In classic biology textbooks, the story of conception resembles nothing so much as a true-romance novel, in which the bodice-ripping formula of Barbara Cartland et al. is transposed into a cellular-level melodrama starring the virile “active sperm” and the demure “passive egg.”
“In these sagas of conception,” writes science historian Londa Schiebinger, “the spermatic hero actively pursues the egg, surviving the hostile environment of the vagina and defeating his many rivals.” Like Sleeping Beauty, the egg drifts unconsciously in the fallopian tube, waiting to be awakened by the valiant, vital sperm. It is an archetypal story of female passivity enlivened by male energy — a story as old as Aristotle, and as replete with patronizing overtones.
Since the late 1970s, however, a new generation of biologists has begun to peek behind this suspect veil and, using fresh analyses, to reveal quite a different story, one summed up by the title of a seminal paper, “The Energetic Egg.” In this new account the egg, no longer a slumbering princess, becomes an active agent, directing the growth of microvilli (small finger-like projections on its surface) to capture and tether the sperm. Here the egg and sperm are partners, co-activators in the process of conception.
What is particularly noteworthy is that while the egg’s cone of microvilli was discovered in the 1890s, it was not thought worthy of serious scientific attention until 80 years later — a time when women’s roles in society were themselves being reconceived.
But before we cheer too loudly for this liberation of a core biological function from the rhetorical trappings of millennia-old sexism, it is worth stopping to reflect that the new tale itself is rife with gendered cultural overtones. As Schiebinger notes, in this new account the egg and sperm have come to resemble nothing so much as the high-powered dual-career couple of the ’80s and ’90s.
Like the contemporary corporate woman, the new “energetic egg” is valued precisely because it is now seen to be more like its male counterpart. Like the business exec with her power suit, the new egg has been “masculinized.” And just as the female exec risks accusations of aggressiveness, so too the new egg is all-too-easily seen as a “femme fatale, threatening to capture and victimize sperm.” The point is that while the new story may have stripped away the old sexist overtones, the egg and sperm remain gendered, essentially reflecting the pattern of current social arrangements between men and women.
This saga of transformation in one of our premier biological narratives raises a question that has become central to the current discussion about science: Can science ever be free of cultural influences? To put it another way: Can science ever be purely objective, an inquiry into the unsullied “truth” about the “real” world, or will it always be prey to the vagaries of subjective experience?
This is the question that resides at the heart of the so-called “science wars” that have rocked the academy for the past several years, and which show little sign of abating. On the one side are the objectivists (sometimes called realists), who believe that science is an ever-progressing ascent toward an ultimate picture of the-world-as-it-really-is. On the other hand are the subjectivists (sometimes known as relativists), who believe, to varying degrees, that science will always carry the stamp of the culture from which it springs. For this camp, prevailing views about gender, race, class and the like inexorably influence scientific theories, so that we can never (even in principle) see the world as it really is. To this camp, that very notion is a fiction that must be abandoned.
Many, though by no means all, scientists fall into the first camp — Stephen Jay Gould is an eminent exception. Likewise, many, though not all, historians, philosophers and science-studies scholars fall into the second camp.
The question of whether science can ever be culture-free is also at the heart of a number of new books. One of the best is Schiebinger’s provocatively titled “Has Feminism Changed Science?” If science is, as the objectivists claim, a culture-free activity, then the answer must be no. But as the changing narrative of the egg reveals, it is not so easy to strip away the cultural subtext from our scientific theories.
The science wars have been simmering for the past decade, but in 1996 they moved from sort of a cold war standoff phase into active engagement. The catalyst was the publication by a little-known physicist named Alan Sokal of an article in the cultural studies journal Social Text. In his now infamous piece Sokal purported to present a postmodern critique of physics in which, using lashings of trendy French philosophy and deliberately nonsensical postmodern jargon, he suggested that quantum mechanics could be seen to support the view that all knowledge is culturally relative. Immediately after the piece came out he gleefully exposed it as a hoax designed to show that cultural studies types know naught about science and ought to lay off pronouncements on the subject.
Whether one regards this as a brilliant exposi or as a petty frat-boy prank, the fallout has driven a deep wedge between the community of scientists and the community of science-studies scholars (those who study how science fits into the social, cultural and historical landscape.)
One way of looking at this divide is suggested by Canadian philosopher Michael Ruse in his new book, “Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction?” Ruse divides the two camps, roughly speaking, into the Popperians (following the Austrian philosopher of science Karl Popper), and the Kuhnians (following the American philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn). For Popper, science was a progressive activity, getting us ever nearer to a true picture of reality. Although Popper acknowledged that we could never find ultimate truth, he insisted on an objective view of science as an exploration of the world as it really is.
Kuhn, in his 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” famously declared that all science proceeds according to “paradigms” — mental constructs or theoretical frameworks which inevitably change as our society changes. For Kuhn, science is not an ascent towards any God’s-eye view, and the science of one age must be considered no better or worse than the science of any other.
Kuhn’s book sparked its own revolution, not in science but in science studies, and it became a flash point for even more revolutionary views of science, which have culminated in the radically relativist views that Sokal and the objectivists so deplore.
The two extremes in the debate may be characterized as follows: For radical objectivists, nature is the only voice, with human culture playing no role. For radical relativists, nature has no voice of its own, and all scientific knowledge is the production of humans. In reality, most people fall somewhere in between. Even Einstein, that arch-realist, recognized that we can only know nature through the prism of our theories — we can never see it naked, as it were. Glad news it is, then, to see Ruse and Schiebinger trying to find a middle ground.
Both Ruse and Schiebinger approach the question — and both books are indeed framed as questions — from the vantage point of a particular case study. For Ruse the case study is the theory of evolution, and the ways that ideas about evolution have themselves evolved over the past two centuries. For Schiebinger the case study is feminism, and the way that both female practitioners of science, and feminist theories about science, have affected (or not) various scientific disciplines — from cell biology to primatology, archeology, medicine, mathematics and physics.
Feminist science scholars, it must be noted, make up one of the key groups to have claimed science as a culture-laden activity. As such, they are seen by objectivists as a key battalion of the enemy. In the post-Sokal era, Schiebinger is aware of the need for caution, and she approaches her subject with the hyperalert acuity of a lion tamer encountering a large, wild cat. The big surprise for many objectivists will be that Schiebinger lays to rest to the notion that women in and of themselves change the nature of science simply by becoming scientists. The culture of science is not rooted in the chromosomes of its practitioners, she assures us — a conclusion all objectivists should applaud.
But if women do not necessarily do science differently, the historical record suggests that feminist perspectives have indeed made an impact on both the culture and content of science. The saga of the egg is just one example Schiebinger gives in which women’s involvement in a field has opened up new lines of inquiry that have led to significant new discoveries. Another case in point is primatology. For more than a century primatologists, who were almost exclusively male, focused almost exclusively on male primates. Once a new generation of primatologists — again beginning in the 1970s, and who by then included women — started to pay attention to the females of the species, they found that previous views were clearly distorted. Other cases can be found in genetics, archeology and medicine.
Some of the female scientists who made these discoveries were avowed feminists, but many were not. Yet, as Schiebinger shows, it is no coincidence that so many of these insights came to the fore at a time when women’s own role in society was changing, and when the very nature of “femininity” and “womanhood” was so much a subject of debate. In short, you do not have to be a feminist to be influenced by feminist cultural movements.
One example of this trend that has struck me forcefully over the past few years is the way in which the whole question of embodiment has become a hot topic in fields like artificial intelligence and cognitive science. After decades during which intelligence was seen to be a purely mental phenomenon, suddenly there is talk of it being ineluctably rooted in the physical reality of a body. Most of the current scientists and philosophers making this claim are men who would not (I am sure) identify themselves as feminists; nonetheless, feminist philosophers have been making just this claim for decades.
We are all a part of a cultural matrix, which, even if unconsciously, affects the way we think. As Schiebinger puts it “We cannot free ourselves of cultural influence; we cannot think or act outside a culture. Language shapes even as it articulates thought.”
Reluctant though he seems to be to admit this, Michael Ruse comes to a similar, if more guarded conclusion regarding evolution. Tracing the evolution of evolutionary theory through a half-dozen of its major proponents — from Charles Darwin to contemporary practitioners such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould and E.O. Wilson — Ruse reveals how their views of evolution were influenced both by the culture of their time and by their own upbringings.
Wilson, for example, perhaps as a legacy of his Southern Baptist childhood, is still essentially looking for some kind of fundamental truth. As he acknowledges in his own recent book, “Consilience,” at university he traded in his religion for science. Given the indelible traces of each man’s culture on his scientific theories, Ruse frankly admits, “I see the influence of culture on scientific ideas as something that is here to stay.”
That said, Ruse also wants to claim victory — and for him it is the most significant victory — for objectivism. The course of history has shown, he says, that although in the beginning evolutionary theory was almost purely a cultural construction, over the past two centuries it has been increasingly cleansed of such intrusions. While individual practitioners may still reveal the hallmarks of their culture, particularly in their use of metaphors to describe their ideas to non-scientists, in the final analysis the theory has been born out by objective, empirical validation.
In the end Ruse wants to have his cake and eat it, too: He sees evolutionary theory as essentially objective, but with an overlay of metaphorical subjectivity. Not everyone will feel satisfied with this resolution, but it is a heartening testimony to our times that this avowed champion of Sokal is at least prepared to acknowledge that the other side is not entirely wrong.
Margaret Wertheim is the author of "Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars," and most recently "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space From Dante to the Internet" (W.W. Norton).
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Fish, without a doubt, gotta swim, but how do they do it? And how, over millenniums of evolution, did they get to be so good at it? These two questions have driven the career of John Long, a professor of biology and cognitive science at Vassar College. Long is so into fish that his primal scene of intellectual seduction involved a Ph.D. trying to get him to join her team by taking him out for coffee and asking, “Have you seen the vertebral column of a marlin?” Thus was Long launched into a course of study that would ultimately lead him to the improbable task of making robot fish.
As geeky as this may sound, it turns out that the problems inherent in making robot fish yield some of humanity’s deepest questions: How did we get here? What (and where) is thought? How much can we trust the symbols (words, images, digital signals) that dominate our lives? Long’s new book, “Darwin’s Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology,” is part Descartes, part MacGyver and part Douglas Adams, turning from rumination on the possibility of intelligence residing in a brainless body to tips on making artificial fish vertebrae out of coffee stirrers to the dopey yet endearing jokes that seem to flourish in laboratories all over the world.
Long works in a field called biorobotics, which builds physical devices to test hypotheses about animal behavior, rather than studying either the animal itself or digital models. Sometimes an animal can’t be studied for logistical reasons: marlins, for example, die in captivity and plesiosaurs are extinct. Computer models allow scientists to simulate complex, unreproducible conditions — say, the modeling of 10,000 generations of a particular organism — but as abstractions, they are prone to certain errors.
Robots, as Long explains, have their peculiar virtues. Long himself once created an impressive computer model illustrating how the marlin’s backbone helped the fish achieve its awe-inspiring swimming and leaping speeds, only to have a revered elder scientist note, “it appears to me that you’ve created a perpetual motion machine.” Robots, as Long points out, can’t violate the laws of physics. Instead of operating in a simulation of a physics-compliant environment, robots simply exist in the real universe, and must therefore play by the rules as a matter of course. At the same time, robots can be simplified to the degree that certain characteristics can be observed in isolation.
The main thing Long uses his robots to study is evolution. His first robot-fish experiment involved creating a bunch of large, tadpole-like “Evolvabots” designed to do one thing: swim toward a light source. With his team of students and fellow scientists — Long makes a point of mentioning the names of everyone who made significant contributions to his projects, a big departure from spotlight-hogging senior-scientist tradition — he rated their success at this imitation of “food-seeking” behavior. The robots (called Tadros) were given tails of varying degrees of stiffness and length and were then “mated” (algorithmically) over several generations to see if this would lead to selection for certain kinds of tails. The hypothesis Long and his colleagues wanted to test was that primeval invertebrates evolved backbones because it improved their ability to feed.
The experiment didn’t work out as they’d hoped, mostly because, in designing the experiment, the scientists had failed to fully appreciate a factor called wobble. One of the most intriguing and important aspects of “Darwin’s Devices” is the way it places the reader in the lab, at the shoulder of people doing hands-on science, sharing in their frustrations (over disappointing data, recalcitrant grant committees and astutely critical colleagues), their successes and their failures. And Long does this so lucidly that you find yourself caught up in the process, grasping the basics and eager to learn the results. It’s the best depiction of how science really works that I’ve ever read.
“Darwin’s Devices” could also administer a chastening rebuke to the many laypeople who talk and think sloppily about evolution. Determining exactly how growing a backbone helped ancient invertebrates thrive might seem superfluous to the quick-and-dirty school of cocktail-party Darwinism. Obviously, backbones helped because otherwise vertebrate animals would never have evolved. But as “Darwin’s Devices” illustrates, we can easily mistake the reasons for the evolution of certain traits by jumping to what seem like “logical” conclusions, and natural selection is not the only evolutionary pressure applied to a species. There are times when you just have to build something to understand how it works.
For example, the next type of robot Long and his colleagues developed they named Madeleine (because it is shaped, roughly, like the little French cakes). Madeleine had four paddles at each corner of its body, much like the extinct plesiosaur, a marine reptile. This creature was a tetrapod: a sea-dwelling animal descended from land-dwelling ancestors. Living aquatic tetrapods include whales, dolphins and sea otters, but “none of the living aquatic tetrapods ever use all four appendages to swim underwater — they only use two.” With Madeleine, the researchers hoped to figure out why this is so, since “it sure seemed like using four flippers for propulsion should be better in almost any way imaginable.”
It isn’t, actually, and that launched yet another branch of inquiry about why the plesiosaur used four flippers at all. If it’s that easy for legitimate scientists to be mistaken about something as seemingly simple as four-flippered locomotion, you can see why so many of them regard popular but highly speculative pastimes like evolutionary psychology as pseudoscience.
One party who has found the activities of Long and his robotics lab keenly interesting is the U.S. government. It’s not a big leap from “robot fish” to the notion of defense applications, and Long, despite a youthful infatuation with all things military, finds this troubling. But not that troubling! After a bit of hemming and hawing about it — noting that, if over 50 nations are pursuing military robot research, then American scientists can’t afford to opt out — he plunges into rampant (and, I must say, fascinating) theorizing about what sorts of robots would work best in battle. They need to be complex enough to cope with contingencies, but simple (i.e., cheap) enough that commanders aren’t afraid to burn through them.
Long ends with these cautionary words: “The reality is that evolving robots are and will be created for academic, industrial and military purposes. This means that we should all become students of robots of any kind, whether they be evolving robots, nonevolving autonomous robots, or semiautonomous and remotely controlled military robots. We need to understand robots so we can proceed with due caution and deliberation.” Yikes! And probably true. “Darwin’s Devices” will get some of us, at least, a little closer.
The Miss USA pageant crowned its annual winner on Sunday, but the contest is drawing new attention for a video of all 51 contestants wrestling with the question, “Should evolution be taught in schools?” The results, as you might expect, are all over the place. To wit: While only a couple said a definitive “no,” dozens more squirmed through answers — trying as hard as possible not to offend anyone — before arriving at the common conclusion that evolution should be taught alongside “alternative beliefs.”
We watched through the video, and decided — in the keeping with the pageant theme — to hand out awards.
Winner: Lauren Carter, Miss Vermont, who said:
I think evolution should be taught in schools, because not everybody has the same religious backgrounds, and it’s important to have scientific facts about the world. We do know that evolution exists even on the small scale, like … bacteria that are becoming resistant to drugs and what not, so [we] might as well learn about it.
(Carter earned bonus points for referencing micro-evolution.)
Worst Answer: Kia Hampton, Miss Kentucky, who said:
I honestly don’t think you can ever have too much knowledge on any subject. That’s my personal view. But I do feel that evolution shouldn’t be taught in school, just because there are so many different views on it, so many definitions. How do you teach a child the true meaning of evolution when so many different cultures have their different beliefs, and sciences have their different theories. It’s just not a good subject that I feel everyone would agree on in classrooms, when kids come from all different backgrounds, different cultures, different beliefs. So, I just personally don’t think its a good topic for school, at all.
Weirdest Answer: Sarah Chapman, Nevada, who said:
I think evolution can be taught in many different ways. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about people, and how people evolved. It can also be about [how] communities [evolved] as well.”
Overall, we counted 24 answers in favor of teaching evolution in school and 3 against, with 24 equivocating to some degree — oftentimes, but not always, arguing the impossible but impossible-to-argue-with goal that everything should be taught. The contest’s winner, California’s Alyssa Campanella, answered with an unequivocal “yes.” Runner-up Miss Tennessee said that evolution should be taught, but people should be able to decide for themselves. (We also counted that as a “yes.”)
As an addendum: It does bear mentioning that even among the women who answered in the affirmative, many seemed to be under the impression that evolution is not already taught in schools. That, in fact, might have been the most head-scratching thing about the video. Oh, well…
For a new study set to be published in the journal Evolution, scientists from the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier, France, mated female brine shrimp (“sea monkeys”) with males from past and future generations.
The report, called “Male-Female Coevolution in the Wild: Evidence from a Time Series in Artemia Franciscana,” found that the female brine shrimp “survived better and had longer interbrood intervals when mated with their contemporary males compared to when mated with males from the future or the past.” Its formal conclusion: “[T]he process of male-female coevolution, previously revealed by experimental evolution in laboratory artificial conditions, can occur in nature on a short evolutionary time scale.”
How is it possible for females of a species to breed with males from past or future generations? For brine shrimp, it’s actually easier than you might think. Science writer Carl Zimmer explains:
Brine shrimp produce tough eggs that can survive through droughts for years and then hatch into healthy young when water returns. In the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the brine shrimp egg cysts form layers on the lake bed going back decades. [Study leader Nicolas] Rode and his colleagues gathered cysts from layers that formed in 1985, 1996, and 2007. They brought the cysts back to their lab and reared the sea monkeys. And then they orchestrated some sea monkey sex. They had females mate with males from their own time, as well as from the other years. For example, females from 1996 could mate with males from 2007 and 1985.
What happened next? Zimmer summarizes:
Rode and his colleagues … discovered … that having sex with males from another time is bad for a sea monkey’s health. The further away in time the sea monkeys were, the sooner the female sea monkey died. When the male traveled 22 years to mate with a female, her life was cut short on average by 12%.
The report’s suggestion that female shrimp are better suited to mate with their contemporaries than with males from the past or future seems to corroborate the theory that “sexual conflict is an ongoing process,” with males and females adapting new mating “strategies” in concert or in competition with each other over time, Zimmer writes — although it’s still not clear what sort of pattern the conflict might follow (nor is it obvious, in this particular case, exactly “how the time-traveling males [harmed] the females”).
Just to be safe, though: If your dream historical dinner party with Cleopatra, Henry VIII and Napoleon ever does happen, you might want to consider heading home early.
Chris Christie, a wealthy, well-educated lawyer from New Jersey, is suddenly not willing to say whether or not he believes in biological evolution. Christie went to a very good public high school and he’s a mainstream American Catholic, not an evangelical Protestant, so I am going to guess that he does believe in evolution, if he ever even gives the idiotic question any thought. I’d also guess that believing in evolution is not particularly controversial among New Jersey Republicans, who are not exactly Kansas Republicans.
So why hedge? Well, someday — maybe someday soon — he may want the support of Kansas Republicans. And sometimes, successful Republican politicians begin debasing themselves to win the votes of far-right rubes well before they begin forming exploratory committees.
Here are some signs that your formerly rational Republican governor (or former governor, or mayor, or representative) might be planning a presidential run:
Candidate develops doubts about evolution
Evolution, a scientific fact, is not recognized by one of America’s two major political parties, and a majority of Americans are either creationists or at least express “doubts” about evolution, so it just makes sense for people seeking the Republican nomination to align themselves with people who think the Earth is 10,000 years old.
But belief in evolution correlates to education level, and most of the elites in politics and media are well-educated, so you don’t want to become a creationist — then you will be mercilessly mocked — you just need to signal your tacit support for creationism and promise to let it be taught in schools. Just like Chris Christie did!
Candidate suddenly agnostic on or openly hostile to climate science
Not that long ago, most Republicans agreed that climate change was real and something should be done about it. Nearly everyone currently running for the Republican nomination supported cap-and-trade, which was the moderate alternative to a proper carbon tax. Now, though, not so much!
Now, even those who still profess to believe in climate science think the government shouldn’t do anything to stop it (the “reasonable” Jon Huntsman approach) and the rest of them no longer think climate change is happening, because Al Gore, who is fat, is also now divorced (the shameless Gingrich approach).
Candidate suddenly has opinions about foreign policy
A governor does not really need to know what to do about Iran or North Korea, but if one suddenly starts telling everyone his or her ideas about what to do about Iran and North Korea, this governor is probably dreaming of the nation’s highest office. (Or at least a Senate run.) If those ideas seem to just involve bombing everyone, everywhere, this guy’s serious! (If the candidate becomes a paleocon isolationist instead, no one will allow them anywhere near the nomination.)
Another hint: A non-Jewish politician suddenly becomes deeply, passionately interested in Israel.
It’s a red alert if your governor reveals these positions in a book of some kind.
Candidate no longer thinks the government has the right to collect revenue on anyone by any means
Most governors and state legislators have to balance their state budgets, and to balance state budgets during horrible times like these, lots of taxes (often renamed, as in Tim Pawlenty’s Minnesota, “fees”) are necessary. But current Republican orthodoxy has it that any taxation, at all, on anyone, is a tyrannical attack on LIBERTY itself.
So they will defend their “fee”-raising as not taxation while demanding that the national deficit be taken care of within three years without a single tax increase on any American. That is leadership. (Plus, you want Grover Norquist on your side.)
Candidate no longer likes transportation projects
Sure, free federal cash for a major infrastructure project sounds great on paper, and also in reality, but Republicans hate trains now, so you better turn that money down, even if you formerly campaigned for it. Trains are for Europe!
If your governor checks off two of these, get worried. If he or she hits three, get ready for the major Politico story on the Republicans Secret Weapon (or Reluctant Best Shot).
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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close up portrait of young caucasian couple kissing(Credit: Serg Zastavkin)
Let’s be honest, a kiss is never just a kiss. It is the ultimate romantic symbol in our culture — from Shakespearean tragedies to Gustav Klimt’s gilded embrace to the legendary V-J Day smooch in Times Square to those critical words “you may kiss the bride.” Sometimes it’s instead an expression of affection, elation, loyalty or, on the other hand, disloyalty (see: the kiss of Judas). In cruder manifestations — take Britney and Madonna’s lip smacking, and the tonsil hockey of modern reality television — it’s a way to scandalize. But despite this breadth of meaning, we have very rigid ideas of what types of kissing are appropriate and acceptable — as Stephanie Seymour recently discovered after photos circulated of an ocean-side embrace with her son.
This rich cultural history makes kissing seem so natural as to be fairly unremarkable, which is why many readers will greet the new book “The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us” with skepticism. How much is there to say about locking lips, anyway? A whole lot, it turns out. Sheril Kirshenbaum, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, gives an engaging overview of the possible evolutionary basis for two people mashing their mouths together — a practice that is actually pretty odd, once you think about it. There’s the way sexy red lipstick plays on our hunter-gatherer past, how swapping spit can help us develop immunity against disease and why it might have first developed as a way to literally sniff out genetically appropriate sexual partners.
That’s not to mention the tremendous variety in kisses the world over — from the Eskimo to the French variety — and that’s just in the human world (bonobos, for example, will suck on each other’s tongues for as long as 12 minutes). Salon spoke with Kirshenbaum about how our lips are “genital echoes,” the natural high of making out with a longtime crush and how technology will change kissing.
What is it about lips, why are we so drawn to them?
There are several theories. For starters, psychologists will tell you that red grabs our attention. I spoke to a neuroscientist and he thought it might have something to do with our ancestors looking for ripe fruit. Those that could detect the color red could find food the fastest and they had an advantage and survived to pass on their genes, and that might be why we notice the color red.
Red became pronounced in different areas of the body, and it became a sexual cue over time. Certain parts of the female anatomy, especially with our primate ancestors, were enhanced with red, and it especially had to do with the female being ready to reproduce. As our ancestors began to walk upright, rather than males being attracted to the female’s posterior, they began to focus on the breasts and the lips — they call this “genital echoes.” In research on lip color, men consistently choose the women wearing the bright red lipstick as the most attractive — there’s this power to making the lips slightly redder. There’s a lot of evidence to back up the existence of the makeup industry.
Much to my surprise, you make a connection between kissing and breast-feeding. Can you explain that?
Nursing is a very pleasurable activity. The lips are so sensitive to stimulus, and the hormone oxytocin, which is involved in social bonding and attachment, is stimulated in the infant and the mother during nursing. We start to associate this bonding with lip pressure. As adults, when we kiss there’s this rise in oxytocin, which is so important in new relationships and in maintaining relationships. Nursing is very important in putting those neural pathways in place. When our lips are stimulated later in life there are these associations with those early experiences.
What about non-romantic kissing?
It’s a really powerful means of expressing yourself. All of our senses are engaged in the behavior. Traditionally, scent was so important in terms of recognizing our friends and family members. In prehistory they were using scent to recognize each other and assess the health of someone. Social kissing probably evolved from a sniff to cheek kissing. It’s one of the most powerful things we can do to connect with another individual.
How do kissing styles vary from culture to culture?
The mouth-to-mouth kiss that we recognize is definitely not the only universal style of kissing. Charles Darwin wrote about this: He suspected that if you talk about kissing in terms of touching the lips to any body part, and even behaviors like licking and blowing, then it’s probably a universal practice.
Traditionally, many cultures around the world didn’t mouth-to-mouth kiss. It was probably not the same experience before there was mouthwash [laughs]. I went into all these historical accounts written in the 1800s, mostly by European explorers. There’s this great anecdote where an explorer goes to Africa and falls in love with the daughter of an African king, and one night he’s brave enough to kiss her. She reacts by screaming and running from the room. He realizes later that she thought he was planning to eat her.
Has kissing changed much over time? Do certain styles of kissing come into fashion?
Well, I love the French kissing story. It turns out that when people were traveling through Europe, there was this notion that women in France were more openly affectionate. There became this saying: “While in France, get the girls to kiss you.” That sort of evolved to be: “Get a French kiss.” But in France they don’t call it that, they call it a “tongue kiss” or a “soul kiss,” because it’s supposed to feel like two souls merging.
What happens physiologically when we kiss?
A lot. It depends on the kind of kiss, of course. If you’re talking about a good kiss, our pulse quickens and our pupils dilate, which is probably part of the reason we close our eyes. There’s also a rise in dopamine, which is responsible for the craving and longing, that can’t-wait-to-be-with-you sensation. It’s also stimulated by a lot of recreational drugs like cocaine; kissing sends us on a natural high. Dopamine spikes from really longing for something for a while and then getting it. When we’ve been dreaming about someone for a long time and then finally get it, dopamine is involved.
Serotonin causes obsessive feelings about someone. It’s also the same neurotransmitter involved in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. It sounds a lot like the symptoms of falling in love. Everyone loves to talk about sex, but kissing is probably the most intimate activity we can engage in. Look at the history of prostitution — prostitutes won’t kiss their johns because they don’t want to get their emotions involved. And, overall, johns aren’t that anxious to kiss their prostitutes either.
There’s a strong gender divide in how we view kissing, isn’t there?
Absolutely. There’s a huge gender divide. In one large study of college-age students, strong patterns emerged: Women were constantly complaining about too much tongue and men were saying, “I really like wet kisses, lots of saliva!” The guys were usually eager to foray into sex without kissing and very few women were. Women paid a lot more attention to the teeth and breath of the person. Men tended to say they would consider starting a relation with someone just because they were a good kisser, and women were not that way. The act of kissing has a lot more significance for women than men. Men tend to report that kissing is a means to an end; women tend to try to figure out what the kiss means about their relationship, what it says about how their partner feels toward them.
Why might this be?
I started getting really frustrated by these findings, because I felt the results were very stereotypical. So I got together 80 of my own friends and acquaintances, and I was pretty shocked to see that they fell almost completely in the same pattern. When you start looking at reproductive strategies, it makes sense: A woman puts a lot more investment into the [sexual] decisions she makes, because she is fertile for a much shorter period of time each month, and a man can theoretically inseminate countless women throughout his life. Women are a lot more sensitive to smell and taste, which can tell a lot about a partner’s health and reproductive capacity.
There’s a great study looking at attraction and scent. It turns out that women are able to identify men who have a very different genetic code from their own, and they tend to be more attracted to them, because if they mate, their children would be healthier and stronger and more likely to survive because of the diversity in their genetics. Interestingly enough, women who are taking the birth control pill seem to have the opposite reaction. They’re more attracted to men with genetic immunities similar to their own. It starts to make you wonder what all these hormones that we take are starting to do to our bodies and whether they’re masking these signals that we’ve developed over thousands and thousands and thousands of years. I came across some pieces asking, “Is it possible that for some couples divorce is a result of the woman going off hormones and all of a sudden feeling less attracted to her partner?” It’s certainly an important question to ask.
What can we expect from the future of kissing?
There are robots that are very eerily lifelike and starting to be able to kiss each other — it’s pretty convincing when you see the actual video. In terms of virtual reality, it might be possible that it could feel like you’re kissing your idealized partner or celebrity.
Just last year, a robot debuted called Roxxxi. She’s supposed to be the first sex robot. I called up the company and spoke to the engineer because I wanted to know whether she could kiss. His response was, “No, but her mouth is one of three inputs.” It turns out kissing was not something they had programmed in. At the time they were about to debut their robot geared toward women and, given all this psychological research, it might be something that women clients would be more interested in seeing.
Speaking of technological changes, what about online dating — how is it changing the courtship process?
Many of my friends were going online looking for love just as I was learning about all these important cues other than what we see in a profile — things like voice and touch and smell taste. We are flying blind when we’re dating online. We’re only able to see a photo and a carefully worded profile. You might invest a lot of time getting to know someone and it might be imminently obvious when you’re actually in the same room that it’s star-crossed, or you might pass over someone who might have seemed ideal if you’d been in the same room together. A kiss just tells you so much more than a poke or a wink — or whatever it is, depending on the service you’re using. I’ve been calling it nature’s litmus test.
A detail from the cover of "Darwin's Devices" 
Chris Christie and Jon Huntsman 
close up portrait of young caucasian couple kissing(Credit: Serg Zastavkin) 
