I gave a little presentation on my research yesterday in the BioA class I'm TA'ing . Whenever I discuss this informally, I like to preface the presentation with personal reasons for being interested in kinship and family. Sometimes I joke about how living with four siblings makes the logic of the demographic transition especially appealing. Today, I showed my class the two photos below and argued that interest in sex-bias was a natural outcome of growing up in my family.
The photo on the right is especially telling. It looks all cute until you realize that one brother (A!!) is ready to strangle the new baby, while another is ready to box in baby's ears. I haven't quite figured out what B1 was doing, but I'm guessing it's not good given his avoidance of the camera. If I had to write a caption for the photo on the left, it might be something like "Who needs glass ceilings when you have older brothers?"*
At one point, when I was still a staunch biological determinist**, I had attributed my mom's love of my brothers to differences in chromosome size. I.e., since dads are more related to their daughters than they are to their sons (they're giving their big juicy X chromos to their daughters and their little piddling Y chromos to their sons) and since moms are proportionately more related to their sons than to their daughters (passing along the same amount of genetic material, but moms' genes account for a larger proportion of sons' genomes due to competition with useless, trivial Y), moms should prefer sons and dads should prefer daughters.
I held this belief privately for a number of years (disclosing only to my friend Pete Buston (now at UCSB) and my brother A, even though he tried to strangle me) because of some egomaniacal paranoia that someone would scoop me. I ate my own stomach when I read a paper by Hartung in 2007 (written sometime in the late 70s or early 80s) where he had laid all of this out, in writing, and much more formally than my piddling brain had even aspired to. During my general exams, I confessed publicly to having held this belief and everyone had a nice hearty laugh at my simplistic (simpleton?) hypothesis' expense***.
Why do I choose to regale you with such soporific tales? What does this have to do with crafts-related pursuits? Nothing! My little rat brain won't sleep and it's stuck on sex bias. There will be no pursuit of craftiness until I can un-obsess over sex (bias).
I'm working on a paper now that examines sex-biased parental investment as it differs according to group-level ideology (this is what happens when you lose determinism; your discourse gets jargon-laden and impossible to understand; sorry Papa Popper!). I am in the pretty early stages of working through some HLM models (redundant, I know, but if Brian Williams gets to say PIN number, I can say HLM models) looking at this and I'm stuck. At first, everything looked all hunky-dory and then I allowed for random variation at the household level and everything turned in the opposite direction. I can't even decide whether the data are poisson^* and I really don't want to deal with the messiness of negative binomial HLM (insert scary music here).
Anyway, before I bore you all to tears (staring through glassy eyes at a glass ceiling is especially counter-productive), I'll finish up with another personal anecdote and a photo (craftsy, right?). Just as psychologists are crazy*, anthropologists who study families come from dysfunctional families*. One of the only bedtime poems I remember being read to me as a kid (read by my father) was "How doth the little crocodile" by Lewis Carroll:
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!
As you can see, though there are obvious benefits to being preferred by dads, there are also costs - nightmares (it's a nice poem, as long as you're not 5). And just to make sure that you can't sleep either, here's a recent photo I took in a parking lot in the Florida Everglades of a nice little alligator with "gently smiling jaws".
*As my friend GK has pointed out, sometimes it's necessary to append statements like these with "just kidding!" lest you should think I'm serious.
**Just kidding?
***Note delusional unwillingness to ascribe hearty laughter to my expense.
^*My stats professor insists that it is necessary to examine the outcome variable within each group, having subtracted effects of covariates before determining functional form, which makes sense to me, but isn't the poisson model a mathematical construct to deal with count data in the first place (i.e. it's a convenient, tractable way to make y positive)? It's not like your data ever really come from a poisson distribution, right? Can stats nerds fill me in on this?
1 comment:
Regarding the family photographs, all I know is that Piggy got what he deserved.
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