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Sex is a puzzle for evolutionary biologists. It seems to be a waste of reproductive output. A population of a fixed size which requires two members to produce offspring reproduces, and therefore grows, at half the rate of the same sized asexsual population (which requires only one member to produce one offspring.)
So to explain the prevalence of sexual reproduction in nature we need to find some advantage to offset this so-called two-fold cost of sex. There are two prominent theories. The first is that sexual reproduction allows a species to shed disadvantageous mutations. Sexual reproduction thus ensures that offspring loses any harmful mutation with probability 1/2 (we are assuming that the parents do not have mutations of the same gene, a good approximation when there are many genes.) But with asexual reproduction, these mutations just accumulate.
Another theory is that sexual reproduction, by mixing around genes, ensures genetic diversity which enables a species to survive changes in the environment.
Not Exactly Rocket Science reports on an experiment designed to test these theories.
Like humans, C.elegans has two sexes but unlike us, they are males and hermaphrodites (with males making up just one in every two thousand individuals). Equipped with both sets of genitals, hermaphrodites worms can fertilise themselves without male help – far from being rude, telling C.elegans to go &$&! itself is a feasible lifestyle suggestion. Hermaphrodites could also mate with males, but they do that on less than one in 20 occasions.
The biologists manipulated the genetics of a population of these worms so that half would always mate with themselves and the others would always mate sexually. Next, they exposed the worms to a chemical that raised their rate of mutations. As the theory predicts, the sexually reproducing worms were more successful.
Next, they exposed the worms to a deadly bacterium. Consistent with the second theory, the sexually reproducing worms also fared better in this experiment.
Now the big puzzle. If sexual reproduction is beneficial, why do all sexually reproducing species in nature do it in pairs? This paper by economists Motty Perry, Phil Reny, and Arthur Robson proves that, at least with respect to the harmful mutation theory, a particular form of tri-parental sex dominates bi-parental sex. In the Perry-Reny-Robson world, reproduction requires two males and one female. The offspring receives genes with half-probability from the mother and 1/4-probability from each of the fathers.
(With this particular menagerie, in every reproductive cycle each female gets two partners per encounter but each male gets two encounters. Not only does this ensure that the “cost of sex” is again two-fold and not three-fold, but it also maintains equity in the gettin’ busy department. Only fair.)
You are out for dinner and your friend is looking at the wine list and gives you “There’s a house wine and then there’s this Aussie Shiraz that’s supposed to be good, what do you think?”
How you answer depends a lot on how long you have known the person. If it was my wife asking me that I would not give it a moment’s thought and go for the Shiraz. If it was someone I know much less about then I would have to think about the budget, I would ask what the house wine was, what the prices were, etc. Then I would give my considered opinion expecting it to be appropriately weighed alongside his.
This is a typical trend in relationships over time. As we come to know one another’s preferences we exchange less and less information on routine decisions. On the one hand this is because there is less to learn, we already know each other very well. But there is a secondary force which squelches communication even when there is valuable information to exchange.
As we learn one another’s preferences, we learn where those preferences diverge. The lines of disagreement become clearer, even when the disagreement is very minor. For example, I learn that I like good wine a little bit more than my wife. Looking at the menu, she sees the price, she sees the alternatives and I know what constellation of those variables would lead her to consider the Shiraz. Now I know that I have a stronger preference for the Shiraz, so if she is even considering it that is enough information for me to know that I want it.
Sadly, my wife can think ahead and see all this. She knows that merely suggesting it will make me pro-Shiraz. She knows, therefore, that my response contains no new information and so she doesn’t even bother asking. Instead, she makes the choice unilaterally and its house wine here we come. (Of course waiters are also shrewd game theorists. They know how to spot the wine drinker at the table and hand him the wine list.)
In every relationship there will be certain routine decisions where the two parties have come to see a predictable difference of opinion. For those, in the long run there will be one party to whom decision-making is delegated and those decisions will almost always be taken unilaterally. Typically it will be the party who cares the most about a specific dimension who will be the assigned the delegate, as this is the efficient arrangement subject to these constraints.
Some relationships have a constitution that prevents delegation and formally requires a vote. Take for example, the Supreme Court. As in recent years when the composition of the court has been relatively stable, justices learn each others’ views in areas that arise frequently.
Justice Scalia can predict the opinion of Justice Ginsburg and Scalia is almost always to the right of Ginsburg. If, during delibaration, Justice Ginsburg reveals any leaning to the right, this is very strong information to Scalia that the rightist decision is the correct one. Knowing this, Ginsburg will be pushed farther to the left: she will express rightist views only in the most extreme cases when it is obvious that those are correct. And the equal and opposite reaction pushes Scalia to the right.
Eventually, the Court becomes so polarized that nearly every justice’s opinions can be predicted in advance. And in fact they will line up on a line. If Breyer is voting right then so will Kennedy, Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas. If Kennedy is voting left then so are Breyer, Souter, Ginsberg, and Stevens. Ultimately only the centrist judges (previously O’Connor, now Kennedy) are left with any flexibility and all cases are decided 5-4.
When a new guy rotates in, this can upset the equilibrium. There is something to learn about the new guy. There is reason to express opinion again, and this means that something new can be learned about the old guys too. We should see that the ordering of the old justices can be altered after the introduction of a new justice. (Don’t expect this from Sotomayor because she has such a long paper trail. Her place in line has already been figured out by all.)
He tottered over to the thermostat and there it was: treachery. Despite a long-fought household compromise standard of 74 degrees, someone — Adler’s suspicions instantly centered on his wife — had nudged the temperature up to 78.
For the sleepy freelance writer, it was time to set things right . . . right at 65 degrees. “I just kept pushing that down arrow,” he said of his midnight retaliation. “It was a defensive maneuver.”
The article suggests that women generally prefer higher thermostat settings than men. (It is the opposite in my household.) The focus is on air conditioning in the summer and I wonder whether this ranking reverses in the winter. (My wife prefers more moderate temperatures: cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter. )
Repeated game exam question: will this make the climate wars better or worse? Give your answers and reasons in the comments. Ushanka Shake: Knowledge Problem.
Millions of internet users who use Skype could be forced to find other ways to make phone calls after parent company eBay said it did not own the underlying technology that powers the service, prompting fears of a shutdown.
Why are there firms? A more flexible way to manage transactions would be through a system of specific contracts detailing what each individual should produce, to whom it should be delivered and what he should be paid. It would also be more efficient: a traditional firm makes some group of individuals the owners and a separate group of individuals the workers. The firm is saddled with the problem of motivating workers when the profits from their efforts go to the owners.
The problem of course is that most of these contracts would be far too complicated to spell out and enforce. And without an airtight contract, disputes occur. Because disputes are inefficient, the disputants almost always find some settlement which supplants the terms of the contract. Knowing all of this in advance, the contracts would usually turn out to be worthless. The strategy of bringing spurious objections to existing contracts in order to trigger renegotiation at more favorable terms is called holdup. The holdup problem is considered by some economic theorists to be the fundamental friction that shapes most of economic organization.
Case in point, Skype and eBay. eBay acquired the Skype brand and much of the software from the founders, JoltId, but did not take full ownership of the core technology, instead entering a licensing agreement which grants Skype exclusive use. Since that time, Skype has become increasingly popular and a strong source of revenue for eBay. Now eBay is being held up. JoltId claims that eBay has violated the licensing agreement, citing a few obscure and relatively minor details in the contract. Litigation is pending.
Not coincidentally, eBay has publicly stated its intention to spinoff Skype and take it public, a sale that would bring a huge infusion of capital to eBay at a time when it is reinventing its core business. That sale is in turn being heldup because Skype is worthless without the license from JoltId. This puts JoltId in an excellent bargaining position to renegotiate for a better share of those spoils. (On the other hand, had Skype not done as well as it did, JoltId would not have such a large share of the downside.)
Whatever were the long-run total expected payments eBay was going to make to JoltId in return for exclusive use of the technology, it should have paid that much to own the technology outright, become an integrated firm, and avoided the holdup problem.
And don’t worry. You got your Skype. Holdup may change the terms of trade, but it is in neither party’s interest to destroy a valuable asset.
Tom Schelling has a famous example illustrating how to solve coordination problems. Suppose you are supposed to meet someone in New York City but you forgot to specify a location to meet. This was before the era of cell phones so there is no opportunity for cooperation before you pick a place to go. Where do you go? You go where your friend thinks you are most likely to go, which is of course where she thinks you think she thinks you are most likely to go, etc.
Notice that convenience or taste or proximity have no direct bearing on your choice. These considerations may indirectly influence your choice, but only if she thinks you think she thinks … that they will influence your choice.
There was an old game show called the Newlywed Game where I learned some of my very early training as a game theorist in my living room roughly at the age of 7. Here is how the show works. 4 pairs of newlyweds were competing. The husbands, say, would be on stage first, with the wives in an isolated room. The husbands would be asked a series of questions about their wives, say “What wedding gift from your family does your wife hate the most?” and the husbands would have to guess what the wives would say. (This was the 70’s so every episode had at least one question about “making whoopee,” like “what movie star would your wife say you best remind her of when you’re makin’ whoopee?”)
When you watch this show every night for as long as I did you soon figure out that the way to win this show is to disregard completely the question and just find something to say that you wife is likely to say, which is of course what she thinks you think she is likely to say, etc. You could try to make a plan with your newlywed spouse beforehand about what to say, something like the first answer is “the crock pot”, the second answer is “burt reynolds” etc. But this looks awkward when the first question turns out to be “What is your wife’s favorite room to make whoopee?” etc.
So the problem is just like Schelling’s meeting problem. The truth is of secondary importance. You want to find the most obvious answer, i.e. the one your wife is most likely to give because she thinks you are most likely to give it, etc. For example, if the question is, “Which Smurf will your wife say best describes your style of makin’ whoopee?” then even though you think the answer is probably “Clumsy Smurf” or “Sloppy Smurf”, you say “Hefty Smurf” because that is the obvious answer.
Ok, all of this is setup to tell you that Gary Becker is clearly a better game theorist than Steve Levitt. Via Freakonomics, Levitt tells the story of a Chicago economics faculty Newlywed game played at their annual skit party. (Northwestern is one of the few top departments that doesn’t have one of these. That sucks.) Becker and Levitt were newlyweds. According to Levitt they did poorly, but it looks like Becker was onto the right strategy, but Levitt was trying to figure out the right answers:
The first question was, “Who is Gary’s favorite economist?” I thought I knew this one for sure. I guessed Milton Friedman. Gary answered Adam Smith. (Although he later apologized to me and said Friedman was the right answer.)
Then they asked, “In Gary’s opinion, how many more quarters will the current recession last?” I guessed he would say three more quarters, but his actual answer was two more quarters.
The next question was, “Who does Gary think will win the next Nobel prize in economics?” This is a hard one, because there are so many reasonable guesses. I figured if Becker writes a blog with Posner, he might think Posner would win the Nobel prize, so that was my answer. Gary said Gene Fama instead.
The last question we got wrong was one that was posed to Gary, asking which of the following three people I would most like to have lunch with: Marilyn Monroe, Napolean, or Karl Marx. I know Gary has a major crush on Marilyn Monroe, so that was the answer I gave, even though the question was about who I would want to have lunch with, not who Gary would want to have lunch with. Gary answered Karl Marx (which makes me wonder what he thinks of me), but did volunteer, as I strongly suspected, that he himself would of course prefer Marilyn to either of the other two.
Female orgasm eludes evolutionary explanation. Most candidate explanations have a hard time reconciling the observation that a large fraction of women do not have orgasm during intercourse and among those that do it is not a consistent occurrence. Here is a fun paper surveying a variety of just-so stories that “explain” female orgasm. The authors dispense with
- Its a non-adaptive vestige of male orgasm.
- It encourages females to have more sex. (then why not always?)
- It encourages females to have sex with multiple partners (thus the asymmetry in “arrival times” between males and females.)
- It improves chances of fertilization. (empirically false)
and they leave us with an intriguing, relatively new one, the Evaluation Hypothesis.
When Barash was a graduate student more than ten years earlier, he observed that when subordinate male grizzly bears copulate, their heads are constantly swiveling about on the lookout for a dominant male, who, should he encounter a couple in flagrante, will likely dislodge his lesser rival and take its place. Not surprisingly, subordinate males ejaculate very quickly, whereas dominants take their time. If female grizzly bears were to experience orgasm, with which partner would you expect it to be more likely? And is it surprising that premature ejaculation is a common problem of young, inexperienced men lacking in status and self-confidence? Moreover, is it surprising that women paired with such men are unlikely to be orgasmic?
So it doesn’t encourage more sex uniformly, it encourages more sex with the right mate. And it is inconsistent and slow to arrive, not by accident, as in the vestigal hypothesis, but by design. And the sorting of men according to, let’s call it patience, seems to be a stable equilibrium as it requires either an exogenous characteristic correlated with “good genes” as in the case of dominant grizzlies, or perhaps in its social incarnation where it requires
sufficient access to resources to orchestrate interactions that are private, safe, and gratifying—in a word, romantic—and thus appealing to women’s evolved evaluation mechanisms.
From the book How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories: Evolutionary Enigmas by David Barash and Judith Lipton. (Cloche Click: Bookslut.)
Ever notice that food tastes better when your spouse cooked it (controlling for talent of course)? Why do leftovers often taste better than when the food was fresh? I believe the same phenomenon explains both of these.
A large part of tasting is actually smelling. You can verify this by, for example, eating an onion with your nose plugged. Our sense of smell tends to filter out persistent smells after being exposed to them for awhile so that we cannot smell them anymore. This means that when you are cooking in the kitchen, surrounded by the aromas of your food, you are quickly de-sensitised to them. Then when you sit down to eat, it is like tasting without smelling.
When your spouse has done the cooking you were likely in another room, isolated from the aromas. When you walk into the kitchen to eat, you get to smell and taste the food at the same time. That’s why it tastes better to you. The same idea applies to leftovers. It takes much less time to reheat leftovers than it took to prepare the food in the first place so you retain sensitivity to more of the aromas when it comes time to eat.
I believe that when recipes direct you to “allow the food to rest so that the flavors can combine” what is really happening is that you are induced to leave the kitchen and return with a renewed sensitivity. This also explains why dinners which you spent all day preparing are often disappointments. And it implies that when you have guests over for dinner you should entertain them outside of the kitchen so that they will enjoy the food more when it is ready.
When my wife, a rational agent, is preparing to welcome our monthly visitor, she is confronted by a preliminary wave of unwelcome hormones. The proximate effect of these hormones is to make her a tad more grouchy than she normally is about otherwise mundane events. But because my wife is a rational agent, presumably she is able to forecast this effect and account for it. In other words, when she has the impulse to feel perturbed about some minor calamity she reasons that her impulse is likely an artificial response brought on by the fluctuating chemistry in her brain. And this reasoning would lead her to moderate her emotional response.
Indeed I have witnessed my dear wife execute exactly these calculations. When this happens, the household is always most appreciative. Sadly, it doesn’t always happen.
My theory therefore is that what is happening is not a uniform variation in the hormonal level, but rather a spike in hormonal volatility that forces my wife into a signal-extraction problem that is inherently prone to error. For example, when her absent-minded husband leaves the lights on in the kitchen and she detects, in response, an oncoming alteration in her mood, she must determine whether this minor offence is something she would ordinarily be upset about. My theory is that hormone volatility makes it hard to know exactly the current hormonal level and therefore difficult to back out the baseline appropriate degree of aggravation (in this case, i would argue, none at all.)
And thus hormones, an otherwise purely nominal variable, can have real (cyclical) effects.
For the game theorists in the room, the difference must boil down to whether we have random matching across populations (case 1) or within a single population (case 2.)
Its a tempting hypothesis. And its entertaining to look at the wives of your relatives/close friends and theorize which attribute of their mothers they replicate (likewise for husbands/fathers.) But this seems like a difficult hypothesis to carefully test. Here is one attempt. Assemble a dataset of bi-racial families. We want the race of the father and mother, the sex of the child, and the race of the child’s spouse. To control for the racial proportions in the population, we compare the probability that a bi-racial male with a white mother marries a white wife to the probabiltity that a bi-racial male with a black mother marries a white wife. The hypothesis is that the first is larger than the second.
Now, marriage is a two-sided matching market. This means that we cannot jump to conclusions about the husband’s tastes on the basis of the characteristics of the wife. It could be that this husband would prefer a black wife (other attributes equal) but the best match he could find was with a white wife.
For example, an alternative story which would explain the above statistic is that black spouses are generally preferred but having a white father makes you a more attractive match and so bi-racial children with white fathers are more likely to match with their preferred race. (Any theory would have to explain why there was a difference in the ultimate match between those with white fathers and those with black fathers.) But the data would enable us to potentially rule this out. If this alternative story were true then bi-racial daughters with white fathers would also be more likely to marry black husbands than those with black fathers. That is, girls marrying their mothers rather than their fathers, the opposite of what the original hypothesis would predict.
So if the data showed that boys marry their mothers and girls marry their fathers, we could rule out this particular alternative story. Of course there will always be some identification problem somewhere, and here the following story would be observationally equivalent: having a white father makes you a more attractive mate, women like white men, men like black women. (Allowing men and women to have different racial preferences adds the extra degree of freedom to explain the [hypothetical] data.)
She is packing for a short trip and she bought a book for the plane ride. Its a historical romance. She asked me if it was a true story. I said “You might as well pretend it is, you will enjoy it more.”
Jennie: “What did you say?”
Jeff: “Yes it is a true story.”
Jennie: “Great, I like to read true stories.”
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