JSTOR Daily: Crows Are Even Smarter Than We Thought

There is tool use and there is tool use. To pick up a stick to help remove objects from a small hole is tool use. New Caledonian Crows go much further than that, and actually modify existing objects to create tools. The crows use some simple manufacturing techniques, folding the edged pieces of screw pine leaves into a bent shape to access grubs in holes. But they have also been observed to follow very complicated procedures. To make twig hooks, the crows first select a twig, trim the edges then bend it into a hook shape. Finally, and most remarkably, the crows shape and sharpen the point of the hook using their beaks.

Further evidence of the crows’ acute intelligence comes from complicated tests administered to captive crows. Some crows were able to solve a complicated treasure hunt involving a task where they needed to use find one tool, use that tool to obtain another tool, and then use that second tool to extract food from a box. Most of the crows required several tries, but at least one was able to solve the problem first try. The exact reasoning behind the task is subject to interpretation; it’s possible that they simply eventually figured out the task through conditioning after receiving the reward for successful completion. But the researchers believe that this may be evidence of complicated thought and innovation, especially because they persisted through the first stages of the test without an immediate reward.

 Why did crows develop these incredible abilities? To evolve a brain capable of such tasks carries a cost in terms of the energy needed to run it. But nothing happens without an evolutionary reason. It turns out that larvae found burrowed inside wood are some of the most nutritious prey available, and only sophisticated tools can fish these morsels easily out of their holes. To capitalize on this food source, crows first had to develop new abilities.

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JSTOR Daily: Don't fall in love on OkCupid

“The thing that’s so interesting—and, from a research perspective, useful—about OkCupid is that their algorithm is transparent and user-driven, rather than the black-box approach employed by Match.com or eHarmony,” he said. “So, with OkCupid, you tell them what you want, and they’ll find your soul mate. Whereas with Match or eHarmony, they say, ‘We know what you really want; let us handle the whole soul mate thing.’ But the truth is none of these sites really has any idea what they’re doing—otherwise they’d have a monopoly on the market.” 

The problem, Lewis noted, is an ancient and obvious one: There’s no such thing as love-hacking. “OkCupid is premised on this great notion that we know what we want,” he said, “but we often have no idea what makes for chemistry or compatibility.” The algorithm, in other words, is geared to find you someone who’s like you—all those political questions, say, on which your ideal match would share your values—which isn’t necessarily the same as a desirable long-term partner. Meeting up with a 99 percent match for cocktails, in other words, is sort of like gazing in a mirror on a good hair day, which may explain why the looks-first model employed by Tinder is winning with tech-savvy younger users. It’s simpler. It discards the unhelpful information.

So, come Valentine’s Day, remember to remember the grim reality: Since the rise of online dating in the early 2000s, research by sociologists, most notably a large-scale 2012 study published by the Association for Psychological Science, has consistently found that matching algorithms, no matter how sophisticated, just do not work. Indeed, the authors of that study wrote, “no compelling evidence supports matching sites’ claims that mathematical algorithms work—that they foster romantic outcomes that are superior to those fostered by other means of pairing partners.” The feel-good principles on which these search-methods are grounded—similarity of values, complementarity of sexual preference—are, sorry to be a killjoy, actually rather poor predictors of subjectively rated romantic success. “[T]hese sites,” the authors continue, “are in a poor position to know how the two partners will grow and mature over time, what life circumstances they will confront and coping responses they will exhibit in the future, and how the dynamics of their interaction will ultimately promote or undermine romantic attraction and long-term relationship well-being.” When you finally get that note-perfect message from a total cutie—who, OMG, is also a 99 percent match!?—in other words, don’t get too excited.

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JSTOR Daily: The psychology behind why clowns creep us out

This wasn’t the first time there had been a wave of clown sightings in the United States. After eerily similar events occurred in the Boston area in the 1980s, Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist who studies the folklore behind mythical beasts such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, came up with something called “The Phantom Clown Theory,” which attributes the proliferation of clown sightings to mass hysteria (usually sparked by incidents witnessed only by children). [...]

In fact, a 2008 study conducted in England revealed that very few children actually like clowns. It also concluded that the common practice of decorating children’s wards in hospitals with pictures of clowns may create the exact opposite of a nurturing environment. It’s no wonder so many people hate Ronald McDonald. [...]

The persona of the creepy clown really came into its own after serial killer John Wayne Gacy was captured. In the 1970s, Gacy appeared at children’s birthday parties as “Pogo the Clown” and also regularly painted pictures of clowns. When the authorities discovered that he had killed at least 33 people, burying most of them in the crawl space of his suburban Chicago home, the connection between clowns and dangerous psychopathic behavior became forever fixed in the collective unconscious of Americans. [...]

Unusual or strange physical characteristics such as bulging eyes, a peculiar smile or inordinately long fingers did not, in and of themselves, cause us to perceive someone as creepy. But the presence of weird physical traits can amplify any other creepy tendencies that the person might be exhibiting, such as persistently steering conversations toward peculiar sexual topics or failing to understand the policy about bringing reptiles into the office.

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JSTOR Daily: Flying Spaghetti Monsters and the Quest for Religious Authenticity

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster began in 2005 with a satiric open letter written by then-25-year-old Bobby Henderson in response to the Kansas Board of Education’s decision to teach the theory of intelligent design alongside evolution in public schools. Henderson argued that schools ought also to devote class time to teaching the theory that a flying spaghetti monster had created the universe. This, he reasoned, was as probable a version of intelligent design as any other. The letter inspired a biblical flood’s worth of memes and launched a religious group that now claims a global membership. As this so-called Pastafarianism has grown, some branches of the FSM church have started demanding the rights and privileges enjoyed by more established religious organizations. What started as a fake religion is now angling to be an authentic one. [...]

When the Brandenburg court decided on August 2nd, 2017 to deny the FSM church recognition as a religious group, it did so because “the critique of beliefs expressed in it is not a comprehensive system of thought.” For the court, Pastafarianism’s satiric origins, along with the fact that its iconography and rituals are so clearly intended to hold an absurdist mirror to Christianity, render it inauthentic. This is a hard charge to deny. At the same time, the court implicitly devalued the humor and play at the heart of Pastafarianism as valid elements of authentic religion, privileging instead history, solemnity, and intellectual coherence.

Spearheading the church’s quixotic fight with the German judiciary has been Rüdiger Weida (aka Brother Spaghettus) who upon hearing the ruling accused the court of judging the FSM church not by its German branch (or is it tentacle?) alone, which Weida insists is a secular humanist organization merely adorned in cookware and eye patches, but by its American counterpart, which he has described as “relatively ridiculous. It is only about partying and pasta recipes. There is only a marginal social concern there.” Perhaps Brother Spaghettus’s frustration with his colander-clad brethren on the other side of the Atlantic will soon propel him into the role of a Pastafarian Luther. This might even help him when he takes his case next to the European Court of Justice, since nothing is more authentically religious than a good old fashioned schism.

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JSTOR Daily: Why does Oklahoma have the Panhandle?

What’s up with Oklahoma’s salient? More popularly known as the Panhandle, the three counties extending in a row west of the rest of the “pan” of the state are one of those geographical quirks of history that really jump off of the map. The Panhandle is also the location of the only county in the country with four states on its borders: Cimarron County, the westernmost part of the state, borders Colorado, Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico.

Today fewer than 1% of Oklahomans live in the 168 x 34 mile-wide strip. It was Spanish territory until 1821, when it became part of independent Mexico. The Republic of Texas claimed it when declaring independence. But then, upon entering the Union as a slave state in 1845, Texas surrendered its claim to the region because slavery was prohibited north of 36°30′ latitude by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. 36°30′ became the Panhandle’s southern boundary. Its northern border at 37° was set in 1854 by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves if they would be slave or free. [...]

Finally, in 1890, this orphan rectangle of land was incorporated into Oklahoma Territory, and in 1907 it became part of the state of Oklahoma, which also included the former Indian Territory. Indian Territory had been the end of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and then the progressively reduced promised homeland for many tribes.

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JSTOR Daily: Beyoncé, the Virgin Mary, and the Power of Imagery

Beyoncé and her photographers appear to present her as the Virgin Mary, using recognizable compositions, such as her veiled face and the flower mandorla enveloping her, in both Erizku’s and Poole’s images. The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber wrote, “Beyoncé is continuing in her long dialogue with the high-art world,” noting such varied influences as the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Renaissance Madonnas, Dutch flower paintings, and Kehinde Wiley. Part of the power in such imagery, he argues, is that “it’s recent and yet classical.”

Both photos nod to the ways in which women in positions of power have been represented throughout history. Historian Linda B. Hall has analyzed “images of women and power,” exploring how artists have used the image of the Virgin Mary to emphasize power, suffering, dedication, and endurance while also instilling a sense of maternal wonder. [...]

Hall analyzes the continued relevance and far-reaching reverence for images of the Virgin Mary throughout Spain, Latin America, and the United States. She notes, “In the case of the Virgin Mary, as time passes, the reverence that began centuries ago is constantly renewed and changed by religious leaders, by artists, and through popular reverence.” Historically speaking, Beyoncé’s imagery seems to borrow elements most heavily from those of Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose image first appeared on the cloak, or tilma, of Juan Diego in 1531, after the Virgin Mary’s fourth visit to him. About a century after her image was emblazoned on his cloak, artistic renderings of Our Lady of Guadalupe, complete with the flower mandorla and blue robe of stars, began appearing in print.

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JSTOR Daily: How the Plastic Pink Flamingo Became an Icon

Union Products tapped into the post-WWII spread of suburbanization and the wondrous age of petroleum byproducts to make “plastics for the lawn.” In 1956, they hired Featherstone, fresh out of art school. The pink flamingo was born the next year. (His first product, the polyethylene “Charlie the Duck,” actually outsold his flamingo for decades.)

The first consumers of the pink flamingo lived in working-class subdivisions, while “middle-class suburbanites gave it a wide berth.” There were diverse sources of appeal: the hot pink, a new and exciting color; the plastic, the miracle material; the exotica of Florida. No matter that actual flamingos had been hunted to extinction before the 20th century in Florida: as icons, they proclaimed “Florida’s cachet of leisure and extravagance.”

Then, in the 1960s, there was a revolt against middle class taste, often by the very children of the middle class. The pink flamingo lawn ornament was celebrated as a marker of “anything rebellious, outrageous, or oxymoronic.” This reached its apotheosis in John Waters’s 1972 cult classic Pink Flamingos, in which the (anti-)heroine, who lives in a trailer surrounded by pink flamingos, competes for the title of “filthiest person alive.” The pink flamingo had arrived, becoming the “ubiquitous signpost for crossing various, overlapping boundaries of class, taste, propriety, art, sexuality and nature.”

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JSTOR Daily: John Calvin: The Religious Reformer Who Influenced Capitalism

Both the blame and the credit for capitalism have often been placed at the feet not of an economist, but rather a sixteenth-century Christian theologian named John Calvin. Calvin’s belief in predestination and other tenets embraced by aggressive capitalists, is seen as giving the theological justification for a Protestant vision that propelled economic growth in Europe, Britain and, eventually, North America. [...]

Calvin’s vision involved a humanistic approach that included a revolutionary look at social questions. For one thing, Calvin, a happily married man, believed that sexual morality should apply equally to both men and women. He was a supporter of republican government over monarchy and saw everyday occupations as part of a calling from God, raising the most humble to an exalted status.

Calvin never accepted capitalism unconditionally. While the first Christian theologian to embrace the use of interest on money—the Catholic Church had long held rules against usury—he also qualified its use. He argued that it should never be used to exploit the poor and that borrowers should profit more from loans than from those they borrowed from. Some ethicists see his principles as a possible response to the worldwide convulsions in banking that occurred in the Great Recession and other economic downturns.

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JSTOR Daily: The Illustrious History of the Avocado

Scientists think that the fruit first originated in Africa, then made it to North America, then traveled down to Central America. Conditions for avocado cultivation may have existed as far back as 16,000 B.C.E., the team writes—and its long history among Caral, Mokaya, and Maya peoples points to its beloved status.

Avocado can be found as the name of the 14th month on the Maya calendar, on Pacal tombs in Chiapas, and in Aztec paintings. Linguistic clues point to avocados’ significance, too. “The presence of a plant or animal in nature alone is not enough for it to be named,” the authors note; “it is necessary for the society or human group to acknowledge the importance of the species before naming it.” [...]

As the Spaniards traveled outward to other colonies, they brought the avocado with them. They’ve been in California since the 1850s and had made their way all over the world by 1998. And though the world is still sorting through its modern avocado supply problem—blame the shortage on weather, labor issues, and increased demand—the ascendance of the humble avocado makes even more sense when you recognize its old-school roots.

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JSTOR Daily: The Recipe for Secession: What Makes Nations Leave

Political Sociologist Michael Hechter has explored what the ingredients to a true secession are. His conclusion: secession doesn’t come from one event, but is borne of economic disparities, identity crises, legislative failure, and bad blood.

Different economic interests: In theory, nations work for the betterment of their populations. But if different regions feel that their contributions outweigh their benefits (as was the popular sentiment in Brexit, substantiated or not), calls for separation naturally follow.

Cultural identity: As with any major decision, there is an emotional component. A nation’s identity isn’t purely (or even necessarily mostly) tied to economic shared interests. Rather, it’s a shared sense of affinity and similarity. There are numerous ways a shared cultural identity can form—and numerous ways it can fracture. [...]

A failure to negotiate an alternative. Unless military action is considered an option, seceding states must come to an agreement with their parent state. And as Hechter notes, “If there is one constant in history apart from the universality of death and taxes, it is the reluctance of states to part with territory.” Unless the seceding territory is a clear liability, there are multiple ways—legislative, economic, political—to appease a disgruntled population.

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JSTOR Daily: The Invention of Pets

Pet are a relatively recent invention. Most date the pethood concept to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of course, human beings lived with animals for much longer—dogs have been domesticated at least 30,000 years—but pets are a very special category. The pet, says Marc Shell, is the “one essentially inedible animal,” the ultimate indulgence in the long history of using animals for food and/or work.

The OED’s first reference for “pet” is from 1539, meaning a baby lamb raised by hand. Another old meaning: the pet as a favored or indulged person, as in the still-current “teacher’s pet.” Ingrid H. Tague argues that both these definitions merge into the modern usage, a pet being a tame animal much-indulged in the home. Since the nineteenth century there has been a particular split between domesticated farm animals and domesticated house animals. Today, few Westerners have daily contact with working animals or those destined to be eaten. The richer parts of the world have the most pets: there are an estimated 163.6 million dogs and cats in the U.S. (compared to some 73 million children under 18) and Americans spend more than $60 billion a year on them.

“Once most animals were moved away from intimate human contact, it became possible for some to be marked out as special by virtue of their sharing the same domestic space as their human owners,” writes Tague. She analyzes eighteenth-century literary works in Britain. Among the hundred plus British epitaphs or elegies for pets in that century, she finds 6 for monkeys, 12 for canaries, 17 for cats, and 53 for dogs. As is often the case when people write about animals, the subject was really “the ways people used animals to think about humans’ place in the world.” By the end of the period, “pet keeping could come to symbolize all that was best in the human spirit, and mourning a pet could be seen as praiseworthy rather than ridiculous.”

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JSTOR Daily: The History of the KKK in American Politics

White supremacism is on the rise again. The Ku Klux Klan supported Donald Trump for president. Former Klansman David Duke made a bid for the Louisiana Senate, hate incidents followed the election, and Trump named as White House senior counselor Steve Bannon, former head of Breitbart.com, a website popular with white supremacists. This isn’t the first time that so-called white nationalists have been involved with American politics. In the 1920s, during what historians call the Ku Klux Klan’s “second wave,” Klan members served in all levels of government.

The Klan didn’t start as a political force, but as a lark. Shortly after the Civil War ended, some Confederate veterans got together and played around with hoods and robes, wearing them while riding  horses through town in Pulaski, Tennessee. They formed a secret group with outlandish names for its officials, like “Grand Cyclops” for the leader. When they saw how their costumed rides scared blacks, the group turned to vigilantism. [...]

The Klan was a big issue in the 1872 presidential election, but the group was in its death throes. It rose again after the 1915 release of D. W. Griffith’s pro-Klan movie, The Birth of a Nation, when the country was reacting to many societal changes brought on by the temperance movement and World War I. This second-wave Klan emerged as a morality police to fight immigration, minorities, and the loose morals of speakeasies, bootlegging, and political corruption. While the first Klan focused on blacks, this wave also fought Catholics, Jews, intellectuals, and anybody else it felt was hurting America. At heart, it was a nativist movement that drew sympathy from those who still saw blacks as unequal to whites.

Heavy marketing drove membership in the second Klan to between 3 and 7 million; that added up to a lot of commissions for recruiters, who got a percentage of member fees. The majority of this KKK were mainstream, mostly Protestant, citizens. A portion of the second-wave Klansmen murdered or beat those they considered un-American, but a majority saw the group as a social or even charitable club. Klaverns gave money to churches and helped other community groups such as baseball teams. Members celebrated holidays together and attended one another’s funerals.

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JSTOR Daily: Does Street Protest Matter?

In 2012, Daniel Q. Gillion looked into the question of whether protests “work” in a very specific, quantifiable way: checking to see if they change how elected representatives vote. He did this by looking at civil rights protests between 1961 and 1995 and then considering the subsequent roll-call votes of the House representatives from the districts where the protests took place.

What he found was that representatives of districts with just the occasional protest weren’t likely to be swayed. But, in places where there were 50 protests over the course of two years, the typical representative became 5 percent more likely to take liberal positions on civil rights issues. If there were 100 protests in a district, the representative became 10 times more likely to take those positions. [...]

What that means is that, even in largely black and Latino areas where politicians might assume that their constituents were generally in favor of civil rights laws, protests made a difference in how politicians acted.