Take Care Of Your Ys Guys


A very long time ago, about 200 million years, our ancestor’s chromosomes had developed the X and Y types that stand us in good stead today. We share a lot of our DNA with other primate species as the species diverged about 25 million years ago.

Us males are very dependent on our Y-chromosomes; especially the male specific part and over the years there has been a lot of fraying around the edges so that we only have about 3% of the original version from 200 million years ago. We have known about this for some time and there has been some concern that men may be getting perilously close to their “sell by date.”

The X and Ys started out with about the same number of genes. Currently the X has around 800 while the Y is down to its last 78. This represents about 3% of what it started out with, hence the tendency for us to start biting our fingernails.

To put our minds at rest (or worry us some more) Hughes et al have sequenced the macaque genome to see if they have suffered a similar loss (1,2). These monkey’s ancestors diverged from ours about 25 million years ago as noted above.

The good news is that since the great divergence from the monkeys, we’ve only lost one gene to bring us down from 79 and we’ve been keeping a firm grip on those 78 for the past 5 million years so our male specific part of our Y-chromosome is in good hands.

Recall that the chimpanzees went off on their own about six million years ago and it was in Hughes et al’s letter to Nature (3) comparing the chimpanzees Ys with ours that started us worrying back in 2005.

  1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10843.html
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17127617
  3. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7055/full/nature04101.html


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One Good Turn...


Yesterday’s post was about cooperation, but there is another form of working together in a social situation that is based on social interaction as opposed to cooperation. For example, we teach our children early on to “play nice” and to take turns.  We accept this behavior as good manners when we get older.

Politely waiting for your turn may appear to be the case when we see young lions waiting for the alpha male to eat his fill, but this is different, it is fear of the consequences of challenging the ‘old man’ and has nothing to do with politely taking turns.

So the question arises are humans the only species with good manners – at least sometimes? Falcone et al from Sapienza U has answered this question for us as they just happened to have a couple of Macaques on hand and a couple of humans with time on theirs. They published their findings in this week’s PLoSone (1).

The Macaques had the usual computer screen beloved of experimentalists in front of them. The job they had to do was to press a white spot and hold it as a gray bar appeared flanked by a red dot and either a cross or a blue dot. Once the gray bar vanished they had to hit the cross or the blue dot to complete the cycle. Being immune to praise, the Macaques were rewarded with a few drops of a syrupy liquid.

By changing the cross for an occasional blue dot, the Macaques had to stay sharp, but now came the real tests. They had a human in to play too. The different color dots and crosses came up in random order and each task had to be different from the previous one. There wasn’t a lot of time to think about it of course so macaque and human had to stay sharp.

Periodically the human would stick his hand in to take a turn, or maybe two or even three or four turns, and then stop to let the Macaque back into the game. With a very high success rate the monkeys continued the sequence and didn’t repeat the last button hit.

 The Macaques had clearly picked up the idea of the game and were very polite about playing. If the human hand moved towards the screen, they waited their turn, but immediately resumed when the fickle finger was pulled back – no fuss, no bother.

At first they got their sticky treat as long as the task was successful. No bad words were uttered if the human got it wrong. To make it challenging, another round was played where if the human played, the monkey got nothing. Again, no squabbling, no pushing “me first, me, me, me,” But just good manners waiting their turn. Clearly, manners maketh the macaque!

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0032209

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Amazing Drives


In many social animal species, we see cooperation. Often those cooperating are related. Humans are among the species that cooperate effectively without being related. One of the current ideas is that this is learned over a long period and is based on the idea that we discern other to have thoughts and feelings similar to ours, which makes that cooperation work.

With a big magnet free, the big question can be asked what parts of the brain are working hard when we cooperate. Krill and colleagues gave 28 participants driving tests while having fMRI scans of their brains and reported on their results in the Public Library of Science (1).

The driving was through a maze on a computer screen. No easy task as they had a time limit to drive through each maze and they were presented with multiple mazes. It may be hard enough trying to drive through a maze when getting an fMRI, but this was just the baseline.

The real challenge was putting the participants in pairs and blindfolding the driver. The other person acted as instructor, indicating right, left, accelerate or brake NOW! They then changed places so that the other could shout at the driver.

After all this excitement the pictures were analyzed. Lots of brain activity of course. Now comes the really exciting part. Each person’s baseline image was subtracted from their blind driving images and there was consistently more activity in two regions when people were cooperating.

The regions were the orbital frontal cortex, and the caudate nucleus, right in the center of the brain. This part is associated with learning and feedback processes, but is also loaded with dopamine neurons. This means that there is a reward feeling (we like dopamine hitting our receptors) when we’re cooperating.

So it appears that we’re hard wired to cooperate with each other. It is interesting that the participants, who were 24 – 25-years old, were made up of 18 women and 10 men. However, the make-up of the pairs wasn’t given in the paper, so we don’t know if things would work better or worse if a blindfolded male was paired with a female instructor or vice versa. We are left to our prejudices remembering that men are notorious for not stopping to ask directions when lost.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030613



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One Good Yawn Deserves Another


Empathy is something that is of current interest among those who are interested in animal behavior, whether it’s people or parrots. One of the ways that is used to assess empathy is to watch for one subject to parrot another.

The latest excitement to hit the streets is Miller et al’s study on yawning parrots parroting each other (1). In this case the flock of captive budgerigars were video taped in the morning, after lunch, and in the evening.

Now it turns out that budgerigars sitting in jail without a lot to do yawn a lot. They also do a lot of stretching of a wing or a leg. The paper mentions that sometimes they stretch both legs, but didn’t make it clear if that was at the same time or sequentially.

Because they yawn and stretch at any time during the day, the impulse can’t be controlled by their circadian clocks telling them it’s time for bed. However, if one budgie yawns, its neighbors quickly follow suit and we see the yawn and stretch flowing through the flock like a Mexican wave.

Yawning contagion seems to be widespread among primates (human or not), rodentia and now parrots. Tortoises, though, are not too bothered if you yawn or not (2). They quietly go about their business chomping on leaves while those around them are yawning or stretching, not caring if they are being polite or not.


  1. M.L. Miller, A.C. Gallup, A.R. Vogel, S.H. Vicario & A.B. Clark, Behavioural Processes, 89, 264, (2012).
  2. http://james-goodwin.blogspot.com/2011/05/tiring-day.html



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Baby Power


Yesterday’s post was on the implications of imitative gazing, and today the gaze monitors are back with their electronics to check out young gazers. 6 or 8-month old children don’t have much in the way of tools to take charge of their environment, but that’s not going to stop them.

The power of the baby’s stare is the subject of this week’s contribution to the Public Library of Science by Wang et al (1).  Their experimental program worked with infants and TV screens. The first thing they tried was showing a red spot in one corner of the screen. If the infant stared at it, a nice picture of an animal appeared on the screen for a second or two. It reappeared on the screen if the dot was again fixed by the beady baby eye.

The electronic eye tracking equipment worked out where the infant was looking and the 6-month old children quickly worked out how to bring up the picture. The 8-month old ones were even quicker to catch on.

So far so good, but our seekers after truth thought maybe the kids were only staring at the dot because there was nothing else to look at, so now the became devious. They displayed two identical dots in opposite corners, but only one would bring up an animal experience. The animal picture this time faded slowly instead of just switching off. Presumably, this made the picture more desirable.

Again the kids quickly learned which spot to stare at and so control their rather limited environment. As a control, a group of adults were given the same test. It turned out that only half the adults worked out that one of the spots was a control mechanism. The other half were confused as to what was going on.

So what have we learned? It seems that in the cradle we learn that we can control our environment by merely staring at something. We’re familiar with the game of fetch. The baby throws the toy out of the cradle, and looks at it, and we rush to retrieve it and then we go round again.

Later on, we play the baby’s role when we take our dog out for a walk. Our dogs are usually willing players, but sometimes they play the other role and just sit there looking at where you threw the ball until you fetch it.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030884


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The Eyes Have It


To all primates body language is important and many animals signal their intentions. Our dogs are exceptionally good at reading our faces. But even when we are attempting to be poker faced, can we really keep our thoughts to ourselves?

This is just the sort of questions that delight our psychologist friends, especially when they have a handy group of undergraduates to take the role of lab rat for a day.

Now Terburg et al in last week’s Public Library of Science reported on the happy/angry face game. The eye movements of the students were recorded electronically while watching a TV display. A series of actors were shown in video with a blank expression and then they switched to a happy or angry face, but here comes the fun. The actor’s eyes shifted during the stimulus to look in a particular direction.

As we all do in such circumstances, the student’s gaze shifted to look in the same direction as the actors. Then the actor’s picture vanished and a target showed up on the screen. The time taken for the students to switch their gaze to look at the target was the critical factor rich in information, just waiting to be mined.

Angry gaze means a threat of some sort and emotional effects of gaze change time can be surmised from that information. Happy faces elicit better possibilities, but again gaze change time is important.

The results indicated that the students shifted the direction of their gaze faster to follow the direction of a possible threat and were more sluggish in checking out what caused the happy face. This confirmed earlier work and makes sense in survival terms, so what’s new here?

The shift time back to look at a target is different. Coming back from the happy direction took longer than coming back from the angry one. This was indicative of anxiety and the need for reassurance, like checking that all was well in other directions thus seeing which direction to head for.

Clearly, seeing the whites of their eyes provides critical information. I think that if I’m going to take up poker, I shall have to wear sunglasses.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0031373


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