Category Archives: science

The living rainbow: The selective benefit of a fa’afafine in the family

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ResearchBlogging.orgOne of the key evolutionary puzzles of same-sex sexuality, as it manifests in modern, Western human societies, is that those of us attracted to members of our own biological sex don’t make a lot of babies. I’ve already spent a lot of pixels on the question of how genes for same-sex attraction might persist in human populations in the face of that selective cost—but a paper just published in PLoS ONE adds some evidence in favor of one popular hypothesis: that gene variants that make men more likely to be gay could also make their straight relatives more fertile.

The new paper presents data from Samoa, where the traditional culture has long had a place for men who are attracted to other men, in the role of fa’afafine—literally, men who “live in the manner of women.” Samoan boys who show interest in feminine activities are recognized by their families as members of this “third gender,” which is more like the modern Western conception of transgender identity than what we call “gay.” Fa’afafine often present and dress like straight women, and as adults, they generally have relationships with straight-identified men. But fa’afafine aren’t exactly “transgendered” as we understand that concept in the West—they don’t have the sense that their bodies don’t match their gender identity.

The fact that Samoan culture accommodates and accepts same-sex sexuality makes it an especially interesting context for testing hypotheses about the evolution of queer sexuality, including the idea that relatives of fa’afafine might be more fertile than people with no fa’afafine in the family. The study’s coauthors surveyed Samoan fa’afafine and straight men, asking how many children their grandmothers, aunts, and uncles had had. And they found that grandmothers of fa’afafine—both maternal and paternal grandmothers—had more children than grandmothers of the straight-identified men they interviewed.◼

Reference

VanderLaan, D., Forrester, D., Petterson, L., & Vasey, P. (2012). Offspring production among the extended relatives of Samoan men and fa’afafine. PLoS ONE, 7 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036088

Science online, diverse botanical evolution edition

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Wind turbines. Photo by ali_pk.

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Carnival of Evolution, May 2012

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Photo by NS Newsflash.

This month’s issue of the Carnival of Evolution, which collects online writing about Darwin’s dangerous idea and all its variously modified descendents, is online over at John S. Wilkins’s blog Evolving Thoughts. Highlights include, but are not limited to, an attempt to trace the origin of the phrase “social Darwinism,” discussion of how sloths and turtles evolved to move slowly, and whether the diet of early humans was more healthy than ours. Go now and read the whole thing.◼

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: The link between science and religious (un)belief

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The Thinker. Photo by marttj.

This week at the collaborative science blog Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, guest contributor Amy Dapper takes on a recent psychological study showing that people prompted to think analytically were subsequently reported less likely to report religious belief.

Their first study establishes a correlational relationship between analytic thinking and religious belief by asking participants to answer three clever questions that have an immediate intuitive, but incorrect, answer and a correct answer that requires deeper analytical processing. These questions, and their answers, can be found in the table below. The study participants then answered a survey about their religious beliefs. The results show that participants that arrive at the correct, analytical answers to the first set of questions also tend to exhibit more religious disbelief in their responses to the survey.

The results would seem to confirm the experiences of many of us working in science: when you think analytically Monday through Friday, it can be difficult to stop thinking that way on Sunday morning. For more detail on the experiments, go read the whole thing.◼

Carnival roundup: Berry-go-Round and Diversity in Science

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One of these tulips is not like the others. Photo by Jørund Myhre.

On the last day of April, two blog carnivals—collections of links to posts on a given topic—are freshy posted, and both are worth some of your surfing time.

First, over at Seeds Aside, is a double March/April edition of Berry-go-Round, which rounds up online writing about all things botanical, with everything from peppers to savannah treetops to electrical signalling within the tissues of carnivorous plants.

And then over at her blog on Scientopia, Scicurious is hosting an edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival devoted to “imposter syndrome,” the nagging fear of secret inferiority that almost everyone seems to feel at some point in a scientific career. In science, imposter syndrome can be especially troublesome for women and members of minority groups, who may not see many folks that look like them amongst their colleagues.◼

Science online, this does not follow edition

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Sometimes a red dress just looks good when you’re dancing. Photo by Lieven SOETE.

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The living rainbow: In budgies, same-sex courting isn’t practice for wooing the ladies

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Budgies in their natural habitat. Photo by David Cook Wildlife Photography (kookr).

I’ve just set myself up a Google Scholar alert for papers on the evolution of same-sex mating behavior. The plan is, I’ll post some brief notes on anything interesting that shows up in my inbox. First up: bisexual budgies!

Male budgerigars—or parakeets, to those of us in the States—live in female-dominated social groups when they’re not caged in a petstore. In these groups, apparently, it’s quite common for pairs of males to engage in behaviors that look a lot like what males do when courting female budiges. It’s been hypothesized that this same-sex courting is practice for the real, reproductive deal. If that were the case you’d expect that male budgies who put in more time practicing with other males would have better luck with females later on.

However, when Puya Abbassi and Nancy Tyler Burley of the University of California Irivine compared the frequency with which individual male budgies engage in same-sex courting to their later success with females, they found a negative relationship—males that had more same-sex interactions were less likely to find female mates [$a]. The authors propose that the same-sex interactions are actually males assessing each others’ social status. That would square with Abbassi and Burley’s observations if low-status males, who are less likely to get lucky in the mating game, spend a lot more time sorting out relative rankings amongst themselves—and this is what the authors suggest may be going on.◼

Reference

Abbassi, P., & Burley, N. (2012). Nice guys finish last: same-sex sexual behavior and pairing success in male budgerigars Behavioral Ecology DOI: 10.1093/beheco/ars030

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: What’s in my traditional medecine?

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Saiga antelope. Photo via Nothing in Biology Makes Sense.

This week at the collaborative blog Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, Sarah Hird explains how to identify the ingredients in traditional Chinese medecines—with a whole pile of sequence data.

[Coghlan et al.] target one animal and one plant marker and “genetically audit” the samples by sequencing the heck out of them using a bench-top HTS, the Roche GS Junior. Their protocol produced 49,000 sequence fragments. They then compare their sequences to large databases containing sequences of known origin and thus, identify what’s in the TCM.

To learn what the group found, go read the whole thing.◼

Science online, overlooked life on Mars edition

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A sidewalk produce cart. Photo by bitchcakesny.

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Adventures in funding applications

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Just got back the decision on my proposal for the NSF’s International Research Fellowship, which would’ve paid for me to go to southern France and do kickass field experiments with the study plant I’ve currently only seen in a greenhouse, Medicago truncatula. Except my project was rated “not competitive.”

It looks like my chief mistake was writing with an audience of evolutionary ecologists in mind when, in fact, the IRF covers a broader range of science, and the reviewer panels reflect that. Which is to say, I got dinged for using “jargon” twice—the first time that’s ever happened in my grant-writing experience—and one reviewer (the third one, natch) had this to say under the heading of “Qualifications of applicant, including applicant’s potential for continued growth”:

The applicant is obviously able, and has written what, judging by their titles, are interesting papers of general interest. The proposal worries me because it was full of bureaucratic generalities about what we would learn and the benefits to be gained therefrom … The top half page of the project summary gave me precious little idea whether the author had any mind or not. He obviously does, but when reading the proposal I kept wanting to tell him to read Homer’s Iliad, or J-H Fabre’s Souvenirs Entomologiques. or Darwin’s Origin of Species, to learn how to liven his stuff with concrete, illustrative detail. But I expect the applicant has plenty of potential, and plenty of willingness, to grow. [Emphasis added.]

Ow. I guess I’d better try and shoehorn in some references to the “wine-dark sea” if I want to revise and resubmit next fall.◼