We’ve known for a few years that chicks can gauge the quality of guys by watching them dance. The cats whose moves we dig tend to, in later analysis, have more symmetrical bodies, higher testosterone, and blah blah blah. But what, exactly, are we females noticing in those moves?

I mean, it would be good to know, right, gents? If dance is an “honest signal” of your excellent genes, you should make the most of your signaling potential.

So this fun lab of researchers (they also do nutritional psychiatry, which I find fascinating) tried to discover what we’re looking for in dance moves.

It’s the abs. The core. The strength you don’t get from sitting in an office.

They determined this by the movements that correlated with women’s great approval. The three key moves — WE’RE DISCUSSING YOUR GENETIC FUTURE HERE, YOUNG MEN — are:

Vertical motions of the head. Not repetitious head-banging, because repetitive moves proved BORING. But moving the head up and down in various planes. Do it now. Feel all the muscles involved? The trapezius runs clear from your neck to your mid-back, for pete’s sake. Work it!

Vertical motions of the trunk. Again, not doing repetitive “air crunches” with your abs, but more like working out your entire core and lats and the obliques and all the little muscles that hold a trunk erect. In all the planes. It takes strength and control to move your core around, and strength and control indicate that you’re healthy and high quality. Sit up straight right now. It’s work! Work it!

Vertical motions of the right knee! Why the right, I cannot imagine. Post your theory below. But again, gravity is a constant challenge to the body of an animal, and if you have the strength and endurance to fight it long and well, you probably have some genetic goodies a female would want for her kid. And to belabor the point, repetition can indicate two things: lack of creativity; and lack of a more general strength.

Now obviously even a male who can’t dance will still occasionally get lucky. Where I grew up, there were only two tribal dances. One I call the Boothbay Shuffle: Shift your right foot to the right, without really picking it up. Slouch the left foot over to meet it. Then reverse. Allow arms to dangle from rounded shoulders.

The other dance had no name but it involved girls whipping each other around with primitive swing-dance moves until someone fell down or dislocated a shoulder.

And many of us reproduced, regardless. There is hope for even the least groovy among us.

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It’s an elegant illustration of genes and environment colliding: Your genes determine whether you’re likely to ask for help in times of trouble. But even the neediest genes can be silenced by a Korean environment.

Scientists first looked at different variations of an oxytocin gene. Oxytocin is the bondy chemical that promotes trust in humans and other animals. We can give ourselves a jolt of warm, oxytocin feelings by touching another human. But some people’s oxytocin system is more active than others. Some people are quicker to seek support when they’re stressed. Others are inclined to tough it out alone.

So, the researchers did discover that different versions of the gene — (OXTR) rs5376, for those playing along at home — did help to predict which people would reach out and which wouldn’t.

Then they tested the gene-behavior link in two differing cultures. And while Americans are able to act on their genetic impulses, Koreans are not so much. The Korean culture, which places a higher value on self-containment, simply doesn’t make room for the same degree of expressiveness.

So the gene variants are present and accounted for, but the behavior they promote is discouraged. The gene-behavior link disappears.

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In just eight years, death-by-painkillers has TRIPLED. Tripled. Exploded. Rocketed from 4,000 in 1999 to 14,500 in 2007. Holy poppyjuice, that’s a lot of dead people!

The category in question is the opioid drugs  stuff like vicodin, methadone, codeine, and oxycodone (aka Oxycontin, Oxy, hillbilly heroin). These are processed extracts of our old friend the opium poppy.

The opioids are tremendous painkillers, but also tremendously attractive to those seeking a euphoric sabbatical from reality. They also tend to be WICKED addictive. And vicodin (hydrocodone, to be generic about it) is THE MOST PRESCRIBED DRUG IN AMERICA TODAY.

No wonder it’s killing us. It’s ubiquitous in the American medicine cabinet. And from what I hear, that’s the first place young drug users look for a score these days.

Anyway, poisoning from “all other drugs” used to rule the morgue.  But in 2005, the opioids crossed over, and became number one in deadliness.

So… just say no. Docs dole out vicodin/hydrocodone for all manner of serious pain. Don’t fill a script until you really  need it. Then, after you don’t need it any more, crush the pills with coffee grounds or something distasteful. Put it in the compost or garbage.

PLEASE don’t flush it down that toilet. Although that’s what the pros do with expired opioids at nursing homes and the like, it’s quite unkind to the fishes.

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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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