By Stephanie Pappas Senior writer Parrots are capable of logical leaps, according to a new study in which a gray parrot named Awisa used reasoning to figure out where a bit of food was hidden. The task is one that kids as young as 4 could figure out, but the only other animals that have been shown to use this type of reasoning are great apes. That makes gray parrots the first non-primates to demonstrate such logical smarts, said study researcher Sandra Mikolasch, a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna. "We now know that a gray parrot is able to logically exclude a wrong possibility and instead choose the right one in order to get a reward, which is known as 'inference by exclusion,'" Mikolasch wrote in an email to LiveScience. Parrots are no birdbrains. One famous gray parrot, Alex, even understood the concept of "zero," something children don't grasp until they are 3 or 4. Alex, who died in 2007, had a vocabulary of 150 words, which he seemed to use in two-way communication with the researchers who worked with him. Other animals have also revealed high levels of intelligence. Elephants, for example, know when and how to cooperate. And hyenas are even better than primates at cooperation. Earlier studies had shown that about one out of five chimps and other great apes could use logical reasoning to find hidden food. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 15478 - Posted: 06.23.2011

Analysis by Marianne English The warning signs may seem subtle at first -- a child unable to empathize with others; another seems to fear nothing, not even the consequences of violence. With time, researchers say, these descriptions might reflect a growing association between criminality and antisocial behavior. But most recently, determining who might become a danger to society may be as easy as performing a brain scan, according to neurocriminology, a scientific discipline that uses neuroscience to predict and potentially reduce crime. Along these lines, is it realistic to use brain scans to pinpoint which individuals are more at risk for criminal behavior before they commit crimes? For some researchers, the idea is plausible, with the field reviving the nature versus nurture debate, as highlighted by Josh Fischman in a Chronicle of Higher Education article that profiles the work of University of Pennsylvania researcher Adrian Raine. Raine's work, which draws from neuroscience and the legal system, focuses on differences in the minds of criminals and non-criminals. Over the years, he's established evidence for a link between the brain and criminal behavior. By working with murderers, rapists and pedophiles, he's helped confirm that two brain structures -- the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex -- are smaller and less active in individuals with antisocial and criminal tendencies. Both areas are thought to give rise to complex behaviors shaped by emotion and fear. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Aggression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 15477 - Posted: 06.23.2011

Alison Abbott Epidemiologists showed decades ago that people raised in cities are more prone to mental disorders than those raised in the countryside. But neuroscientists have avoided studying the connection, preferring to leave the disorderly realm of the social environment to social scientists. A paper in this issue of Nature represents a pioneering foray across that divide. Using functional brain imaging, a group led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg's Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, showed that specific brain structures in people from the city and the countryside respond differently to social stress (see pages 452 and 498). Stress is a major factor in precipitating psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. The work is a first step towards defining how urban life can affect brain biology in a way that has a potentially major impact on society — schizophrenia affects one in 100 people. It may also open the way for greater cooperation between neuroscientists and social scientists. "There has been a long history of mutual antipathy, particularly in psychiatry," says sociologist Craig Morgan at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. "But this is the sort of study that can prove to both sides that they can gain from each others' insights." Meyer-Lindenberg works on risk mechanisms in schizophrenia, and previously focused on the role of genes. But although a dozen or so genes have been linked to the disorder, "even the most powerful of these genes conveys only a 20% increased risk", he says. Yet schizophrenia is twice as common in those who are city-born and raised as in those from the countryside, and the bigger the city, the higher the risk (see 'Dose response?'). © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Stress
Link ID: 15476 - Posted: 06.23.2011

A protein in spinal fluid could be used to predict the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, according to German researchers. Patients with high levels of the chemical - soluble amyloid precursor protein beta - were more likely to develop the disease, they found. Doctors said in the journal Neurology this was more precise than other tests. Alzheimer's Research UK said early diagnosis was a key goal, and the study represented a potential new lead. Doctors analysed samples of spinal fluid from 58 patients with mild cognitive impairment, a memory-loss condition which can lead to Alzheimer's. The patients were followed for three years. Around a third developed Alzheimer's. Those who developed the illness had, on average, 1,200 nanograms/ml of the protein in the spinal fluid at the start of the study. Those who did not started with just 932 nanograms/ml. Beta amyloid proteins have already been implicated in Alzheimer's itself, but not as a "predictor" of the disease. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15475 - Posted: 06.23.2011

By Oliver Wright, Whitehall Editor Britain's leading health charities last night warned that vital medical research into cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer's could be set back by decades because of a high-profile boycott campaign being launched by animal rights campaigners. Animal Aid plans to take out a series of newspaper adverts urging the public to stop giving money to Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, the Alzheimer's Society and Parkinson's UK unless they end their support for animal testing. But the campaign has been condemned as irresponsible and damaging by the charities and scientists, who have warned that it could set back medical research and damage other important areas of the charities' work. "This is an illogical and ill-conceived campaign," said Lord Willis of Knaresborough, the chairman of the Association of Medical Research Charities. "It will have consequences for charities targeted as, during tight economic times, any small downturn in donations could really put back cures by decades." Colin Blakemore, a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, added: "This is an utterly irresponsible attack by Animal Aid on some of the most important charitable contributors to medical research in this country. "These charities have a duty to use money given to them to support patients and to understand and treat disease. They support research on animals only when it's absolutely essential. If Animal Aid were successful in discouraging donation to medical charities, they would be guilty of delaying progress towards treatments and cures for devastating conditions." ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 15474 - Posted: 06.21.2011

by Will Hunt The laser in a tiny but powerful microscope is giving neuroscientists their best look yet at how the brains of rats work as they scurry about their daily activities. Until now, the ability of researchers to study the animals’ brains while they socialize or look for food has been relatively limited. The best method was to hook up a restrained rat to electrodes that monitor brain signals and then play images on a screen in front of the rat to create the illusion that it is roaming through a landscape. But virtual reality can go only so far in simulating natural movement. “To understand how the animal’s brain operates, we need to let it behave as naturally as possible,” says Jason Kerr, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. To that end, Kerr and his team recently developed a 0.2-ounce multi-photon microscope that can track networks of brain cells and individual neurons. Mounted on a rat’s head, the 1.5-inch plastic and titanium instrument allows the animal to move freely and captures in real time how brain cells interact during everyday behaviors. One key to the microscope’s success is its powerful 
2-photon laser, which emits pulses that probe up to 300 microns deep into the brain. Before researchers activate the laser, they must inject a fluorescent dye to highlight brain cells. Then the laser bombards the dye with photons, causing it to glow green when a cell is active. A miniature scanner guides the beam across the cells. A plastic optical fiber collects the emitted light, which is converted into an electric signal that appears as an image on a computer screen, allowing scientists to track cells without limiting the rats’ mobility. Since rats and humans probably share similar decision-making mechanisms, this technology could help us understand how we make choices, Kerr says. Copyright © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 15473 - Posted: 06.21.2011

by Menno Schilthuizen BERNHARD HUBER's bespectacled face is just visible behind the piles of vials and bottles that form a skyline on his desk at Museum Koenig in Bonn, Germany. In them float the pickled remains of thousands of daddy-long-legs spiders waiting to be returned to natural history museums around the world. And somewhere amongst them sit a few specimens of Metagonia mariguitarensis. It was this tiny Venezuelan species that first put Huber, a world expert on daddy-long-legs spiders - not to be confused with crane flies or harvestmen - on the untrodden trail of the evolution of asymmetric genitalia. Spiders, he explains, are among the most perfectly symmetric animals. As anybody with any experience of disembowelling knows, outwardly symmetric creatures are often much less neatly laid out inside, with internal organs jumbled around. Think, for example, of our own loopy intestines, left-sided heart and right-sided liver. Not so the spider. As a rule, its left half is an exact mirror image of the right. That's why M. mariguitarensis was such a surprise when it was discovered in 1986. All male spiders have a pair of sex organs called pedipalps, held like two boxing gloves in front of their face, but in this particular daddy-long-legs spider the right pedipalp was twice as large as the left. For many years, it was thought to be one-of-a-kind. Although genital asymmetry is extraordinarily rare among spiders, when Huber started looking into the matter it soon became clear that the rest of the natural world is awash with lopsided penises and crooked vulvas. He also realised that from an evolutionary point of view, all this blatant asymmetry is very strange. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Laterality
Link ID: 15472 - Posted: 06.21.2011

by Andy Coghlan Childhood autism is two to four times as common in Eindhoven, the centre of the Dutch information technology industry, as it is in two comparably sized Dutch cities with far fewer IT employees. The result supports the suggestion that people who work in hi-tech engineering and computing industries, which demand the kinds of systemising and analytical skills often seen in people with autism, are more likely to have autistic children too. Rising autism has also been seen in regions such as Silicon Valley, California. But the Dutch study claims to be the first to directly ask whether concentrations of IT workers mean more children with autism too. Researchers analysed data on autism prevalence on 62,000 schoolchildren in three Dutch cities, each with populations of around quarter a million. In Eindhoven, where 30 per cent of all jobs are in IT and computing industries, there were 229 cases of autism-spectrum disorders per 10,000 school-age children. This was more than double the corresponding figure of 84 in Haarlem and four times the figure of 57 in Utrecht. Each city has half as many IT jobs as Eindhoven. By contrast, all three cities had the same prevalence of two other childhood psychiatric conditions unrelated to autism, namely attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyspraxia. "These figures are pretty striking," says Rosa Hoekstra of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15471 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By Laura Sanders Like side-by-side computer RAM cards, the left and the right hemispheres of the brain store information separately, a new study finds. The results help explain why people can remember only a handful of objects at one time, and suggest that people may be able to maximize their cognitive power by delivering information in equal doses to both sides of the brain, researchers suggest online the week of June 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. On average, people can hold about four things in their working memory at once, such as the location of four cards in a game of Concentration. Though many studies have linked this memory capacity to intelligence, scientists still don’t completely understand how the brain reaches this limit. “Why can’t you think about 100 things simultaneously, or 50 things simultaneously? Why only four?” says study coauthor Earl Miller of MIT. “If we understand something about that, we’ll understand something very deep about how the brain represents information and how thoughts are made conscious.” Miller and his colleagues tested two monkeys (monkeys also have a four-item working memory capacity) in a simple task. First, the monkeys saw two to five colored squares flash on a computer screen for a little less than a second. The screen went blank for about the same amount of time, and then the squares reappeared — but one was a different color. The monkeys were rewarded for spotting the change. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Laterality
Link ID: 15470 - Posted: 06.21.2011

by Dani Cooper, ABC Science Online The mystery of how the brain develops the sense of ownership that recognizes our body belongs to us is a step closer to being solved. Australian researchers have shown that along with the sense of touch and vision, signalling receptors in the muscles and joints also play a critical role. The finding, published recently in the Journal of Physiology, will help in designing treatments for disorders of body ownership that can occur with conditions such as stroke and epilepsy. Lead author Lee Walsh, of Neuroscience Research Australia, explained we instinctively know our body parts "belong" to us. However, how the brain develops that map of what belongs to it is still in part unknown. "How do I know my hand is mine and not yours and that the telephone is not a part of my body," he said. Previous research shows people can be deluded into claiming ownership of an artificial hand. This is done by simultaneously stroking the subject's hidden hand and a visible artificial rubber hand. "Once the illusion of ownership of the hand is established, subjects have physiological responses to threats made against the rubber hand," Walsh and his colleagues wrote in the paper. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Vision
Link ID: 15469 - Posted: 06.21.2011

Nicola Nosengo If you are a small animal, it is useful to know whether there is anything around that might want to eat you. Stephen Liberles from Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues have analysed urine samples from a variety of zoo inhabitants, including lions and bears, and discovered how rodents can use smell to do just that. In a research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the team identifies a chemical found in high concentrations in the urine of carnivores that makes mice and rats run for cover1. Chemicals have already been identified that allow prey to recognize a known predator. But this is the first example of a generic clue that allows an animal to detect any potential predator, irrespective of whether the two species have ever come into contact. The researchers started by analysing an engimatic group of olfactory receptors discovered in 2001 called trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs)2. They are found in most vertebrates, in varying numbers. Mice, for example, have 15, rats 17 and humans have just 6. Very little is known about what chemicals bind to them. Liberles and his colleagues found that one member of the receptor family, TAAR4, is strongly activated by bobcat urine, which is sold online and used by gardeners to keep rodents and rabbits away. They managed to extract the molecule responsible for activating the receptor, called 2-phenylethylamine. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 15468 - Posted: 06.21.2011

by Tim Wogan Atherosclerosis, the buildup of fatty deposits on the walls of major arteries, can kill without warning. The disease causes few symptoms in its early stages, so sufferers are often hit with a heart attack or stroke before they realize anything is wrong. Now researchers have devised a way to spot the deposits before they cause serious harm by using a combination of infrared light and ultrasound. To detect atherosclerosis early, doctors need to spot fat inside artery walls. They can glean some information by bombarding soft tissue (anything that's not bone) with infrared radiation from a laser, which passes through the tissue until it hits a specific chemical bond, causing it to vibrate like a spring. Different chemical bonds absorb infrared radiation of different wavelengths, so the radiation absorbed by a tissue sample can give doctors some clue to what's inside it. But to diagnose atherosclerosis, doctors not only need to know that tissue contains fat but also need to see that it's on the inside of an artery wall. In the new study, researchers took advantage of the fact that infrared-induced vibration of chemical bonds is swiftly damped by surrounding tissue; the energy is converted to heat. This leads to rapid expansion of the tissue, which sends a pressure wave traveling outward in all directions to the surface of the sample, where it is emitted as ultrasound. By using a series of detectors to pick up the ultrasound, the team realized that it could work out where the expansion took place—a technique called photoacoustic imaging. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Stroke; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15467 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By KAY E. HOLEKAMP After nine months trapped behind my desk in Michigan, I’m finally back in the African bush, the one place I love above all others on earth. Only here are the skies so vast you can see both rainbows and bright sunshine while sitting under a drenching downpour from a massive black thunderhead. Only here can you be sure to see some weird and interesting form of animal life no matter where you look. Ever heard of a duiker? A solifugid? A pangolin? A springhare? A cameroptera? They all live here, along with hundreds of other animal species. Elephants forage in the riverbed that runs beside our camp, hippos chuckle in the pool below my tent, the shrill calls of white-browed robin-chats tell me when I have overslept, baboons steal our sugar jar whenever one of us is dumb enough to leave it unattended, and giraffes browse silently through camp after dark like great ships drifting in the night. But the best thing about the African bush is that it is where you can find spotted hyenas. As I have done every spring since I joined the faculty in the department of zoology at Michigan State University, I’ve once again traded sitting through endless committee meetings and grading overwhelming stacks of student papers for life in a tented camp where my most pressing concern every day is whether or not I will encounter a grumpy hippo on the footpath connecting my sleeping tent to our lab tent and dining area. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15466 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By NICHOLAS WADE In an eighth-floor laboratory overlooking the East River, Cornelia I. Bargmann watches two colleagues manipulate a microscopic roundworm. They have trapped it in a tiny groove on a clear plastic chip, with just its nose sticking into a channel. Pheromones — signaling chemicals produced by other worms — are being pumped through the channel, and the researchers have genetically engineered two neurons in the worm’s head to glow bright green if a neuron responds. These ingenious techniques for exploring a tiny animal’s behavior are the fruit of many years’ work by Dr. Bargmann’s and other labs. Despite the roundworm’s lowliness on the scale of intellectual achievement, the study of its nervous system offers one of the most promising approaches for understanding the human brain, since it uses much the same working parts but is around a million times less complex. Caenorhabditis elegans, as the roundworm is properly known, is a tiny, transparent animal just a millimeter long. In nature, it feeds on the bacteria that thrive in rotting plants and animals. It is a favorite laboratory organism for several reasons, including the comparative simplicity of its brain, which has just 302 neurons and 8,000 synapses, or neuron-to-neuron connections. These connections are pretty much the same from one individual to another, meaning that in all worms the brain is wired up in essentially the same way. Such a system should be considerably easier to understand than the human brain, a structure with billions of neurons, 100,000 miles of biological wiring and 100 trillion synapses. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15465 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By PATRICIA COHEN It was less than 20 years ago that the National Institutes of Health abruptly withdrew funds for a conference on genetics and crime after outraged complaints that the idea smacked of eugenics. The president of the Association of Black Psychologists at the time declared that such research was in itself “a blatant form of stereotyping and racism.” The tainted history of using biology to explain criminal behavior has pushed criminologists to reject or ignore genetics and concentrate on social causes: miserable poverty, corrosive addictions, guns. Now that the human genome has been sequenced, and scientists are studying the genetics of areas as varied as alcoholism and party affiliation, criminologists are cautiously returning to the subject. A small cadre of experts is exploring how genes might heighten the risk of committing a crime and whether such a trait can be inherited. The turnabout will be evident on Monday at the annual National Institute of Justice conference in Arlington, Va. On the opening day criminologists from around the country can attend a panel on creating databases for information about DNA and “new genetic markers” that forensic scientists are discovering. “Throughout the past 30 or 40 years most criminologists couldn’t say the word ‘genetics’ without spitting,” Terrie E. Moffitt, a behavioral scientist at Duke University, said. “Today the most compelling modern theories of crime and violence weave social and biological themes together.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15464 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By JIMMY CARTER IN an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker. The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders. These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15463 - Posted: 06.20.2011

By Rachael Rettner Surgery for obesity began with a simple premise: if you make the stomach smaller, people will eat less, so they will lose weight. But in recent years the results of obesity surgery have been so outstanding, researchers went back to the drawing boards to figure out what was going on. Their findings are beginning to present a far more complicated picture of weight — and of how much diet and exercise can really do to change it. Turns out, a slew of hormones from the gut, and their communication with the brain, play a role in the way the body maintains and loses weight. Chasing down the answer to exactly how obesity surgeryworks is providing new insights into human weight loss and appetite regulation, researchers say. "As a result of weight loss surgery, we finally are beginning to understand the physiology of weight loss better than we've ever understood it before," said Dr. Sunil Bhoyrul, a weight-loss surgeon at Olde Del Mar Surgical in La Jolla, Calif. Their investigations may reveal how to replicate the results of the surgery without requiring patients to go under the knife. Patients can lose up to 60 to 80 percent of their excess weight in one to four years after surgery, and many have an easier time keeping it off than they did through dieting, Bhoyrul said. However, up to a third can end up back at their pre-surgical weight seven to 10 years later, he noted. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15462 - Posted: 06.20.2011

By Jennifer Welsh WASHINGTON — Suit pressed, mind ready and resume in hand. When preparing for a job interview, most people take every precaution to convey the best impression possible. But aside from body odor, not many people pay attention to the odors that surround them. That onion-laden lunch could give your potential boss-to-be the wrong impression, according to new research presented in May at the Association for Psychological Science annual meeting. "There's a lot of research that's begun now, where people are looking at how the environment affects our well-being," said Jeannette Haviland-Jones, of Rutgers University in New Jersey. "We tend to think of ourselves as separate from the environment, but we're not. We create our environment." Hers and others' research is showing that smell can influence our thoughts and behaviors more expected. Many things in the environment, including verbal and physical cues, can influence how we perceive others. New research presented by Nicole Hovis and Theresa White of Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., shows that certain smells can influence a first impression. They asked 65 volunteer undergraduates (who were mostly female) to sniff a vial holding either a lemon or onion scent, or no scent, while standing near a gender-neutral silhouette. They were asked to form an impression of the personality of the silhouette and later filled out a form rating several personality traits. © 2011 LiveScience.com

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 15461 - Posted: 06.20.2011

By KATHRYN HARRISON Readers who can’t identify Jean-Martin Charcot as the name of the French neurologist whose 19th-century experiments with hypnosis influenced Sigmund Freud’s theory of neurosis may yet recognize the work he conducted at the Saltpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Photographs and illustrations of Charcot’s patients, all women suffering hysteria, remain in currency today, 140 years after they were made, if more as curiosities than as clinically valuable documents. Once seen, these images — of, for example, a woman wearing little more than a tangle of bed sheets, her eyes rolled up into her head in either “ecstasy” or “delirium,” or fixed on the invisible object of her “amorous supplication” — are not easily forgotten, let alone dismissed. Poses classified as “passionate attitudes,” they have the disquieting aspect of pornography masquerading as intellectual inquiry. Charcot, as portrayed in Asti Hust­vedt’s consistently enthralling “Medical Muses,” focused intently — myopically, one could argue — on using hypnosis to induce hysteria and make “his hysterics, with their bizarre fits and spasms, into ideal medical specimens.” But the provocative behavior of those “specimens” transformed Saltpêtrière into something closer to a carnival than a teaching hospital. As much showman as physician, Charcot gave weekly two-hour lectures to a packed amphitheater, including demonstrations designed to captivate an audience accustomed to staged séances and exhibitions of mesmerism or telepathy. One of Charcot’s students described the dramatic potential of exhibiting hypnotized women: “We can cut them, prick them and burn them, and they feel nothing.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15460 - Posted: 06.20.2011

By John Matson Does junior really have his father's nose? A common bit of parenting folklore holds that babies tend to look more like their fathers than their mothers, a claim with a reasonable evolutionary explanation. Fathers, after all, do not share a mother's certainty that a baby is theirs, and are more likely to invest whatever resources they have in their own offspring. Human evolution, then, could have favored children that resemble their fathers, at least early on, as a way of confirming paternity. The paternal-resemblance hypothesis got some scientific backing in 1995, when a study in Nature by Nicholas Christenfeld and Emily Hill of the University of California, San Diego, showed that people were much better at matching photos of one-year-old children with pictures of their fathers than with photos of their mothers. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Case closed? Hardly. "It's a very sexy result, it's seductive, it's what evolutionary psychology would predict—and I think it's wrong," says psychologist Robert French of the National Center for Scientific Research in France. A subsequent body of research, building over the years in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, has delivered results in conflict with the 1995 paper, indicating that young children resemble both parents equally. Some studies have even found that newborns tend to resemble their mothers more than their fathers. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15459 - Posted: 06.20.2011