One wonders what toddlers think about “rotten people,” if anything at all.

Grownups, however, express their opinions about the ickiness of others loud and clear:

“David Merkur, 28, Keeps Seriously Creepy Spreadsheet Of All His Online Dates” claims the Huffington Post.

Poor David Merkur wrote no more in his spreadsheet than millions of women have written in their diaries–there is nothing remotely creepy about noting where you met someone or when you have a date scheduled. His only mistake was showing the spreadsheet to one of the women he was interested in. For this, Jezebel, the HuffPo, and many other websites ran articles which used his real name and intended, IMO, to completely humiliate and defame him.

Something similar happened to a friend when one of their exes decided to destroy them as publicly as possible. Thankfully their story didn’t make it onto Jezebel or HuffPo, but embarrassing personal details were broadcast to almost all of their friends, pretty much destroying their social life and leaving them really fucking depressed.

It is no secret that women are hostile to men they don’t like. Really hostile. I’ve spent enough time in the feminist trenches to know how these conversations tend to go:

“Why do women go after assholes? I’m such a nice guy and I can’t even get a date!”

“Any guy who calls himself a nice guy is actually an asshole! You’re a misogynist oppressor!”

Etc., etc.

The whole business has always been a little baroque to me, perhaps because I think people should be nice to each other, or perhaps because I’ve watched plenty of women fall all over themselves trying to hop into bed with criminals. But I find that one of the tricks to understanding people is to generally assume that they are asserting some true version of reality as they see it, so to understand feminists, I must assume that they really, truly hate Nice Guys.

But if we dig a little deeper, it’s not really the niceness they hate, (well, it is the niceness, but it is more than just that,) it’s the sexual interest.

Slate Star Codex made this montage that I have stolen without permission so I really hope he forgives me:

Some of those are anti-Semitic cartoons Scott stuck in there.

It’s from his article about Creep Shaming (my title, not his,) that is quite relevant to this whole post and I encourage you to read it if you haven’t already.

(While we are at it, 1. What is up with the fedora thing? Seriously I don’t get it. It is a hat. Who cares about hats? 2. How much social rejection/creep shaming is actually aimed at Jewish men who just don’t look like other whites and so don’t meet female attractiveness standards?)

Also, Scott Alexander is not the only person I’ve seen compare/imply that the whole feminist reaction to nerdy men reminds them of anti-Semitism.

Women complain about men’s unreasonable beauty standards, but it’s the women who rate 80% of men unattractive. Men, by contrast, rate most women as around “average” attractiveness.

As I noted a few days ago, this is all most likely because women have actually evolved to find male sexuality disgusting. A woman only needs 1-4 men in her life, not thousands, so any men other than her chosen few are little more than threats.

And apparently, people also route “potential threats” though their “disgust” modules, and some people are particularly prone to experiencing physical disgust at the mere thought of things they do not like.

Like inferior males and their sexuality.

Free Northerner has an older post about the time he tried to court a Christian young woman, and her parents (quite rudely) grilled him on a long list of personal questions. They obviously had it out for him, and so he should not have answered any of the questions or otherwise put up with their bullshit, but regardless, he probably sealed his fate with the woman by answering honestly that he sometimes watches porn.

You might as well talk about your feces at the dinner table as admit to a woman you barely know and her parents that you watch porn. Yes, everyone has to poop, but that doesn’t mean you talk about it in polite company. Likewise, yes, you have sexual needs, but that doesn’t mean you talk about them at the dinner, and any insistence that you should is just an insistence that the girl should only date men who are good at lying.

Be careful what you incentivise.

 

On a neurological level, I suspect that disgust and fear are closely related. Both get processed through the same region of the brain, my old favorite, the amygdala (but probably involve a bunch of other regions that I just don’t know anything about.) Both are negative reactions to external stimuli intended to protect you from danger. Fear protects you from things you might need to run away from, like tigers, while disgust protects you from stationary things, like rotting lions.

Conservatives show heightened fear/disgust responses upon meeting strangers, leading to distrust of outsiders, but the ability to feel fear also seems to help us empathize with others and feel their fear; sociopaths are deficient in their abilities to empathize and feel fear.

Disgust therefore has, apparently, two purposes:

1. It keeps you away from disease vectors like rot/feces

2. It prevents you from having sex with inferior mates.

One of the results implied by this is that cleaner people have less interest in sex, and dirtier people more interest. Which I suppose explains the phrase, “dirty old man.”

There is an additional important factor: aggression. Aggression, I suspect, neutralizes disgust. “Nice guys” lack the proper forms of aggression, like being tall and socially dominant, having a good sense of humor, good looks, prestigious job, and generally not being shy or otherwise beta. I am really super not the greatest person to get opinions about dating from, because I have never dated any women at all, but this appears, IMO, to be basically true: the aggressive bird gets the worm.

In the past, monogamy functioned, among other things, to basically protect women from too much male sexual interest, because married women were basically thought of as off-limits. This greatly reduced the number of men expressing sexual interest in married women, removing one source of potential stress from their lives.

When I hear women my own age talk about how, “We need to have a discussion about consent and aggression and rape,” I just look at them weird. After a decade of marriage, first-date style concerns about negotiating boundaries with people I’ve just met have faded far into the recesses of memory.

One of the side effects of decreasing monogamy in our society and an increase in “hookup” culture, seems to be an increase female concern about male sexual aggression. Overall, I suspect the numbers on aggressions like rape are down, (at least since 1990,) tracking other crime rates. But fear of male aggression need not have anything to do with actual aggression; it need only have to do with contact with males. If contact with men who want to have sex with them triggers womens’ disgust instincts, then putting women into more contact with men who want to have sex with them, even if those guys are totally nice guys who’d never do anything aggressive, will constantly trigger the disgust response and start stressing out the women. In the end, you get things like the whole Mattress Girl phenomenon.

“Sulkowicz, who graduated Sunday, spent her senior year hauling a 50-pound mattress around campus to protest the Columbia administration’s failure to expel her alleged rapist. …

““If we use proof in rape cases,” said Sulkowicz, “we fall into the patterns of rape deniers.” Yet it also trafficked in high-sounding maxims composed of that mélange of pseudo-academic, quasi-mystical jargon that passes today for profundity: “In saying I expose the truth, the viewer superimposes their truth upon mine, and once again silences me.” “Well-meaning people on the street will touch me reverently. . . . They do not believe they are violating me with their hands.” “When people engage in believing in me, they objectify me.” “

Read enough cases like these, and you start wondering if maybe there’s something to be said for social norms encouraging people to only have sex with people they already know really well, and maybe are already married to.

Instead, feminists tend to demand that men not express sexual desire in women, which of course only the really shy guys who are terrified of accidentally offending women and deeply committed to being decent humans in the first place actually listen to. They then sit in their rooms, alone, and feel absolutely awful for ever being attracted to a woman (objectification!) The assholes, of course, do not give a shit about any of this and continue being assholes.

As such, aggression appears to be an important factor in overcoming disgust and generally functioning in jobs and life. Shy, gentle people get shat upon in our society, while aggressive liars get jobs and women.

 

Of course, there are truly rotten people in this world, ones that kids (and adults) should watch out for. But the vast majority of “creeps” that women reject aren’t the truly rotten apples. They’re just guys with the misfortune to be not very attractive or socially dominant.

(See also: Part 1, Yes, Women Think Male Sexuality is Disgusting; Part 2, Is disgust Real? and Part 4, Disgust vs. Aggression vs. Fertility.)

Is Disgust Real? (Part 2 of a series)

(See also: Part 1, Yes, Women Think Male Sexuality is Disgusting; Part 3, Disney Explains Disgust; and Part 4, Disgust vs. Aggression vs. Fertility.)

One of the theories that undergirds a large subset of my thoughts on how brains work is the idea that Disgust is a Real Thing.

I don’t just mean a mild aversion to things that smell bad, like overturned port-a-potties or that fuzzy thing you found growing in the back of the fridge that might have been lasagna, once upon a time. Even I have such aversions.

I mean reactions like screaming and looking like you are about to vomit upon finding a chicken heart in your soup; gagging at the sight of trans people or female body hair; writhing and waving your hands while removing a slug from your porch; or the claim that talking about rats at the dinner table puts you off your meal. Or more generally, people claiming, “That’s disgusting!” or “What a creep!” about things or people that obviously aren’t even stinky.

There is a parable about a deaf person watching people dance to music he can’t hear and assuming that the people have all gone mad.

For most of my life, I assumed these reactions were just some sort of complicated schtick people put on, for totally obtuse reasons. It was only about a year ago that I realized, in a flash of insight, that this disgust is a real thing that people actually feel.

I recently expressed this idea to a friend, and they stared at me in shock. (That, or they were joking.) We both agreed that chicken hearts are a perfectly normal thing to put in soup, so at least I’m not the only one confused by this.

This breakthrough happened as a result of reading a slew of neuro-political articles that I can’t find now, and it looks like the site itself might be gone, which makes me really sad. I’ve linked to at least one of them before, which means that now my old links are dead, too. Damn. Luckily, it looks like Wired has an article covering the same or similar research: Primal Propensity for Disgust Shapes Political Positions.

“The latest such finding comes from a study of people who looked at gross images, such as a man eating earthworms. Viewers who self-identified as conservative, especially those opposing gay marriage, reacted with particularly deep disgust. … Disgust is especially interesting to researchers because it’s such a fundamental sensation, an emotional building block so primal that feelings of moral repugnance originate in neurobiological processes shared with a repugnance for rotten food.”

So when people say that some moral or political thing is, “disgusting,” I don’t think they’re being metaphorical; I think they actually, literally mean that the idea of it makes them want to vomit.

Which begs the question: Why?

Simply put, I suspect that some of us have more of our brain space devoted to processing disgust than others. I can handle lab rats–or pieces of dead lab rats–without any internal reaction, I don’t care if there are trans people in my bathroom, and I suspect my sense of smell isn’t very good. My opinions on moral issues are routed primarily through what I hope are the rational, logic-making parts of my brain.

By contrast, people with stronger disgust reactions probably have more of their brain space devoted to disgust, and so are routing more of their sensory experiences through that region, and so feel strong, physical disgust in reaction to a variety of things, like people with different cultural norms than themselves. Their moral reasoning comes from a more instinctual place.

It is tempting to claim that processing things logically is superior to routing them through the disgust regions, but sometimes things are disgusting for good, evolutionarily sound reasons. Having an instinctual aversion to rats is not such a bad thing, given that they have historically been disease vectors. Most of our instincts exist to protect and help us, after all.

(See also: Part 1, Yes, Women Think Male Sexuality is Disgusting; Part 3, Disney Explains Disgust; and Part 4, Disgust vs. Aggression vs. Fertility.)

Yes, Women think male Sexuality is Disgusting (Part one of a series)

(See also: Part 2, Is Disgust Real?; Part 3, Disney Explains Disgust, and Part 4, Disgust vs. Aggression vs. Fertility.)

And they ought to.

So, I’m going to let you in on a little not-so-secret: childbirth is horrendously painful. Don’t believe those bastards with their natural birth hoo-ha. There is nothing magical or wonderful about childbirth. You bleed copiously, you can barely walk for the next two weeks, and before modern medicine, you stood a good chance of dying in the process.

The US’s homicide rate is 4.7 deaths per 100,000 people per year. The UK’s is 1. Japan’s is 0.3. (Source.)

The “developed nations” have a maternal mortality rate of 16 women per 100,000 births. (Source.) (Note that one woman may give birth to more than one child in her lifetime.)

The “developing nations” have a maternal mortality rate of 230 per 100,000 births (and a much higher number of children per woman,) and some countries have maternal mortality rates around 1,000 per 100,000 births. If the average woman in these countries has 5-7 children, that works out to 5-7% of women dying in childbirth. (Though not every year.)

In other words, in the state of nature, childbirth is kind of like being stuck in the middle of WWII.

 

Let’s consider the male side of things. Given enough available females, a male could, hypothetically, sire one child every night for 30 years, resulting in 10,957 children, plus or minus a couple depending on the leap years. We’ll call 11,000 our “hypothetical male maximum.”

The man stands approximately zero chance of dying in the process of siring children, does not endure pregnancy or childbirth, and even if he depends on someone else to do all of the childcare for him, he still has a reasonable chance at his offspring making it to maturity. (After all, Genghis Khan didn’t get to be the most evolutionarily successful man in recent history by raising all of his bastards.)

In other words, for men, there is basically zero cost to impregnating a woman (other than, obviously, finding one.) Even under harsh economic/environmental conditions, every additional woman a man mates with is an additional chance at offspring. The only limiting factor is how many women he can convince to mate with him.

A woman, by contrast, can produce at max only about 20 children (9 months gestation + 6 months nursing / 25 years fertility). (State of nature does not have baby formula.) She needs a maximum of 20 mates, and can make do with <1 if she has to share.

Where the male number of potential offspring is practically limitless, by human standards, the female is decidedly limited. Which means that women must be picky. A male who has sex once with someone kind of meh is not seriously limiting his ability to have tons of awesome children. A woman who has sex with a guy who’s kind of meh is potentially wasting one of her very limited chances of having children on a loser.

Note: I am not claiming that 11,000 is a realistic number. Obviously even Genghis Khan himself probably didn’t have 11,000 children. The point is that male and female reproduction are vastly different, creating very different incentives.

The average male has approximately zero to lose and all the offspring to gain from a random fling, and thus is mentally ready to consider the majority of women as potential mates. If some of those women happen to not be particularly attractive, well, it’s no big loss.

Women, by contrast, endure high-risk pregnancies and births, for a very limited set of children. They therefore cannot risk having children with inferior males.

So it is in the male’s interest to mate with everyone in sight, but in a woman’s interests to eliminate the vast, vast majority of potential mates, winnowing her selection down to the best 1-4.

Which means that all other potential suitors, whether they’re 14 men in a small hunter-gatherer band or 4 million men in Tokyo, are sexually useless.

In fact, they’re less than useless: they’re a threat. Because it takes only one act of violence for one of those men to get another potential offspring, and for a woman to lose one of hers.

The difference between optimal male and optimal female strategies leads to conflict–not just between men and women, but also between men and men. If one man mates with 550 to 11,000 women, (11,000/20 children per woman = 550), that implies that 549 to 10,999 men are not mating with those women. And those men are going to be pretty pissed.

Monogamy is one of the more elegant solutions to this issue. The relative guarantee of one mate per person reduces conflict and increases parental investment in the children. But monogamy requires fidelity–reducing female interest in the sexual desires of the majority of men even further.

Disgust in the face of unnecessary male sexual attention helps keep women loyal to their husbands and protects their long-term evolutionary interests, even if people express it in really annoying ways.

(See also: Part 2, Is Disgust Real?; Part 3, Disney Explains Disgust, and Part 4, Disgust vs. Aggression vs. Fertility.)

Melanin, aggression, and sexuality

I began researching melanin and its effects based on rumors that injecting it into animals makes them more aggressive. The search, so far, has led me down even weirder rabbit holes than usual.

Why do people tan? Not physically, but cosmetically. Cosmetic tanning is probably unhealthy (skin cancer,) costs money if you use a tanning salon, historically novel, and boring as fuck.

Tanning is especially confusing if you take the ideas of Critical Theory/White Privilege seriously, because then why would anyone want to look ethnically darker than they actually are? Are millions of whites unconsciously trying to pull a Doleazal?

But women do not pair their tans with darker hair; they pair their tans with lighter hair. The result, I suppose, is like a dark-skinned German. It makes about as much sense to me as ganguro girls.

The obvious answer is that women tan because it gets them sexual interest from men, which is the answer to virtually every question along these lines, but this only kicks the question back a notch: why are men sexually interested in tan women? Of course, something could arise, chicken and egg, as nothing more than a signal of sexual availability that men then respond to as a signal of availability. But this is a dull hypothesis, so let’s abandon it and carry on.

First, a  quick note on what melanin is: melanin is a kind of “natural pigment” found in your brain, (eg, the substantia nigra,) skin, irises, the feathers of birds, squid ink, fungi, plants, micro-organisms, etc. There are a few different types of melanin, which cause different skin colors.

White people, btw, aren’t albino.

Overall, I find that conservative and politically moderate women tend to tan, (and bleach their hair,) while liberal women do not. I suspect that conservatives and moderates do more of almost any image-enhancing thing, perhaps because they are more often on the sexual market (conservatives have more divorces than liberals and become sexually active younger.) It’s not clear to me, though, if this is just a “thing dumb people do” rather than a specifically conservative/moderate thing.

Peter Frost suggests that melanin plays a role in visually identifying adults (and men.) Children (of all races) tend to be lighter skinned/have less melanin than adults*, like this girl from Vanuatu, whose hair is that color naturally:

Her hair will darken with age, just like many other blond children.

*I suspect this is just because adults have spent a longer total amount of time in the sun than children.

Women generally have lighter skin than men, which Frost proposes is a neotenous trait which thus:

1. Increases the male desire to provide for women, making marriage more likely

2. Decreases male aggression toward females, making marriage less likely to result in dead women

3. implies a lack of sexual experience with other men.

He suggests that the tanned appearance, therefore, implies sexual maturity; purposeful tanning or glorification of tanning, therefore, implies a desire for sexual availability rather than virginity.

In a culture where evolutionary success is determined by the stability of one’s monogamous pair-bond, people valued and cultivated traits that led to or implied that one would be a good partner. In a culture where success is determined by one’s ability to get multiple partners over one’s lifetime, traits that enhance sexual availability will be valued.

Men also tan, (often in conjunction with weightlifting,) in order to better fit the archetype of “tall, dark, and handsome” and thus get laid. On one post I found contained explicit denunciation of PUA “personality” and “conversation” techniques as just for men who want stable, long-term relationships rather than lots of one night stands with hot chicks, the body-builders’ goal. Well, that’s a new criticism.

Does more melanin actually lead to more sex? Certainly there is a correlation among humans between pigmentation levels and (reported) frequency of sex. According to Rushton’s article, “Do pigmentation and the melanocortin system modulate aggression and sexuality in humans as they do in other animals?” Ford and Beach (1951) report that Pacific Islanders and Native Americans claim to have sex 1 to 4 times per week, US Whites 2–4 times, and Africans from 3 to >10. Rushton and Bogaert (1987 and 1988) concluded, based on Kinsey data, that Blacks more sex than whites. The WHO reports that, (for married 20-somethings,) the Japanese and Chinese have sex 2.5 times per week, American whites 4 times per week, and American blacks have sex 5 times per week. Also,

“A Los Angeles study found that the age of first sexual activity in high school students was 14.4 years for Blacks, 16.4 years for East Asians, with Whites in the middle. The percentage of students who were sexually active was 32% for East Asians and 81% for Blacks, with Whites again between the other two. In another study, White Americans reported more sex guilt than Black Americans and that sex had a weakening effect. Blacks said they had casual intercourse more and felt less concern about it than Whites.”

Correlation, correlation, correlation.

Luckily (for our purposes, anyway,) there appears to be a sub-population of people actively injecting themselves with chemicals intended to increase the amount of melanin in their skin, and reporting the effects on the internet. (While some of the posts on the subject sound too similar too each other, and thus I suspect they were made by shills trying to market the drugs they’re selling, I think some of these posts are legit.)

First, a digression: Yes, there are people out there making injectible tanning drugs. No, I don’t recommend them, because everything about them comes with a big warning label that says, “THIS MIGHT CAUSE CANCER.” They haven’t been approved by the FDA, so you can’t buy them from legal sources.

Why invent a tanning drug? Aside from the obvious reasons, because there are people with vitigilio and rare skin conditions that make them super-prone to burning who could potentially use it. The drugs aren’t injectible melanin. (I haven’t seen anything about anyone injecting actual melanin.) They’re an artificially synthesized chemical similar in structure to α-Melanocyte-stimulating hormone (a-MSH,) which, as its name implies, stimulates the body to produce melanocytes, which are cells that produce melanin.

So, what happens when people inject themselves with a drug kinda like a-MSH? Well, they get tan. They get a better night’s sleep. And they get constant erections.

Apparently, the drugs are also being investigated as an alternative to Viagra.

One thing almost no one seems to be noticing is aggression. One guy did note he was feeling some anger, but everyone else responded that they’d felt nothing of the sort, so it was probably just some random thing going on with one guy. That said, I’m not convinced that people are all that good at realizing that they’ve become more aggressive–they tend to just blame their aggression on other people suddenly sucking more. I also assume that people who are getting constant erections are going to try to do something about it, which could lead to more sexually aggressive behaviors, without causing, say, random fights.

So, Melanotan II/melanin/a-MSH does seem to have some causal relationship with sex, but so far nothing shows that it increases aggression.

Some black people have noticed that whites are injecting themselves with Melanotan II to make themselves look darker and get more erections, and while some of them think this is absolutely hilarious, others take it very badly. (This is interesting, but slightly off-topic, so I will reserve these observations/comments for a later post.)

Anyway, back on subject.

Another reason people may tan is that it appears to trigger the release of endorphins, leading to speculation that some people are actually addicted to tanning:

“While many report that the desire for a tanned appearance is the strongest motivation for sunbathing and tanning bed use, tanners also report mood enhancement, relaxation, and socialization. It has been suggested by the popular media and suspected by dermatologists for years that one reason tanning is so popular is that UV light is addictive. …

“UV light has been shown to increase release of opioid- like endorphins, feel-good chemicals that relieve pain and generate feelings of well-being, potentially leading to dependency.

“A 2006 study used naltrexone, a drug that blocks the endorphins produced in the skin while tanning, to induce symptoms of withdrawal in frequent tanners. … These symptoms were not observed in any of the infrequent tanners given naltrexone in the study.

“Another study found that frequent tanners were able to distinguish between otherwise identical UV and non-UV light-emitting tanning beds. Tanners in this study showed an overwhelming preference (95 percent) to tan in the UV light-emitting bed. Participants suggested that UV tanning created a more relaxed mood and even relieved pain, possibly due to endorphin release.”

A former tanning addict writes:

“I was a tanning addict. Being brown was being me. If I wasn’t tanned, then I didn’t look like “me”. Silly I know, but that’s just the way I felt. Having a tan made me feel better about myself. I used to say it was like a “tonic” – it made me feel more confident and more healthy.”

Here’s her picture:

Tanned and bleached. But I think the ganguro girl rocked the style better.

What does the scientific literature have to say about melanin levels and aggression? Like, what happens when you inject a mouse with melanin-inducing hormones, or breed mice to have low melanin levels?

Luckily for me, Takase et al have done a meta-analysis of studies done on mice who’ve been genetically modified not to produce much melanin. “MCH” stands for Melanin-Concentrating Hormone. As far as I can tell, More MCH => More Melanin. Phrases like “MCH knockout,” “MCH deletion,” and “MCH deficiency” all refer to mice that have been modified so that they don’t make much (or any) MCH. So Less MCH => Less Melanin. (If I’ve got thi wrong, please tell me.)

From the paper:

“Overall, the meta-analysis revealed that the deletion of MCH signaling suppressed non-REM sleep, anxiety, response to novelty, startle response, stress-induced hyperthermia, conditioned place preference, and olfaction (p<0.05) and that MCH signaling deficiency enhanced locomotor activity, wakefulness, alcohol preference, motor activation by psychostimulants, aggression, male sexual behavior, and social interaction (p<0.05).”

So, in plain speak, Less Melanin => crappy sleep, anxiety, aggression, and sex.

However, I would like to caution that you are not a mouse. There are some big differences between you and mice, like that mice can synthesize vitamin C and you can’t. Also, your body has had thousands of years to adapt to your melanin levels, to keep you healthy under certain environmental conditions. MCH-deficient mice don’t have that same luxury; their bodies might just not be adapted to cope with some side effect of MCH deficiency.

So let’s keep looking.

Demas at all have an interesting article, “Adrenal hormones mediate melatonin-induced increases in aggression in male Siberian hamsters (Phodopus sungorus)”

From the article:

“In Experiment 1, male Siberian hamsters received either daily (s.c.) injections of melatonin (15 Ag/day) or saline 2 h before lights out for 10 consecutive days. In Experiment 2, hamsters received adrenal demedullations (ADMEDx), whereas in Experiment 3 animals received adrenalectomies (ADx); control animals in both experiments received sham surgeries. Animals in both experiments subsequently received daily injections of melatonin or vehicle as in Experiment 1. Animals in all experiments were tested using a resident–intruder model of aggression. In Experiment 1, exogenous melatonin treatment increased aggression compared with control hamsters. In Experiment 2, ADMEDx had no effect on melatonin-induced aggression. In Experiment 3, the melatonin-induced increase in aggression was significantly attenuated by ADx. Collectively, the results of the present study demonstrate that short day-like patterns of melatonin increase aggression in male Siberian hamsters and suggest that increased aggression is due, in part, to changes in adrenocortical steroids.”

“Several studies have demonstrated photoperiodic changes in aggression in both male and female rodents (Badura and Nunez, 1989; Fleming et al., 1988; Garrett and Campbell, 1980; Jasnow et al., 2000). For example, male Syrian hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) maintained in short days for 8 weeks undergo gonadal regression and display increases in aggression compared with long-day hamsters, despite basal serum concentrations of testosterone (T) (Garrett and Campbell, 1980). Interestingly, prolonged maintenance (i.e., N15 weeks) in short days triggers gonadal recrudescence and the short-day increases in aggressive behavior largely disappear, returning to long-day levels of aggression by 21 weeks…”

(I think “gonadal regression” means the gonads got smaller, which would imply less sexual activity.)

“…both pinealectomy and treatment with exogenous melatonin within species-typical physiological ranges also affect aggression in photoperiodic species. For example, pinealectomy eliminates the short-day increase in aggression in female Syrian hamsters, whereas exogenous melatonin treatment augments aggression in long-day-housed animals (Fleming et al., 1988). Short-term treatment with exogenous melatonin also increases aggression in male Syrian hamsters without altering serum T concentrations (Jasnow et al., 2002).”

Now we’re getting somewhere, right? Except, wait, that’s MELATONIN, not melanin. Different chemical. Melatonin is a chemical your brain makes (in your pineal gland) in response to darkness/dim light helps you fall asleep and helps keep your circadian rhythms functioning properly. Increasing melatonin appears to decrease melanin–“As early as 1917, Carey Pratt McCord and Floyd P. Allen discovered that feeding extract of the pineal glands of cows lightened tadpole skin by contracting the dark epidermal melanophores.” (from the Wikipedia.) This makes sense: Longer days => less darkness => less melatonin => more melanin so you don’t burn in the sun. Shorter days => more darkness => more melatonin => less melanin so you can absorb more of the limited sunlight.

But I suspect that here we have found the source of the original rumor: Someone read a study about melatonin, which makes hamsters cranky and aggressive, and confused it with melanin, which appears to make mice less aggressive.

But wait. Aren’t hamsters (and other rodents) nocturnal? Whereas humans generally aren’t?

Yup. So hamsters and mice might actually be designed to be more active when they have more melatonin, and humans might be designed to be less active.

Luckily for us, humans regularly consume supplemental melatonin. According to eHealthMe, “2,237 people reported to have side effects when taking Melatonin. Among them, 32 people (1.43%) have Aggression.”

Honestly, 1.43% is nothing; that’s more like statistical noise in your data.

Some parents who’ve put their autistic kids on melatonin report aggression or aggression-like symptoms:

“…tonight he was grabbing his face and squeezing it(which he has never done before) and just kept crying then fell asleep about ten minutes later???”

“I have used Melatonin to help my Autistic son sleep but when I do he gets very aggressive and knocks things over and lashes out. I actually have to hold him down or wrap my legs and arms around him from behind or he will try and head butt you until he settles and this behavior repeats for a couple of days till the Melatonin leaves his system and then he is mellow again, for takes 72 hours to leave his system. This behavior manifests itself only when I gave him melatonin.”

But other people report the opposite:

” …good things with the Melatonin. It has been a few weeks and aggression is still significantly down as is the stimming.”

“I Started Taking Nightrest With Melatonin And Ive Gotten Much Deeper Nights Sleep. My Work Outs Got Better, Recovery Was Way Better And Aggression Level Decreased…”

Some of the moms suggest that what’s actually happening when the autistic kids become “aggressive” is that they are experiencing some form of night terrors/waking dreams, since melatonin makes people have more/deeper REM sleep, (I think that’s accurate,) rather than actual aggression.

One wonders if scientists could tell the difference between a sleep-walking hamster and a regular one!

Well, shit, this isn’t looking good for any interesting theories. I might end up with a boring result: nothing.

But let’s take a quick look at sexuality. Does summer correlate with conception? I took the birth month data from Live Science, divided by number of days per month and subtracted average gestation length to get the number of conceptions per day:

April: 11k per day

May: 11k per day

June: 11.5k per day

July: 11k per day

August: 11.5k per day

September: 12k per day

October: 12k per day

November: 12.5k per day

December: 12.5k per day

January: 12k per day

February: 12k per day

March: 11.5k per day

So, conceptions per month increase from July through December–that is, as the days get shorter and melatonin increases. Conceptions decrease from Jan through May–as the days get longer and melatonin decreases. This conception schedule is also consistent with the traditional availability of food in the northern hemisphere, with the harvest beginning in July and still enjoyed in December, but the supply dwindling as winter and then spring commence. (On the other hand, LiveStrong claims, ” high levels of melatonin may have a contraceptive effect on those hoping to conceive. Men using the supplement may notice a decrease in sperm count, decreased sperm mobility and increased breast size. Both men and women may experience a decrease in sex drive.” but doesn’t offer a source. The University of Maryland Medical Center says something similar, though, and they seem fairly trustworthy.)

Since rodent gestation lengths and human ones are radically different, I’m not going to bother looking up when mice have babies.

That violent crime (and even political revolutions) goes up in the summer is well-documented, but most theories attribute this to people getting out more or heat making them cranky.

Summary:

No one seems to be injecting melanin, but synthetic versions of melanin-producing hormones do seem to make people horny and tanning releases happy hormones. No one is reporting increased aggression as a result of increased melanin.

Mice who’ve been bred not to produce melanin are more aggressive than mice who haven’t.

Injecting hamsters with melatonin makes them aggressive. Melatonin isn’t melanin, but it sounds similar. Increasing melatonin appears to decrease melanin.

Melatonin supplements don’t really seem to make humans more aggressive. There are some claims that melatonin decreases libido.

Humans do conceive more babies in fall (when melatonin levels are rising) than in spring (when they are falling) and commit more crime in the summer (when melanin is up) than in winter (when it’s down.)

Conclusion: Someone probably mixed up melanin and melatonin.

Is Humor Some Sort of Man Thing?

As I mentioned before, I’ve never even heard this claim before that “men are funnier than women,” much less any ev psych claims on the subject, so I decided to investigate.

According to Cracked, approximately everyone thinks men are funnier than women, but for totally dumb reasons like evolution turning men into dicks who then act in evolutionarily approved ways rather than socially approved ways. Or because elementary school teachers laugh at the antics of little boys and punish little girls for acting up, which I suppose is the sort of thing you might believe if you’ve never encountered elementary school, children, or parents in your life and are completely incapable of understanding basic statistics.

It’s at times like this that a little voice pops up in the back of my head and says, “Math is hard. Let’s go shopping!” and I say, “Yes, disembodied Barbie, yes! Let’s give in to the corporate programming! Maybe we will get dumb shoes!” Then I go back to acting like a normal human.

According to The Independent, men don’t find women funny or don’t like it when women are funny or something like that. Why? ‘Cuz, like, masculine egos, domination, funny women intimidate men or come off as mannish or something.

Moving on to to Psychology Today, “humor researchers have long noted gender differences in the use and appreciation of humor. While women want to settle down with a guy who can crack a good joke, men, to a large degree, want a partner who laughs at their antics.”

Wait, “humor researchers”? This is a thing? That people get paid for?

Can I get that job?

Back on subject, this seems like a reasonable arrangement: if one side likes telling jokes, and one side likes hearing them, then everyone is happy, yes? (Except, of course, for women who want a career in stand-up comedy. Although Lucile Ball seems to have done quite well as a professional comedian.)

To be fair, “good sense of humor” is something I have heard that women put in their dating profiles a lot. I’m not exactly sure why; if I were making a dating profile, it’d probably say something like, “Must be willing to check the math on my calculations of rates of genetic spread over time,” or, “Must be capable of intelligently debating the role of the anterior cingula in disgust and facial recognition.”

Probably the guys over at Chateau Heartiste and the other PUA blogs have some intelligent answer to this mystery; any of you guys want to weigh in?

Let’s assume that everyone is telling the truth, and that women like funny men, and men like women who laugh at their jokes. On the male side, this leads to the obvious conclusion that “humor” is not just “masculine,” but a form of masculine aggression or alphaness, similar to being 6’4″, making over 100k a year, or doing Xtreme sports. We might even classify “humor” as a subset of “aggressively gregarious,” which obviously works very well at attracting women. (Suggesting that starting off your date with a series of knock-knock jokes is not what women want, but actually the ability to generally converse in an aggressive conversation style that lets you successfully deflect embarrassment from yourself while showing how much better than others you are, eg, the responses listed in “How to Blow Past Girls Dropping the “Creep” Bomb.”)

Aggressive behavior is actually valuable for women (they have to live in society, too,) but it is not generally their core competency. In particular, while men strut through life trying to dominate each other at every pass (they even randomly bash into each other while walking down the sidewalk just to assert dominance,) women tend to pepper their conversations with signals of non-aggression.

This all gets back to the different historical rates–and mechanisms–of male/female reproductive success. In a world where 40% of males reproduced, vs. 80% of women, male success has been ensured largely by being dominant over other males in order to control access to women. Female success has not been due to being dominant over other women, but due to their skills at social organization. Women are sensitive to aggression because, simply put, they are easier to kill than men, and no one wants to be killed.

At any rate, laughter is a form of punctuation, especially for women. This is part of why people note laughter in their online communications, LOL. Smiley faces are also common in female text, and general non-aggression signaling (“Sorry for writing so much, LOL! I’m just a chatterbox! :)” writes a woman who just wrote four whole sentences on a topic.)

To be honest, this quality can make women really annoying to talk to. They have emotions and get offended easily, and there’s a whole industry devoted to milking women’s offendedness for all its worth. Additionally, even when politics aren’t concerned, women tend to take critique really personally and get frustrated easily. When men get frustrated, they get aggressive. Frustrated women cry.

Laughter is a good technique for diffusing potentially awkward or frustrating situations. Laughing makes people happy and disguises aggression–so if you can make a girl laugh, she probably 1. enjoys your conversation, and 2. perceives you as less aggressive.

But what about men not valuing humor in women? Well, men don’t generally want dominance displays from women; they want to know that women like them. Women’s dating advice websites don’t generally cover how to make playful banter, suggesting that playful banter just isn’t that important a skill for women. (Though conversation skills help with making friends.)

Very tellingly, apparently women who crack jokes appear to be preferred as one-night stands, while less-joke prone women have an advantage on the long-term market. This introduces a chicken and egg problem: do men actually prefer jokers for one night stands, or do jokers prefer one-night stands? In general, the one-night-stand environment tends to select for masculine women (and men) with more aggressive traits (suitable to encountering and pursuing many partners,) whereas the long-term environment tends to favor more feminine traits, like staying devoted to one partner and not sleeping around.

Civilization, of course, is built on these feminine traits (among many).