"Quite useful"

New issue of Science has a fascinating profile of the (depressive, hand-waving, enormously influential) evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers [Science 334, 589 (2011)]:

Stories of his reckless and aggressive side abound. He loves to use the words “fuck” and “motherfucker,” calling them quite useful, and he has gotten into public spats with many people over the years. Trivers can be brutally honest and plain rude, as many letters he has written to colleagues over the years testify.[...] Asked whether his discussion of Middle East politics might not turn off some people whom he might otherwise convince of his ideas, he just says, “Well, fuck 'em."

 Trivers has accused Brown, who he says was in charge of the statistics, of preselecting the dancers and changing the values on some of the dancers' measures of symmetry to get that result. Trivers has even written a short book about it that he sends to whoever cites the paper. Brown will only say that Rutgers is investigating the matter, and Nature has no comment.

A potentially useful aphorism:

“Did you know that the enjoyment of sex is actually correlated with sperm count in the ejaculate?” he asks. “So it is true that in old age you appreciate the smaller things more. There are no big things to enjoy anymore.”

According to the profile, "Most biologists spend their lives studying ants, geese, or other animals and then extend their conclusions to humans later in life. Trivers tended to start with humans." The profile in general reminds me of something I've always disliked about the human-and-mammal end of evolutionary biology, which is that people's scientific opinions are really worldviews -- and usually the worldviews that you would expect them to hold given their temperament and background. (Not surprising: as Lewontin remarked in an article -- NYRB? -- I cannot find, if your motives were scientific in the conventional sense you'd probably be studying plants.) Now there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, and you could even argue that the community picks out people whose worldviews happen to be good biology, but at a minimum it tends to blur the line between simplifying-one's-research and mouthing-off-in-general.

"Damaging attention"

The downside of rough sex:

The males of many species demonstrate behaviours that are harmful to females. Some, for example, can physically damage females during courting or mating. Daniel Rankin at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and his team now demonstrate that such sexual conflict can lead to a 'tragedy of the commons'.
Their models suggest that the evolution of male harassment of females during mate competition can lead to a downward spiral of fewer surviving females; these females are themselves less likely to survive because they receive even more damaging attention from males. Conversely, if female resistance to damaging behaviour evolves, making harassment too costly for males, this can prevent a species from dying out.
Am. Nat. 177, 780–791 (2011) 

(In this week's issue of Nature.)

Hanseatische Gummiwerke

As all possible flights out of O'Hare are canceled, I've had to put off the UVA seminar until next week. I must say I'm not entirely displeased at this outcome, seeing as the weather in the midwest is pretty dire right now. We have been subjected to a considerable amount of "wintry mix" -- the sidewalks are all covered in inches of ice-encrusted snow of a strange plasticky consistency -- and I believe it is supposed to get worse tonight.

Meanwhile, an article about German condom manufacturer Julius Fromm, whose enterprise was taken over by the Nazis. (I like that the Berlin Review of Books abbreviates as brb.)

Fromm improved on the manufacturing technique. He used glass moulds, which were mounted on carrier frames and dipped into a vat of rubber solution liquefied with gasoline, benzene and tetrachloromethane. After two dippings, a thin rubber skin formed around the glass moulds and this was then vulcanised in special ovens with sulphur vapours. The condoms were dusted with a lubricant, rolled off the glass moulds and tested by inflation with compressed air, inverted and packaged. Fromms’ condoms were sturdy yet elastic, durable enough to be warehoused and transported for long distances. In fact this technical process of condom manufacturing has remained largely unchanged, with the exception of automation and the replacement of the benzene treatment with a latex process in the 1960s. Using a similar setup, Fromm also made surgical finger cots, rubber gloves, pacifiers and teats for baby bottles – another sound business move given the rising birth rate in Germany.

After the war, Fromm's trademark, at least in West Germany, devolved to the Bremen-based company Hanseatische Gummiwerke, which is a pretty great name.

Alas, the book is unlikely to be of wide interest; the reviewer ruefully notes that "Aly and Sontheimer do not seem to be that interested in condoms."

"And one kitchen blender" -- miscellanea

1. Get away from it all at the Wild Ass Homestay in Tibet. If you're lucky your expenses might be paid by the Ass Meat Research Group. (The comments on the latter post are quite good. See also here for an explanation.)

1'. In Wild Ass comments, Victor Mair mentions that "dashlar/tashlar" are Turkic words for "stone." (This looks like a mix-up, I think he meant to comment on this other -- fascinating but less "neat" -- post.) There is an apparent cognate in Beijing dialect, and Mair speculates on possible Turkic influence... but of course what came first to my mind was the English word "ashlar" for paving stones, which -- although its etymology isn't satisfying -- derives from previous English words for "axle" and such and has nothing to do with Turkic.

2. Slate has an interesting and gross article -- the kind that belongs in a Mary Roach book -- about fecal transplants as a cure for recurrent intestinal diseases that arise when antibiotics kill off almost all the bacteria in your intestines and the surviving (mostly evil) ones proliferate in the resulting bacterial vacuum.

And then there's the do-it-yourself crowd. All you need is a bottle of saline, a 2-quart enema bag, and one standard kitchen blender. Mike Silverman, a University of Toronto physician who wrote up a guide to homespun fecal transplants for the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, says it's entirely safe to do the procedure this way

3. Via Jeremy, a clever article in the latest issue of Science explains how one can make "isotopes of hydrogen" that are substantially heavier than tritium. The idea is to replace one of the electrons in helium-4 with a muon, which is basically similar to an electron but much heavier. The muon, being much heavier, orbits much closer to the nucleus than the electron does (it is more "classical" and has less spread), so the electron effectively sees a nucleus that's got one positive charge but the mass of (say) a helium-4 atom.

4. I have been meaning to post/link to this William Dunbar poem for some time now. If you can read Late Middle Scots or tolerate looking at the glossary, it is a wonderful bit of work... it is also notable, among other things, for being (a) the first OED entry for "fuck" and (b) the only poem that had to be expurgated from library editions of Auden's Book of Light Verse. Though technically in Scots dialect it's mostly in baby-talk and onomatopoeia:

Quod he: "My kid, my capirculyoun,
My bony baib with the ruch brylyoun,
My tendir gyrle, my wallie gowdye,
My tyrlie myrlie, my crowdie mowdie,
Quhone that oure mouthis dois meit at ane,
My stang dois storkyn with your towdie:
Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane."

5. John Quiggin's musings on the Egypt question are somewhat thought-provoking:

The idea that the US can legitimately use its military power to ensure continued access to oil resources rests, in large measure, on the (not entirely unfounded) assumption that those controlling the resources are a bunch of sheikhs and military adventurers who happened to be in the right place, with guns, at the right time. Without the Arab exception, the idea of oil as a special case, not subject to the ordinary assumption that resources are the property of the people in whose country they are found, will also be hard to sustain.

Sir Gawain, possums, hippopotamuses

1. Last night I came up with a new poem project; it's going to be in the Gawain and the Grene Knight form -- which I've always been a fan of -- and will involve possums, the breakup of Gondwanaland, and the Great American Interchange. (A look at the first stanza of Gawain -- the Mod E translation follows the text -- will suggest how these things fit together.) Currently the poem is meant to be a setpiece in the "novel" I'm supposedly writing with Marina Weiss; this bit is titled, for now, "A divagation, concerning possums" (yes there's a dreadful pun in there); but it might not belong in the novel in the end. If the novel ever gets written. And if the poem ever gets written.

1'. The next few weeks are going to be horribly busy; I have to give a seminar at UVA in a week, and finish up two papers by the APS meeting in Dallas in late March. Blogging will (hopefully) be sporadic. Unfortunately I tend to be a self-starting worker; times when I'm getting work done are also times when I just really want to blog and tweet and write and do other stuff, and fallow spells tend to be fallow on all fronts. But we'll see how this goes.

1''. On the topic of Gawain, Michael Berube (via Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog) has posted my favorite passage in the poem. My favorite lines are not the same as his, though.

2. Perhaps relatedly, I was plagued last night by dreams -- "dreams" is perhaps the wrong word -- involving hippopotamuses, their classification, etc.; I seemed to think I'd made some deep connection between the taxonomy and the etymology... Anyway I cleared it all up on Wikipedia just now, I was getting hippos mixed up with rhinoceroses, the point is that rhinoceroses and horses are both odd-toed ungulates (unlike, say, antelope) whereas hippos are even-toed ungulates.

2'. Naturally this post wouldn't be complete without drawing out the "muses" in hippopotamuses, and linking to the three obvious poems: Lewis Carroll's "Mad Gardener's Song," T.S. Eliot's "Hippopotamus" and the neat little four-liner by Hilaire Belloc.

The quills of love; fletchery

The current issue of Nature has this pretty awesome picture of the various kinds of sperm:

Here's what the intricacies are for:

Lukas Schärer at the University of Basel in Switzerland and his colleagues watched 16 species of promiscuous hermaphroditic flatworm (Macrostomum), which have a variety of sperm shapes (pictured), mating under a microscope. After sex, some species suck out the ejaculate, possibly as a way of selecting which sperm are ultimately accepted.

The researchers found that those species that exhibit this sucking behaviour have ornate sperm with features such as a pair of long bristles emerging at the mid-point and a tail resembling a paint brush. These appendages can become lodged in the female orifice after copulation, preventing the sperm from being sucked out. Species that don't remove sperm have evolved simpler sperm that tend to be smaller and lack hairs or bristles.

I seem to remember that certain types of porcupines have barbed quills that are meant to cause additional damage when pulled out, but I can't find a reference for this. Looking this up -- and trying to find the term for arrows/darts that are meant to be hard to pull out -- took me on a ramble through Wikipedia that introduced me to the concept of "fletching" on arrows. Which, strangely enough, appears to be a common-ish variant of the Urbandictionary term "felching." Language prefigures science as it were.