Know Your Primates

On February 17th a woman in Stamford Connecticut was seriously injured when the pet chimpanzee of a friend suddenly attacked her.

The incident was another unfortunate one for all involved, including the chimp, Travis, who was killed by police, as are so many innocent animals who are acquired by humans and just behaving as they should.

Forget about the fact that people who own exotic animals such as chimps and tigers are not only stupid, but selfish; that's not what this post is about.

No, this post is about what we call these great apes.

More often than not, people call chimpanzees monkeys. But they are not monkeys, they are chimpanzees, just as we are not chimpanzees, we are homo sapiens.

So why do some people confuse chimps for monkeys? Giving these people the benefit of the doubt, there are a few families of primates that include monkeys who resemble the great apes. For example, the family of monkeys called Cebidae, which includes species such as black howler (see middle photo) and squirrel monkeys (see bottom photo) bear a slight resemblance to chimps (see top photo) and gorillas. (Of course, most species of monkeys bear very little resemblance to chimpanzees.)

The other answer to the question as to why people call chimps monkeys is because they are stupid and really don't know the difference, although their stupidity is not their fault.

To clarify, monkeys, chimps, gorillas, orang-utans, bonobos, and homo sapiens (us) are all part of the order called primates (All of the above except for monkeys make up the family of primates called Pongidae).

So, know your primates and don't call chimpanzees monkeys!

Pet Peeves: Part I: Restaurants

I have a lot of pet peeves.

This one is about restaurants.

I've been to restaurants in many countries in addition to the United States, but my favorites are in France and Italy, not only for the quality of the food but for the service or, depending on your perspective, the lack of service. But not many Americans probably agree with me.

Here's what I hate about most restaurants in this country.

The waiters and waitresses are always trying to sell you food and beverages. For example, when waiters (sorry I'm going to use male nouns and pronouns) ask you what you want to drink and you say "I'll only have water," they immediately ask, "Are you sure? We also have wine and beer." I know you have wine and beer. What do you think I'm a moron and forgot or couldn't read the menu? Or do you think I'm so stupid that I don't know what I want?

Of course, this happens with the entire meal. If I only order an entree, say the salmon, waiters are not satisfied with that so they have to ask "Don't you want an appetizer? We have some great fried calamari!"

I say, "No thanks," but what I'm saying to myself is, "Idiot, if I wanted to order the fried calamari I would have ordered it. What am I, a child, who needs to be prompted to order?"

Well, of course, many Americans are like children such that they allow waiters to talk them into ordering everything on the menu.

Then, and this never happens in France, the waiter has to interrupt my mediocre meal to ask "Is everything all right"? I say, "Yes, thanks," but what I say to myself is "It was all right until you came up for the fifth time to ask me if everything was all right."

Christ, they just won't leave you alone in American restaurants.

And then when you finally finish your meal and ask for the check, their last stand is to ask whether you want coffee and to see the desert menu. "No," I say to myself, "I just want to get out of here and go home where I can do what I thought I could do here -- relax."

I want a waiter who both waits on me and waits for me. If I need something, I'll call you and ask for it. Just take my order and bring me the damn food, and leave me alone.

Of course, waiters (and restaurants) push food and beverages because they want you to run up a bigger bill. And, frankly, many customers fall for these sales ploys, so why wouldn't they keep selling. Also, the waiter gets a bigger tip. Well here's a tip: leave me alone and be ready at my beck and call and I'll give you a big tip!

In France, you have to send up flares to get the waiter's attention, but I prefer that to an over eager waiter that, like a fly, keeps buzzing around me throughout the whole meal.

Just one of my pet peeves.

Economists Are Experts on Human Behavior?

I've noticed a trend recently: economists are claiming to be experts on human behavior, a realm once restricted mainly to psychologists.

A recent article in the L.A. Times, titled, "UCLA researchers study social forces shaping human behavior during war" finally pushed me to write this.

When I saw this title, I naturally thought the "researchers" would be psychologists or even sociologists. But economists?

What do economists know about human behavior (He asked rhetorically)? Is there really an economist out there anywhere whose predictions about the economy or the economic behavior of human beings are better than chance? And what kind of"research" do these economists do? I can tell you that it's not experimental. In fact, it's based on complex statistical analyses from a variety of different sources that are used to predict the behavior of individuals during war. I'm not suggesting that their "research" doesn't have value, but if we want to understand the behavior of individuals, I submit that we have to study the behavior of individuals in controlled settings.

Christ, economists even get a Nobel prize! For what? Has any economic theory ever accurately predicted or explained human behavior? That is why economists, like social workers, have to go shopping for a discipline with a real research base that they can use to buttress their own theories.

And that discipline is usually psychology. Until recently, that is.

Economists, not having a substantial discipline of their own, have become polygamists, extending their marriage with psychology to include, you guessed it, neuroscience.

The union of these three disciplines is a new discipline called neuroeconomics. According to the website of The Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics at George Mason University, neuroeconomics is "dedicated to the experimental study of how emergent mental computations in the brain interact with the emergent computations of institutions to produce legal, political, and economic order."

What the hell does that mean? How does one study mental computations experimentally? (Are there really computations going on in the brain?) And, is there really a "legal, political and economic order"?

But the issue is much larger than whether economists know anything about human behavior.

The issue is who is in the best position to explain human behavior and by what methods? Nowadays, everyone, it seems, is an expert on human behavior, especially those who aren't experts (e.g., economists, people with MBAs, people with literature degrees, social workers, therapists, and journalists). If you have a Ph.D. in experimental or behavioral psychology beware; everyone knows as much as you do about your subject matter. While no one would ever question a physicist's explanation of, well, physical things, there are many out there who will debate with you your knowledge of and expertise on human behavior.

So, be prepared for more psychologizing from economists and others from business schools at universities, especially when they collaborate with brain imaging researchers.

Let me wrap up by saying emphatically that no amount of knowledge or understanding of the brain mechanisms involved when we are said to make decisions or choices will ultimately explain the decision-making or choice behaviors. That will come only from an understanding of the environmental contingencies that impact directly on the behaviors of interest and that will only come from experimental behavioral psychologists.

Monkeys Are As Smart As College Students Because They Have Better Teachers

You can always tell when scientific meetings such as the AAAS meeting are going on because there are a lot of news stories about, well science.

One of the most recent, again from the National Geographic News, bore the title, "Monkeys Can Subtract, Study Finds."

This story, just as others like it, begs for skeptical thinking.

In the story, we are told that "Rhesus macaques placed in front of touch screens in a Duke University laboratory were able to subtract dots—not by counting them individually but by using a more instantaneous ability researchers call number sense."

The lead researcher, Duke University graduate student Jessica Cantlon, was quoted as saying that the results "suggest that these abilities are part of a primitive system for reasoning about numbers that has been passed down for millions of years of evolutionary time."

An "instantaneous ability" to subtract? A "number sense"? Like the sense of smell, taste, vision? A primitive system for reasoning?

Malarkey!

These ways of talking about the monkeys' behavior are completely circular: What is the evidence for the "number sense," or the "primitive system"? Only the monkeys' behavior. There is no independent evidence for any of these claims.

Not to take anything away from the monkeys, but what is left out of the sloppy and designed-for-PR ways of describing what the monkeys did was a throw-away line in the story about what happened after the monkey made a correct response: "Each correct answer was worth a serving of Kool-Aid." No mention was made of what happened if the monkeys made an incorrect response which they surely did at the beginning of training.

Some will recognize this as operant learning: correct responses produce consequences called "reinforcers," and incorrect responses likely produce either a brief time-out, when the monkey loses the opportunity to respond, or some other withholding of reinforcement (i.e., the Kool-Aid).

Why is it important to describe the training? Simple. Because without the training, the monkeys do not subtract. Why is this point important? Because only if monkeys engage in the kinds of behaviors WITHOUT training can they be said the have a "number sense," or a "primitive system for reasoning."

It is not the monkeys who have done anything worth writing about; it is the training! Thus, monkeys do not have a number sense or ability to "add" or "subtract." What they have, which is what we have, is the ability to learn.

But in the absence of a good learning environment, neither monkeys nor people, will learn. So, the fact that the college students used as controls in the study performed as well as the monkeys' means only that the monkeys had better teachers than the supposedly smarter college students.

This Post (It) Should Be Read, And Other Grammatical Musings

From time to time, I will comment on grammatical errors that bug me. This post is about a couple of errors that have become so common that I find myself making at least one of them.

One problem is that almost everyone nowadays uses both a noun and a pronoun to perform the same function in a sentence, namely that of the subject, for example, saying "My sister she called me today" instead of the more correct, "My sister called me today." I hear this every day by people who should know better, such as news anchors (okay, so maybe they really don't know better), and actors in movies and on television who are reading scripts written by educated writers (okay, so maybe they aren't that educated).

The rule, which can be found as 30c n the book Rules for Writers (6th ed.) by Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers, Tom Jehn, Jane Rosenzweig, Marcy Carbajal Van Horn, is "Do not use both a noun and a pronoun to perform the same grammatical function in a sentence" (p. 255).

Now that you're aware of it, try to listen for this mistake.

Another grammatical error that I notice is when people (again, news anchors are common grammatical criminals) screw up the subject verb agreement with singular and plural, for example, saying "There's a lot of cars" instead of "There are a lot of cars." Maybe people wouldn't make this mistake as much if they didn't make a contraction of "there" and "is," but then again, maybe they would. Or, maybe it's just easier to say "There's" than to say "There are."

Either way, we are slowly becoming a country of illiterates.

More Stupid Psychology

Unfortunately, the science magazines (e.g., Scientific American, National Geographic), like the rest of the culture, have been bamboozled by psychology into taking psychological research seriously.

Take the most recent ridiculousness, an article in the National Geographic News titled, "Bikinis Make Men See Women as Objects, Scans Confirm," which reported on a study by psychologists at prestigious Princeton University and presented at the equally prestigious annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In the study the researchers performed brain scans of men while they saw pictures of scantily clad women. Apparently the region of the brain associated with tool use lit up confirming for the researchers the stereotype that we men view women as objects. And a really "shocking" finding was the activation of brain regions associated with inferring another person's intentions, suggesting to the lead researcher, Susan Fiske, that "This means that these men see women "as sexually inviting, but they are not thinking about their minds," Fiske said."

Is she kidding? Okay men, be honest, which of you looks at skimpily clad women and thinks, "I wonder what college she went to"?

Did these "researchers" look at other parts of the brain, such as the part of the hypothalamus that mediates sexual arousal, or perhaps measure sympathetic nervous system activation? Oh, and did I mention that, at least according to the article, the photographs of the scantily clad women were headless? Assuming any validity to the findings (a big assumption), aren't we more likely to view a headless person more as an object?

And the ridiculousness doesn't end there, because apparently some of Dr. Fiske's male colleagues at prestigious Princeton suggested performing a similar study with women because according to a reverse stereotype, women look for men who have wealth and power. Aha, so women see us men as objects too!

Of course, this analysis smacks of evolutionary psychology, which, if you need to be reminded, is just a rehash of sociobiology in a slightly more appealing package. But if they want to play the evolutionary psychology game, then, yeah, I look at sexy women as objects with whom I want to have sex. What healthy male doesn't? If we didn't, and were only interested in their minds, then perhaps we wouldn't have succeeded much as a species.

So, let women look for men to mate with who have power, and let us men look for sexually attractive females, and maybe we'll all be happy and successful.

By the way, this study is just one example of why psychology has contributed very little to either our understanding of human behavior or to our ability to change it.

Doctors Aren't the Only Doctors, And Other Ruminations on Using Names

I have a Ph.D., but when I go to my physician's office, everyone, from the receptionist to the nurse to the physician himself calls me by my first name. Okay, so they don't know that I'm also called "doctor." But what really riles me is that when I introduce myself as "Doctor . . . ," or when I call and identify myself as "Doctor . . . ," they still call me by my first name.

Another thing that gets my goat is how every one in the physican's office calls all patients by their first name, even patients who are in the 70s or 80s. Now, I'm probably old fashioned in this regard, but I believe that everyone older than about 20 or so should be called "Mr.," "Mrs.," "Ms.," or "Dr." (if that person has any kind of doctorate degree).

And the same goes for my bank, credit card company, local newspaper, etc., or anyone who calls me and isnt' a friend of mind. Show some respect.

The only exceptions are when someone tells you that you can call them by their first name.

But back to you medical doctors out there. My degree says the same thing yours does: Doctor. Just because we generically call physicians "doctor," doesn't mean you are the only doctors. So, get over your ego trip. I went to school for as many years as you did and as a university professor, I think I do as much good, maybe even saving some lives (metaphorically), as you do.

So, unless you want me to call you by your first name, call me "Doctor" okay?

Fourteen is Thirteen Too Many

Almost everyone else in country has weighed in on Nadya Suleman, the Whittier California woman with six children who recently gave birth to eight more after in vitro fertilization, so why not The Sheriff?

But I cannot equal Tim Rutten's recent column in the L.A. Times on February 11, "The excesses of Nadya Suleman," in which Rutten refers to "the grotesque story of Nadya Suleman, the sad and disturbing serial mom whose apparent addiction to childbirth recently resulted in the delivery of octuplets."

But my two cents are that not only should we require any one who wants to have a child to apply for a license that the state only issues when the parents-to-be have taken prenatal care and child rearing classes and demonstrated mastery of the knowledge, BUT we should definitely regulate the fertility industry and require strict oversight not only of the parents-to-be, but of the physicians as well.

The medical board should strip the physician who oversaw Suleman's fertilization of his privileges to practice medicine. And we should consider adopting a version of China's law that would limit people like Nadya Suleman to only one child, if any.

I'm Sorry

Have you noticed how celebrities fuck up big time and then think they can erase the damage they've done by saying "I'm sorry"? Remember Mel Gibson's apology to the Jewish community after his drunken anti-semitic tirade? Hey, Mel, you're probably an anti-semite and have a substance-abuse problem. Or how about Ted Haggard apologizing twice for having sex with another man. Hey, Ted, you're Gay and maybe have a substance-abuse problem. Just admit it and stop saying you're sorry. Or Don Imus apologizing for his racial slur about the Rutger's University women's basketball team. Or Michael Richards hurling racial epithets at a Hollywood comedy club and then claiming he's not a racist. (See a list of the top ten according to Time Magazine.) You're both racists; we all are; but most of us keep it under wraps.

The two latest are Christian Bale and Michael Phelps.

In the case of Christian Bale, he went off on a profanity-laced rant last year against an assistant director on the set of Terminator: Salvation, who apparently entered Bale's line of sight while checking a light.

Now, I'm not judging Bale's behavior, but he apparently thinks he can make it all right by simply saying, "I'm sorry."

The case of Michael Phelps pisses me off more. Phelps was photographed smoking dope from a bong at a party. When the photo surfaced and he was chastised by the media and was threatened with the loss of some high-paying sponsors, he apologized. But why?

Phelps is a 23-year-old (kid) who smokes pot. Well, here's a news flash: A lot of 23-year-olds smoke pot. Get over it. But some are saying that Phelps is a role model. For what? And who conferred that status on him? Okay, so he won a record eight gold medals at the Olympics. If that makes him a role model, it should only be for working hard.

So I say to Michael, "Don't apologize. Tell everyone to mind their own business and to get a life and start worrying about the decline of Western Civilization and the human species instead of whether you smoke pot."

It is, I think, fitting that I inaugurate my blog with a tribute to Charles Darwin on this the anniversary of his 200th birthday.

First, I reprint an editorial from the L.A. Times on Thursday, February 12th.

Evolution survives
Opposition to evolution has taken various forms over the years, but each attack has been unreasonable. Schools must continue to fight attempts to undermine it.

February 12, 2009

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, an occasion that ought to be cause for universal celebration. Not only was Darwin's theory of evolution a scientific epiphany, millions of people owe their lives and their health to research that is predicated on Darwin's insight that human beings share a common ancestor with other species. But there is a malodorous skunk at this garden party: a movement rooted in American-style biblical fundamentalism that seeks to discredit Darwinism and undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Like species in the Darwinian account, the opposition to evolution has mutated over the years. The initial strategy was to ban the teaching of evolution outright, as Tennessee did in 1925 (provoking the Scopes "monkey trial") and Arkansas did in 1928. It wasn't until 40 years later that the Supreme Court invalidated Arkansas' law. That should have been the last word, but opponents of evolution have ingeniously recast their crusade, from "creationism," with explicit invocation of the Book of Genesis, to "creation science" to "intelligent design." For good measure, they have couched their arguments in terms of academic freedom.

Fortunately, the courts have seen through these subterfuges. But the fact that they had to intervene at all is a reminder that opposition to evolution persists in the face of overwhelming evidence. In a debate during the 2008 Republican presidential primary, three of the 10 candidates raised their hands when the moderator asked who didn't believe in evolution. Two-thirds of the respondents in a 2007 USA Today/Gallup poll said that it is definitely or probably true that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

Explanations for this attitude abound: biblical literalism, uneasiness with Darwin's theory of natural selection, the mistaken belief that a scientific "theory" is just a guess, and a failure to distinguish between minor revisions of Darwin's theory and fundamental objections to it. The overriding reality may be that many Christians don't realize many of their coreligionists see no conflict between evolution and belief in God. In 1996, Pope John Paul II declared that evolution was "more than just a hypothesis." Francis Collins, who retired last year after 15 years as head of the Human Genome Project, an enterprise that presumes the truth of evolution, is a Christian.

However ingenious the arguments, opposition to evolution is literally unreasonable. Schools must stand firm against attempts to introduce theology into science classrooms -- not out of veneration for Charles Darwin, but because students deserve to be told the truth.
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I have to comment on a recent Gallup Poll that shows that "only 39% of Americans say they 'believe in the theory of evolution,' while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don't have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity."

So, we Americans are getting stupider than we were, which is no small accomplishment. But I don't blame the stupid people who don't believe in evolution (not that it's something one chooses to believe in, like Santa Claus), or even know what the hell it is, much less the primary mechanism by which it has proceeded -- natural selection. No, I blame an educational system that fails to teach our children not only the basic facts of science, but is unable to even teach them to read and write.

So, although as the L. A. Times noted, we should be universally celebrating the birthday of Charles Darwin. Instead, it is being celebrated only by scientists and a relative handful of others. We are our own worst enemies.

Darwin's 200th Birthday

It is, I think, fitting that I inaugurate my blog with a tribute to Charles Darwin on this the anniversary of his 200th birthday. Unfortunately, I have to comment on a recent Gallup Poll that shows that "only 39% of Americans say they 'believe in the theory of evolution,' while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don't have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity."

So, we Americans are getting stupider than we were, which is no small accomplishment. But I don't blame the stupid people who don't believe in evolution, or even know what the hell it is, much less the primary mechanism by which it has proceeded -- natural selection. No, I blame an educational system that rather than