HUMAN. NATURE.

Got a kid with anger issues? What to do, what to do? Step one: Look in the mirror. You won’t see your DNA in there, but you might remember that you, too, have a bit of a temper.

Social aggression arises from a combination of low self-control, and low people-pleasing, or agreeability. Both are normal components of human personality. The combination makes for a person with a short-term orientation, versus a long-haul planner. This person will pursue his own path even if the majority is going the other way. It’s a useful type to have in society. And it’s inheritable.

I learned, while researching QUIRK, that personality is just about half genetic. The other force shaping your personality is how your genes interact with your environment  — parents, friends, various traumas and triumphs.

This particular study focused on five specific behaviors: verbal aggression; indirect aggression (like gossip); fighting; assault; and tantrums.

And, yup: half genetic.

The good news: All of us gain more control over our behavior as we age. The frontal lobes, which apply the brake on impulsive behavior, gets stronger.

A person with low agreeability will never become a people-pleaser. But that frontal lobe will learn to temper self-oriented behavior for the best results.

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You might think that’s redundant, that if a person is autistic everybody already knows about it. Not so. Autism has been a laundry basket into which psychologists toss certain behaviors. It has never never enjoyed a strict, standardized description.

This is a problem with many psychological conditions. For instance, how do you decide who has ADHD? The attentional part of that difforder is easy to measure with science, actually. There are tests. And the impulsivity is easy to measure. But how do you define who is “hyperactive”? The current test is: Ask a bunch of people, “Hey, is that kid hyperactive?”

That’s not so sciency. And again, a billion difforders are diagnosed in this not-so-exact way. Even major depression is a multiple choice diagnosis: If you answer yes to four of the seven qualifying questions, you’re depressed.

You can see how that might result in some not-so-exact treatment. If you and I answer yes to different depression question, why would we expect the same drug or therapist to work equally for us?

So I’m quite pleased that an MRI machine can now say who has autism. With just five measurements of brain regions, it’s 90% accurate.

I’m no fan of MRI Mania, but in this case a quick diagnosis can make a big difference. Knowing a child has an autistic brain can save that child years of frustration and misguided treatment, and can hasten the start of teaching him to compensate for his differences.

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Oh, it’s not just me! This insanely hot summer has had a very real effect on my domestic productivity. I think I quit vacuuming for a whole month. Now magnify that by an entire nation of hot people. The Gross Domestic Product tanks. Climate change brings a slower rate of work.

We in the temperate north tend to giggle about the pace of life in hot regions. “They’re on Caribbean time! Ha ha ha!” The fact is if they lived faster they’d and heat up faster and wear out quicker.

Why should humans be any exception to the natural rule, the rule where on a hot day animals pant harder and walk slower? Cooling a body is both time consuming and mandatory.

The study that caught my attention looked at the national output of a bunch of Caribbean-basin countries, and watched how that went up and down with the average temperature. A LOT. A FRIGGING TON. ENTIRE NATIONS QUIT VACUUMING WHEN THE TEMPERATURE RISES JUST A TINY BIT!

The effect is probably much stronger in poor, hot countries. Air conditioning is less common, and manual labor is more common. Both conditions — physical labor and a hot work environment — raise a human’s temperature. A sensible human will slow down so as to avoid baking his delicate brain. And when your nation’s GDP rests heavily on physical labor, that slowdown is going to affect the bottom line.

So, ahem, about that climate change…

That’s his point. When deciding where to spend our climate-change dollar, we’d like to know where the bargains are. So here’s a climate-change cost we hadn’t even thought about: The whole working world is going to slow down. Kind of a lot.

Fascinating. The author of the study has written a “simplified” version of the study for the public, which is a tremendous service. I love that kind of scientist. It’s still complex. But it shows that he cares about reaching as many people as possible. He cares about his work.

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I used to think I was the world’s worst reporter, because I was too shy to ask questions. Slowly it dawned on me that when I was supposed to be extracting words from people I was really busy gathering a different kind of information. A recent study has found that this is a common feature of shy kids: They have a better grasp on other people’s motivations.

In this study researchers identified kids who, at age three, were:

Non-aggressive
Shy
Withdrawn in social situations

Socially perceptive

And two years later they tested the kids’ sophistication at reading other people’s minds — theory of mind.

“Theory of mind” is your understanding that others have a mind like yours, with similar emotions and motivations. Most animals don’t have it, and it develops quite slowly in humans. Babies start to glimpse it with pointing — they know that if they point, you might shift your attention to the same thing that interests them. At two or three, kids can discriminate between another person’s accidental and intentional acts — what the other person meant to do. And so on.

Some people never get particularly excellent at seeing the world from another’s perspective; others are awesome at it.

Those awesome ones would be the shy kids. The watchers. The ones who may not get your attention, but BELIEVE ME YOU HAVE OURS! EVEN WHEN YOU DON’T WANT IT! WE’RE STUDYING YOU!

It’s the stealth approach to maneuvering in a dangerous social world. Extraverts just stride into the room and begin hammering people with questions. They don’t care about the subtext and the hidden agenda. They’re low on fear, high on aggression, and they take their chances. The shy kids slip into the room and find a corner. They don’t come out until they understand who’s who, and what’s what.

Both strategies work, or they would not have survived the evolutionary test.

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Chimps and bonobos are practically the same species of ape. But their behavior is so different that, depending on the IQ test you give them, either one can look like a genius — or a dummy.

Chimps are the more pragmatic of the two. They use tools as a matter of routine. Although they’re social animals compared to, say, tigers, they squabble a lot, and kill each other as a matter of routine.

Bonobos are the more social of the two. They rarely use tools. They are among the most affectionate creatures on the planet.

When researchers presented both apes with a battery of intelligence tests, their behavior — their biology — echoed clearly in the results.

Chimpanzees excelled at solving problems on their own. They could analyze a situation and imagine the steps necessary to solve it. They could choose an appropriate tool. Bonobos looked kind of stupid in this category of intelligence.

But in tests where an ape had to learn a skill by watching another ape perform it, bonobos cleaned house. They also excelled at “theory of the mind” tasks. Theory of the mind is how I, by knowing my own mind, can watch you confront a problem and guess how you’re feeling in your own mind. It’s mind-reading, in a sense.

Bonobos can read minds with ease. Chimps… don’t care as much. They can get along without worrying so much about everyone else.

Different life challenges produce different kinds of intelligence.

It’s been said that humans fall in between the two species, behaviorally. We’re practical and tooly, but we also have a strong social drive. What I see in our species is that different individuals fall all along the spectrum. And in that diversity is our strength.

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The whole point of defining your territory is that it saves you from fighting the same fight every day. You mark the boundary with a fence or a door, then you leave your neighbor alone and he leaves you alone. But does it really save on fighting?

For many animals, it does. It’s so common that it’s called the “Dear-Enemy Effect.” This study looked at how a bird knows which enemies are dear, when all its enemies are out of sight.

Skylarks mark their territory not with fences and doors, but with yelling. We call the yelling a “song,” but it’s more like an all-day rant: Mine! Mine-mine-mine-mine! Alllllllllll mine! And this is mine tooooooo!

When one male hears another male ranting, he tends to reply: Oh, yeah? Well THIS is mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!

But if the males never meet, how do they know when it’s safe to toss off a half-hearted reply: Yeah, I hear you, buddy.

What if they say that to the wrong guy — not a neighbor — and that guy interprets the reply as: I‘m a total wuss. Come kick my butt.

They go by the accents. Like humans, the birds pay attention to phrases and syllables in each other’s ranting. If a rant has enough elements of the local lingo, you’re probably safe with a lame reply.
But if a rant sounds too foreign, too strange, you’d better give it your best.

Humans, who also defend individual territories, do much the same thing. Those who speak like us get a pass. But if you challenge my territory AND you talk funny, we’re going to have a problem.

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If you’re a male in a conquered society, your genetic future is not looking bright. That’s the message from a new study of how mating proceeded after the European invasion of Columbia. The native women reproduced. The native men…

Going back a few centuries, the human female was pretty much guaranteed to reproduce. If she was seeking a sperm donor, there were always willing participants. And if she wasn’t, her smaller size meant forced mating was likely. So your average female reproduced.

Your average male had to try a little harder. Females are picky, for one thing. They invest heavily in each offspring, and don’t want to spend three or four years on a low-quality kid. Secondly, even if a sub-standard male could attract or capture a female, he might still have to battle other males for access to her uterus.

This study surveyed the genes of 1,700 modern Columbians to see who had mated with whom since the Big Invasion. The researchers didn’t look at the entire genome, but focused on known markers, some of which are handed down only by females, others only by males.

“There is a pattern across regions indicative of admixture involving predominantly Native American women and European and African men.” That’s the conclusion. By choice or by force, conquered females mated with the victorious invaders. The conquered males were benched.

We kind of know about this dynamic from ancient history: Greeks invade a city, kill or enslave the men, and divide up the women among themselves. More recently, DNA analysis indicated that Genghis Khan took control not just of Asia, but also of a staggering percentage of Asia’s uteruses. And chimpanzees have been documented doing the same thing: killing off the neighboring males, but welcoming the uteruses to the fold.

It all stands to biological reason. Invading and conquering are good fun, but what’s the point of winning new territory if you can’t fill it with your own DNA?

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He was born a poor Black child … Nah. He singlehandedly took down the worst herbicide on earth… Nah. He’s quite possibly off his nut… Not quite right. He’s a killer scientists but he also has a wicked mouth on him.

I tuned into the Tyrone Hayes Channel about ten years ago when he published research on how the popular weed-killer, atrazine, messes up the gonads of frogs. He exposed larval frogs to levels of the chemical that you might find in your back yard — particularly if there was a corn field in the vicinity. Egad! The male frogs matured with feminized genitals!

Oh, and the guy was Black. Never seen one before, frankly, a Black biologist. The species in North America is typically pale, shod in Birkenstocks, and coiffed by whoever was holding the sharpest dissection scalpel when necessity struck. Generally the critter’s communication repertoire is limited, as well.

Tyrone Hayes’ communication repertoire is unlimited. He raps in his scientific presentations, apparently. But he also has produced a massive body of work in the form of vituperative, outlandish, bedazzling, grotesque e.mails to some of the folks who represent atrazine.

It’s totally and howlingly unprofessional, this body of work, which atrazine maker Syngenta thoughtfully archived. It’s delightfully uninhibited by academic protocol. It’s frequently influenced by Tupac and DMX. And it’s alive. It’s a thudding pulse in the silent halls of academia.

That the guy is still employed by UC Berkeley is a heart-warming reminder that some educational institutions still offer safe harbor to people who don’t act normal.

Because somewhere along the line, it became uncool to care about what you’re researching. Getting emotionally involved with your subject turned into a bad thing. The normal thing became a dispassionate distance, and a cold analytical perspective. I recently had a biologist flip his shiz on me because I wrote about his emotional attachment to his mouse subjects. I thought it was touching and real. He thought it was professional suicide.

Tyrone Hayes is not normal. He may be offensive, egomaniacal, tremendously intelligent, a snappy dresser, a loudmouth and a braggart, a principled man with no patience, or even crazy as a shithouse rat. But he is DEFINITELY not normal. (I said he “may” be those things. Please don’t sue me, Dr. Hayes. Feel free to e.mail me, though — I’d kind of like that.)

And what has this abnormal behavior done for the world? Atrazine, dumped by the ton on American crops, and some lawns as well, is banned in the European Union. A bunch of water districts in the U.S. are suing Syngenta for the cost of removing atrazine pollution from drinking water. And frogs worldwide are gaining some clarity about their feelings of sexual confusion.

The abnormal passion of Tyrone Hayes has made a difference.

Nutshell: Do not use chemicals on your lawn. Convert to a Freedom Lawn at once. And support organic farms.

Other nutshell: Extremists can be embarrassing, entertaining, and frustrating. But we couldn’t live without them. Nor could the frogs.

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Every high school student learns about the annual flooding of the Nile. Every summer the thing swelled up and covered the land. When it shrank back to size, farmers found a fresh layer of fertile earth on their fields. Yay! Well, the same thing happens in the Indus River of Pakistan. But… boooo!

It’s the monsoon that brings this annual flooding. Well, backing up a bit, it’s actually the way the Earth tilts its northern hemisphere toward the Sun in the summer. The land heats up. And heats up. And heats up more. By June, much of Asia is baking.

The hot ground heats the air. Hot air… rises! What happens down by the ground when that air rises? The air next door is sucked in.

In summer, in India and Pakistan, that air next door is soggy, drenching, saturated Indian Ocean air. The hot land pulls in this sodden air in off the ocean from June to September. Then the earth cools off and the energy goes out of the system. Things dry out. It’s planting time.

So the Indus, which is Pakistan’s major river, floods every year. Everybody gets a little damp and inconvenienced. Just like in Bangladesh. And Mumbai. That’s life in monsoonland. The reason so many people live in flood plains is that the fertility is worth the hassle.

What’s different this year is that it’s Pakistan’s year to get hammered with extra rain. In 2005 it was Mumbai’s turn. That year the city got a meter of rain in 24 hours. Every year seems to be Bangladesh’s turn.

So anyway, the monsoon is dumping on Pakistan this year. Farmers whose land hasn’t flooded in 80 years are suddenly getting inundated. As always happens when monsoons dump on heavily populated areas, people are dying, starving, losing the shirts off their backs and the horses in their paddocks and the crops in their fields. It’s a totally muddy calamity.

For thousands of years, since the human animal began farming — like, invented farming — on the banks of the Indus, this has been happening. And in those thousands of years, many humans have died, starved, lost everything.

That’s how I pacify myself — I biologize. It helps me that if you look closely in some pictures, what you see is teenage boys grinning and fooling around in the flooded streets. When Nature opens a can of whupass, someone always suffers, and someone else always gets out of school for a week!

Is climate change a factor in this year’s flooding? Probably. Going back to that hot air that rises off Pakistan’s flood plain, sucking in the wet ocean air: Heat is the fuel that drives the seasonal cycles. The more heat you put into that system, the stronger the engine will be. Our CO2-enriched atmosphere holds more heat these days, which keeps the land warmer all year around.

But meteorologists are still debating the origin of the raindrops that added up to this particular flood. Some say the monsoon went really far north; others say the jet stream went really far south.

And of course many say Allah is pissed. If he wasn’t before, I bet he is now.

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They’ll kill you! Just with their criticism and dissatisfaction, they’ll gnaw at your heart and your brain. For a healthier cardiovascular system and a balanced brain, stick with the people who don’t stress you out.

It may seem obvious, if you come from a family where people are nice to each other: Spending time with people who treat you poorly is numb. Who would do that?

Well, lots of people whose family of origin was not sweetness and light would do that, because it seems completely normal to be forever on guard against attacks.

And lots of other people are forced into toxic relationships by their work. And millions upon millions of people have teenage children.

So most of us know what it’s like to get the stink-eye, or find out we’re not invited to the birthday party, or to hear The Kid refer to one’s beloved 1999 Toyota Corolla as a “loser cruiser.” Just for example.

The point of this study is: Minimize that.

The scientists measured stress chemicals in people who were watching scenes of social rejection. And yes, even watching those scenes was enough to raise a person’s stress chemicals. And stress chemicals are known to cause inflammation — the Big I. Inflammation of pretty much anything in your body is BAD. (Yes, PG, there are exceptions.) Heart disease, depression, even cancer are being tagged back to our stress and inflammation levels.

Nutshell: Social injuries cause physical injuries. Avoid them.

OH! CATERPILLAR UPDATE!  The ‘Pillar of the Community is ENORMOUS. Nearly the size of my pinky finger. And made ENTIRELY OF PARSLEY. I read that they get restless, and wander around, before they pupate. So I check on him a lot. Don’t want him wandering into trouble.

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