Monday, November 19, 2007 - Posts
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Our evolutionary psychology discussion has had me on the lookout for stories that seem particularly ridiculous. And on Fox News today, the morning hosts mentioned a study that purports to show that gentlemen preferred blondes as far back as the Ice Age. I started Googling, and the stories I found demonstrate a huge problem for this particular field of research: The media does a poor job reporting on the science.
For example, the Times of London writes that "north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males." One thing I've learned from my casual reading on evolution is that adaptation doesn't work this way. Yes, if a trait is evolutionarily beneficial, it will get passed on and become more prevalent, while traits that are harmful or undesirable will be lost because the people who carry them don't breed successfully. But a brunette woman is not going to give birth to flaxen-haired tots just because her genes looked around, noticed how all the men were going for the blond hotties, and decided to mutate. (This piece from the Toronto Star explains it better.) Yet so many of the stories I see use this cause-and-effect structure to explain findings on evolution, and the ignorance is incredibly frustrating.
Some of the claims of evolutionary psychologists are shaky enough without such bad reporting, which leaves me with a lot of questions. Do evolutionary psychologists even care that the reporting is bad, or do they enjoy the attention that misleading stories bring to them? And is too much to expect journalists to have a little bit of knowledge about the subjects they cover?
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Melinda, I think your instinct about the deterrent effect of the death penalty is about the same as mine. The Liptak article is incredibly interesting but makes the same point I learned in law school: Deterrence works if there is a reasonable chance the punishment in question will actually happen. Even my kids know that if they only get in trouble one time out of every 10,000 times they crayon the walls, it's totally worthwhile to take a chance and crayon the walls. We currently execute only a few dozen people a year.
But even if it were proved that the death penalty served as a terrific deterrent, it wouldn’t solve for the other fundamental problem: We don’t kill the worst offenders—we mainly kill only the most unlucky ones (the guys lumped with sleepy counsel, mixed-up DNA, tough-on-crime judges). Here’s a great new piece by Stuart Taylor on the recent decline of the death penalty that ties some of that together. For something to be a true deterrent, it needs to be understood to work. Even a rationally acting drunk killer on a spree can hardly game the odds of a capital punishment system that seems to punish indiscriminately.
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I really don't know what to make of the study Morgan posted about on Friday. More maternal stress, fewer male babies—it's one of those findings that seems too funny to be true, and enormously entertaining.
Meanwhile, EMILY's List is off to Iowa, to stump for Hillary by luring more women to the caucuses. The group is posting online ads at day-care centers and yoga and health sites, Politico tells us. Good for them—creative-sounding tactics, and the more women who vote the better. But is that as in, the more PEOPLE who vote, or the more women who vote, specifically?
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I am totally riveted by today's Washington Post story about the Baltimore cop convicted of killing his young mistress a dozen years ago—based on a discredited method of bullet-matching and the testimony of an "expert'' who faked his credentials, misrepresented his findings, and after he was busted, committed suicide. Now a judge may overturn the conviction, which is getting a second look mostly because the cop's wife has never given up on him. (Her position is that he cheated on her, but didn't kill anybody. Dude, what did you do to deserve this woman?)
Though this is not a capital case—the cop, James Kulbicki, got life without parole—it seems yet another example of the most undeniable problem with the death penalty: We get stuff wrong. Often enough that we ought to be humbled. And I'm eager to hear what you legal experts think of the New York Times story about the new studies that purport to find that capital punishment might "save lives'' by preventing murders in the states that impose it most freely.
I find this hard to believe, for one thing because I doubt that violent criminals, most of whom are drunk or high at the time of an attack, are at all apt to stop and think, "Uh-oh, do I really want to wind up like old Joe, who ate his last meal and then rode the needle? No! And so, my intended victim, never mind!'' I also cannot see how capital punishment, even as administered in Texas or Virginia, could have a statistically significant deterrent effect. How is it possible to isolate that effect from the larger law-and-order picture in those states?
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