Science Tuesday - Nature vs. Nurture?

[brdgt]

Love Among Finches: It’s Not All About Looks
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, July 12, 2010

Handsome men may turn the heads of women, but for those less attractive, sociability and friendliness also seem to seduce the fairer sex. The same is true for male house finches, according to a new study.

Female house finches prefer to mate with males with the reddest feathers, but dull-colored males make themselves more appealing by acting more social before mating season, according to a study in the September issue of the American Naturalist. The researchers found that the duller a male bird was in color, the more likely he was to engage with multiple social groups. Birds in a social group flock and forage together and any bird can belong to multiple groups.



Drab-looking male finches drifted from group to group in the winter, the researchers found. By mating season in the spring, the less attractive males tended to have the same level of mating success as the most colorful, attractive males.

“Females have limited options to chose from and this is a way for males to manipulate their chances to find mates, by placing themselves in certain settings,” said Kevin Oh, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University and the study’s lead author. The least attractive, or most yellow, males were four times as likely to interact with multiple social groups then the most attractive, or reddest, males, Dr. Oh said. House finches are found across North America, but Dr. Oh and his co-author, Alexander Badyaev of the University of Arizona, studied wild populations in Arizona.







A Mass Mating Signal Over the Smoky Mountains
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, July 12, 2010

In early June of each year, thousands of male fireflies in the Smoky Mountains flash in harmony across the night sky.

It is a brilliant show for residents and visitors, but the synchronous flashing is really a mass mating call to female fireflies, a new study finds. By flashing in synchrony, males of the species Photinus carolinus work together to help females spot them and avoid other distracting visual clutter, according to the study, which appears in the journal Science .



To conduct the study, the researchers placed female fireflies in Petri dishes and monitored their responses to flashes from LED lights that simulated male behavior. Females responded to synchronous flashes about 82 percent of the time, and to out-of-sync flashes less than 10 percent of the time, the study found.

While it has been known that male fireflies of all species flash specific codes in order to attract females of the same species, the synchronous flashing of certain species remained a mystery until now.

Further study could help scientists understand why this particular species relies on synchronous flashing while others do not, said Andrew Moiseff, a professor of physiology and neurobiology at the University of Connecticut and the lead author. It could also shed light on how the brains of fireflies and other animals process information.

“The fireflies have to count, possibly measure intervals,” he said, “and the question is, How do you wire neurons together to be able to do that?”





Accepting That Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D., The New York Times, July 12, 2010

“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” the patient told me.

She was an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s who came to see me for depression and anxiety. In discussing the stresses she faced, it was clear that her teenage son had been front and center for many years.

When he was growing up, she explained, he fought frequently with other children, had few close friends, and had a reputation for being mean. She always hoped he would change, but now that he was almost 17, she had a sinking feeling.

I asked her what she meant by mean. “I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people,” she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members.

Along the way, she had him evaluated by many child psychiatrists, with several extensive neuropsychological tests. The results were always the same: he tested in the intellectually superior range, with no evidence of any learning disability or mental illness. Naturally, she wondered if she and her husband were somehow remiss as parents.



Here, it seems, they did not fare as well as their son under psychiatric scrutiny. One therapist noted that they were not entirely consistent around their son, especially when it came to discipline; she was generally more permissive than her husband. Another therapist suggested that the father was not around enough and hinted that he was not a strong role model for his son.

But there was one small problem with these explanations: this supposedly suboptimal couple had managed to raise two other well-adjusted and perfectly nice boys. How could they have pulled that off if they were such bad parents?

To be sure, they had a fundamentally different relationship with their difficult child. My patient would be the first to admit that she was often angry with him, something she rarely experienced with his brothers.

But that left open a fundamental question: If the young man did not suffer from any demonstrable psychiatric disorder, just what was his problem?

My answer may sound heretical, coming from a psychiatrist. After all, our bent is to see misbehavior as psychopathology that needs treatment; there is no such thing as a bad person, just a sick one.

But maybe this young man was just not a nice person.

For years, mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good until influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behavior, there must be a bad parent behind it.

But while I do not mean to let bad parents off the hook — sadly, there are all too many of them, from malignant to merely apathetic — the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children.

When I say “toxic,” I don’t mean psychopathic — those children who blossom into petty criminals, killers and everything in between. Much has been written about psychopaths in the scientific literature, including their frequent histories of childhood abuse, their early penchant for violating rules and their cruelty toward peers and animals. There are even some interesting studies suggesting that such antisocial behavior can be modified with parental coaching.

But there is little, if anything, in peer-reviewed journals about the paradox of good parents with toxic children.

Another patient told me about his son, now 35, who despite his many advantages was short-tempered and rude to his parents — refusing to return their phone calls and e-mail, even when his mother was gravely ill.

“We have racked our brains trying to figure why our son treats us this way,” he told me. “We don’t know what we did to deserve this.”

Apparently very little, as far as I could tell.

We marvel at the resilient child who survives the most toxic parents and home environment and goes on to a life of success. Yet the converse — the notion that some children might be the bad seeds of more or less decent parents — is hard to take.

It goes against the grain not just because it seems like such a grim and pessimistic judgment, but because it violates a prevailing social belief that people have a nearly limitless potential for change and self-improvement. After all, we are the culture of Baby Einstein, the video product that promised — and spectacularly failed — to make geniuses of all our infants.

Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving. And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.

“The central pitch of any child psychiatrist now is that the illness is often in the child and that the family responses may aggravate the scene but not wholly create it,” said my colleague Dr. Theodore Shapiro, a child psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The era of ‘there are no bad children, only bad parents’ is gone.”

I recall one patient who told me that she had given up trying to have a relationship with her 24-year-old daughter, whose relentless criticism she could no longer bear. “I still love and miss her,” she said sadly. “But I really don’t like her.”

For better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. That is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become.

Dr. Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan.

Comments

[angel80.livejournal.com]

Re the last one. Depressingly obvious really. I'm so tired of parents being blamed for every misdemeanour.

[brdgt.livejournal.com]

Also, tired of "perfect" parents who judge other parents.

[marciagirl.livejournal.com]

That last article is fascinating to me. I think about families I know where the parents seem to be loving and responsible and then one child is completely out of control and the other children are really responsible. Yep, I totally understand how it is hardwired into some people and loving parents won't change their behavior.