Sociology
There are two articles this week that speak directly to the socio-political hot mess of the moment. And neither of them says nice things.
Ethnic hostility is contagious.
Researchers from Charles University and the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences sifted some uncomfortable statistics to find some equally uncomfortable results. In a series of experiments, they gave participants tests in which they could behave in a friendly or hostile way toward other people involved in the test.
For example, in a “Joy of Destruction” game, two players were given equal amounts of money and asked whether they wanted to spend some of their own money to destroy an even larger amount of their opponent’s money. Note that standing pat would allow both players to walk away with the maximum dollars. And most players did just that.
Then non-acting players were allowed to watch the behavior of another pair facing the same choice. When a pair of players of the same ethnic group watched another pair of players who choose to be hostile, they followed suit only 19 percent of the time. However, if players saw another player of their ethnic group being hostile to a member of a different ethnic group, they mimicked that behavior 71 percent of the time. Players were almost four times as likely to repeat hostile behavior to another ethnic group, as they were to their own group.
In another game, players were encouraged to cooperate and to develop an evaluation of appropriate behavior. Again, when players saw that other pairs developed a measure of appropriateness that was destructive, they were much more likely to follow suit if there was an ethnic difference among the players.
There was some good news: When players were watching peers who took the “peaceful” choice, they also took the peaceful choice at a very high, and equal rate no matter the ethnic pairing. But when the other pair modeled hostile behavior, it was much more readily adopted by pairs with an ethnic difference.
Trump supporters and “status threat.”
A researcher from the University of Pennsylvania looked at the factors behind Donald Trump supporters in the 2016 election and moved away from the media-standard “economic threat” to a new term: Status threat.
In fact, she demonstrated that “financial wellbeing had little impact on candidate preference.” Instead, the factors that drove voters to Trump were not the color of money, but the color of skin.
… changing preferences were related to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global dominance and the rise of a majority–minority America: issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status.
If that sounds like racism, it’s because it’s racism. The analysis showed that “Results do not support an interpretation of the election based on pocketbook economic concerns.” If there was an “anxiety” demonstrated by Trump voters, it had nothing to do with economics. And everything to do with a fear of people who were not white and Christian obtaining greater status in the country. Trump voters felt that white Americans are “under siege.” They engaged in their own kind of “Joy of Destruction” game: Throwing Trump at the perceived threat, even if they were hurt in the process.
And you can bet that these results will be heavily under-reported, as the New York Times and others continue to build on their Hillbilly Elegy, downtrodden ironworker, and oh-that-Hillary-is-mean soft-focus portrait of racists. Just plain racists.
Come on in. Let’s read science.
Evolutionary Biology
Human-dependent butterflies fall into an evolutionary trap.
Many creatures can’t adapt to extreme environmental changes made to a local environment by human action. Some can. But even adaptation … can be a trap, as revealed by a story captured by scientists from the University of Plymouth.
Ribwort plantain, also known as Lamb’s tongue, is a plant native to Europe and Asia. However, it’s also an invasive plant in the United States—an incredibly common one. One so common, that I invite you to take a look at it. In many parts of the country, there’s a good chance of finding an example in your own yard right this minute, especially along the boundaries of sidewalks or roads. When this invasive species reached the western half of the country, along with cattle, many insects left it alone, but an American butterfly called Edith's checkerspot soon moved in. Like many butterflies, Edith’s checkerspot was normally selective of a particular native flower. In this case, Blue-eyed Mary. But those checkerspots that learned to lay their eggs on the Ribwort instead, generated higher numbers of offspring. In many areas, checkerspot moved from being a Blue-eyed Mary specialist, to a Ribwort plantain specialist. Soon, the Blue-eyed Mary was ignored, and the Ribwort was it.
And then … as it turned out, Blue-Eyed Mary grew only in dry, warmer areas of fields. So did Ribwort plantain. Except, Ribwort plantain would also grow in cooler areas among high grasses. When humans removed cattle from the areas where the Edith’s checkerspot had become Ribwort-adapted, a trap was sprung. Blue-eyed Mary was still growing in the warm, dry locations. But Ribwort persisted in growing in areas that soon became mixed with tall grass, making the micro-environment cooler and wetter. And the butterflies, unable to tolerate this temperature change, died.
At first glance, moving to the Ribwort would seem to be a huge advantage to the Edith’s checkerspot. It gave them a resource no other local insect was exploiting, and they produced more offspring. However, it set up an unrecognized dependency between butterfly and cow. Remove the cows, and the butterflies died.
Better sweat vs. better breasts
Ectodysplasin-A receptor V370A sounds like the name of a spaceship or a test batch of a wonder drug. It’s actually a human gene. In this case, a gene that triggers several features of a developing infant, including denser hair, more sweat glands, and smaller breasts. It’s a gene that’s shared by many Northeast Asians as well as Native Americans, one of many that shows the shared ancestry of the two populations.
For some time, scientists have theorized that the second feature of the above list, increased number of sweat glands, was the factor that cause this gene to be preferentially selected. Those who carry the gene might be better able to thermoregulate, especially in a warm environment, and gain an activity edge over their fewer-sweat-gland competitors.
Only … recent archeological evidence has suggested that Native Americans came from a group that was isolated in an area of the Arctic, the Beringian platform, for thousands of years before they dispersed down the Americas. Too much heat wasn’t exactly their major concern.
So researchers from UC Berkley are targeting another feature that results from this gene. They don’t think it became widespread because the people who carried it were having to deal with extreme heat and needed to sweat. They think it spread because of extreme cold. They theorize that the dominance of the gene appeared among that isolated group of people who lived at high latitudes, where UV radiation was low. That, in turn, means that the people at that latitude are unable to produce much vitamin D. Which is where EDAR V370A comes in. The gene may promote smaller breasts, but the same factors that promote more sweat glands also promote more milk ducts, or “improved mammary ductal branching” as they state in the article. The result is a sort of higher-breast-efficiency, where mothers carrying the gene are better able to pass critical nutrients to their vitamin-D deprived offspring.
Invasive bug hybridizes with local past to form crop eating super-moth.
Another buggy tale, this one from a evolutionary biologist at Harvard.
Helicoverpa zea is better known as the corn earworm. The “worm” is actually the larva of a moth, but just because it’s a baby doesn’t make it any nicer. Earworm is a major, sometimes devastating pest that reaches across the continental US and consumes not just corn but cotton, tomatoes and almost two dozen other crop species. The species, also known as bollworm, is tough enough on its own, and like many pests, after a century of surviving chemical assault, it’s become immune to many pesticides, driving farmers to raise levels of chemical use or switch to new forms of pesticide. So … bad worm.
But wait. There’s another one. Helicoverpa armigera is the African bollworm. It’s an equally widespread pest in the Old World, where it eats cotton, tobacco, okra, potatoes, flax and … insert 300 different species of plants here. Really. 300. They already do an estimated $5 billion in crop damage a year.
And now, Old World moths have made it to the New World, and they’re hybridizing with the American moths to create a kind of pesticide-resistance, everything-eating “mega-pest.” Because, of course, pretty little Edith’s checkerspots are so, so selective and crop-destroying earworms will eat anything they land on.
Environment and Climate
As the ocean, so goes the land.
As climate change becomes more and more notable, the trends are also solidifying. In general, the land—as in continents around the globe—are becoming not just warmer, but drier. The humidity over land is decreasing as the temperature of the land surface outruns the temperature of the ocean.
That’s a trend that climate models expect to continue. A pair of researchers from Imperial College London took a look at data going back to 1979, and found that the conditions over land were connected to both direct warming of the land and warming of neighboring oceans, with unequal heating driving lower specific humidity over land. To increase the humidity over land, there would actually have to be an unequal distribution of new heat into the system. Like, more sunshine on water than on land. Which is unlikely. Looking at the four decades of accumulated data, they were able to test the model and confirm that … yep. It got hotter and drier, as expected.
Meaning that the predictions for the near future that call for being even hotter and even drier are also likely to hold true. There was some notable variability in local conditions, so there’s no guarantee that any one spot is likely to become drier, and it’s not a formula for world-wide desertification. Yet.
But it does point up that future planning for every urban area would be wise to consider a significant decrease in potential precip.
Anthropology
Human speciation may not be related to climate change.
Scientists looking for reasons behind the development of new species of ancient humans have often invoked changes in climate. It seems simple enough: Rising temperatures might give rise to a species with decreased hair and longer limbs, drier periods with shrinking forests could promote species better able to conduct the long-distance walking needed to live on open savannas. And there do seem to be some pretty good alignments between the appearance of some species and major changes in their surrounding environment. But, and this is a big but, humans developed over a relatively short period geologically, and the truth is that across that short period there just are not that many great sites for collecting human fossils.
A team from the University of London looked at the distribution of human species and compared it to the available collection sites, the time periods they cover, and the gaps in the record. Their conclusion is that we don’t have a clean enough picture of human development over the last few million years to state whether or not these environmental changes drove the development of new human species. Instead, the bigger factor seems to simply be that scientists are sampling from diverse sites separated from each other in space and time. That doesn’t affect the relationships that the fossils show, but it does mean that the actual points of diversification, and their causes, are essentially hidden.
Physics
Scientists measure the weak force of a proton for the first time.
There are four fundamental forces. Of these, two have effects we’re pretty familiar with in the day-to-day: Gravity and electromagnetism. The other two forces are, oddly enough, considerably more powerful than gravity, but … only over a very tiny distance. So tiny, in fact that they are only effective down there in the subatomic level.
The strong force is what holds quarks together as “gluons.” These are most of the familiar particles, including protons and neutrons. It takes a big kick of energy to break these things apart into their components.
The weak force … is a lot weaker than either the strong force or electromagnetism. It’s also hard to describe. If magnetic fields are associated with electromagnetism and mass is directly related to gravity, then mumble mumble mumble is related to the weak force. As in, big shrug. Or at least, little shrug, as the weak force turns out to be very, very weak.
To determine the strength of the weak force associated with a proton, researchers fired a beam of right-handed electrons at protons. Then they repeated the process with left-handed electrons. Left-handed electrons were very, very slightly more likely to be scattered by the proton. As in …
if parity symmetry were violated for the height of mountains, Mount Everest and its mirror-image twin would differ in height by a mere 2 millimetres, and this difference would have been measured to a precision of ± 80 µm.
That’s a very small difference, and some very fine measuring. The measurements help to determine that if there is yet another fundamental force out there hiding in even smaller spaces, a fifth fundamental force that some theories predict, finding that force is going to take the application of a lot of energy. More energy, in fact, than any current instrument can provide.
Image
As usual, today’s image comes from Andy Brunning at Compound Interest. Visit his site for a larger, easier to read version of the infographic.
