Daily Archives: July 7, 2017

Male baboons have been observed carrying out long-term abuse of their female partners as a means of control and to increase mating success.

The discoverythe result of a four-year research projectprovides more evidence to support the idea that sexual intimidation among humans has evolutionary roots, potentially helping explain why domestic abuse is so frequent in humans today.

Researchers from the Zoological Society of London, U.K., and CNRS in France monitored a population of chacma baboons in Namibia to find out whether male aggression towards females was a type of sexual coercion, where females were intimidated into mating rather than being directly forced to.

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"When I was in the field and observing the baboons, I often noticed that males were directing unprovoked attacks or chases toward females in oestrus [in heat]," study author Alice Baniel said in a statement. "They also maintained close proximity and formed a strong social bond with one particular cycling female, from the beginning of their cycle until the end.

Researchers monitored the baboons for attacks and sexual activity in the 20 minutes that followed and found there was no increase in mating directly after violent attacks, but further analysis revealed another trend. Their findings are published in the journal Current Biology.

A male baboon attacking a female. Scientists found males use long-term sexual intimidation to increase their mating success. Alecia Carter

Over four years, researchers found fertile females suffered more aggression from males than those that were pregnant or lactating. Male aggression was a major source of injury to fertile females. Males that were more aggressive towards one particular female were found to have had more mating success than those that were less aggressive.

Instead of forcing the females to mate after violence, the males appear to be using the attacks as a means of long-term sexual intimidation that, over time, encourages the female to stick with the male aggressor.

Elise Huchard, another author on the study, tells Newsweek the patterns seen appear to work as a mating strategy in two waysit discourages the female from leaving the proximity of the male, while also inciting her to accept his mating facilitation.

Similar long-term sexual intimidation has previously been observed in chimpanzees and may well be present in other primates. "Because sexual intimidationwhere aggression and matings are not clustered in timeis discreet, it may easily go unnoticed," Baniel said. "It may therefore be more common than previously appreciated in mammalian societies, and constrain female sexuality even in some species where they seem to enjoy relative freedom."

Female baboon with her newborn baby. Alice Baniel

Because both chimpanzees and baboons are relatives of humans, this behavior being present in all three could indicate it has a long evolutionary history, Baniel said.

Sexual intimidation was first described in chimpanzees a few years ago and now weve got evidence of sexual intimidation in baboons, Huchard says: This suggests sexual intimidation might be widespread in social primates, so it opens the possibility for an evolutionary origin of human sexual intimidation.

But its just a possibility. It doesnt mean it has an evolutionary basis. All we can say at the moment is that its now well documented in animalsanimals that are closely related, so its not impossible to think that human sexual intimidation has a long evolutionary history.

She says they will next need to find more evidence of this behavior in other mammals to pinpoint the systems involved. That would shed more light on human sexual intimidation and whether its an evolutionary trait, she says.

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Evolution of Sexual Intimidation: Male Baboons Beat up Females to Increase Mating Success - Newsweek

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There is much value to be found in spending a summer scooping ice cream or stocking grocery store shelves or picking fruit. Generations of American teens have gleaned life lessons and work experience from traditional seasonal jobs, learning responsibility and money management and the all-important skill of customer service.

Anybody who has worked in the retail industry, for example, can share stories of unreasonable patrons and the difficulty of embracing the idea that the customer is always right a mantra that reportedly dates to 1909 and a London department store.

Yet, while we agree with the benefits of summer employment for teens, we also recognize the changing economy that has altered employment options for young workers. According to a recent report from the Associated Press, 57 percent of Americans ages 16 to 19 were employed in July 1986. That percentage remained above 50 percent until 2002, but by last year it had dipped to 36 percent.

One major factor is that jobs traditionally taken by teens often are filled by adults these days. Experts point to growth in the number of low-skilled immigrants, a population that works later in life, and increases to the minimum wage as factors that reduce seasonal employment for teens. Each of those boosts the number of adults seeking jobs formerly filled by young workers. A study by Drexel University found that in 2000-01, teens accounted for 12 percent of retail workers; by 2016, that number was 7 percent. In the restaurant and hotel industries, the percentage of teen employees fell from 21 percent to 16 percent.

Indeed, there is a tendency to lament this trend. As the Associated Press report details: Economists and labor market observers worry that falling teen employment will deprive them of valuable work experience and of opportunities to encounter people of different ethnic, social and cultural backgrounds. Locally, Sharon Pesut of Partners in Careers told The Columbian in May: Where those jobs used to be plentiful, those are now few and far between. The kids really need to do their research. Its not as simple as dropping off a r?sum? anymore.

At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that fewer and fewer teens are seeking summer jobs. No, this is not the result of a lazy generation that would rather sit on the couch and play video games; it is the result of a generation that is busier than ever. Teens are more inclined to seek summer educational opportunities, fill their schedules with sports, volunteer for r?sum?-building endeavors, travel with their families, or attend summer camps. As Derek Thompson wrote last month for The Atlantic: Education is to blame, rather than indolence. The percent of recent high-school graduates enrolled in college both two-year and four-year has grown by 25 percentage points.

Thompson also details a rise in unpaid internships, in which teens are working but are not counted among the labor force.

As with any economic trend, the issue of teen employment is complex, and it was exacerbated by the Great Recession of the past decade. The recovery has come largely in the sector of low-skilled, low-wage jobs, increasing the likelihood of adults filling jobs formerly open to youngsters.

Summer employment for teens is, indeed, valuable. But the loss of summer jobs does not necessarily reflect a loss of the American work ethic or a changing generation. Instead, it reflects unavoidable alterations in the nations economic structure.

Continue reading here:

In Our View: Evolution of Summer Jobs - The Columbian

Would humanity survive if the Sun somehow escaped the orbit of the Milky Way and broke free? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Richard Muller, Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley, author of Now, The Physics of Time, on Quora:

If we gently left the Milky Way today, the main difference would be the absence of starry nights. But if it had happened a billion years ago, the evolution of life on our planet would have been dramatically different.

Without the Milky Way, we would have had few cometary impacts on the Earth. Comets have stable elliptical orbits, and in the first few hundred million years of the solar system, any comet with an orbit that intersected the inner solar system would crash (or be kicked out by Jupiter) and be wiped out. This would happen before life began.

Remarkably, most cometary impacts occur because of the local tidal force of the Milky Way galaxy. (That is a theory first published by Donald Morris and myself, and now generally accepted.) The next most common cause is gravitational perturbation from passing stars. If we were out of the Milky Way, neither would happen. Without either effect, there would not have been catastrophic impacts and evolution might have been much simpler. And less interesting.

We now think that cometary impacts played a huge role in evolution. Take the simple case of the dinosaurs. They were powerful and intelligent, and far better suited to survival than the tiny mammals that lived along side. But then came the cometary impact, blocking sunlight and killing the plants that were the foundation of life.

The large animals could not survive. Indeed, neither could most of the smaller ones. Probably 99.99% of all individuals were killed. But the little animals were more abundant, and some of them made it through. The only dinosaurs which survived were indeed the mobile seed-eaters those that didnt depend on fresh plants. We now call those survivors the birds. Over a few thousand years, the little creatures spread exponentially (like the famous rabbits in Australia) and repopulated the Earth.

Remarkably, being big helps you in competition with other species. But being small helps you to endure catastrophe.

Evolution is driven by survival of the fittest, but what makes for fitness? We once thought it mean competition with other creatures both peers and microscopic organisms that are trying to eat us. The discovery of the role of impacts added something new. To survive for millions of years, species must be fit to survive catastrophe. The small and numerous ones have an advantage. But so too do the intelligent ones. (Good news for humans.) Without the occasional catastrophic interruption of the ecology that took place during the evolution of life, there might not have been sufficient advantage to have a calorie consuming big brain.

The world would have had a different history of life. It is fun to speculate on how it would have been different. Would dinosaurs still be at the top of the food chain? Or maybe it would be something simpler, like worms. Or trilobites.

This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

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The Whole Milky Way Galaxy Shaped the Evolution of Life on Earth - HuffPost