Nautilus Magazine: Men Are Better At Maps Until Women Take This Course

Psychologists long took it for granted that the male and female brains were fundamentally different. But in a landmark 1974 book, Stanford developmental psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin reviewed thousands of studies and found the opposite: By and large, there just wasn’t much data to support the conventional wisdom. Yes, men’s brains are bigger, but so are their bodies; aside from size, there’s no solid evidence of physical characteristics in the brain that are demonstrably male or female. A 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that “human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.” [...]

Yet over the years, research has documented differences in cognitive abilities between men and women, something Maccoby and Jacklin noted in 1974. And spatial skills, says Elizabeth Cashdan, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, “are the largest cognitive sex difference known.” [...]

Maccoby and Jacklin also found differences in math and verbal abilities. But data has since shown that spatial cognition might explain some of the gender gap psychologists measured in mathematical ability. High scores on mental rotation tests correspond to higher scores on math questions that involve geometry or story problems. And spatial cognition turns out to be a better predictor of success in engineering than SAT or GRE scores, for example. [...]

It’s still unclear whether a predilection to wander may help men develop better spatial cognition skills—or whether better spatial cognition skills make their peregrinations possible. “We don’t know what’s cause, and what’s effect,” Cashdan says. What is clear is that cultural biases have an effect. Consciously or unconsciously, girls are nudged away from activities that would help them develop spatial skills almost as soon as they’re born. As they grow, parents respond to their kids’ interests, quickly compounding what may start out as very slight biases. [...]

Moreover, while comparing the cognitive performances of men and women may produce a measurable difference, the averages don’t tell the whole story. “Many women have significantly stronger spatial ability than many men,” explains George M. Bodner, a professor of chemical education at Purdue University, who designed one of the tests commonly used to measure spatial cognition ability. Bodner stresses it’s important not to perpetuate the myth that a gender gap implies all men are better than all women at spatial cognition tasks. Stereotypes about spatial ability can have an insidious effect. “When women hear myths, such as the idea that they have ‘poor spatial ability when compared with men,’ they often believe this will be true for themselves, and it often is not true,” Bodner says.

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Nautilus Magazine: Why Females Decide What’s Beautiful

Today Ryan teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and is a senior research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Decades of studying sexual selection have led him to develop a theory called sensory exploitation. “The key idea is simple: Features of the female’s brain that find certain notes of the males’ mating call attractive existed long before those attractive notes evolved,” he writes. A central aspect of his theory is animals harbor hidden sexual preferences that influence the evolution of sexual traits. In “The Mate Selection Trapdoor” in this week’s Nautilus, Ryan spells out the adaptive benefits of hidden preferences.  [...]

The view long has long been that males, in their sexual communication, are saying something important about themselves, and it’s up to the females to figure out what that is, to figure out which males are truly attractive and which are not. I argue the other side of the coin. Females aren’t trying to figure out what males are saying. When they mate with a male, by definition, that male is attractive. So females are the deciders. Over evolutionary time, it seems males are trying out a lot of different courtship traits. A bright orange here, a bright blue there, rub your wings together and make a sound, or jump up and do a dance. They are trying to do these things to tickle females’ preferences. But it’s really the females calling the shots. It’s the female’s brain that sets the bar for what kind of traits are attractive and unattractive. [...]

Well, there are idiosyncrasies, for sure, with females. With bowerbirds, females are attracted by all of the ornaments the male displays around the bower. What scientists have shown is that younger females seem to be more swayed by the decorations of the bower than they are by the males themselves. And older females are more impressed by the display of the male than the decorations of the bower. Scientists have shown, in swordtail fishes, that the preference for the male’s sword seems to change with the age of the female, or the size of the female. [...]

It’s taught me it’s hard to know why women prefer certain traits in males. The brain is our most important sex organ, but it has lots of other things on its mind. So it leads you to wonder how the life experiences of women, with things that have nothing to do with sexual beauty, influence what they find as attractive? This isn’t surprising. I’m an academic, so the kinds of folks that I run into in my job have respect for creativity, intelligence, and being articulate. Things that would make a male attractive in this social scenario probably might not add to a male’s attractiveness in other kinds of scenarios.

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Nautilus Magazine: Love, Death, and Other Forgotten Traditions

In the United States, the conversations we have with our children about sex are often awkward, limited, and brimming with euphemism. At school, if kids are lucky enough to live in a state that allows it, they’ll get something like 10 total hours of sex education.1 If they’re less lucky, they’ll instead experience the curious phenomenon of abstinence-only education, in which the goal is to avoid transmitting any information at all. In addition to being counterproductive—potentially leading to higher rates of teen pregnancy2 and sexually transmitted illnesses3—this practice is strange. Compare it to the practices of many small-scale societies, where children first learn about sex by observing their parents! [...]

Throughout my years of fieldwork with the Shuar, I’ve witnessed a catalog of behaviors that would shock Western1 parents. I’ve imagined how they would stare in alarm at the sight of children setting fire to fields, walking barefoot past tarantulas, or mowing grass with knives. But as the years have gone on, I’ve found myself less surprised by the culture of the Shuar, and more surprised by our own. Why don’t we allow children access to the world as we know it, a world that involves death and sex and, yes, sometimes even machetes? After all, there’s good reason to think that small-scale societies like the Shuar, though not perfect mirrors into the past, are living in ways that closely resemble the lifestyles of our predecessors. Maybe they’ve held onto something we’ve recently lost. [...]

It wasn’t always like this. Just as breastfeeding was once more prevalent in our culture prior to the 1970s, there was a time when death was welcome in our living rooms. In the Victorian era, the funeral parlor was the parlor of your home; the body of loved ones would often rest on an ice board, and embalming might take place in the kitchen. Friends and families would gather together to have tea, to chat, all the while saying goodbye to the body on display. It’s likely that this practice helped the bereaved deal with the reality of death.11

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Al Jazeera: Is Vladimir Putin tired?

There is suddenly too much entropy in the Russian political universe. At least some people are acting as if there are no adults in the house. Political campaigns seem to start without the Kremlin's blessing, state TV channels contradict each other in their coverage of important stories, and infighting between Kremlin factions gets into the open. A major player in that infighting has been Igor Sechin, the head of the oil giant Rosneft, who helped engineer the arrest of Economy Minister Alexey Ulyukayev, but who is currently ignoring court summons for the same the case. [...]

Of course, the Russian leader is very much still around, his busy schedule reflected in daily news broadcasts on state TV. But as political expert Gleb Pavlovsky writes: the "the president is disappearing". Currently a critic of Putin's political regime, Pavlovsky was one of its chief architects in the 2000s - definitely a man whose opinion matters on such occasions. In the article, he goes on to describe the Russian leader as a "not-so-young gentleman dogged by power fatigue and accumulated weaknesses". [...]

If the Kremlin allows Navalny to register as a candidate, Putin is still very likely to win, but for him, that means stepping into unchartered territory. Will this let a revolutionary genie out of the bottle, as it happened with Mikhail Gorbachev's limited reforms leading to the colossal release of political energy which destroyed the entire communist system? Will it be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the hardline part of the establishment? And is this allegedly tired man up for the challenge of running a real campaign against a real rival? Can he run in an election that does not use the surrogate opposition leaders who helped the Kremlin maintain a semblance of pluralism in the last three elections? [...]

The second season began with the chaotic revolution in Ukraine, which allowed the political leadership, or - as many Russians say - the "collective Putin", to rebrand the regime by embracing irredentist nationalism and aggressive conservatism, a plagiarised version of the Christian fundamentalism of the US Bible Belt. That transformation culminated in the annexation of Crimea, which sent Putin's approval ratings soaring to almost 90 percent.  

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Al Jazeera: Akufo-Addo: Africa's march of democracy hard to reverse

Ghana today - at least on the surface - is enjoying political stability, with a multiethnic population coming together in peaceful democratic elections.

President Nana Akufo-Addo speaks with Al Jazeera's Jane Dutton on why his country is so different from its neighbours in this respect - and what work still remains to be done in Ghana and in the rest of the continent. [...]

President Nana Akufo-Addo speaks with Al Jazeera's Jane Dutton on why his country is so different from its neighbours in this respect - and what work still remains to be done in Ghana and in the rest of the continent. 

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Haaretz: Israel's Shabbat Wars Are a Symptom of a Much Deeper Crisis Among ultra-Orthodox Jews

Behind the scenes, even the most devout ultra-Orthodox politician will admit that in reality, it is impossible to enforce a Shabbat standstill on the economy. After all, Haredim make up only a minority of Israeli society. They also understand that any Haredi attempt to do so would dramatically decrease their power to influence other matters close to their hearts. That’s not news and Health Minister Yaakov Litzman’s announcement on Friday that he would be resigning over weekend work on the railway network is an anomaly.

Crucial infrastructure maintenance has been taking place on Saturdays for decades, without causing tension – as long as the work was going on quietly, far from public view. When the Israel Electric Corporation transported a massive turbine on Highway 2 on Shabbat in 2001, it was a public event that the Haredim could not ignore and the ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism left Ehud Barak’s coalition in protest. But week after week, the low-profile maintenance work on the railway and power lines has on the whole been ignored. [...]

The failure of the rabbis to articulate a clear position on the Shabbat issue is just a symptom of the much deeper malaise. The Haredi community is comprised largely of hundreds of thousands of young men and women, trying to build their new families while being cut off from the opportunities the Israeli economy affords bright and eager people like them. Despite the rabbis’ edicts against using the internet, many of these young Haredim are fully exposed to the world outside and yearn to have some connection with it, especially through their workplaces. Secular Israelis may be angry at Haredi attempts to impose religious strictures on public life, but the real rage is the one that is building up among young Haredim at their leaders, rabbis seventy years older than them, who have no comprehension of the obstacles facing them. 

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BBC4 Profile: Yevgeny Prigozhin

At the Lord Mayors banquet a couple of weeks ago the Prime Minister Theresa May didn't mince her words when she waded into the alleged Russian interference in western countries accusing them of sowing disinformation she declared "We know what you are doing and you will not succeed."

This week on Profile we look at the man accused of funding the St Petersburg troll factory which has produced so much pro-Russian material online. Yevgeny Prigozhin has moved from jail to restaurateur and close friend of President Putin, but precious little is known about his personal life.

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Politico: Margrethe Vestager versus the Olympics

The IOC is one of the world’s most venerated brands, and an investigation opened in 2015 by Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, into the Olympic-affiliated International Skating Union (ISU) is set to limit the rights of sporting federations to manage their sports and brands. Vestager is expected to reach a verdict, which could include fines, by the end of this year.

IOC President Thomas Bach was in Brussels this week — becoming the first person in his position to address the EU’s national ministers — and told POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast that sports bodies should not be treated like businesses. [...]

Bach said the Olympic movement pumps about a billion euros a year back into grassroots sports — “it’s €3 million per day.” For this reason, he wants EU regulators to look past the multi-billion euro broadcast rights deals the IOC benefits from to see a social movement rather than a business.

EU competition regulators agree that sports have an important social role and say they don’t want to get involved in sporting decisions. But they point out that many sports bodies are also businesses too — so any bans on athletes should be proportionate.

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