Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Search
Why So Much Dumb in Science Reporting?
December 20th, 2008
OK, I’m going to go after a biology story today that I found particularly poor. The Perfect Mate: What We Really Want, by Meredith F. Small, apparently an anthropologist at Cornell, somehow, according the bio.
First she opens with something of strawman argument, simplifying a position she’s both going to support and contradict in the very same short article:
For years, the evolutionary psychologists have been saying that men want young pretty women for their mates and women want older men with money.
She then goes on to explain that a recent study supports this “party line” as she puts it (a sure sign she’s got an axe to grind — characterize consensus postions as dogmatic), but with a “surprise” this time. Woman also prefer good-looking men! Oh my, what a surprise compared to the “party line!”
She goes on to explain that there are a dozen or more qualities we can find attractive in the opposite sex and that different genders have somewhat different priorites in ranking them. But somehow adding “good looks” to a list of two items, older and rich, is a huge surprise.
OK, maybe she’s just reaching for an angle to make the less-than-original research sound fresh and interesting. Where does she take this next then?
But all these studies are deeply flawed for the simple reason that they ask people what they want in their mates, not what the actually get. And yet evolution only works on what we do, not on what we desire; from an evolutionary standpoint, it’s not our ideal that counts, but who we actually make babies with.
She has a point, but misses the point, too. Big time. Cornell, really?! Evolution is a statistical process operating on populations with a diversity of genes. These preferences, what we find attractive, are at work now because they result from what our ancestors actually got, and what they actually got was probably, on average, the most attractive available to them. On average. Small preferences become reinforced over generations where those small preferences result with improved reproductive success.
There are no guys who prefer sex with great grandmothers, or those showing a lot of signs of age, because those liaisons don’t result in offspring. If they did, we’d have different preferences. This is an easy, strong preference.
Likewise, guys end up with less-than-ideal mates. Sure they do, all the time. But those that are less than ideal are likely still preferable to other choices, and share some attributes with the ideal. And the really hard-up guy will take anything available (pressure to pass on those genes is the same as the pressure to stick his dick somewhere, biologically speaking).
Women should be, and are, more picky, given the higher investment in reproduction, just as theory predicts. They also end up with less-than-ideal mates often enough. Fine.
But back to the original point. Evolution only requires that the different preferences — what we’re attracted to — lead to some increased success when these preferences are followed. If half the population mates at random, and half the population gives some weight (even a small preference) for features that lead to reproductive success, those preferences will grow to be much more common than 50/50 over enough generations.
What does the article say?
No matter what we might say to researchers, the truth is we all end up mating with people who are interested in us, people we run into, people who happen to look our way. And our “choices,” more often than not, make no sense at all.
I can’t actually tell if she’s throwing out all the research as useless, or just trying to say that individuals need not follow general trends. I also can’t tell if the way she puts “choices” in quotes, which would seem to be a tip of the hat to evolutionary forces determining what we find attractive, is contradictory to her statement that they “make no sense at all,” which is not what understanding evolution has taught us. It seems like some platitude to make people feel good about freewill, to undermine what we do understand from science.
After reading her article, I can’t for the life of me really understand if it is supposed to mean that we understand something from evolutionary psychology, despite all the studies reaching similar conclusions, or if she expects us to throw all that information away as useless because mating “makes no sense at all.”
I suspect the latter, based on the ridiculously stupid autobiographical statements like this one:
For example, George Clooney is my ideal mate. He’s rich, popular, and I bet he’d make a great father. Problem is, as far as I know, George is not interested in me. Although I might pencil him in as my ideal mate, the person I got, the person I have a child with, is nothing like George. Instead, he is younger than me, without many resources, and, well look what he got – an older, less than fertile, woman.
She seems guilty of some sort of confirmation bias, trying to tell herself that it’s okay that she settled for less than her ideal — someone “nothing like” her ideal. If I were her guy, I’d be pretty annoyed to be compared to George Clooney, negatively, to a large audience. She’d better have cleared the article with him first, and if it were me, I wouldn’t have let this go as written.
Oh, and it’s an internet article, but I assume Meredith Small and her editor are getting paid something, so why not clean up the spelling/grammar mistakes? It’s not always the case, but we’re conditioned to also think that sloppy writing means sloppy thinking. I give bloggers more leeway, but science reporters should be a little more professional in my opinion.
Often I think the problem with science reporting is that journalists are not well trained in science, or have to write outside their expertise due to covering a broad range of topics. An anthropologist should understand evolution better than this, and be able to write more clearly than this. She’s helped make the world a slightly dumber place.
Somehow we need to a better job of evolution on the internet, and if she consistently writes such crappy articles she should lose her audience. I know I’m going to be less likely to read the next article when I see her byline.
Let me know if I’m being too harsh. This isn’t as bad as when creationists are given equal time next to biologists, but it still undermines public understanding and pisses me off.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
There are no guys who prefer sex with great grandmothers, or those showing a lot of signs of age, because those liaisons don’t result in offspring.
Here’s a quick test of your hypothesis above: go to google images, set your preferences to “anything goes” and then google for, oh, granny sex.
There’s a reason there’s a Rule 34, Rule 35 and Rule 36.
Most of the time when I read crappy science articles I give the reporter a tiny bit of slack, since they are usually using sensationalistic and misleading press releases as their primary source (not that I think that’s a good idea, but it’s the reality). But Small doesn’t have that excuse – and the Cloony anecdote makes me cringe.
It is an important point that what matters to evolution is not what people describe as their “ideal” mate, but who they actually have babies with – and how many offspring they have. But the point kind of gets lost in her attempt to be cute and folksy.
James, point taken, but that’s a minor, minor fraction of the population. If it wasn’t, we’d have a reality show called, “Who wants to boff granny?” Brrrr….
Peggy, I agree that this important point is buried, but there’s also the point that those preferences are real and expressed in mate selection, even if the only practical upshot is a minor deviation from random choice. Any significant divergence from random leads to an eventually clear sexual selection in the population (as evidenced by the clear preferences in all these studies), and there’s interplay between fitness and the sexual selection for sure. It would be really easy for someone reading that article to think that a Cornell anthropologist has dismissed an entire slew of studies and all evolutionary effects in favor of some sort of random magic.
Hey Mike,
It is clear to me almost from sentence one that this woman is not very smart. That’s the simple reason why her reporting is dumb and defies logic.
At some level you know that also. But somehow you try to write an intelligent piece about her lack of intelligence. To be honest, it doesn’t seem like it is worth your time. It’s not like miraculously, you will change a dumb person into an intelligent one.
Since I’ve read many articles like this, it’s hard to see stuff that stands out, but I think some facts are missing. I think another reason men chase younger women is because young women are more willing to have sex. Women get pickier as they get older. I have a lot of women friends in their late forties and fifties and we talk about these issues. Most of them are single or widowed and they universally say they’d like to meet a rich man. Most still talk about men they feel are attractive, but to date or remarry at their age means giving up a lot of freedom, and a reason a man with money is attractive is because it means more freedom. To them men represent burdens and freedoms. I get the feeling most of my lady friends will never remarry but they still fantasize about hot actors.
I really liked that the writer revealed her feelings about George Clooney and her husband. It was very honest. Everyone makes compromises. Few people get their dream mate. One thing I’ve learned from talking to women is they hate this unromantic view of courtship, that is applying biological science to why people fall in love. Thus I see Meridith Small making a major breakthrough in honesty.
Another issue is age. What we want and accept in our twenties is far different from what we want in our forties, fifties and sixties. Sure, some old guys do chase young babes, but many chase women their own age. But things are relative to. I’m 57, so a woman 47 would be young to me.
The science of sex is a fascinating topic, but a lot of people like to argue with the results. I’m guessing people are so different that any generalized results seem off to even the average person.
Rob, perhaps, but apparently the author is smart enough to get paid to write about science for an audience.
James, let’s move beyond anecdote! That’s what science requires. The anecdote is only a useful tool if it reflects the truth science is getting at. I’m 40 and in the past few years have dated women from their early 20s to my age, and my ex-wife was six years older than me. There are women at all ages interested in sex, and women at all ages that are pickier than others.
I’m living now in Brazil where men your age are often seen with young wives pushing baby strollers. Another fallacy of the article is that the author is applying her own experiences from the U.S. (e.g., about people of the same age marrying and the women working) which is less common in other countries, which seems like a strange fallacy for an anthropologist of all people to make.
Honesty in writing is often interesting to read, but not always a good idea, especially with non-fiction. I’m reminded of my Clarion class picking up on a mild fetish of mine based on my first story. “But it’s the character thinking that!” I argued too much, to no avail, blushing.
She made a horrible choice with George Clooney as an example, BTW. He’s an avowed bachelor with no plans to ever marry. How ideal is he then from a female perspective?
Well hell, Mike, if you’re only 40 your still young and won’t notice any of the observations I’m seeing. My attitude towards sex now is totally different from when I was 40.
And you said we should move beyond anecdote, but then you go and mention the hot moms with older men anecdote. I see that in Memphis too, but it’s not that common. What, 1 in a 1,000, or 1 in 10,000. If only it was polite to walk up to these young women and ask them how much their husbands are worth.
At 57 the only way I’d expect a woman in her 20s or 30s to be interested in me is if I had a huge bank account (which I don’t). When I was in my 40s, I still met young women who were interested in me, and they weren’t looking for rich guys. They were looking for guys with good jobs to pay their way through graduate school. But now that I’m in my 50s, I don’t get that kind of attention. I do get some attention from women who are closer to my age and are looking for financial security, and if I wasn’t married I could probably get remarried easily, but like my lady friends who are my age, I might be less interested in sex and more interested in marrying someone with some security.
At 40 you might think that sex is about physical attraction, but wait 15 or 20 years.
Older men and younger women is a LOT more common here. The anecdote reflects the different cultural norm as seen in demographics.
And you’re married, Jim, so I doubt you have much to tell me about sex. 😉
Besides, everyone knows that sex is about the quality of your bondage gear.
James, point taken, but that’s a minor, minor fraction of the population.
There’s a big difference between rare and unheard of and your position was that there were no men at all of that sort.
To a first approximation, nobody reads SF (If you subtract all the people who read the average midlist SF novel, the remainder is the same as the world population to two significant digits) but the field still manages to survive.
If it wasn’t, we’d have a reality show called, “Who wants to boff granny?†Brrrr….
The only reason we don’t have it yet is that the FCC would crap a brick. The only people who are supposed to be sexually exploited on TV are young women.
My grandmother died in her 90s but as I learned at the funeral she had a 70-year-old [1] boy friend. Talking to him about her fell somewhat outside my prepared fields of discussion for a funeral but I don’t begrudge either them their experiences.
My grandfather could often be found surrounded by women but he had a particular talent for attracting them that is hard to learn: he really found all (or at least most) of them interesting as individuals and was able to give them his full attention without any particular covert agenda.
1: A physical therapist so a lot more fit than his age may make you expect.