Jesse Bering just can't get enough of that sociobiology. This time, in a post about how an allegedly tiny number of female humorists are "crowded out on the roster of female comedy all-stars by a long list of Sapphic wise-girls" he volunteers the following explanation for why there are two, like, totally different kinds of senses of humor, one, "humor production" for boys, another, "humor receptivity," is for girls.

And of course, maybe because it's about men being "productive" and women just "receptive," Bering naturally gravitates to the sexual selection solution.

The authors [of the study Bering is expanding on here] interpret these data, and similar data, by drawing from psychologist Geoffrey Miller’s ideas about the evolution of humor. Miller has argued that ancestral males’ ability to produce entertaining humor demanded a set of heritable cognitive skills, including intelligence and creativity, and thus was a hard-to-fake signal of genetic quality. Due to the sexes’ differential investment in reproduction (just at a coital level alone, about 90 seconds versus 9 months), women would have evolved to be more receptive to signs of genetic quality than males. Men, meanwhile, would have been on the lookout for women who responded positively to their humor.

Source: Scientific American

If Miller really thinks that then he's an idiot. Not because it's implausible, though it is. But because maybe, just maybe, not everything about "reproductive fitness" is about the reproduction part.

For instance I wonder if... naw... couldn't possibly be... you could test his hypothesis by assessing whether men are more likely to joke around women (which would help confirm his hypothesis) or around mixed company (which would be the null hypothesis if one wasn't a sociobiology fetishist) or around other men. Which it seems to me would be at least as effective at helping men defuse tension between rivals, boost morale when things looked bad, enhance camaraderie and thus group bonding, and so on.

What are the odds that male bonding, morale boosting, and tension defusing might increase men's likelihood of surviving long enough to be reproductively successful? Oh, right, silly me, the only possible sources of selective pressure in humans were spreading seed and avoiding leopards.

Similarly, if I was to try and test the "humor receptivity" side of Miller's hypothesis I might also look to see if more women are found in comedy audiences, whether men and women are equally likely to appreciate other people's humor, or if men are more likely to listen to and laugh at other men's jokes.

Oh, and hey, here's Bering with another welcome notion:

Researchers who study homosexuality have discovered that the brains of many lesbians were over-exposed to male hormones during prenatal development, influencing not only their adult sexual orientation, but also masculinizing other behavioral and cognitive traits in which there exist innate sex differences. This is not true of all lesbians, but it is especially true for those who exhibit male-typed profiles. So it is not implausible that some lesbians’ courtship strategies would largely mimic opposite-sex-typed patterns, including a differentiated capacity for humor production that attracts female attention. This would not be a conscious strategy, it must be emphasized, and indeed this is what many critics of evolutionary psychology repeatedly fail to realize.

And finally, if I was to try and test Bering's "lesbians have little penises inside their brains that make them act like men" hypothesis, and maybe backup Miller's humor-receptivity hypothesis, I might check out the audience composition of women comedians (lesbian and otherwise.) Would we see more women in the audience, equal numbers of men and women, or more men? Remember, if any men at all show for women comedians, or appreciate their senses of humor, that's going to substantially complicate the "women evolved to laugh at men's jokes" notion.

Also, yeah, I guess the first thing people always say about humorists like Lucille Ball, Mae West, Mary Tyler Moore, Christine Lavin, Moms Mabley, Gracie Allen, Roseanne Barr, Carol Burnett, Imogene Cocoa, Phyllis Diller, Fran Dreshcher, Terry Garr, Valerie Harper, Gilda Radner, Tracy Ulner, Ana Marie Cox, Nikol Hasler, Totie Fields, Madeline Kahn, Fanny Brice, Jane Austin, Tina Fey, Louise Lasser, Amy Poehler, the Roach sisters, Sarah Haskins, Erma Bombeck, Goldie Hawn, etc. is "what a bunch of dykes."

Suzie at Echidne of the Snakes speaks with entirely reasonable ire about gendered anthropomorphizing about dominance and subordination she keeps hearing when people talk about zoos.

I think it was one of those 7-Habits books where the author talks about how at a very high level a map of, I think, Detroit can be mistaken for a map of, I think, Cleveland in the sense they can both have a big street called Main St. that intersects with 1st St., 2nd St, 12th, etc., and so you can imagine you’re navigating in the right direction… until it says you should be turning right on Broad Street and there’s just no such thing in Cleveland. At which point you can either realize you’ve got the wrong map or… drive yourself and everyone else insane trying to match up the landmarks of the town you’re in with the map of the town you’re not in.

We do that a lot with animals. And ourselves. The common term for ascribing human-like qualities to tigers or, say, lab rats, is anthropomorphism, but Hannah Arendt warned about the corresponding phenomenon she called ratomorphisation where we ascribe the behavior of humans to what we observe in rats or other animals.

And if you’re going to try to map humans to animals, or for that matter animals to humans, you’ll see the same effects as you do with maps of Detroit or Cincinnati. Similar street names, sure. A “Riverside Park” too maybe. If you go to a zoo it’s only going to get worse.

Yes, animals fight, have sex, and eat. But those are like the Main Streets and Broad Avenues — every town has one, but they don’t necessarily go the same places. And if you get it in your head that each animal (and human) map is going to have a Main St. then it gets even weirder because you’re going to say stuff like one gender or another is dominant or there’s always some kind of territoriality or blah, blah, blah. Each of which could even be true. But they might be more instructive if we weren’t trying to enforce our preconceptions of what has to be there.

Warning: Curmudgeon alert

So someone finally showed me the Susan Boyle video that’s been making the rounds lately. She’s a 47-year-old Scotswoman, a choirist, who wound up on one of those mean-people “talent show” programs that are so popular these days. You know, the ones where instead of risking having the bad taste to enjoy a performer’s actual performance they show cool people’s faces during the performance so you can tell if you’re making the right choice? Oh, and to make sure you aren’t confused they mug horribly if they don’t think you should like a performer, and smile and gently shake their heads as if in wonder so you’ll know you should like the performer too.

Anyway, Boyle’s got the sort of great, room-filling voice that’s prized by show-tune impresarios, opera conductors, and choir directors. She’s also not beautiful the same way people who are paid to look cool on TV are beautiful.

And so everybody mugged awfully when she walked out on stage, and mugged worse when she said she wanted to sing a love-affirming song. And then she began singing and was really good so all the cool people stopped mugging and started smiling and gently shaking their heads. The live audience was so impressed by the switch to smiling and head-shaking that they all stood up and started cheering.

After the performance the smiling head-shakers said a bunch of condescending bullshit.

Anyway, since I hadn’t seen it I hadn’t registered any of the previous online commentary, but Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors sums the whole thing up rather nicely. Here’s a snippet.

When Simon tells Susan Boyle she is a “little tiger” I really wanted to throw up. She rolls it off with a lot of equanimity and class. The only thing that makes watching the portions of the video clip in which the judges are speaking tolerable to me is the utter joy the entire experience seems to bring to Susan Boyle.

She said it here.

There was a program in the 1970s called the Gong Show. It too was a talent show with a panel of judges. One difference was the judges weren’t paid to be cool. Another difference was that the judges had buttons on their desks that would ring a big gong that signaled that they were rejecting the performance or…

...the performer.

Which is what I thought about when I saw the program staffer’s reactions before, during, and after Susan Boyle’s performance.

Perhaps not surprisingly I couldn’t find the exact clip from the Gong Show I was looking for. The one that reminded me so closely of the “cool people’s” performance as Boyle sang.

Instead, here’s a clip of the same performer from an episode several months after the first. The intro by the host is significant. “Right now let’s bring back a terrific lady…”

Her name is Bobby Tremain.

The reason I couldn’t find the first clip, and why I’m not surprised, is that the first time ‘round one… or maybe more than one of the judges let her get about one verse into the song… maybe as far as when she started playing and tap dancing, and they rang the gong.

Why? I don’t remember who the nobody daytime “celebrities” were back then (anymore than I’ve heard of the daytime celebrities hired to be judgmental about Susan Boyle) but the one who stands out in my memory had Paul-Linde-fey kind schtick and he explained that he rang the gong because “that poor woman, that poor little old lady, I didn’t want her to die up there!”

There was much chittering, not all of it enthusiastic, from the audience. The host’s plastic smile never faded. Ms. Tremain was pretty speechless but clearly disappointed.

There was considerable outcry from the non-studio audience, however, and so they had her back. And let her finish. Three years later Tremain one the over-eighty tournament on another game show, Tic-tac Dough.

I bring all this up because Tremain, like Boyle, was talented, energetic, and enthusiastic. And like Boyle she didn’t fit the stereotypes of the judges who, in both instances, made their judgments based their preconceptions that people who look like X should be expected to do only Y.

I’m not ashamed for having watched The Gong Show because I was a very young and the two broadcast-only alternatives were worse. There are many more channels today, and many more choices of programming. I would be ashamed if today I watched whatever program it is that Boyle transcended. For one thing I’m a big boy now. For another I have my own sense of taste. For another, having been an amateur performing musician and singer I appreciate how much work goes into even the least praiseworthy performance. And so I have no patience for trained monkeys paid to mug or gently smile and shake their heads based on their preconceptions, their prejudices, and possibly anticipation of bananas from their producers after the show. I have to say I might watch the show if they had gong buttons on their desks like the old show… it would be amusing to watch the cool people try and master the technology to push them.

%@#*&!!!

Wayne Hooke of The Psychology of Beauty says

Using photographs of real men, Peters, et.al (2009) found no evidence of a preference for either masculinized or symmetric male faces or bodies in ovulating women.

Photos by Flickr user spongemonkey.
Used under a Creative Commons license.Previous studies that have found a relationship between ovulation and attraction to masculine features have used computer-morphed images that are weak in ecological validity. This study used photographs of actual men, like the ones below.

Masculinity, attractiveness, and symmetry ratings of the stimuli appear to approximate a normal distribution, strengthening the ecological validity of this study. The only noteworthy limitation in this design is that there were no objective measurements of masculinity or symmetry – only subjective ratings were used.

The authors were also careful to use precise measurements of ovulation to ensure that the ratings of women in the ovulatory phase were well-within the previously identified six-day long sexually active phase of the menstrual cycle.

Read the quote in context here.

Evolutionary Psychologists, of course, had proposed that magic uteruses make women… what?... pickier during ovulation? And it sounds like if you cherry pick your criteria sufficiently you can get that result. The tricky thing about science isn’t that it’s flawless. Quite the opposite (being a human endeavor, not because it’s science.) What’s cool about science, though, is over time it’s institutionally self-correcting. Scientist A says X, scientist B says that doesn’t sound right, scientist B tries to reproduce scientist A’s findings.

I often carp that pop Ev-Psych (the Ozzie-and-Harriet-assumption-conserving stuff you’re likely to hear about, not the real stuff that’s still mostly in the basic foundation-building phase) is made up mostly of loser types trying to justify why they can’t get dates with “superior” men or women. For which reason, ironically, ginning up data that says ovulating women prefer symmetrical jock types a) makes sense but also b) also shows lack of imagination. Here’s how.

Near as I can understand it, the original researchers were saying that when women ovulate they prefer more handsome men. They also claim that women are more horny when they’re ovulating. Put the two together and you get an explanation for why horny babes never hook up with ev-psych doods.
Photos by Flickr user spongemonkey. Used under a
Creative Commons license.

But let’s slow that waaaaaayyyyy down and play it again. Ev-psych assumes that no matter how much it looks like we use sophisticated mental processes to modify or even disregard bodily impulses we’re actually really, really, really simple moist robots utterly controlled by extraordinarily sophisticated, highly conditionally-expressed genes. Like the alleged genes in women for both extra pickiness and horniness during ovulation.

But…

Doesn’t it seem like the whole idea of horniness is to override pickiness? And aren’t women only something close to ovulating six days out of the month? Which means women usually aren’t ovulating? And don’t women usually decline dates with ev-psych doods?

So doesn’t it seem like ev-psych doods should be cherry-picking data to show that women won’t date them prefer more symmetrical-looking men even more when they’re not ovulating instead?

And when women are ovulating and their adolescent-porn-fantasy genes are turning them into helpless fembots of lust and they still won’t date sociobiologists? Sadly for the EP community Holly offers only non-genetic explanations.

(via ResearchBlogging)