Posts Tagged ‘testosterone’
inspired by writers’ week, sort of – the internet, violence, testosterone and our future
Hmmm – needs further investigation. Vive les bonobos!
I spent some time at the Adelaide Writers’ Week tents yesterday, and heard a couple of remarks from speakers that exercised me in a negative way, so I thought I might air my grievances and expand on my thinking here. One was a quote taken, I think, from the historian and ‘public intellectual’ Bernard Lewis, on the influence of the internet on modern culture, and the other was a dismissal of the ‘better angels of our nature’ thesis of Steven Pinker.
I know Lewis only as a name, never having read any of his work, and I note that he died in 2018, just a few days shy of his 102nd birthday, so I can’t imagine him being an early adopter of the internet. I put his ‘public intellectual’ status in quotes largely out of jealousy, as I think I yearn to be a public intellectual myself, though I’m not sure. Anyway, from the little I heard of the quote, selected and spoken by Waleed Aly, Lewis was considering the double-edged sword of the internet in something like the manner of Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium is the Massage, only rather more negatively. I do recall dipping into McLuhan’s work decades ago, and finding it a bit over-hyped, and hyper. Anyway that’s enough of McLuhan. The concern being expressed about the internet was really mostly about social media and the ideological balkanisation it appears to foster. There’s some truth to this of course, which is why, without really thinking it through, I’ve been avoiding social media outlets more and more. Facebook lies dormant on my devices, and Twitter has come and gone.
But that is a minor part of the internet for me. Its advantages far outweigh the distractions of clickbait sites, and I personally consider it the greatest development in the dissemination of human knowledge at least since the invention of writing – and far more consequential than Gutenberg’s invention. For example, just in the past few months, without stepping outside my home, I’ve watched a lecture series from Yale University on the history of Russia, from the Kievan Rus to 1917 and the end of Tzardom; another lecture series – an Introduction to Neurology, from MIT, and a number of lengthy lectures from the Royal Institution, on palaeontology and on epigenetics, for example. I’ve subscribed to Brilliant.org and have completed 115 of their lessons on everyday science, and I’m boning up on the basics with Professor Dave’s Introduction to Mathematics series. Meanwhile, over the years I’ve observed Wikipedia growing in stature to become the first and best go-to site for learning about historical figures and events, as well as complex scientific subjects. And full scientific papers on just about every possible subject are becoming increasingly available online. I now have access to the greatest library in human history, which leaves me, at times, with a confused feeling – sometimes a dwarf, sometimes a titan. Bliss at this time it is to be alive, but to be young… I recall watching a video (online of course) about how a young African boy was able to build a wind turbine via online instructions, and so bring cheap electricity to his village. .. In short, the internet is an instrument – as is writing and the printing press. It can be used for a multiplicity of purposes, positive or negative. It’s up to us.
Second little irritant. I heard a brief segment of an onstage discussion between the philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer and a writer unknown to me, Samantha Rose Hill, author of a study on Hannah Arendt, about whether they viewed the future positively or negatively. Singer described himself as essentially an optimist, and spoke of his ‘expanding circle’ thesis. He also referred to Pinker’s The better angels of our nature, a book with which he was in broad agreement. The female writer, in her turn, said that she was definitely not in agreement with Pinker, after which I petulantly switched off.
I read The better angels of our nature, probably not long after it was published in 2011, and Pinker’s follow-up book, Enlightenment now, in 2018 or 2019. Right now I can say that I can’t recall a single sentence from either book, which is also the case for the hundreds of other books that have been consumed by the gaping maw of my mind. I might also say that I’ve written more than 800 pieces on this blog, and I’d be hard put to remember a line or two from any of them. In fact I’m sometimes moved to read an old blog piece – somebody has to – and find it amazing that I once knew so much on a topic about which I now know nothing.
But I digress. I don’t have to dig up my copy of Better angels to confirm my agreement with Pinker’s thesis. He wasn’t putting forward an argument that we’d become less violent as a species. He didn’t need to, because it was so obviously true, as anyone who reads a lot of history – as I do – knows full well. The real key to Pinker’s book lies in its sub-title, Why violence has declined. It seems to me that nobody in their right mind – or, I mean, nobody with an informed mind – would argue that the human world, a hundred years ago, 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, or, taking advantage of the knowledge provided to us from ancient DNA, 10,000 years ago, was more peaceful than it is today, on a per capita basis. The question is why.
Of course it’s impossible to keep track of the daily violent acts among a current global population of 8 billion, and to compare them to those of say, the year 1600, when the population has been estimated at about a half billion. And, yes, we’re now capable of, and have committed, acts of extreme, impersonal violence via nuclear weapons, but anybody who has read of the gruesome events of the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, the Scottish slaughters of England’s Edward I (a recent read for me), the centuries-long witch-hunts of Europe, and many other brutal engagements, as well as the public hangings, burnings, decapitations and tortures that were commonplace worldwide in earlier centuries, would surely not want to be transported back in a time machine without a cloak of invisibility or the support of a very powerful overlord – supernatural by preference.
Pinker’s book seeks to answer his own question with data and the possible/probable causal linkages, while recognising the complexity of isolating and independently weighing causes and correlations (he returns to this theme in his latest book Rationality, especially in the chapter entitled ‘Correlation and Causation’), including the spread of democracy, the growth of globalism and internationalism, the developing concepts of human rights, feminism, international monitoring agencies, and improved, less dangerous technologies re industry, medicine and transport, to name a few. Deaths can be no less violent, that’s to say violating, for being slow and accidental, after all.
Note that I snuck ‘feminism’ in there. Unsurprisingly, that’s the factor that most engages me. In the WEIRD world, thanks largely to Simone de Beauvoir (ok, a bit of flagrant heroine-worship there), feminism has been on the rise for several decades. During the same period, in the same regions of the world, male testosterone levels have been dropping. I would rest my case there, but I hear Mr Pinker tsk-tsking in the background. Seriously, the rise of feminism is surely one of a multiplicity of factors leading to a situation that medical researchers describe as ‘alarming’ – I’m not sure why.
Of course, testosterone is an important hormone, especially for men. On this medical website, Dr Kevin Pantalone, an endocrinologist, points out that, for males, testosterone helps maintain and develop:
- Sex organs, genitalia and reproductive function.
- A sense of well-being.
- Muscle mass.
- Bone health.
- Red blood cell count.
So, questions arise. Why are testosterone levels dropping (pace feminism), and is the drop significant enough to seriously compromise WEIRD men’s health? Well, according to the same website, different figures are given for what counts as a low testosterone level – 250 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dl), according to Dr Pantalone, and 300 ng/dl according to the American Urology Association. We’re not there yet, on average, but we’re inching closer, apparently.
So why the drop, apart from feminism? Some suggested factors include obesity (elevated BMI), reduced physical activity (however, endurance activities such as long-distance running and cycling have been shown to lower testosterone levels)., poor diet (but ‘several studies indicate that low-fat diets may lead to slightly lower testosterone levels‘), chronic and excessive alcohol consumption, lack of sleep (e.g. sleep apnea), and environmental toxins such as EDC (endocrine-disrupting chemicals – which sounds a bit vague).
That’s it. It all seems a bit thin to me – apart from the obesity bit. One factor they don’t mention, probably due to our overly polite society – or is it ‘wokeness?’ – is the serious drop in recent decades, and perhaps even centuries, of good old raping and pillaging. Nothing better for boosting ye olde testosterone, surely?
Seriously, would it be a terrible thing if male testosterone levels were reduced to those of females? And what about my darling bonobos?
So, human males typically have testosterone levels ranging from 265 to 923 ng/dl, while females range from 15 to 70 ng/dl. That’s a big big difference. Which raises the question – if females have such low testosterone levels, what about their bone health, muscle mass and sense of well-being? I suppose this is where we get into the finer details of endocrinology and evolution, but my uneducated guess would be that, over time, the endocrine systems of male and female humans have diverged somewhat, perhaps in response to different activities between the sexes. One way of getting more information about this – and this rather excites me, I have to say – is to look at the endocrine systems of largely female-dominated bonobos and compare them to those of chimpanzees. So that’s what I’ll be looking at in my next post. I can’t wait.
References
Stephen Pinker, The better angels of our nature, 2011
Stephen Pinker,Enlightenment now, 2018
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33741447/
less testosterone? – such a worry
the Chinese Testosterone Party – ‘let’s wear boring western outfits and shit on “western values” – that’ll fix em’
Okay, so back to the real stuff, testosterone. The inimitable Sabine Hossenfelder, of the dry humour and sexy German accent, has explored its supposed reduction among humans and how it is deplored among the wannabe macho fraternity.
So first of all I must go straight to bonobos, our more or less female-dominant cousins. There’s precious little data on bonobos and testosterone, but see my previous piece, referenced below. A 2005 study of wild bonobos found, unsurprisingly, that ‘the alpha male had the highest circulating levels of T’, though a comparison with chimp T levels would have been useful. And when I say ‘little data’ I should qualify that – there’s not much data that can be made sense of (by me), it’s so complicated. For example, testosterone levels in female bonobos are just as important as in males, and they vary with age and circumstances. What seems to be the case, which I suspected all along, is that testosterone levels follow rather than lead social aggression and lifestyle patterns, which is why I’ve always been interested in the social development of humans along bonobo lines, so to speak, without worrying about hormones too much.
Now, returning to Sabine, who does a great job of summarising the pros and cons of having too much or too little T. Her most important point, which is well-known but can hardly be stressed enough, is that testosterone levels drop when males are holding or playing with a child (or maybe even thinking of doing so, or having pregnancy fantasies, or just wearing his favourite little black dress…), and they rise after divorce – which may help to explain some restraining orders. But these effects are relatively small for most males.
The evidence is clear, though, that T levels really are falling (oh frabjous day!). Sabine provides graphic, heartening evidence, at least to this dweeb. But there are downsides – both men and women are becoming physically weaker, slower and fatter, especially in the WEIRD world. High protein diets are more common than ever before, and weight gain lowers T, which in turn results in weight gain. And even the abandonment of cigarettes reduces T somewhat – another pleasant, if bizarre, surprise. Of course, as Sabine points out, all this is far from pleasant to some, such as the perennial dweeb who would be otherwise, Tucker Carlson, but others, such as myself, call it progress. Sabine winds her piece up with a most excellent quote from the sadly missed Carl Sagan which I’ll set down here for my own delight:
Why is the half of humanity with a special sensitivity to the preciousness of life, the half untainted by testosterone poisoning, almost wholly unrepresented in defence establishments and peace negotiations worldwide?…. Testosterone also causes the kind of aggression needed to defend against predators and without it we’d all be dead…. Testosterone is there for a reason. It’s not an evolutionary mistake.
Testosterone won’t disappear, in humans or bonobos. If we have more need of it in the future, it’ll probably mean bad news, as Sabine points out. Meanwhile we have the near-apoplectic Mr Poo-tin (a sobriquet for which I’m most grateful) and the Chinese Testosterone Party as ongoing examples of the downside of T.
So while T isn’t an evolutionary mistake, evolution doesn’t stand still. Indeed social evolution is a more accelerated version of earlier forms. It took a couple of million years, at most, for bonobos to depart from chimps in terms of their happy, sharing-and-caring lifestyles. Humans, so much smarter and quicker off the mark once they’ve grasped the benefits (think Deutsche’s The beginning of infinity), have just started to move towards a more female-empowered society in the last century or so, at least in the WEIRD world. And it’s largely females in collaboration that have made it happen, just as occurred, I’m sure, in bonobo society. Of course, this is still too slow for those of us growing older and more impatient. However, horrible as this is to admit, super-macho events such as the ‘great wars’ of the first half of the 20th century, Japan’s half-century of brutal slaughter and rape in the East, and now Poo-tin’s crime against Ukraine, lead to a quickening of positive responses – the United Nations, international monitoring agencies, defensive alliances, and the like. Global human-caused problems are leading to globally-negotiated attempts at solutions, and the lure of global trade dollars also has its benefits.
We need also to learn from previous mis-steps. Here in Australia we commemorate Anzac Day every year, and we hear kids saying ‘they died to save our country’ or ‘…that we can be free’. In the USA we hear praise of Vietnam vets, who fought ‘to defend our country’ or ‘our values’. Against the Vietnamese? It’s such arrant bullshit. The US was in Vietnam first at the behest of the French, who decided to quit their overlordship because it wasn’t delivering enough benefits – to the French. And of course it was impossible for the locals to govern themselves, in spite of having inhabited the region for millennia. It’s just another story of the powerful against the powerless, stories that go back to the dawn of civilisations. As to the ANZACs, fighting the Turks on the other side of the world, what was that about? Certainly nothing to do with Australian freedom. Australia just happened to be much more closely linked to Britain in 1914 than it is now, and two imperialisms, Britain with its quite vast empire, and Germany, the late-comers, spoiling for more power and influence, and a great muddle of other countries trying to work out which side would best suit their interests, came to blows in much the same way as two troupes of chimps have been known to do, but with much more horrific consequences. And blind patriotism, and its fanatical encouragement, didn’t help matters. The ‘Great War’ was an avoidable catastrophe and all our remembrance should surely be focussed on this avoidability.
To accentuate the positive, we are getting better. Yes, there’s the horrors in Ukraine, Iran, Burma and a number of African nations, which have diverse roots. Often it’s to do with the powerless rising up against their disempowerment, having virtually nothing to lose. Such conflicts have been going on for millennia, but we shouldn’t turn our backs o them. None of us get to choose whether we’re born in a rich or poor country, or a rich or poor sub-section of that country. We need to always bear this in mind. Of course it’s hard. It’s estimated that there are between 10,000 and 50,000 bonobos left in the wild. Humans number 8 billion. Even if we turned our backs on 99% of them, that would leave us with millions to worry about. And we all have our own problems… but sympathy and sharing seem to do us all a power of good. Vive les bonobos!
References
more on hormones, bonobos and humans
So having recently read Carole Hooven’s Testosterone: the hormone that dominates and divides us, an extremely informative and well-argued book that was basically a necessary read for me, considering my obsession with a more bonobo-like world for humans, I’m left with – what to do? How can I incorporate all this hormonal stuff into my ‘bonobo world and other impossibilities’ essays? I know I’ve mentioned hormones here and there, but never in any detail. Basically I’ve noted, along with Steven Pinker and others, that ‘we’re getting better’. Less violent, more caring of our children, more appreciative of our ‘feminine’ side, more questioning of the nature of gender, a little less male-dominant, at least in the WEIRD world. And since this doesn’t seem to have involved hormones, at least on the face of it, the testosterone issue was never so much front and centre in my dreams of human transformation as was the example, largely ignored by the human world, as it seems to me, of bonobo society.
Sadly, Hooven hardly mentions bonobos, so I need to do some bonobo-testosterone research myself. Here are my initial thoughts. Since bonobos, along with chimps, are our closest rellies, it’s reasonable to assume that we’re hormonally very similar (research required). So how did they evolve into the make-love-not-war apes (yes, an over-simplifying cliché), and why did we evolve more along the chimp line (yes, with great diversity, but very few cultures that ‘aped’ bonobos)?
Again, before I start looking at research abstracts, I can surmise a little. Chimps eat more meat than bonobos, which means more hunting and killing. Testosterone helps with that. The males are more into it so they gang together, leaving the women – sorry, the females – behind. There will be teamwork but also show-offy competition and a muscular hierarchy within the team. And the excitement of the hunt will boost testosterone all the more, which will be worked off on the females afterwards. Bonobos on the other hand spend more time in the trees, in a relatively nutrient-rich part of the DRC rainforest, eating mostly fruit and nuts. Not the sort of stuff you have to chase around and bash to death. And they hang around together, so the males might spend more time entertaining the kids, more or less by default.
And there are mysteries. The male bonobos are bigger than the females, by about the same proportion as humans. The females keep control by female-female bonding, often sexualised, but since ‘sexual healing’ goes on in every possible combination, why don’t the males gain control by the same means? Or why haven’t they? (It wouldn’t be a matter of deciding to do so, more an evolved thing, which didn’t happen). Also dominant females appear to have favoured male offspring, who might serve as their captain-at-arms, in a sense. But now I’m starting to speculate more wildly.
So, the research: in 2010, a paper was published in PNAS (pronounced ‘penis’ by the cognoscenti), entitled ‘Differential changes in steroid hormones before competition in bonobos and chimpanzees’. It described an experiment conducted on male pairs of chimps and bonobos (chimp with chimp, bonobo with bonobo). The pairs were tested for hormonal changes before and after two different food-sharing settings:
We found that in both species, males showed an anticipatory decrease (relative to baseline) in steroids when placed with a partner in a situation in which the two individuals shared food, and an anticipatory increase when placed with a partner in a situation in which the dominant individual obtained more food.
However, these ‘endocrine shifts’ occurred in cortisol for bonobos, and testosterone for chimps, which was more or less as predicted by the researchers. And why did they predict this?
Given that chimpanzees and bonobos differ markedly in their food-sharing behavior, we predicted that they would differ in their rapid endocrine shifts.
Cortisol is generally regarded as a stress hormone, or the fight or flight hormone. I used to get one of those ‘shifts’ (which sent me to the toilet) before teaching a new class. I haven’t asked female teachers if they ‘suffered’ similarly.
Because competition for overt markers of status and mating opportunities is more relevant to males, these effects are less consistent in females.
I’m not sure I was concerned about mating opportunities when starting a new class – could get me into a spot of bother – but status, maybe. But what interests me is that hormone shifts follow social behavioural patterns. That’s to say, shifts in testosterone will be rapid in all-male groups such as male gangs (which I experienced as a young person), in which the pecking order is constantly under challenge, all the way down the line. Cortisol too, I suppose, but gangs are all about ‘proving manhood’, which didn’t at the time seem to be all about sex, but in a not-so-roundabout way, it was.
Chimps, as mentioned, tend to hang together in these sorts of tight hierarchical groups, and so show a stronger ‘power motive’, a term used in human competition research. Bonobos are more co-operative, to the point of becoming stressed when food isn’t easily shared:
Because bonobo conflicts rarely escalate to severe aggression, we might classify bonobos as possessing a passive coping style…
That sounds like me, especially in my youth – considering that, all through my school years, I was one of the two or three smallest kids in the class, male or female, what other coping style could I have? But unfortunately, in the human world, too many blokes have an active coping style, together with a power motive, making misérables of the rest of us.
So, I’ve focused only on this one piece of research for this little essay, and I’ll have a look at more in the future. What it tells me is that we can, indeed, and should, shape our society to become more bonoboesque in the future, for the good of us all. It is heading that way anyway (again with that WEIRD world caveat), in spite of the Trumps and their epigones (dear, the idea that Old Shitmouth could bring forth epigones is grossly disturbing). One last quote from the researchers:
can’t get enough of bonobo bonding
References
Carole Hooven, Testosterone: the hormone that dominates and divides us, 2021
https://ussromantics.com/category/bonobos/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1007411107
Evolutionary biology, testosterone and bonobos
this is the first of a 22-part slide show on the topic – hormones don’t rate a mention!
Canto: So I think we need to get back to another obsession of ours – bonobos and how we can harness a bit more bonoboism for human purposes. We’re currently observing, horrified, as Russia’s alpha male chimp flips out on his own testosterone, perhaps….
Jacinta: Yes, it could well read like something out of Jane Goodall – a long-term alpha male, who has done reasonably well in holding his troupe together by inordinate bullying, random slaughter and regular breast-beating, and by smart alliances, suddenly endangers everything in attempting to take over another troupe…
Canto: And having read three books on the trot, referenced below, on China and its all-male thugocracy, it’s more than tempting to cast that thugocracy in chimpian terms – alpha male after alpha male after alpha male.
Jacinta: Yes, I’ve long considered how best to rename the soi-disant Chinese Communist Party (CCP), arguably the most absurd misnomer in the known universe. I considered the Chinese Fascist Party, but that seems a bit ‘trendy’, and to call it simply The Party seems too bland, neutral, and even festive. But to call it the Chinese Testosterone Party – that fits the bill perfectly. I really really want that to catch on in the WEIRD world. So anyway, with the evidence mounting that female leadership leads to better outcomes, politically, socially and, I hope, sexually – though we’ve been a bit nervous about that tediously sensitive issue – how can we speed up the trend towards human bonoboism?
Canto: It’s hard, especially when all these macho shenanigans bring out my own most bloodthirsty revenge fantasies. But I’ve been wondering about hormones: Are there any hormonal differences between chimps and bonobos that might help to explain the bonobo turn towards female-female bonding and control of males – and the freewheeling sexual play within bonobo society?
Jacinta: You mean – could we control and transform our human world through some kind of hormone replacement therapy? Sounds promising.
Canto: We’ll here’s some food for thought re males versus females, and not just in humans:
Empathy is our ability to understand how others are feeling, and men are less able to do this than women, across cultures. This is a widely replicated and consistent finding, and it’s not true just of human males and females. In chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, elephants, dogs and wolves, researchers have observed that males engage in lower rates of behaviours related to empathy, like caregiving, cooperating, helping and comforting.
Carole Hooven, Testosterone, p159.
Jacinta: So the question is – is there a hormone we can take for that? Sadly, it’s never that simple.
Canto: Sure, but anyway, let’s ask Dr Google. Hmmm, top of the page:
There is some evidence that high levels of estradiol and progesterone are associated with low levels of aggression
Jacinta: That’s enough for me. Compulsory high-level doses for all males. Overdoses in fact. They either die or shut the fuck up.
Canto: So there’s a university textbook, Principles of social psychology, which has a section, the biological and emotional causes of aggression, and of course Hooven writes a lot about aggression and testosterone in humans and other animals. There’s just so much to dig into here. For example, pair-bonding male birds and other animals, such as bonobos, who have more of a share in child-rearing, have lower testosterone levels than those in social situations where there is a greater separation between males and females. Arguably that is the case in agricultural societies as opposed to hunter-gatherers.
Jacinta: So much easier to change hormone levels by just stuffing them into people’s bodies than by changing behaviour, though, surely. Can’t you just add them to the water supply?
Canto: That might be possible, especially if we lived in a thugocracy.
Jacinta: Hmmm, it gets more and more confusing.
Canto: What’s interesting about the findings is the chicken-egg issue. Does the gradual social evolution of male caring – if that’s what’s happening – reduce hormone levels or vice versa? I would hypothesise that it’s the caring that’s affecting the hormone levels, but how to test this?
Jacinta: Seriously, testosterone plays a huge role in our development, physiologically to take it to its most basic level. It makes for more athleticism, and probably for more of the competitive urge that leads to that obsessive athleticism, and bodybuilding claptrap. Somehow it makes me think of Mr Pudding, and his caricaturish experience of first being bullied by Charles Atlas types, and then learning a few martial arts-type skills to get revenge, with the end result of controlling a whole nation, and leading a military to rape and murder women and blow kids to bits in Ukraine. Testosterone has a lot to answer for.
Canto: And yet. Look at bonobos. Look at Scandinavia. The beast has been tamed, in a few pockets of our universe.
Jacinta: Do aliens have hormones, there’s a question.
Canto: Yeah we first have to answer the earthling question – are there aliens in the universe?
Jacinta: But haven’t quite a few humans been kidnapped by aliens?
Canto: Ha, oh yes, the ones who escaped…. but all the missing persons…
Jacinta: Returning to Earth, the hormone issue, and possibly even the neurophysiology issue, these raise the questions of masculinity and femininity – which Hooven explores from an endocrinological perspective – does a woman with a high testosterone level have a disqualifying advantage over another ‘normal’ woman, in running, jumping, throwing and lifting?
Canto: Hilariously – depending on your perspective – this has become a minefield in the world of sport and athletics. Hooven cites an athlete, Caster Semenya (and I know v little about this topic) who had a habit of blitzing the field in running events a decade ago – in fact from 2009 to 2018. Unsurprisingly, I would say, she had ‘suspiciously’ high testosterone levels (which of course would never have been measured before the 21st century), so complaints were made. Was this woman really a man? Which raises obvious masculinity and femininity questions…
Jacinta: Which, just as obviously, should be quashed by – fuck, she’s fast, that’s so fantastic! Go, girl!
Canto: But I suppose there’s a legitimate question – do abnormal levels of x give you an advantage?
Jacinta: Yeah, like long legs, in running? Shouldn’t leg length be subject to restrictions?
Canto: It’s a good point. We want to think maleness and femaleness are distinct, but we tend to think in terms of averages – the average female is 80% of the mass of the average male, the average male produces x more testosterone than the average female, etc, but there’s enormous variation within each gender, and that’s genderbendingly problematic for more than just athletics officials.
Jacinta: Anyway, just how important is endocrinology for a future bonobo world? Should we be focussing on promoting estradiol and progesterone rather than femaledom? Should we be screening politicians for the best hormonal balance rather than the best policies?
Canto: Ah but if my previously mentioned hypothesis is correct, we should be screening potential ‘leaders’ for their caring and sharing, which will lead to a greater expression of the ‘good’ hormones.
Jacinta: Yes, good for a society in which aggression has more serious consequences than it had in the past, what with WMDs and the like – the slaughter of women for their ‘contemptuous’ flouting of dress codes, the slaughter of ethic communities for their insistence on a modicum of independence. Aggression with a massive state apparatus behind it, and more effective weaponry than ever before. But how do we rid ourselves of these aggressive states without aggression? How do we even defend ourselves against them without aggression?
Canto: Maybe we’re just wanting too much too soon. I note that we’re getting more female political leaders than in the past, though they tend so far to be countries with relatively small populations – Scotland (our birth country), Scandinavian countries, New Zealand, Taiwan, the Baltic States… and, as with bonobos, it’s not just the alpha females, it’s the status of the whole female sex that makes the difference.
Jacinta: Yes, if we had but world enough, and time….
References
Jane Goodall, Through a window, 1990
Trevor Watson & Melissa Roberts, ed. The Beijing bureau, 2021
David Brophy, China panic, 2021
Bill Birtles, The truth about China, 2021
Carole Hooven, Testosterone: the story of the hormone that dominates and divides us, 2021
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5942158/
Nicky Hayes (?), Principles of social psychology, c2015?