SCIENCE AS HUMANITY'S BEST FRIEND

Today I want to share revelations from just-released scientific studies which have political and cultural implications we might want to consider. All of these are taken from the excellent blog Eureka! Science News.

Fear of getting fat seen in healthy women's brain scans

"A group of women in a new study seemed unlikely to have body image issues – at least their responses on a tried-and-true psychological screening presented no red flags. That assessment changed when Brigham Young University researchers used MRI technology to observe what happened in the brain when people viewed images of complete strangers.
If the stranger happened to be overweight and female, it surprisingly activated in women's brains an area that processes identity and self-reflection. Men did not show signs of any self-reflection in similar situations."

I didn't actually need the confirmation that looking at me causes many women's brains to light up "in ways that suggest extreme unhappiness and in some cases, self-loathing" -- I'd already figured that out -- but do read the study for some interesting details.

(Japanese artist Koshi Kawachi uses old manga collections to plant and grow vegetables)

Why humans believe that better things come to those who wait

'New research reveals a brain circuit that seems to underlie the ability of humans to resist instant gratification and delay reward for months, or even years, in order to earn a better payoff. The study, published by Cell Press in the April 15 issue of the journal Neuron, provides insight into the capacity for "mental time travel," also known as episodic future thought, that enables humans to make choices with high long-term benefits.'
Short version: Maturity as reflected by impulse control and ability to plan for long-term benefit is dependent on the ability to concretely IMAGINE that long-term result. World-views or emotional states which inhibit functional imagination -- such as dependence on authority figures and hierarchies for decision-making instead of individual consideration or operating from a place of fear and avoidance -- will also interrupt rational long-term planning.

Hurts so good: Chronic pain changes brain response to acute pain

"New research reveals why a stimulus that healthy human subjects perceive as a reward might be processed quite differently in the brains of humans suffering from chronic pain." This paper requires a careful read, but what I got from it was that if you live with chronic pain, you are more likely to view a switch to acute pain as a "good thing" because it interrupts the chronic cycle, and perceive the relief of such acute pain, with return to the "regular chronic pain", as a disappointment.

Given how much disability and debilitation of health in this country is linked to chronic pain, going largely untreated by the current for-profit-ONLY health care system, this dissonance is important to remember.

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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STEPPING OUT OF THE FRAME

I have a geek question in search of a serious answer or a fresh theory: I just read this article at Eureka! Science News about how the genome of an entire family has been sequenced to track how genetic mutations are handed on. The article states "Scientists long had estimated that each parent passes 75 gene mutations to their children." However, the actual rate of passing on was less than half of what had been estimated -- "By comparing the parents' DNA sequences to those of their children, the researchers estimated with a high degree of certainty that each parent passes 30 mutations — for a total of 60 — to their offspring."

My question is, why was the erroneous estimate so high to begin with? What were they observing that caused them to attribute a passing on of mutations at this level? And if the mutations are present but not being transmitted via our parents' DNA (which seems likely), then what IS causing the mutations?


I'm theorizing it is genetic reconfiguration that is the result of environment in early development. Cultural biological mutation, a la epigenetics. Which biological determinists and essentialists of all stripes do NOT want to admit is the case -- especially all those among us obsessed with "masculinity" as if it has authentic biological reality, instead of being a pathological cultural construct in the midst of epic fail. I am as interested in hearing "examinations of masculinity" as I am in hearing about exploring white supremacy -- i.e., it has shot its wad and we can't afford to waste any more time pretending it has value to impart. Yes, my generation looked at "femininity" which had been crammed down our throats (sometimes literally) as part of girl conditioning, but we quickly understood it was a bogus binary and instead began focusing on what was HUMAN -- and reclaiming humanity for women.

I feel this morning as if we have lost an entire generation to the rabbithole of feminist denial and a lopsided, desperate clutch at keeping the gender binary alive through the pretense of "subverting" it.

The silver lining is that money has been poured into scientific studies which hope to bolster biological determinism, and the vast majority of them (except for the tiny ones done on selected populations of adults) keep proving that culture and environment are the major factors in determining "identity". Truth will out, even if it is funded by the boys (and boy fetishists) who want to prove their definition of boy is triumphant.


NOTE: Here's another recent article from The New York Times, Human Culture Plays A Role In Natural Selection, which states that genetic adaptation to sustained cultural change "works more quickly than other selective forces, 'leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution could be the dominant mode of human evolution'". Yep.


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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