I read the Guardian newspaper on a semi-regular basis, and I find their coverage to range from Pretty Good to Good Lord No, with a peak around Not Bad (the quality is somewhat moot, since the ever-delightful Ben Goldacre, among other loved columnists, guarantee that I will always return).
However, there is the occasional distressing piece from an individual notably unaware of the complexity, and often the substance, of what they are talking about. One source that provides such tidbits with unfortunate frequency is in the G2 columnist Michele Hanson. Now, her column usually just offers Humorous Anecdotes and Gripes, which is fine for a supplement, but she also spends plenty of time commenting on science subjects from a platform of ignorance and, more worrying, derisive scorn. From yesterday’s column:
A bumper crop of bad science plopped out of our universities and hospitals this week. Three lots at once, and all about relationships. The first gang, from UCL, LSE and Warwick Medical School, have “developed a mathematical model of the mating game to help explain why courtship is often protracted”. Or as every girl’s mother has probably told her, “Don’t do it on the first date. If he can’t wait, he’s not worth it.” [...]
I would like to tear my hair out. I ought to be used to professors churning out this sort of old-hat, inapplicable drek, time after time, but for me the shock never fades. How do they get away with it? Has Professor Robert Seymour, of UCL, been shut away in the groves of academe since birth, and does he really think that we don’t know that “longer courtship is a way for the female to acquire information about the male”. Has he ever met a female person? Or a male from the outside world? Did he not know already that we know that you can’t get to know someone all that well in the course of a quick bang?
Ignoring her implicit assumption that all biologists are men, I am left to wonder what Michele Hanson thinks academics do all day. Placed in her position, I would pause and wonder how Robert Seymour can have a job in which he does nothing more than state “longer courtship is a way for the female to acquire information about the male”, put down his pencil and head out to walk the green fields of Bloomsbury. Does she not at least suspect that he publishes some sort of work, and it must run to at least a number of paragraphs, and there would be something more contained within them.
As it happens, she should not have to wonder about these things, since the information is easily available. Using my considerable interneting abilities, I typed “Robert Seymour UCL” into google, and found the UCL press release on the subject as the second entry. The press release explains in more detail what the study involved, notably that it was seeking evolutionary stable equilibrium behaviors, which it describes as “behaviors in which females are doing as well as they can against male behavior and males are doing as well as they can against female behavior”. If she wanted more detail in exactly what this meant, the press release contained details on the paper in which the results were published, as well as a specific invitation to send a copy to any journalists who wished to read it (in case they did not want to go to the library or pay to for it). I think you’ll agree, reader, that information on this subject was not hard to come by.
Game Of Love Theory
The point that Michele Hanson missed is that the purpose of the paper was not to state what occurs, but instead to attempt to explain WHY it occurs. There is no a priori reason to suppose that animals (for this paper was not specifically about human mating) should undergo a long courting process. Yes, courtship allows animals to learn about their partner, but there is no particular reason why two individuals would not communicate all relevant information up front, thus avoiding wasting time that could otherwise be spent feeding and rearing young. Statements of “they try to take advantage” or “life doesn’t work like that” are just circular, begging the question of WHY animals are like that. Instead we want to see if we can look at it from an evolutionary perspective.
Seymour et al‘s paper puts together a mathematical model of mating between two individuals; this is basically a way of determining a level of ‘pay-off’ for particular pairs of actions (the pay-off being measured in number of offspring that survive to themselves mate, or something similar). For instance, if the female invests in a period of courtship and the male then gives up, then the pay-off for both the male and the female will be low; if the male and female court for a short period of time and then mate, and the male is of good quality, then the pay-off for both the male and the female will be high; and so on. The model gives specific values to these various outcomes, given the value of mating with good and bad males, the cost of courtship over time, and so on.
Now, the behaviour of organisms evolve, so the male’s and female’s choice can change and be selected for. Since choices that lead to a greater pay-off by definition will result in more children, the choices that lead to having a higher pay-off will become more common in the population*. This is where the concept of an evolutionary stable behaviour becomes important. Two behaviors are said to be stable if any change in the behaviour will lead the individual with the changed behaviour to have a lower pay-off.
As an example, suppose that a population of birds have the following behaviour; any bird that has more than a certain amount of food will give some of their food to any bird that has less than that amount of food. This is a good strategy in the sense that the advantage of having a big meal over having a good-sized meal is low, whereas the advantage of having a small meal over having no meal is large; everyone in the population does well, on average. However, this behaviour is not stable, because an individual in this population who does not give out food when they have excess will do even better (since they will get food from everyone else when hungry, but get their own extra food when they have it). On the flip side, a population where everyone keeps their food for themselves is stable, since any individual who starts giving away excess food will be worse off**.
Now, the UCL paper analyzed their model to see which strategies were evolutionary stable, and which were not. The paper shows that the only generally stable method is for females to prolong mating for long periods of time; this exacts a cost on both the male and the female, but eventually in a long courtship males of lower quality will find that this cost becomes too much, and will give up. What is significant is not just this explanation of why females prolong courtship, but that analysis of the mating model showed that this is the only strategy (of the simple ones investigated) that will stand up to evolutionary forces. I think that it would not be too much to expect a journalist for a national newspaper to put in enough effort to get this simple point, instead of merely using their work to make snide remarks about the authors’ personal lives.
———————————————————————————
*Note that this only works in so far as the various choices are under genetic, and therefore hereditary, control
** Of course, more complicated systems exist in nature that do allow sharing, but they always find a way to punish cheaters in some way
This takes me right back to first year “Evolution and Behavior” lectures. All the models for courtship behavior in birds and such (although I preferred the termites, they were cool).
Unfortunately the image of a scientist as some old bloke with no knowledge of the outside world is hard to shift. *sigh*, it annoys me as well that people go all faux-protesty about this kind of science (which seems to be quite good science as far as I can make out, didn’t bother to chase up any of the preliminary papers) yet get all excited about psudo-science crap like amino-acids in shampoo and detoxifiers in bath salts.
In writing that column, this woman is simultaneously providing a perfect example of the negative effect of her kind of ‘journalism’. “I ought to be used to professors churning out this sort of old-hat, inapplicable drek”, she says: and that attitude would be perfectly understandable in someone whose picture of science was built entirely from reading this sort of thing in the papers. The fact that she chooses to use her own incompetent summary of the work to justify the contempt for science that no doubt prompted it in the first place, though, is unforgivable.
Did you write to the Guardian about it?
I did not, no. I’m not sure they’d take it that seriously, given that it was a) in a light supplement and not the paper proper and b) contains no definite factual errors. Making an argument that a piece of reporting promotes a false and harmful idea of the process of science is probably less likely to have much of an effect. Maybe I should, though.
I actually thought of sending a link to this blog article to Michele Hanson, though I’m not sure it would do any good.