Knowing

The Boston Globe has run a wonderful story about a set of identical twins, born as Jonas and Wyatt, who nevertheless have developed very differently. Wyatt, from as early as age 3, always self-identified as a girl. Now 14, Wyatt is now known as Nicole, and she is undergoing treatment to postpone male puberty until she can make the decision to undergo full male-to-female gender reassignment surgery after she's 18. The Globe's article details the tricky navigation of this social adjustment and the heartwarming bravery of Nicole and her family. Must-read.

Led by the child who simply knew

Too Close For Comfort

Relationships are usually way more complicated than they appear. Case in point, new evidence from a study conducted jointly by the University of Chicago and Cornell University, which suggests that men whose wives are friendly with their male buddies are significantly more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction.

What’s going on here? It’s not as simple as straight-up insecurity or jealousy. Rather, the results appear to indicate that the friendly wife interferes with the social connections that maintain her husband’s male identity. In this kind of “partner-betweenness” situation, men were an astonishing 92% more likely to report erectile dysfunction than men of a similar age not in a betweenness situation. As men entered old age, though, the correlation faltered. Old men do not define their masculinity by their buddy friendships, but have identities supported more by relationships with family members.

What makes a man a man? Certainly not the ability to coerce, threaten, or control his wife – to forbid her to socialize with his friends – or to play upon her insecurities to keep her compliant. The results of this study beg more examination, but in the meantime I might suggest: if you’re a man who wants to keep up keeping it up all through middle age, take the time to figure out who you are without your buddies around to remind you.

Read more here: Is impotence linked to dating within your group of friends? Via io9.com

Bats Without Belfries

Maria Sagot and Richard Stevens, of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge recently correlated a lot of existing data about bats. Some bats, it seems, make their own shelters of leaves or other plant material under which to hang while they snooze during the day. Some shelters last longer than others, depending upon what kinds of plants grow in the places where the bats live. The scientists wanted to know, what kind of social bonds do these bats develop among them? The working theory was that flimsy shelters would correlate with poor social bonds.

In fact, they found exactly the opposite. Bats with sturdy houses tended to stick together less, and bats with more ad-hoc shelters displayed social bonds that were extremely strong. The Economist, reporting on this work, notes, "[as] in people, so in bats: adversity promotes solidarity."

This strikes at the heart of human instinct. Even in our sedentary, city-bound Western lifestyle, we still talk about our lives as if we are nomadic, although the span of time has replaced the physical path that was once laid in front of us. Where did we come from? Where are we going? Does some part of us suffer from too much comfort? Our distant ancestors walked endlessly back and forth across the African savannah, following game and avoiding predators. Our first shelters were flimsy huts that might have lasted a few weeks to a few months at most, and our tribes must have been very, very closely bonded.

Read more here: Bats building bonds via Economist.com