Male-dominance?

I am a traceuse - a women who does parkour (not sure what parkour is? check out these links). I read a post on American Parkour that asked why so many more men than women did parkour. Some suggested it was because social constraints on women made them feel they had to be more reserved and lady-like, while men were "allowed" to play and rough-house more. Others suggested that women were less strong in general, with less upper-body strength than men, making some of the common moves in parkour more difficult.

But I can't help feeling the pattern seen in parkour is part of something more - men are far more likely than women to engage in "risky-behavior". In everything from parkour to fast driving to heavy drinking, men outnumber women by large margins. Biological anthropologists have noticed this pattern in humans, as well as in other mammals, and have come up for a biological explanation for this sex difference. One text book summarized the argument as follows:

"For a female mammal, the costs associated with risk-taking behavior are unlikely to outweigh the benefits. She is likely to be able to find mates and fulfill her reproductive potential throughout her lifetime, so she has no particular need to engage in risk-taking behavior to acquire mates. On the other hand, male mammals vary much more in reproductive success. A male mammal may engage in high-risk, potentially very costly (even life-threatening) activities because such behavior could have a potentially high reproductive benefit." - Stanford, Allen and Anton, 2006. Biological Anthropology. New Jersey: Pearson, pp 523-524.

I find this biological argument interesting, because it explains patterns seen across species, not just in humans, and while I expect that social, personal and other explanations probably have an effect on people's decisions to engage in risky-behavior, I can't help wondering how much of human behavior in general is influenced by deeply hard-wired features of our long evolutionary history.

Saving the Gorillas (aka charismatic megafauna)

A few weeks ago, my journal club at work read about the plight of the Gorillas - apparently, as if habitat devastation and trophy hunting weren't enough, the Ebola virus is wiping out the scattered groups across western Africa, which has caused the ICUN to list the western lowland gorilla as critically endangered. What does this mean? Well, technically, it means that gorillas have undergone a population reduction on the order of 80 - 90% over the past ten years, and is at extremely high risk for extinction (click here for a detailed description of the ICUN classifications). What it means in human terms is that your children will never see a gorilla in the wild.

As a bunch of anthropologists, primatologists and the like, we worried about the gorillas and wondered what we could do. After all, Ebola is still a major health issue in humans, and many have documented the horrors of the virus. Shouldn't we do something to save our close relatives, the gentle, intelligent giants?

We were all on board, until the devil's advocate in the group mentioned that as a whole, great apes have been declining since their heyday in the Miocene (which ended some five million years ago). Outside of humans, apes are confined to areas of relatively heavy, tropical forest in only a few areas of the world, and only a handful of ape species are alive today, compared with hundreds of extinct species. They are not adapted to today's environments and have not been a terribly successful group (excepting us). Clearly, then, apes are already on the decline, why should we bother to save them?

The answer, as I see it, is a case of Charismatic Megafauna. Gorillas, and apes in general, have a great deal of appeal for most people. The environments they inhabit are rare and unique, and undoubtedly the homes to a wide variety of other species ofbirds, plants, insects and other invertebrates, not to mention the cute and furries. But despite studies of these groups it's a lot harder to motivate the masses to give money to save bugs than it is to get money for gorillas. So by keeping these ideal poster children alive, we are giving everything else that lives in the same environment a bit more of a fighting chance at survival, too.