How cooking makes you a man

Anthropologist Richard Wrangham has a provocative theory on human evolution. It starts with food and an open flame
By Sarah Karnasiewicz

http://www.salon.com/mwt/food/eat_drink/2009/07/29/catching_fire/index.html

July 29, 2009 Animals of the genus Homo are defined by their little mouths, large guts, big brains -- and appetite for bratwurst. This, at least, is the provocative theory of evolution put forth by Dr. Richard Wrangham in his fascinating new book, "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human."
Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, began his career studying chimpanzees alongside Jane Goodall, and rose to academic acclaim as a primatologist specializing in the roots of male aggression. Naturally, he tends to think of most scientific questions in relation to chimps. And so it was that a few years ago, while sitting in front of his fireplace preparing a lecture on human evolution, he wondered, "What would it take to turn a chimpanzee-like animal into a human?" The answer, he decided, was in front of him: fire to cook food.
For years, accepted wisdom has held that it was a transition to meat eating that prompted human evolution -- which makes Wrangham's hypothesis a radical departure. Yet, the more he tested his theory, the more he found the science to back it up: Cooked food is universally easier to process and more nutritionally dense than raw food, which means adopting a cooked diet would have given man a biological advantage. The energy he once spent consuming and digesting raw food could be diverted to other physiological functions, leading to the development of bigger bodies and brains. And Wrangham's "cooking hypothesis" not only explains the physical changes that humans underwent but also the social ones: Cooking created a sexual division of labor that informs our ideas of gender, love, family and marriage even to this day. "Humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows adapted to eating grass, or fleas to sucking blood," Wrangham concludes. "And the results pervade our lives, from our bodies to our minds. We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame."


Salon spoke with Wrangham, 60, by telephone from his research station in Uganda, about the dangers of strictly raw-food diets, why women are the ones who cook and the tricky business of calorie counting.
For years scientists have suggested that the making of tools, and then using tools for hunting and meat-eating, were factors that prompted the evolution of man as we know him. You push that theory farther to say that it was not eating meat, but cooking it and eating it, that's responsible for the transformation. How did you make that leap?


In the very beginning, I wasn't even thinking about human evolution. In fact, the basic idea came to me after long days of following chimpanzees, when -- because I was hungry, and sometimes I didn't take my food with me -- I tried to eat what they ate. I assumed that since I was a member of a species that was so closely related to chimps -- different only in terms of bodies and brains -- I would be able to eat anything that they could. But in actuality, though I could force it down, I quickly realized that I could not eat enough of what they ate to satisfy my hunger.
That started me subconsciously wondering about the question of food's role in human evolution. But it wasn't until some years later -- when I was sitting in front of my fireplace one night, thinking how nice and comforting a fire is, and how long ago back it would have been that our ancestors had been doing the same thing -- that I went further back in time in my mind, and realized it was very difficult to imagine our ancestors having fire and not cooking. And from there, I began to find it very hard to imagine any creature with the basic human shape surviving on raw food.
Still, when I started my research, I was amazed to discover how little investigation had been done into the nutritional and biological aspects of cooking. In particular, I was amazed by how many people thought that humans could live perfectly well on raw food.
Yes, you do quite a convincing job of arguing that a purely raw diet cannot sustain an active human. Do you believe that we have evolved to a point where a raw diet is fundamentally against our biology?
Yes, I suppose I do. If I hesitate, it is because I certainly recognize that raw foodists who live in an urban area of a well-to-do nation can make it work, so it's not that much against our biology. But I do feel very confident now that going off into the wild and living like a hunter-gatherer on raw food is not possible. People who switch to a raw diet report feeling constant hunger and lose large amounts of weight, even when they are careful to take in at least the nutritionally suggested number of calories a day for an adult. Basically, all the studies show that over the long term, a strictly raw diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply for our bodies. In other words, raw foodism is against our biology in a state of nature.
How do you respond to raw foodists who say a raw diet makes them feel healthier than they ever have before?



My response is that under modern conditions, living in places where you have money and grocery stores that make a super abundance of high-class domesticated foods accessible, I think it probably can be a healthy way of eating. Don't get me wrong: I have tremendous admiration for raw food devotees because it is a very hard life to resist the temptations of cooked food, and they must build their whole life around it. And of course, because they build their lives around it, they are very, very committed to the idea that it is a valuable diet. That makes them feel some resentment toward me, I guess. But the irony is that these days, very often, cooked food can be unhealthy, too. The most obvious way is that people eat too much of it.
But raw foodism seems like a pretty extreme response to the problem of obesity, doesn't it? And from what I can tell, most people don't eat raw food just to lose weight -- there seems to be a philosophical element to it, an idea that as though by choosing a raw diet, they can get back to a pure state.
Yes, of course, raw foodists argue quite strongly that it is our natural diet. My response to them is to say that yes it is, in a way. But it was natural 2 million years ago, not a few thousand years ago.
You write that cooked foods give our bodies more energy than raw foods. Can you explain that, because it seems somewhat counterintuitive. Even when you're not adding anything -- oils or fats -- the caloric value goes up?
It's really very simple. Cooking doesn't change the actual number of calories in food -- meaning that, if you take two portions of raw vegetable or animal product and cook one of them, when you blow it up in a bomb calorimeter and compare the two, you'd get the same number of calories. But there are two big things that cooking does. One is that it increases the proportion of the nutrients that our bodies digest, and from the data I reviewed -- for instance, in the case of egg protein it goes from 50 percent to 90 percent -- it looks as though that effect can make an enormous difference. And the second thing it does is that cooking reduces the costs we pay to digest our food.
So, eating cooked food conserves our energy?
That's right. We all fall asleep after a heavy meal, but if you eat a large meal of raw food, you'll fall asleep faster, because your body is working harder. More oxygen will be leaving your peripheral tissues and going to your intestinal organs.
Basically, cooking makes the food we eat more nutritionally efficient?
Yes. And that's why in my last chapter, I take on the issue of our food labeling system. When you treat food through processing or grinding, you're not actually creating more calories -- so technically, the food labeling system we have now is correct. But, if we want to be realistic about the caloric value we actually get from a food, we need to modify our labels to reflect more subtle measurements -- something like: "This item has been given a level 2 processing, which has increased its nutritional value by 50 percent."
You argue that cooking not only shaped our bodies, but it also shaped our households and our most basic ideas of gender. How so?
Well, without language, we can't be absolutely sure about what happened right in the beginning. But with what knowledge we have, I do think that cooking has this huge impact on households and our system of gender as we see it today -- and I've been trying to figure out where my thinking on this began. I've been fascinated for a long time by the idea that cooking basically produces a lump of food -- yet unlike any other primate, we humans have an extraordinary degree of respect for women who make it. Other men -- bachelors, children -- almost never take food from them. And the more I thought about this, I concluded that it looked to me like a system in which women cook for their husbands to earn the social protections that only men can give them through their membership in the male community.


So the concept of marriage began fundamentally not as about power or sex, but food?
Yes, though that would mean that women always do the cooking, and when I first started down this path, I wasn't at all sure that was the case. So, I went to the anthropological literature, and sure enough, I found reports of societies where men did the cooking. But then I dug into it more carefully -- and I discovered that, in the cases where the anthropologists claimed the men had done the cooking, the scientists had been wrong. In every single society women cook for men. And, what's more fascinating, in many societies you can really say that food or domestic promiscuity is far more serious than sexual promiscuity. In other words, it's more of a breach of social convention for a woman to feed the wrong man than it is for her to have sex with him.
Why do you think societies have evolved that way?
Because it is, and has always been, so critical for a man to be able to know that someone is going to give him a meal in the evening – because this enables him to spend the whole day doing what he wants -- doing, as it were, manly things. It's very clear from the literature on small-scale societies – and probably true even in our society today – that bachelors have a very hard time of it. They are thin, they are looked down upon by married men, they deeply desire to have a wife in order to be able to join the ranks of the elders. The problem that bachelors face is that they have to spend time during the day not simply doing things that will bring them glory -- like hunting -- but making sure they have a way of feeding themselves in the evening. And it uses up a lot of energy and time to take care of yourself.
A lot of my book has been challenging to people, but because the male-female relationship is so central to the way we think about humans, and because for so long people have tended to think about pair bonding as being about mating competition and choice of a sexual partner, this in particular has been quite a difficult theory for people to chew over.
Does that mean that, evolutionarily, men should focus on finding a wife who can cook instead of a beauty?
Yes, essentially. I know that from our perspective in the West, where we tend to focus even more than other societies on questions of sexual morality, it's rather an immoral suggestion that I'm making -- basically that men set themselves up with wives in order to have the freedom to be men, as it were -- and then go ahead and design their sexual strategy from that point on.
Now, in modern Western societies, that strategy is usually to stay with one's wife -- but not always, as we know! From the woman's point of view, the wife wants the security of knowing that she has her husband to protect her from the scrounging "others." It's not a notion of a love relationship. That's less common and more nakedly economic in many societies than in our own.


Haven't we evolved an emotional attachment to cooked food as well as a physical one? It didn't occur to me until I was reading your book, but raw foods have little scent -- yet the sense of smell is one of our most powerful senses. And elemental smells like warm vanilla or baked apples or grilled meat -- all cooked foods -- are ones that humans seem to respond to positively and universally across age and culture and place.
Absolutely, and as Proust says, smells definitely have an immense effect on our memory and our biology. But it's a complex question. When I was working on the book, I tested apes on a diet of cooked food, and they liked it spontaneously. You can understand why: The physical characteristics of cooked food have commonalities with other foods that are good for them in the wild. But the smells of cooked food are not like anything you'd find in the wild. They're really totally different -- though I admit I have no chemical data to support that. So, you might think that we have adapted to appreciating and enjoying cooked food as a result of our evolutionary history of exposure to it. But, in that case, other animals should not be adapted to like the smell of cooked food. And we simply have no data to reflect that at the moment.
Did your your studies change the way you thought about the way we should be eating?
Not really. I'd like people to be aware of how easy it is to overeat in today's world. But personally I've always been on a quasi-Mediterranean diet: lots of vegetables, some oil, not too much of anything and not much red meat. I don't think this experience changed the way I choose to eat, though frankly, if I had the courage, I might try a raw diet for a bit -- just to see how it is.
You haven't ever gone on a completely raw diet?
No, I haven't. It just seems such a social inconvenience. But maybe that's just an excuse.

Scientists Present First Genetic Evidence For Why Placebos Work

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090720191147.htm

ScienceDaily (July 22, 2009) — Placebos are a sham — usually mere sugar pills designed to represent "no treatment" in a clinical treatment study. The effectiveness of the actual medication is compared with the placebo to determine if the medication works.
And yet, for some people, the placebo works nearly as well as the medication. How well placebos work varies widely among individuals. Why that is so, and why they work at all, remains a mystery, thought to be based on some combination of biological and psychological factors.
Now, researchers at UCLA have found a new explanation: genetics. Dr. Andrew Leuchter, a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and colleagues report that in people suffering from major depressive disorder, or MDD, genes that influence the brain's reward pathways may modulate the response to placebos. The research appears in the August edition of the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology.
Placebos are thought to act by stimulating the brain's central reward pathways by releasing a class of neurotransmitters called monoamines, specifically dopamine and norepinephrine. These are the brain chemicals that make us "feel good." Because the chemical signaling done by monoamines is under strong genetic control, the scientists reasoned that common genetic variations between individuals — called genetic polymorphisms — could influence the placebo response.
Researchers took blood samples from 84 people diagnosed with MDD; 32 were given medication and 52 a placebo. The researchers looked at the polymorphisms in genes that coded for two enzymes that regulate monoamine levels: catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) and monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A). Subjects with the highest enzyme activity within the MAO-A polymorphism had a significantly lower placebo response than those with other genotypes. With respect to COMT, those with lower enzyme activity within this polymorphism had a lower placebo response.
"Our findings suggest that patients with MDD who have specific MAO-A and COMT genotypes may be biologically advantaged or disadvantaged in mounting a placebo response, because of the activity of these two enzymes," said Leuchter, who directs the Laboratory of Brain, Behavior and Pharmacology at the UCLA Semel Institute.
"To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the association between MAO-A and COMT polymorphisms and a response to placebo in people who suffer from major depressive disorder," he said.
Leuchter noted that this is not the sole explanation for a response to a placebo, which is likely to be caused by many factors, both biological and psychosocial. "But the data suggests that individual differences in response to placebo are significantly influenced by individual genotypes," he said.
Including the influence of genotype in the design of clinical trials could facilitate more powerful testing of future treatments, Leuchter said.
Funding for the study was provided by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health, Eli Lilly and Co., and Pfizer Inc.
Other authors included James McCracken, Aimee Hunter and Ian Cook, all of UCLA, and Jonathan Alpert of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University.
Dr. Andrew Leuchter has provided scientific consultation or served on advisory boards of a number of companies, including Eli Lilly and Co., where he has also served in the speakers bureau. He has received research/grant support from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Eli Lilly and Co., and Pfizer Inc., among others.
Dr. James T. McCracken has served as an adviser and consultant for Eli Lilly and Co. and other companies and receives research support from, among others, Eli Lilly and Co.
Dr. Ian A. Cook has served in the speakers bureau for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Inc. and other companies and has received research support from, among others, Eli Lilly and Co. and Pfizer Inc.
Dr. Jonathan E. Alpert has served as an adviser and consultant for Eli Lilly and Co. and other companies and has served in the speakers bureau for Eli Lilly and Co. He receives research support from, among others, Eli Lilly and Co. and Pfizer Inc.
Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles.

How Evolution Can Allow For Large Developmental Leaps

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090720163716.htm

ScienceDaily (July 21, 2009) — How evolution acts to bridge the chasm between two discrete physiological states is a question that's long puzzled scientists. Most evolutionary changes, after all, happen in tiny increments: an elephant grows a little larger, a giraffe's neck a little longer. If those tiny changes prove advantageous, there's a better chance of passing them to the next generation, which might then add its own mutations. And so on, and so on, until you have a huge pachyderm or the characteristic stretched neck of a giraffe.

But when it comes to traits like the number of wings on an insect, or limbs on a primate, there is no middle ground. How are these sorts of large evolutionary leaps made?
According to a team led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in close collaboration with Patrick Piggot and colleagues from the Temple University School of Medicine, such changes may at least sometimes be the result of random fluctuations, or noise (nongenetic variations), working alongside a phenomenon known as partial penetrance.
Their findings were recently published online in the journal Nature.
"Our work shows how partial penetrance can play a role in evolution by allowing a species to gradually evolve from producing 100 percent of one form to developing 100 percent of another, qualitatively different, form," says Michael Elowitz, the Caltech assistant professor of biology and applied physics, Bren Scholar, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator who led the team. "The intermediate states that occur along the way are not intermediate forms, but rather changes in the fraction of individuals that develop one way or the other."
Partial penetrance is the name given by evolutionary biologists to the degree to which a single genetic mutation may have different effects on different organisms in a population.
"If you take a bunch of cells and grow them in exactly the same environment, they'll be identical twin brothers in terms of the genes they have, but they may still show substantial differences in their behavior," says Avigdor Eldar, a postdoctoral scholar in biology at Caltech and the paper's first author. These sorts of variations—or noise, as the researchers call it—can actually allow a mutation to have an effect in some organisms but not in others. For example, while some genetically variable cells will show the expected effect of the mutation, others may still behave like a normal, or wild type, cell. And still others may do something else entirely.
"These mutant cells don't only show a different morphology," Eldar notes. "They show more variability in their behavior. In a population, you can see a mixture of several different behaviors, with some cells doing one thing and others doing something else."
In their Nature paper, Elowitz and Eldar, along with their colleagues, studied partial penetrance in a species of bacterium known as Bacillus subtilis. Specifically, they looked at the spores B. subtilis produces as a survival mechanism when times get tough. These spores are smaller, dormant clones of their so-called "mother cell." They're attached to the mother, but are separate entities with their own DNA.
A bacterial spore is designed specifically to do nothing but survive. "It doesn't grow, it doesn't do anything," says Eldar. "It just waits for the good times to return."
The wild-type B. subtilis bacterium always sporulates the same way: it creates a single spore, smaller than the mother cell, but with an exact single copy of the mother's chromosome.
What the scientists looked at was a "mutant in which the sporulation process was altered," Eldar explains. "Usually, these cells talk with each other, with the small spore telling the large mother cell, 'I'm here, and I'm doing OK.' In the wild-type cell, this chatter is loud; in the mutant, it's just a whisper, and the mother can't always hear."
When this whispering sort of mutation occurs, the researchers discovered, there are four possible outcomes:
The bacterium sporulates normally, like the wild type.
The bacterium makes two copies of its chromosome instead of one, so that there are three chromosomes but creates only a single spore. In this case, the mother cell retains two of the chromosomes and gives the spore one.
The bacterium makes only one copy of its chromosome, but creates two spores instead of one. In this case, each spore will have a chromosome, and the mother cell will have none. (This is a lethal mutation; neither the mother nor its spores will survive.)
The bacterium makes two copies of its chromosome instead of one, so that there are three chromosomes. It then creates two spores. In this case, the mother and each of the twin spores will have a single chromosome.
This last possibility, notes Eldar, is something that had never been seen before in B. subtilis. But that doesn't mean this twinning behavior doesn't have its advantages. "In some environments, it might be better for the cell," he says. "We know that because there are other species whose wild types do the same thing that our mutant was doing only once in a while."
The scientists soon realized that this variability was their way in to understanding how evolution makes the leap from one to another phenotype. "You can't switch from 1 to 1.1 spores," Eldar points out. "But it's easy to find a mutation that simply changes the frequency of the behavior. If 10 percent of the population makes 2 spores and the rest makes 1, that works. It solves the need for a quantum jump between 1 and 2 spores."
Once they had seen this rare behavior in a small minority of the bacteria, the researchers took the process one step further, tweaking other players in the sporulation system. For instance, they looked at what would happen if, in addition to dampening the communication between mother and spore—making the mother think she hadn't yet successfully produced a spore—you also increased the volume of the signals that tell the mother to replicate its chromosome.
Perhaps not surprisingly, they found that these sorts of changes increase the percentage of B. subtilis individuals that decide to produce two spores rather than one. In fact, by combining mutations, Eldar says, they were able to up the percentage of bacteria that create twin spores from about 1 percent (in singly mutated bacteria) to as high as 40 percent (in multiply mutated bacteria).
"When you have only a single mutation, twinning shows very low penetrance," Eldar says. "But when you add more and more mutations, you can build up the penetrance to very high levels."
"We showed that some mutations cause a low frequency of twin spores to develop in the same cell, rather than a single spore per cell, as occurs normally," Elowitz says. "The relative frequency of this form could be tuned up to high levels by other mutations."
This study provides a concrete example of a particular scenario to explain developmental evolution. "It illustrates a somewhat unfamiliar mode in which developmental evolution might work," Elowitz adds. "Qualitative changes from one form to another can proceed through changes in the relative frequencies—or penetrance—of those forms.
"It's interesting that noise—these random fluctuations of proteins in the cell—is critical for this to work," he continues. "Noise is not just a nuisance in this system; it's a key part of the process that allows genetically identical cells to do very different things."
In addition, Elowitz notes, the work shows that "bacterial development can be a good system to enable further study of these general issues in developmental evolution."
Other researchers involved in the work included Caltech staff member Michelle Fontes and graduate student Oliver Loson; Piggot, Vasant Chary, and Panagiotis Xenopoulos from Temple University School of Medicine; and Jonathan Dworkin from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.
The work was funded by grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the International Human Frontier Science Organization, and the European Molecular Biology Organization.
Journal reference:
Eldar et al. Partial penetrance facilitates developmental evolution in bacteria. Nature, 2009; DOI: 10.1038/nature08150
Adapted from materials provided by California Institute of Technology.

Monkeys Recognize Poor Grammar

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090708-monkey-grammar.html
Matt Kaplanfor National Geographic News
July 8, 2009
Monkeys can form sentences and speak in accents—and now a new study shows that our genetic relatives can also recognize poor grammar.
"We were really curious whether monkeys could even detect the common trend found in human language to add sounds to word edges, like adding 'ed' in English to create the past tense," said lead study author Ansgar Endress, a linguist at Harvard University.

Previous research in cotton-top tamarins had shown that the animals can understand basic grammar, for instance, identifying which words logically follow other words in a sentence.
But that same study, published in the journal Science in 2004, found that monkeys did not understand complex grammar, such as when words in a sentence depend on each other but are separated.
While that study suggested monkeys were deaf to complex communication, the new research shows that tamarins can grasp at least one advanced concept: prefixes and suffixes.
Wordplay
For their study, Endress and colleagues played recordings of made-up English words to a population of captive cotton-top tamarins for roughly 30 minutes a day.
Half of the tamarins were exposed to words with a varied stem but a constant suffix (such as bi-shoy, mo-shoy, and lu-shoy). The other half were exposed to a constant prefix followed by a varied stem (such as shoy-bi, shoy-mo, and shoy-lu).
The following day, individual tamarins were brought into an observation enclosure equipped with an audio speaker and video-recording equipment to capture their behavior. These tamarins were then exposed to more words.
Many of the words followed the same language rules that the tamarins had heard the day before, with half hearing "shoy" as a suffix and half hearing it as a prefix.
However, every once in a while, the researchers would play a recording of an "incorrect" word. For instance, the speaker would broadcast "shoy" as a suffix when it had previously been presented as a prefix, or vice versa.
Mental Machinery
Other biologists who were not aware of the research question were asked to watch and note every time the small mammals turned their heads toward the speaker.
When tamarins were exposed to words that "broke" the rules they had learned, they looked toward the speaker in a startled manner, observers noted.
The finding is dramatic, Endress explained, because it reveals that our distant cousins seem to have the mental machinery to identify verbal structures like suffixes and prefixes.
The research will appear this week in the journal Biology Letters.

Swearing can make you feel better, lessen pain

http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE56C1B320090713

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Cut your finger? Hurt your leg? Start swearing. It might lessen the pain.
Researchers from the school of psychology at Britain's Keele University have found swearing can make you feel better as it can have a "pain-lessening effect," according to a study published in the journal NeuroReport.
Colleagues Richard Stephens, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston, set out to establish if there was any link between swearing and physical pain.
"Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon," says Stephens.
"It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain. Our research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists."
Their study involved 64 volunteers who were each asked to put their hand in a tub of ice water for as long as possible while repeating a swear word of their choice.
They then repeated the experiment using a more commonplace word that they would use to describe a table.
The researchers found the volunteers were able to keep their hands in the ice water for a longer when swearing, establishing a link between swearing and an increase in pain tolerance.
Stephens said it was not clear how or why this link existed but it could be because swearing may increase aggression.
"What is clear is that swearing triggers not only an emotional response, but a physical one too, which may explain why the centuries-old practice of cursing developed and still persists today," he said.
(Writing by Belinda Goldsmith, Editing by Miral Fahmy)

Study: Women look away more from abnormal babies

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jr3ugkDMltCdofzIv9kTb2egDhUgD990MQC00

By LAURAN NEERGAARD – Jun 23, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — Puzzling new research suggests women have a harder time than men looking at babies with facial birth defects. It's a surprise finding. Psychiatrists from the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, who were studying perceptions of beauty, had expected women to spend more time than men cooing over pictures of extra-cute babies. Nope.
Instead, the small study being published Wednesday raises more questions than it can answer.
First the background: The McLean team already had studied men and women looking at photos of adults' faces on a computer screen. They rated facial beauty, and could do various keystrokes to watch the photos longer. A keystroke count showed men put three times more effort into watching beautiful women as women put into watching handsome men.
Lead researcher Dr. Igor Elman wondered what else might motivate women. Enter the new baby study.
This time 13 men and 14 women were shown 80 photos of babies, 30 of whom had abnormal facial features such as a cleft palate, Down syndrome or crossed eyes. Participants rated each baby's attractiveness on a scale of zero to 100, and used keystrokes to make the photo stay on the screen longer or disappear faster.
Women pressed the keys 2.5 times more than men to make photos of babies with the facial abnormalities disappear, researchers reported in PLoS One, a journal of the Public Library of Science. That's even though they rated those babies no less attractive than the men had.
"They had this subliminal motivation to get rid of the faces," said Elman, who questions whether "we're designed by nature to invest all the resources into healthy-looking kids."
Both genders spent equal time and effort looking at photos of the normal babies.
The study couldn't explain the gender disparity. Elman noted that previous work has linked child abandonment and neglect to abnormal appearance, and even asked if the finding might challenge the concept of unconditional maternal love.
That's too far-reaching a conclusion, cautioned Dr. Steven Grant of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which funded the study.
The work is part of broader research into how we normally form attachments and what can make those attachments go awry, work that tests if what people say matches what they do.
"Common sense would tell you one thing," Grant said. "This doesn't fit with common sense. It raises a question."

Darwin survey shows international consensus on acceptance of evolution

http://www.examiner.com/x-10571-Jackson-Atheism-Examiner~y2009m7d7-Darwin-survey-shows-international-consensus-on-acceptance-of-evolution
In a press release, a British Council poll into awareness of Charles Darwin and attitudes towards evolution has found that there is a broad international consensus of acceptance towards his theory of evolution.
The British Council, the UK’s international body for cultural relations, announced the results of its global survey at the World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ) in London on Tuesday 30 June, 2009, as part of its international programme Darwin Now, to mark the publication of Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection on 24 November, 1859.
The research, conducted by Ipsos MORI, surveyed over ten thousand adults across ten countries worldwide including Argentina, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Great Britain and the USA.
The results show that the majority of people polled have heard of Charles Darwin with the highest levels of awareness in Russia (93%), Mexico (91%), Great Britain (91%), and China (90%) whilst less than half of people polled in Egypt (38%) and South Africa (27%) saying they had not heard of him. Overall, the majority (70%) of people surveyed have heard of the British naturalist.
Adults in the United States (84%) showed the highest levels of awareness and understanding of evolution and Darwin’s theories followed by Great Britain (80%) saying they had a ‘good or some knowledge’ of the theory of evolution.
In all countries polled more people agreed than disagreed that it is possible to believe in a God and hold the view that life evolved on Earth by means of natural selection at the same time, with those in India most likely (85%) to be of this opinion, followed by Mexico (65%), Argentina (63%), South Africa, Great Britain (54%), USA, Russia (53%), Egypt, Spain (45%), and China (39%).
In six out of ten countries the majority of people who had heard of Charles Darwin and know something about his theory of evolution agreed with the view that there is enough scientific evidence that exists to support the theory against an overall average of 54 percent.
Only Russia (48%), USA (42%), South Africa (41%) and Egypt (25%) remained sceptical about the scientific evidence that exists to support Darwin’s theory.
The results also show that a significant proportion of those people surveyed in the USA, South Africa and India (43%) believe that all life on Earth, including human life, has always existed in its current form.
In all other countries, people in China (74%), Mexico (69%), Argentina (68%), Great Britain (63%) Russia, Spain (56%), and Egypt (52%) were of the view that more people thought that life on Earth, including human life, evolved over time either by a process guided by God or as a result of natural selection in which no God played a part.
Dr Fern Elsdon-Baker, Head of the British Council Darwin Now programme, said: ‘The international Darwin survey has thrown up some very interesting results, especially as it includes data from countries not previously covered before. The most encouraging aspect of the survey shows that whilst there are diverse views on Darwin’s theory of evolution, there appears to a broad acceptance that science and faith do not have to be in conflict. Whilst the results show that there is some way to go in communicating the evidence of evolutionary theory to wider audiences, it is evident that there is clear space for dialogue on this sometimes complex area of debate.’
The survey is now open to the public in each of these countries and can be completed by visiting the survey online. Over the coming months, this survey will create the largest data set ever gathered on the public’s understanding of evolutionary theory. For more information and to request a copy of the survey, please contact, Tony Stephenson, Adam Michael, or Benjamyn Tan on +44 (0) 20 7457 2020 or send them an email.