Search

DOES ALTRUISM EXIST? CULTURE, GENES, AND THE WELFARE OF OTHERS BY DAVID SLOAN WILSON Yale University/Templeton Press Do altruistic groups always beat selfish groups? A new book claims they do. [...]

The evolution of development (“evo-devo”) has become a central concern in both evolu­tionary and developmental research, and human immaturity is no less a proper focus for evolutionary analysis than that of other species-if anything, it is more so. Two new books by David F. Bjorklund, a founder of evolutionary developmental psychology, summarize what we know now and propose that children invented our species. Due to the new phe­nomenon of partly heritable epigenetic modification of genes and the old one of the Bald­win Effect (by which plasticity leads to new selective forces on genes), this claim must be at least partly true. The inherent plasticity of children’s behavior, including play, accelerat­ed the evolution of humanity as instantiated in the human brain. Evolution cannot be understood without extensive reference to development, and nothing in childhood makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Byline: Melvin Konner Women are not equal to men; they are superior in many ways, and in most ways that will count in the future. It is not just a [...]

Infants crying increases during the first few weeks of life, peaks during the second month, and declines during the third and fourth months. Crying behavior clusters during the first quarter of life in the late afternoon and early evening. While the amount of crying each day seems to be age-related, the frequency of crying is not. The 'crying peak' may be universal despite considerable variation in other factors in infants' early life, but shortcomings in the current literature make it difficult to make a case for a culture-specific versus species-specific crying pattern. For example, almost all the studies have been done in the West, and some studies report effects of caretaking style on crying behavior. To look for cultural differences in crying behavior, infant care practices among the !Kung San were studied. These hunter-gatherers living in Botswana hold their infants more than 80 percent of the time during daytime observation and they provide them with frequent or continuous feeding. Greater than 92 percent of the time, infants' cries are responded to within 15 seconds. These practices are obviously different from practices in the Western world. Care of children in seven age categories (from four weeks or less to 99 weeks) was observed and cry and fret behaviors were noted. Data were compared with appropriate data from Western societies. For !Kung San infants, the duration of cry/fret behavior increased to a peak in the third month, then decreased until the sixth month, after which it remained stable. Cry duration and fret duration, analyzed separately, produced a similar pattern. There was little difference between the !Kung San, and Dutch and USA data. Therefore, support is lent to the notion that crying behavior patterns are universal in human infants and not affected significantly by caretaking practices or other cultural variables. (Consumer Summary produced by Reliance Medical Information, Inc.)

Byline: Melvin Konner As a graduate student in the 1960s, I joined Irven DeVore and Richard Lee in a multifaceted study of the !Kung San, then still hunter-gatherers, in northwestern [...]

HATRED The Psychological Descent Into Violence. By Willard Gaylin. 261 pp. New York: PublicAffairs. $24. WILLARD GAYLIN has long been one of our leading explainers of psychology, and his books [...]

Byline: Melvin Konner, M.D. I don't think most men like to talk about feelings,' an acquaintance of mine said recently. 'Gay men like to talk about feelings.' It wasn't an [...]

Summary points * Darwinian medicine asks why the body is not better designed * Obesity and its complications arise because our body is not designed for a modern environment * [...]

The Age of Scientific Sexism By Mari Ruti (Bloomsbury Academic) Full DISCLOSURE: My latest book defends the main viewpoint excoriated by Mari Ruti in The Age of Scientific Sexism: that [...]

SOME KIND OF NEW PRESCRIPTION MIND-SOOTHER SEEMS to have pervaded all walks of American life. Everywhere you go, everyone you know now seems to be listening to Prozac or to [...]

THE MASK OF BENEVOLENCE Disabling the Deaf Community. By Harlan Lane. 310 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $23. MY mother, we thought, was fortunate in comparison with the born [...]

THE CULTURE OF PAIN By David B. Morris. Illustrated. 342 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press. $29.95. 'Pain,' according to Aristotle, 'upsets and destroys the nature of the person who [...]

MAKING SEX Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud. By Thomas Laqueur. Illustrated. 313 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $27.95. 'I HAVE not written this book as an [...]

LEAD: ONCE DURING MEDICAL school I actually fell asleep for a moment or so in the emergency room while holding a retractor during surgery on a knife wound. I knew [...]

LEAD: ''THE PULSE QUICKENS, THE EYES become dilated and unfocused. . . . With some the breath comes in gasps, others become breathless . . . the powers of movement [...]

LEAD: PRISONERS OF RITUAL An Odyssey Into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa. By Hanny Lightfoot-Klein. Illustrated. 306 pp. Binghamton, N.Y.: The Haworth Press. Cloth, $24.95. Harrington Park Press. Paper, $14.95. [...]

Discusses the reluctance of men to communicate. Finding that men and women approach love differently; Researchers who are studying the differences between men and women; Discussion of traditional sex roles; Differences between male and female brains.

MICROCOSMOS Four Billion Years of Evolution From Our Microbial Ancestors. By Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. Foreword by Lewis Thomas. Illustrated. 301 pp. New York: Summit Books. $17.95. IT is [...]

VAULTING AMBITION Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature. By Philip Kitcher. 456 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. $25. A DECADE has passed since the publication of E. O. [...]

LEAD: THE RITUAL FRAMEwork for circumcision -still traditional in much of the world despite heated medical controversy - is complicated and varied. But the tradition best known in the United [...]

LEAD: THE ERNEST young psychiatrist recalled his patient sadly: THE ERNEST young psychiatrist recalled his patient sadly: ''We knew the cancer was there, but it was temporarily under control. In [...]

LEAD: ANY CANCER IS horrible, but cancer of the brain adds insult to injury. When a growth occurs in the colon or breast or liver, that is bad enough; but [...]

LEAD: A FRIEND OF MINE, a sedate historian, allows how he used to sit in the library as a graduate student at Princeton trying to bury his thoughts in some [...]

LEAD: ABOUT TWO-THIRDS of the way through one of those 36-hour shifts in medical school, I went to the coffee urn - that ubiquitous trough nestled somewhere in or near [...]

LEAD: MY SISTER-IN-law, Ronnie, is a 44-year-old screenwriter and mother of two who suffered a major stroke 18 months ago. A tiny blood vessel in the brain had ruptured; she [...]

LEAD: I REALIZED NOT LONG ago that a dozen or so of the women I know, most of them in their late 30's - old friends, peers, colleagues - were [...]

LEAD: ALL OF US, even physicians, are squeamish about discussing mortality, and it is difficult to imagine a desk - of physician or theologian, philosopher or poet - adorned today [...]

LEAD: IN ONE OF THE BETTER sections of Atlanta, a man in his early 60's again faces an anguished decision. His sister, 58 years old, has not been of normal [...]

LEAD: A FRIEND OF MINE WITH AN EARLY case of coronary disease recently had to choose a surgeon and then an internist for follow-up. For both, he went outside the [...]

LEAD: WE HAVE OFTEN seen in the breast a tumor exactly re-sembling the animal the crab. . . . In this disease the veins extending out from the unnatural growth [...]

LEAD: IN THE BAD OLD DAYS, WHEN homosexuality was considered a mental illness, a friend of mine was trying to go straight. He was seeing a distinguished psychoanalyst who believed [...]

LEAD: DR. DAN OLWEUS KNOWS THE BULLIES in Norway; at least those 8 to 16 years old in a population of 140,000 in 715 public schools. DR. DAN OLWEUS KNOWS [...]

LEAD: NO SEEEP! NO SEEEP!'' such is the sad wail of my 20-month-old daughter, amid lullabies in her father's arms, just before she sinks into the state she has been [...]

LEAD: THERE ARE THESE LITTLE ROUND BLACK cookies - you know the ones: two flat hard chocolate biscuits separated by a creamy, sugary interior. You can part the halves and [...]

Focuses on the use of antidepressants by patients. Side effects of drugs; Fears by critics that drugs would replace needed psychotherapy; effect of drugs against anxiety and depression.

Pontius (1973) raised ethical questions concerning research on reflexive stimulation in newborn infants. A reliance on poor data, theoretical misinterpretations, and inappropriate generalizations seriously weaken the scientific merit of her case. Available research reveals no detrimental consequence of reflexive stimulation during infancy.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles in the previous issues including one on the foreign policy that U.S. President Jimmy Carter adopted, one on sociobiology and one on the history of Sir Peter Paul Rubens paintings.

Presents the view that doctors and patients need more discipline to resist overusing medical technology, and that unproven technology can be dangerous. Question of whether doctors and patients are losing sight of the proper role of technology; Question of whether young doctors will be prepared for times when technology is not the solution; View that technology can come between patients and doctors.