anhinga_anhinga | Male monkeys prefer toy cars, females like dolls

Something seems ~~wrong~~ strange with this.

from http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/printDS/108552

The differences apparently date far back in evolutionary history to the time before humans and monkeys separated from their common ancestor some 25 million years ago, according to Gerianne Alexander, a psychologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, who led the experiment.

"Human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," Richard Haier, a neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine, wrote in the journal NeuroImage.

Variety of toys used

In the monkey experiment, researchers put a variety of toys in front of 44 male and 44 female vervets, a breed of small African monkeys, and measured the amount of time they spent with each object.

Like little boys, some male monkeys moved a toy car along the ground. Like little girls, female monkeys closely inspected a doll's bottom. Males also played with balls while females fancied cooking pots. Both were equally interested in neutral objects such as a picture book and a stuffed dog.

People used to think that boys and girls played differently because of the way they were brought up. Now scientists such as Alexander say a creature's genetic inheritance also plays an important role.

"Vervet monkeys, like human beings, show sex differences in toy preferences," Alexander wrote in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. "Sex-related object preference appeared early in human evolution," she said.

Alexander speculated that females of both species prefer dolls because evolution programmed them to care for infants. Males may have evolved toy preferences that involve throwing and moving, skills useful for hunting and finding a mate.

What seems ~~wrong~~ strange is how the statement that female monkeys fancied cooking pots might fit into this evolutionary speculation... hmmm... hmmm...

Upd: probably this was because the cooking pots were red, and the authors of the paper decided to spin their conclusions somewhat.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

In a newspaper, by a syndicated columnist - ever heard that journalists don't care to understand the results very well, are not at all good at conveying them to the public, and are after sensations? Did you read the original article? I think cooking pots could very easily be any other containers or devices. Or it could be that monkeys have been given videotapes of TV shows. Or that it wasn't monkeys in the study at all :-))

the original article - I mean the original research article.

In any case, it looks like we've already reached something resembling the consensus that it's inconclusive...

Given that the author does not have electronic links to her artciles on her Web site, I think I'll skip further investigation... Especially, since most scientific papers seem to be wrong even without help from the journalists:

http://economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4342386&no_na_tran=1

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7915

This is another bit of sensational journalistic crap! Sure, most scientific papers are wrong, let's not give our tax dollars to the f*ckers!

This story is much more to the point.

No, this looks just right to me (I know first-hand what kind of "quality" is typical for bio-medical research). And these are science-supporting publications. I also like the recursion in the last paragraph of the Economist story:

"It should be noted that Dr Ioannidis's study suffers from its own particular bias. Important as medical science is, it is not the be-all and end-all of research. The physical sciences, with more certain theoretical foundations and well-defined methods and endpoints, probably do better than medicine. Still, he makes a good point—and one that lay readers of scientific results, including those reported in this newspaper, would do well to bear in mind. Which leaves just one question: is there a less than even chance that Dr Iaonnidis's paper itself is wrong?"

> much more to the point

It's very interesing, and correctly describes the pathologies of the scientific community, but it's probably wrong on substance, judging by the discussion here:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/avva/1494111.html

For one thing, let's keep in mind that there is rarely an article that's completely "true" or completely "false". The data is there, interpretations may vary, some factors may not have been documented correctly. Medical science seems to always generalize from a fairly small set of data to the entire population, that may be flawed by itself. But I still think that a huge part of the problem is the media's attention to "not-yet-cooked" medical results ("recent studies show...") and the cut-throat fight for grants where, again, no one is going to give you money for a negative result.
The whole "recursive" thing, again, is based on the same idea of "right" and "wrong", and is totally disgusting in this case (as much as I love recursion in general).
And, yes, I am in a crappy mood today. Figures, I am sure. :-(

I think that the fight for grants and careers is a much larger factor in low quality of the results than anything that media can do. It all comes from the internal dynamics of the field(s) involved. Overall, the media frenzy helps to increase funding and also to attract new researcher (both might actually be unhealthy in terms of pressure to get results and eventual quality, to tell the truth), but otherwise the media frenzy is irrelevant.

In hard sciences it's much better, of course. The significance sections in the introductions and conclusions suck failry often, but the results themselves are correct more often...

> is totally disgusting in this case

I don't see any reason for disgust. The study uses a methodology which is typical for the studies it criticizes. The question about its own validity is, therefore, entirely legitimate.

Yes, but the media is a huge factor in perception of science by - well, even educated people, not to mention the majority. And that's why the damaqge done by media to the society in general is very large: it undoes what colleges and universities try to do (at least the better ones, anyway).

And the disgusting part is, again, the believe in the absolute of "right" and "wrong". The article is certainly right, the numbers are certainly somewhat wrong - let's get over it and get back to life.

the believe = the belief

> The article is certainly right, the numbers are certainly somewhat wrong - let's get over it and get back to life.

My informal observation is that the articles are very often quite wrong in these fields, not just the numbers. And this is something that is (thankfully? because the society cannot correct this without inflicting even more damage?) underreported...

There is a difference between an informal understanding that a lot of published papers are, to a degree, wrong, and screaming in Washington Post "more than 50% of research papers are wrong!" (and not even bothering to say "in medical field" in the title!). People who understand how research process works are very aware of the degree to which the results should (or rather shouldn't) be trusted.

This is not Washington Post. This is New Scientist, which is specifically dedicated to the coverage of science, and Economist whose science coverage is excellent.

Но чукча все равно не читатель, чукча журналист. Даже и там, где excellent coverage. Блин!

Так он, наверняка, поговорил с этой дамой, которая написала статью, и, скорее всего, еще показал ей перед публикацией... по крайней мере, так обычно стараются делать...

Чукча скорее слушатель...

Чукча - он и в Африке чукча :-)))

Male monkeys prefer toy cars, females like dolls

Re: Eurika! :-)

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not my day...

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Чукча скорее слушатель...