Science Tuesday - Nature vs. Nurture?

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.

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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 .

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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.

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