Farm News 02-11-07

Sunday morning, after chores, 23°

Ad Astra

Monday was the 40th anniversary of the launch of Lunar Orbiter 3, the final moon mapping mission. We have Google Earth and Google Mars, but not Google Moon. Hey! Google! We want Google Moon!

The moon has no atmosphere so satellites of the moon can orbit as low as they wish, just so they clear the mountain tops. What a ride it would be to orbit the moon about 100 feet above the highest peaks. That would be enough to make a person want to drink some whiskey, smoke some pot, and yell, “WHOOPEE.” As you might deduce, I belong to the Han Solo school of space exploration.


Garden Seeds

The garden seed order for this year arrived this week. For years we have ordered most of our seeds from Henry Field or Gurney, but this year we changed to Burpee. Both Gurney and Henry Field have greatly reduced the number of varieties they carry, whereas Burpee has a very large selection. Burpee might be a bit more expensive, but the variety makes it worthwhile.

One thing I'm looking forward to trying is Ruby Sweet Corn, a variety with bright red kernels. We've grown the red popcorn before, but this is the first red sweet corn I've seen. Along with the Ruby we ordered two other varieties, Sweet Treat and Silver Choice. Another new variety for us this year is Lemon Cucumber, an heirloom variety that produces lemon shaped yellow cucumbers.

Both of us like golden beets, so we ordered Golden Globe and Detroit Dark Red. For green beans we'll plant Blue Lake Bush, which have worked for years for us. Sweet Treat carrots are the only variety we ordered, new for us. Lettuce this year is Simpson Elite, which we have grown before. Honey Bun hybrid cantaloupe is new for us this year. Avon hybrid spinach is also a new variety for us.

We don't take too many chances on peas. This year we are planting Garden Sweet and Wando. Wando has produced well for us in the past. Orange Smoothie pumpkin, another first timer for us, finishes the list of vegetables.

Paula thinks global warming threatens the strawberry supply, so we will be planting a new bed with Festival, a variety we haven't tried before.

Flowers draw you into the garden. We save a lot of flower seed from year to year, and this year we are buying Scarlet Runner beans, which are pretty, attract butterflies and hummingbirds, and are good to eat. Calendula Oktoberfest is also going into the garden.

We purchased Teddy Bear and Chianti ornamental sunflower seed this year. The ornamentals cross pollinate with the wild ones and give us neat sunflowers all over the place.

There will be more seed purchases before the planting season is finished and we will buy plants, too. There are two kinds of garlic already in the ground and we will buy and plant more in the fall.

In a few weeks we will have the tree and shrub orders ready, and I will be able to give you another thrilling line by line report on what we are going to plant.

Monkey Toys


Okay, this started when I wrote this:

Our culture seems to be coming off a peak of ascribing all gender differences in behavior to socialization instead of genetics, yet most parents who have children of both sexes are certain that they differ from birth. Somebody watched baby monkeys when they were offered their choice of toy trucks or dolls. Little female monkeys liked dolls and little male monkeys liked trucks, generally. Not all of them were that way, just most of them. Although one might expect young monkeys to respond in some way to dolls, it makes no sense that young male monkeys would like trucks more than dolls unless one accepts the idea that something deeper, not explicitly stated, is being detected.

Dolls look enough like monkeys that one can understand why little female monkeys would like them, but there is nothing in the ancestry of the primates that looked like a pickup truck. Social influences could be used to explain why human boys like pickup trucks, but not monkeys. When our genes, and those of the monkeys, were selected out of the pool there were no mechanical devices around. Evolution is not forward looking, and I can't believe that some grand designer selected a set of genes that would lead to male monkeys liking mechanical devices.

What, then, were the characteristics being selected that led male primates to like mechanical devices and females to like dolls? It makes some slight sense for females to be more interested in dolls because they are the ones that will raise the next generation of babies. Perhaps males like pickup trucks more because, for some reason, more of the genes that incline primates to use tools appear only on the Y chromosome.

Maybe I'll ask my daughter what she thinks about this question.

So, I asked my daughter. She went to Wellesley, a women's college (the first thing she taught me is that it is a 'women's college', not a 'girl's school'), so I thought she might have some thoughts on the subject. Feminists have a tendency to ascribe all differences in behavior between the sexes to social, not genetic, influences, which made me think my daughter might disagree with me. She did, and wrote:

Trucks vs. dolls, I'm very skeptical; I'd want to see the published results of that study, because it sounds like the results could be open to interpretation and the methodology could be tricky. (What kind of dolls? Was each monkey offered a choice between the two or was it a free-for-all? What color were the toys?) I'd bet that human children of both genders like playing with baby dolls when they're quite young, and the boy/girl doll/truck split happens at a later age, which has little to do with evolution.

As for genes that incline primates to use tools - I think you're excessively tying behavior to genetics there. Something as high-level as tool use is the territory of cognitive science and neurobiology, not genetics. Toy trucks have nothing to do with the kinds of tools the other primates use; that's just our human brains making a connection. Monkeys don't know how to drive trucks, and even if they did they wouldn't connect that little plastic Tonka to a Ford F-150. (Frankly, you could say the same thing about the dolls - to a monkey they could just be another hunk of plastic.) If you did the study with known tool-using primates, and gave them a choice between sticks and realistic toy baby monkeys, you might have useful results.

I couldn't send the original report to her, it was published in Evolution and Human Behavior, but I did send a summary that appeared on EurekAlert, a site maintained by the AAAS. The summary said, in part:

Though the monkeys had no concept of a "boy" toy and a "girl" toy, they still showed the same gender preferences in playing with the toys, Alexander [Dr. Gerrianne Alexander of Texas A&M, the researcher] says. That is, compared to female monkeys, male monkeys spent more time with "boy" toys, and the female monkeys, compared to their male counterparts, spent more time with "girl" toys, she notes.

"Masculine toys and feminine toys," Alexander says, "are clearly categories constructed by people. However, our finding that male and female vervet monkeys show similar preferences for these toys as boys and girls do, suggests that what makes a 'boy toy' and a 'girl toy' is more than just what society dictates – it suggests that there may be perceptual cues that attract males or females to particular objects such as toys."

In the experiment, Alexander says, male monkeys spent more time playing with traditional male toys such as a car and a ball than did female monkeys. The female monkeys, however, spent more time playing with a doll and pot than did the males. What's more, both male and female monkeys spent about the same amount of time with "gender neutral" toys such as a picture book and a stuffed dog.

The summary then goes on to say:

She says the toys preferred by boys – the ball and the car – are described as objects with the ability to be used actively and be propelled through space. Though the specific reasons behind the monkeys' preferences have yet to be determined, she says, the preferences for these objects might exist because they afford greater opportunities for rough and active play – something characteristic of male play. Also, the motion capabilities of the object could be related to the navigating abilities that are useful for hunting, locating food or finding a mate.

Males, she says, may therefore have evolved preferences for objects that invite movement.

On the other hand, females may have evolved preferences for object color, relating to their roles as nurturers, Alexander notes. A preference for red or pink – the color of the doll and pot – has been proposed to elicit female behaviors toward infants that enhance infant survival, such as contact.

My clever daughter hit on the color problem right off. The researcher's speculation, that the males' preference might be for objects that can be propelled through space, doesn't make much sense to me, because dolls and pots can be thrown as readily as cars and balls.

My not always clever daughter doesn't think that tool-using has a genetic basis, but I ascribe that to the one-sided education she received at the women's college. Like most good feminists, she hasn't read much of Steven Pinker's work. However, she is about three months away from having a son, her first child, which might change some of her opinions about there not being a genetic basis for many of the differences between boys and girls.

Why are those monkeys behaving in that way? Don't they understand how confusing this can be? I am sending all this speculation to Dr. Alexander in the hope she might take time to help straighten us out.

William Calvin and Open Source Software


This newsletter is wandering quite a bit from discussions of ducks and goats, so I'll try to close some things up. When I stated that the product of a Darwin machine is complexity, I should have explained the difference between a Model T Ford and a new Lexus. A Model T is a very simple automobile and very difficult to drive. A new Lexus is a very complex automobile, but so easy to drive it can even automatically parallel park. Windows is far more complex than CP/M, it's long ago predecessor, but far easier to use. Complex things can have a simple exterior.

Darwin machines are not, in themselves, complex systems. Six easy to understand requirements are all that are needed to create a Darwin machine. Some day, perhaps, someone smart will link Stephen Wolfram's thoughts on the creation of complexity with William Calvin's six requirements and we will have something interesting.