Month: October 2009

evolution of sex and gender differences in communication

Sex is not socially constructed through human discourse.  Almost all the plant and animals that you see reproduce sexually.  Humans have reproduced sexually from the time of the very first humans.  Fossils indicate that life forms have reproduced sexually for at least 1.2 billion years.[*]

Sex is a key variable in Darwinian evolution.  Biological and behavioral factors important for reproductive success differ by sex.  The social environment differs by sex for most primates.  Human social roles and everyday tasks have differed by sex throughout recorded human history.

Sex differences in human communication should be expected.  Human communication is a central aspect of human life.  The same force that creates life creates sex differences.

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[*] On the earliest fossil evidence of sexual reproducing organisms, see Butterfield, Nicholas J., “Bangiomorpha pubescens n. gen., n. sp.: implications for the evolution of sex, multicellularity, and the Mesoproterozoic/Neoproterozoic radiation of eukaryotes,” Paleobiology, Vol. 26, No. 3. (1 September 2000), pp. 386-404. For comparison, archaic homo sapiens are thought to have evolved between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago.  Thus sex has orders of magnitude greater evolutionary depth than does other common human characterizations such as black, tall, short, brown-eyed, blond, brunette, etc.

evolutionary roots of friending

Non-human animals can have quite complex social relationships.  Consider, for example, greylag geese.  They live in flocks.  Within a flock, the geese recognize closely related birds (kin) long past the period of necessary care for dependent offspring. In addition, the geese form long-term, opposite-sex, reproductive pair-bonds.  The geese identify close genetic relations (kin) with a much more genetically distant other (the reproductive partner) as a behavioral category of affiliated flock members.  Among affiliated flock members, almost no aggression occurs. Among non-affiliated flock members, aggression is frequent.[1]

The geese have sensitive physiological responses to social events. Aggressive  interactions or geese taking off or landing (social events) occur more frequently and predictably than vehicles passing by or loud noises (non-social events). A goose’s heart rate, however, increases significantly more when it observes the social events than when it observes the non-social events.  Moreover, a goose’s heart rate increases significantly more when it observes an aggressive interaction involving an affiliated goose than when it observes an aggressive interaction involving unaffiliated geese. Geese are thus emotionally sensitive to the occurrence of and participants in social events that do not directly involve them.[2]

Wild baboons also have complex social relationships. Like at least some ancient human populations, female baboons remain in their natal group and male baboons disperse. Adult male baboons within a group  form a dominance hierarchy with high mating skew.  Events closely associated with male baboons’ reproductive fitness (changes in the male dominance hierarchy and sexual consorting) produce a physiological indicator of stress.  A male’s position in the male dominance hierarchy is correlated with his level of stress.[3]

Compared to males, female baboons’ sources of stress are more closely associated with social relations.  While females form dominance hierarchies, females have much less mating skew than do males, and a female’s position in the female dominance hierarchy is not correlated with her level of stress.  Females also are more active in forming and maintaining social relations.  Consistent with that social orientation, females seem to use grooming to reduce stress.  Although a female may groom at some time with all other females in her group, females typically groom mainly with a few predictable partners.  Those partners often are close female kin.  Females with greater dispersion in their grooming partner-time have higher stress.  If one of a female’s primary grooming partners dies, she suffers stress and increases her dispersion in grooming partners.  That’s reasonably interpreted as behavior oriented toward finding a suitable, new primary grooming partner.[4]

Language and complex cognition aren’t necessary for complex social relations.  Social relations among non-human animals are similar in important respects to those of humans.  If you want to understand Facebook better, study geese and baboons.

chacma-baboons

Notes:

[1] Claudia A. F. Wascher, , Isabella B. R. Scheiber and Kurt Kotrschal, “Heart rate modulation in bystanding geese watching social and non-social events,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2008, 275, 1653-1659 (doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.0146).  Young greylag geese remain with their parents for one year or more after fledging.

[2] Id.  Information on the geese’s heart rates were transmitted from fully implanted radio transmitters.

[3] The ancient Hebrews apparently had a system of  female philopatry and male dispersal.  See Genesis 2:24.  On male baboons, see T. J. Bergman, J. C. Beehner, D. L. Cheney, R. M. Seyfarth and P. L. Whitten, “Correlates of stress in free-ranging male chacma baboons, Papio hamadryas ursinus,” Animal Behaviour, 2005, 70, 703–713 (doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2004.12.017).  The physiological indicator of stress is elevated glucocorticoid level.  All subsequent references to increased stress are based on this indicator.  The direction of correlation between male rank and stress level depends on specific social circumstances.

[4] Catherine Crockford, Roman M. Wittig, Patricia L. Whitten, Robert M. Seyfarth, Dorothy L. Cheney, “Social stressors and coping mechanisms in wild female baboons (Papio hamadryas ursinus),” Hormones and Behavior, 2008, 53, 254–265.

supporting family farms is easy

Here’s an important aspect of U.S. communications policy:

The high-cost support mechanisms enable areas with very high costs to recover some of these costs from the federal universal service fund, leaving a smaller remainder of the costs to be recovered through end-user rates or state universal service support mechanisms….The high-cost support mechanisms include embedded high-cost loop support (HCLS), safety net additive support, safety valve support, forward-looking non-rural high-cost model support (HCMS), interstate common line support (ICLS) for rate-of-return carriers, interstate access support (IAS) for price-cap carriers, and local switching support (LSS) for carriers that serve 50,000 or fewer access lines.

U.S. communications policy is somewhat like U.S. agricultural policy.  Agricultural policy, however, has many advantages relative to communications policy:

  1. At every geographic scale, the agricultural sector has much more competition among corporate producers than does the communications sector.
  2. Food can be imported, while local communications facilities can’t.
  3. Food markets across the world provide good, simple benchmarks for the economic performance of local producers.  In contrast, communications markets are difficult to compare.
  4. The political economy of agricultural policy favors special interests less than does the political economy of communications policy.  Subsidies (support) for agricultural producers come from general tax revenue and tax policies established through the normal political process.  Subsidies (support) for communications producers come from communications-sector-specific taxes (contributions) established through an industry-specific process.
  5. The agricultural sector has much less economy-wide importance than the communications sector.
  6. The agricultural sector is much less important to future economic growth and job creation than is the communications sector.
  7. While both farming and communications have strong ideological support, in reality agrarianism and the family farmer historically have been more important to sector-specific agricultural policy than freedom of the press and family communications have been to sector-specific communications policy.
  8. The number of family farmers seeking government subsidies is now fewer than the number of high-cost communications companies seeking subsidies.
  9. The agricultural sector can always blame the weather.  The communications sector can’t.

Pity civil servants who work on communications policy!

new media?

Sacred to Commonweal was this net design’d
To pierce the heart and humanize the mind.
But if a hitless Blog, the Blogger’s curse,
Shows us our Thoughts and Reasons lose their force
Unwilling we must change the nobler scene,
And in our turn present you Celeb-queens;
Quit Poets, and set Journalists to work,
Show gaudy scenes, or mount the starring Buck:
For, though we Bloggers, one and all, agree
Boldly to struggle for our — vanity,
If want comes on, importance must retreat;
Our first, great, ruling passion, is — to eat.