“When children draw on walls, reject daily baths, or leave the house wearing no pants and a tutu, caretakers may reasonably doubt their capacity for rational decision-making.”
“However, recent evidence suggests that even very young children possess sophisticated decision-making capabilities …”
The authors conducted an experiment: a marshmallow was set in front of a small child; the child was told that if they waited to eat it, they’d be given two marshmallows instead; the child was left alone in the room with the marshmallow for up to fifteen minutes.
This is a common experiment – variants have been conducted since the 1970s. In Kidd, Palmeri, & Aslin’s 2013 version, each child was first shown that the researcher offering marshmallows was either reliable or unreliable. At the beginning of each child’s encounter with the researcher, the researcher provided mediocre art supplies and promised that, if the child waited, the researcher would bring something better. Then the researcher either fulfilled that promise (bringing fresh markers or cool stickers!), or came back offering only apologies and saying that the child should just use the mediocre supplies that had been in the room all along. The wait had been for naught!
During the subsequent marshmallow test, children were asked to trust this same researcher to fulfill a promise, even after being shown that the researcher wasn’t reliable.
The children who’d been disappointed were less likely to wait.
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Actually, it’s not just “knock knock” jokes – none of the jokes that children tell are funny.
And yet, parents feign excitement. We smile, maybe even laugh.
My kids are two years apart. When they were six and four, my younger child would often watch and listen and then tell the exact same joke to me.
I’d do my best to respond in the exact same way. As though surely I couldn’t know – no child wants for you to actually try to guess the answer when they tell a joke.
“I don’t know, where does a cow go for entertainment?”
Eventually a child will experience disillusionment from the world; it needn’t come from a caretaker.
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At the end of Kidd, Palmeri, & Aslin’s marshmallow experiment,every child was given evidence that the researchers were unreliable. No matter if the child had waited to eat the marshmallow or had scarfed it right away, each child was given three additional marshmallows.
No child’s expectations were met. And the children who’d decided that waiting was pointless had their beliefs reinforced.
In the great scheme of things, giving children a few extra marshmallows doesn’t cause much harm. Although it’s curious that this group of researchers would intentionally undermine children’s trust in scientists.
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At the local high school, the boys’ bathroom adjacent to the cafeteria doesn’t have soap. Empty plastic shells are affixed to the wall where soap dispensers used to be.
There’s a soap dispenser in the hallway outside the bathroom. If someone wanted to wash their hands properly, they’d have to turn on a sink, get their hands wet, walk outside, use the dispenser, then walk back into the bathroom to rinse the soap off. Few students do.
The administration removed the dispensers because some students were stealing them, and, at least once, somebody urinated into the soap pouch – these students needed devious licks to boast about on social. Similar incidents happened all around the country.
The problem, several high school seniors insisted to me, is that schools were closed for a while during the pandemic, which meant that current sophomores and juniors didn’t get bullied enough during middle school.
Obviously, their theory is ridiculous – “more bullying” is never a good solution to the world’s problems. But I find it fascinating that this would be the students’ first hypothesis. That the underlying problem isn’t that children were forcibly isolated during a crucial phase of their development, nor that we’ve inundated children’s lives with addictive, psychologically manipulative smartphone apps. No, the real problem is that these young people weren’t bullied enough!
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By middle school, nearly all students will have experienced the disillusionment of having a knock knock joke batted away without a “Who’s there?” in response – I believe most middle school humor still revolves around sex, sarcasm, and dead baby jokes.
But I find it difficult to believe that young people – whose lives transitioned from in-person interactions with people their own age to transpiring almost entirely on the internet – would’ve experienced significantly less bullying during the pandemic. The internet is a nightmare!
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The best audience for a child’s knock knock joke is another child – maybe, just maybe, a child might think it’s funny to hear the turnabout from “Boo who?” to “Oh, what’s wrong, are you hurt?”
The interaction is personal, localized, and impermanent.
And when the disillusionment comes – a friend not saying “Who’s there?” – the moment is brief and private.
How much worse might it feel to have your moments of embarrassment linger in full view?
Personally, I’m embarrassed about the world we’re building for young people.
Not everyone attending Stanford comes from a background of wealth and privilege, obviously, but few people arrive there after circumstances like my spouse’s.
Violent trauma; abandonment; food insecurity. For college, she’d turned down Harvard despite their generous offer of significant financial aid: she didn’t have any money to pay for college. Instead, she went to a school that offered a full ride plus a stipend.
Even that wasn’t enough: her father took out credit cards in her name and used them to pay his bills. After collection notices began to arrive at her dormitory mail room, she … well, first she slumped to the floor and cried. Wouldn’t you? But then she used the money from her job at the college bookstore to pay them off.
After college, she won a Fulbright. The Fulbright award comes with a stipend: many young people use this money to travel, to see something of the world while they’re overseas. My spouse used the stipend to pay her bills from dental surgery.
By the time she and I met, she’d made her way to Stanford; her mother, father, and younger sibling were all unhoused.
#
Her father was in Albany. Luckily, a friend took him in, a man named Paul who had a little pension from working at the post office. Paul’s house was small, the foundation was sinking, and everything rattled with the passing trains, but there were four walls and heat. I’ve never not had four walls and heat. I like to think that I have a good imagination, but I can’t fathom being unhoused in Albany.
The post office pension was something, but Paul decided that he ought to grow marijuana. That would nicely supplement his income. He also decided, despite living on a street where two-thirds of the houses were vacant and boarded up, that he ought to tell his neighbors about this plan to grow marijuana in the attic. Then they’d know to buy from him.
The first time people broke in to steal the marijuana, my spouse’s father got pistol whipped in the face. For weeks afterward, his face ached. After the second time, he found his bedraggled tomato plants abandoned in the middle of the street. This I can imagine: somebody waiting in the car, engine idling, ready to drive away, looking up to say “You idiots, that’s not marijuana!”
Paul decided to get a guard dog. He found somebody with a pitbull too unruly to handle – the dog had been kicked out of two houses already, for howling, breaking things, biting people. This dog would go berserk around bright lights, and was even worse when he heard the sound of motorcycles. Two years old, but he walked and ran with a limp; the dog must’ve broken a leg when he was a puppy.
Having a guard dog helped. When some guys were working their way down the street, stripping copper pipes out of all the vacant houses, the dog started barking and got the guys arrested. My spouse’s father didn’t get pistol-whipped again.
He talked to my spouse on the phone. “Paul got a dog,” he said.
My spouse knew how much her father loved animals. “Is this really your dog?” she asked.
“No,” her father said, “it’s Paul’s dog.” But also, my spouse could hear a gentle panting; the dog’s head was in her father’s lap.
#
The next year, toward the end of November, Paul was having sex and died. Very suddenly. Which must have been traumatizing for Paul’s lady friend?
After Paul passed, the dog was very clearly my spouse’s father’s dog.
Unfortunately, the mortgage was in Paul’s name. As were the utilities. Paul’s post office pension had been paying the bills. Which meant that my spouse’s father and the dog were squatting in the vacant house without electricity or heat. December tends to be cold in Albany.
So my spouse and I borrowed a car – we’d spent a few years walking and biking everywhere – and drove out to get her father and the dog. We moved them in with us, thinking that they’d be with us briefly, then found out that you can’t keep a pitbull in Section 8 housing. So then we spent a few months searching for a second apartment that we could afford.
My spouse’s father didn’t have any money. He’d lost his last job – parking cars in a garage – when he had a stroke during working hours. His boss assumed that he’d been drinking and so he was thrown in jail instead of taken to the hospital. He had unmanaged diabetes and cardiovascular troubles and the stroke made things worse, but it took several years before he was approved for disability.
But the dog kept him alive. Got him outside a few times a day – the dog would pull like a little tugboat to get my spouse’s father up the stairs again to their apartment – and would rouse him when my spouse’s father briefly stopped breathing in his sleep. (Which happened often, and always sounded deeply unsettling during the time that he lived with my spouse and me.) The dog seemed to like trying to help. Although, honestly, the dog was pretty traumatized too: he’d howl when he was left alone, and the gunshot sounds of the 4th of July would make him thrash and snap his jaws.
The dog got his full name a few years later, when my spouse showed up at her father’s apartment to tell him she was pregnant.
“Max,” her father said, turning toward the dog with tears brimming in his eyes, “you’re gonna be an uncle. Uncle Max.”
“Nuh uh,” my spouse said, “we are not calling the dog Uncle Max.”
My spouse’s father died when our child was one. The dog came to live with us: his fifth family, then. We called him Uncle Max.
The name helped. He was a sixty-pound, scary-looking pitbull. But there’s something disarming about a dog called “uncle.”
#
The first week he lived with us, I thought he’d bitten off my child’s fingers. I was fixing lunch and had lost track of what my child was doing. I didn’t realize that she might be in the room with the scary dog.
Suddenly, I heard my child wail. I rushed toward the sound, and my child came staggering toward me, clutching her arm against her belly as though her hand might be bleeding or even missing, but when she finally let me see, there was the slightest little dimple on the soft skin of the back of her hand. She tried to explain what had happened to me in that vaguely incomprehensible way that an 18-month-old explains things:
“I, I …” she said, or perhaps “Eye, eye …” and then, “…put finger Max-y eye.”
So she’d been putting her fingers into the dog’s eyeball and then wailed, chagrined, when he had rather gently told her “No.”
#
Uncle Max loved running. I rather loathed going running with him, but we went together three times each week. He was fast, despite his limp, and he liked to start at a sprint, bolting from the house with me stumbling along behind him, struggling to hang on to his leash. Then, after about three miles he’d tire and plod along the rest of the way home.
He especially loved bounding through the local university campus, drawing smiles from students as his tongue flopped rakishly through the air: he was as gorgeous and charismatic as an underwear model. When people were watching, he liked to hop up and prance along little stone walls next to the sidewalk. He’d wag his tail and flirt whenever people asked to pet him.
But Uncle Max had memories. He held a lifelong vendetta. He’d seen an ambulance take my spouse’s father away, and then my spouse’s father never came back: just a long lock of faded russet hair that my spouse brought for Uncle Max to sniff.
I was walking Uncle Max one day when an ambulance came by us, forty miles per hour and flashing lights on a quiet street. Uncle Max lunged, trying to bite the ambulance, and nearly pulled me off my feet.
To be perfectly honest, my eyes filled up with tears when I typed this. Uncle Max seemed mostly happy. But that was one goal he never achieved: he never got his revenge, never killed an ambulance.
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That’s one type of heroism. Easy to spot. Cinematic. A dog hurling himself into danger to slay the mechanical beast that took his person.
Uncle Max also had the other kind. The quiet heroism. Generally I don’t like David Foster Wallace’s writing, but I love this passage about heroism from The Pale King:
“By which,” [our accounting instructor] said, “I mean true heroism, not heroism as you might know it from films or the tales of childhood. You are now nearly at childhood’s end; you are ready for the truth’s weight, to bear it. The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all – all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. An audience.”
He made a gesture I can’t describe: “Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth – actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.”
He paused again and smiled in a way that was not one bit self-mocking. “True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care – with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk.”
This is a sad passage: the author wants to convey the heroism of quietly getting your work done; his own ability to do so had faltered. David Foster Wallace could no longer bear to sit at his desk.
But Uncle Max had children to look after. I think that Uncle Max was in a lot of pain for his last few years. He lived until he was almost fourteen, but by the time he was eight, he stopped being able to run – he still wanted to run, but if we let him, he’d spend the next few days licking his aching, arthritic joints – and as the years went on, he needed to take progressively shorter and shorter walks. Near the end of his life, he was so stiff in the mornings that watching him walk was like a stop-motion film of a taxidermied dead animal.
But each day, after his medication kicked in, he was so happy to see his kids, to play with them or simply sit and be their pillow. He hurt, a lot, but he probably would have kept on going if we’d asked him.
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At times, of course, he was infuriating. He felt aggrieved one evening when we rushed off to a dinner party without taking him; he protested by nosing his way into our baking supplies, dragging a package of chocolate chips off a shelf, and devouring them. His heart was racing and his breath was shallow as I drove him to the all-night vet; it took a while to clean all his chocolate-scented vomit.
He’d shriek with a high-pitched, plangent whine whenever he felt like he wasn’t near enough to help; other people in town can walk their dogs to playgrounds and leave them tied just outside the fence, but Uncle Max had lost so many families that he couldn’t believe we’d survive without him. His shrieks sounded like he was in agony; spiritually, perhaps he was.
And he was very loud. Our whole neighborhood knew when he was demanding to go outside or in. Once when we happened to be out of the house for a while on the 4th of July, we returned home to find the kid next door shaking her head ruefully and saying, “I think there’s something wrong with your dog.” He never could handle fireworks.
But he loved his children.
Uncle Max did well. I believe he lived his life with heroism.
I’m proud of that dog.
And I’m proud of my spouse. She took care of her father until the end and then some. For seven years after her father died, my spouse made sure that his dog was safe & warm, well-fed & loved.
Most paths that start like theirs do not lead to here.
As translated by Edith Grossman, Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera begins:
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
An unhealthy longing. Unidirectional affection is often based on an illusion, with the besotted failing to see the whole complex, contradictory, living person in front of them.
Infatuation can feel overwhelming: the scent of bitter almonds, which about 40% of us can’t detect (early in my research career, a lab director counseled that “You should find some and check, you’ll be safer if you know whether or not you can smell it”) is cyanide, an agent of suicide. A release from the emotions that a person momentarily believes they cannot live with.
Throughout high school and college – bumbling through social situations as an undiagnosed, awkward, empathetic autistic person – I was prone to unrequited love. I could recognize when a classmate was intelligent, friendly, and fun; I understood less about the scaffolding of mutual care that might allow for reciprocal love to grow.
And so I grew adept at expressing unrequited affection: heartfelt handwritten letters; delivering home-cooked meals; offering compassion and care when a person I liked was sick; making fumbling offers to hold hands during an evening we spent jaunting about together.
It wasn’t love, exactly, which between adults needs both trust and the accumulation of shared memories to grow, but it was something. An imagined swirl of possibility that helped me feel hopeful about the future. In Love and the Time of Cholera, a character maintains his unrequited love for fifty-three years before finally building a reciprocal relationship:
Then [the captain] looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.
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Unrequited love is unhealthy, and it surrounds us. The world depends on our desire to care, our willingness to occasionally sacrifice our own interests for the benefit of others.
Every consciousness, whether human or animal, loves differently. When we love animals, we love creatures whose conception of love we’ll never fully understand. We love creatures whose love for us will always be different from our love for them.
But isn’t this, you might wonder, the state of loving other people as well? Aren’t we always flinging our desire at the opacity of another person, and receiving care we cannot fully comprehend?
Well, yes.
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A friend recently contacted me in the middle of the night: he and his spouse just had their first child, and – surprise, surprise! – they weren’t sleeping.
“Right now,” my friend told me, “he’s quiet if he’s nursing, or if we’re walking around with him in the carrier, but other than that, he’ll wake up and yell.”
I tried to think of what cheerful advice I could possibly give. “Sometimes I’d put my kids in the carrier,” I said, “then bounce on an exercise ball while I watched TV, to trick them into thinking we were walking.”
“Hey!” shouted my six-year-old, who was drawing cartoon monsters at my feet. “You tricked us!”
“Yup,” I told her, “and you’ll be glad to know how I did it, in case you’re ever trying to soothe a baby.”
For most of human evolution, most people’s lives were intimately entwined with their whole community. New parents would have watched other people raise children. But in recent years, upper and middle class Americans have segregated themselves by age. After leaving college, many rarely spend time around babies until having their own. And then, wham! After only a few months preparation, there’s a hungry, helpless, needy being who needs care.
Those first few weeks – which hazily become the first few months – are particularly punishing because very young babies can express contentment or angst, but not appreciation. New parents upend everything about their lives to provide for these tiny creatures, and they’re given so little back. In the beginning there are no smiles, no giggles or coos – just a few moments’ absence of yelling.
Upon reflection – thinking about the handwritten letters that my spouse and I have penned in journals for our children, interspersed with bits of their art that we’ve taped to the pages; all the excessively bland meals I’ve cooked; the doting cuddles and care when their stuffy noses made it hard for them to breathe; my continued insistence that we hold hands when crossing busy streets – I realized that unrequited love was perhaps my major preparation.
“I guess it was nice,” I told my friend, “that after all those years, I finally had a relationship where unrequited love was considered healthy.”
Luckily for me, my friend was sleep deprived enough to laugh.
Recently my spouse & I reviewed Jennifer Raff’s Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas for the American Biology Teacher magazine (in brief: Raff’s book is lovely, you should read it! I’ll include a link to our review once it’s published!), which deftly balances twin goals of disseminating scientific findings and honoring traditional knowledge.
By the time European immigrants reached the Americas, many of the people living here told stories suggesting that their ancestors had always inhabited these lands. This is not literally true. We have very good evidence that all human species – including Homo sapiens, Homo neaderthalensis, and Homo denisovans among possible others – first lived in Africa. Their descendants then migrated around the globe over a period of a few hundred thousand years.
As best we know, no lasting population of humans reached the Americas until about twenty thousand years ago (by which time most human species had gone extinct – only Homo sapiens remained).
During the most recent ice age, a few thousand humans lived in an isolated, Texas-sized grassland called Beringia for perhaps a few thousand years. They were cut off from other humans to the west and an entire continent to the east by glacial ice sheets. By about twenty thousand years ago, though, some members of this group ventured south by boat and established new homes along the shoreline.
By about ten thousand years ago, and perhaps earlier, descendants of these travelers reached the southern tip of South America, the eastern seaboard of North America, and everywhere between. This spread was likely quite rapid (from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist) based on the diversity of local languages that had developed by the time Europeans arrived, about five hundred years ago.
So, by the time Europeans arrived, some groups of people had probably been living in place for nearly 10,000 years. This is not “always” from a scientific perspective, which judges our planet to be over 4,000,000,000 years old. But this is “always” when in conversation with an immigrant who believes the planet to be about 4,000 years old. Compared with Isaac Newton’s interpretation of Genesis, the First People had been living here long before God created Adam and Eve.
If “In the beginning …” marks the beginning of time, then, yes, their people had always lived here.
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I found myself reflecting on the balance between scientific & traditional knowledge while reading Gabriel Andrade’s essay, “How ‘Indigenous Ways of Knowing’ Works in Venezuela.” Andrade describes his interactions with students who hold the traditional belief in partible paternity: that semen is the stuff of life from which human babies are formed, and so every cis-man who ejaculates during penetrative sex with a pregnant person becomes a father to the child.
I appreciate partible paternity because, although this belief is often framed in misogynistic language – inaccurately grandiose claims about the role of semen in fetal development, often while ignoring the huge contribution of a pregnant person’s body – the belief makes the world better. People who are or might become pregnant are given more freedom. Other parents, typically men, are encouraged to help many children.
Replacing belief in partible paternity with a scientifically “correct” understanding of reproduction would probably make the world worse – people who might become pregnant would be permitted less freedom, and potential parents might cease to aid children whom they didn’t know to be their own genetic offspring.
Also, the traditional knowledge – belief in partible paternity – might be correct.
Obviously, there’s a question of relationships – what makes someone a parent? But I also mean something more biological — a human child actually can have three or more genetic contributors among their parents.
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Presumably you know the scientific version of human reproduction. To wit: a single sperm cell merges with a single egg cell. This egg rapidly changes to exclude all the other sperm cells surrounding it, then implants in the uterine lining. Over the next nine months, this pluripotent cell divides repeatedly to form the entire body of a child. The resulting child has exactly two parents. Every cell in the child’s body has the same 3 billion base pair long genome.
No scientist believes in this simplified version. For instance, every time a cell divides, the entire genome must be copied – each time, this process will create a few mistakes. By the time a human child is ready to be born, their cells will have divided so many times that the genome of a cell in the hand is different from the genome of a cell in the liver or in the brain.
In Unique, David Linden writes that:
Until recently, reading someone’s DNA required a goodly amount of it: you’d take a blood draw or a cheek swab and pool the DNA from many cells before loading it into the sequencing machine.
However, in recent years it has become possible to read the complete sequence of DNA, all three billion or so nucleotides, from individual cells, such as a single skin cell or neuron. With this technique in hand, Christopher Walsh and his coworkers at Boston Children’s Hopsital and Harvard Medical School isolated thirty-six individual neurons from three healthy postmortem human brains and then determined the complete genetic sequence for each of them.
This revealed that no two neurons had exactly the same DNA sequence. In fact, each neuron harbored, on average, about 1,500 single-nucleotide mutations. That’s 1,500 nucleotides out of a total of three billion in the entire genome – a very low rate, but those mutations can have important consequences. For example, one was in a gene that instructs the production of an ion channel protein that’s crucial for electrical signaling in neurons. If this mutation were present in a group of neurons, instead of just one, it could cause epilepsy.
No human has a genome: we are composite creatures.
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Most scientists do believe that all these unique individual genomes inside your cells were composed by combining genetic information from your two parents and then layering on novel mutations. But we don’t know how often this is false.
Pluripotent (“able to form many things”) cells from a developing human embryo / fetus / baby can travel throughout a pregnant person’s body. This is quite common – most people with XX chromosomes who have given birth to people with XY chromosomes will have cells with Y chromosomes in their brains. During the gestation of twins, the twins often swap cells (and therefore genomes).
At the time of birth, most humans aren’t twins, but many of us do start that way. There’s only a one in fifty chance of twin birth following a dizygotic pregnancy (the fertilization of two or more eggs cells released during a single ovulation). Usually what happens next is a merger or absorption of one set of these cells by another, resulting in a single child. When this occurs, different regions of a person’s body end up with distinct genetic lineages, but it’s difficult to identify. Before the advent of genetic sequencing, you might notice only if there was a difference in eye, skin, or hair color from one part of a person’s body to the next. Even now, you’ll only notice if you sequence full genomes from several regions of a person’s body and find that they’re distinct.
For a person to have more than two genetic contributors, there would have to be a dizygotic pregnancy in which sperm cells from unique individuals merged with the two eggs.
In the United States, where the dominant culture is such that people who are trying to get pregnant are exhorted not to mate with multiple individuals, studies conducted in the 1990s found that at least one set of every few hundred twins had separate fathers (termed “heteropaternal superfecundication”). In these cases, the children almost certainly had genomes derived from the genetic contributions of three separate people (although each individual cell in the children’s bodies would have a genome derived from only two genetic contributors).
So, we actually know that partible paternity is real. Because it’s so difficult to notice, our current estimates are probably lower bounds. If 1:400 were the rate among live twins, probably that many dizygotic pregnancies in the United States also result from three or more genetic contributors. Probably this frequency is higher in cultures that celebrate rather than castigate this practice.
Honestly, I could be persuaded that estimates ranging anywhere from 1:20 to 1:4,000 were reasonable for the frequency that individuals from these cultures have three or more genetic contributors.** We just don’t know.
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I agree with Gabriel Andrade that we’d like for medical students who grew up believing in partible paternity to benefit from our scientific understanding of genetics and inheritance – this scientific knowledge will help them help their patients. But I also believe that, even in this extreme case, the traditional knowledge should be respected. It’s not as inaccurate as we might reflexively believe!
The scientific uncertainty I’ve described above doesn’t quite match the traditional knowledge, though. A person can only receive genetic inheritance from, ahem, mating events that happen during ovulation, whereas partible paternity belief systems also treat everyone who has sex with the pregnant person over the next few months as a parent, too.
But there’s a big difference between contributing genes and being a parent. In Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification, and the Will to Change Nature, Lisa Jean Moore discusses the many parents who have helped raise the three children she conceived through artificial insemination. Even after Moore’s romantic relationships with some of these people ended, they remained parents to her children. The parental bond, like all human relationships, is created by the relationship itself.
This should go without saying, but: foster families are families. Adopted families are families. Families are families.
Partible paternity is a belief that makes itself real.
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** A note on the math: Dizygotic fertilization appears to account for 1:10 human births, and in each of these cases there is probably at least some degree of chimerism in the resulting child. My upper estimate for the frequency that individuals have three or more genetic contributors, 1:20, would be if sperm from multiple individuals had exactly equal probabilities of fertilizing each of the two egg cells. My lower estimate of 1:4,000 would be if dizygotic fertilization from multiple individuals had the same odds as the 1:400 that fraternal twin pairs in the U.S. have distinct primary genetic contributors. Presumably a culture that actively pursues partible paternity would have a higher rate than this, but we don’t know for sure. And in any case, these are large numbers! Up to 5% of people from these cultures might actually have three or more genetic contributors, which is both biologically relevant and something that we’d be likely to overlook if we ignored the traditional Indigenous knowledge about partible paternity.
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header image from Zappy’s Technology Solution on flickr
In the New York Times Magazine article “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” journalist Emily Bazelon describes the conflicting views of several medical doctors and psychologists. They disagree over timing and access: who should decide whether a young person receives gender-affirming medical care, and how long should this decision-making process take?
In general, waiting before finalizing a decision is best. This is true whether they are big decisions – like getting married or buying a house – or relatively small decisions – like buying a new couch, posting an irate Twitter message, or drinking another beer. If you can give yourself time to mull it over, you’ll probably be happier with your resulting decision, even if you end up doing the same thing.
In the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, a chess instructor attempts to teach this patience to his student:
“So what’s your best move?”
“Rook to d.”
“What about taking on e?”
“What about it?”
“You didn’t consider it. You’re still not considering it.”
“I’m right. Rook to d is the best move.”
“You didn’t study the board!”
Even when the answer seems clear, it’s still often better to take time to think. To plan, to weigh options.
But we don’t always have this luxury. Sometimes, when considering whether to buy a house, people feel forced to make a decision immediately – otherwise, someone else might buy it! These snap decisions, like the home purchases that many people made during the pandemic, are more likely to lead to regret.
For a person seeking gender-affirming medical care, deciding to begin hormone therapy might be an even bigger decision than getting married or buying a house. Hormone therapy can cause irreversible physical changes. For a person who was assigned female at birth, taking testosterone often results in a permanently deeper voice; reshaping of the face to appear more angular; changes in the shape and size of genitals.
Similarly, when a person who was assigned male at birth uses hormone therapy to help their appearance and physiology better match the gender of their brain, an analogous set of changes may linger even if this person decides to stop taking the medications.
And, yes, some people will decide to stop taking the medications. As with any medical treatment, hormone therapy has both benefits and side-effects, and it’s hard to know how these will balance out for a particular individual’s brain & body before they try.
So, it’s a big decision. There are irreversible changes. Obviously, taking a lot of time to wait and evaluate would be best, right?
But sometimes, competing urgency makes waiting impractical. As an example, consider surgical removal of an organ. This is a drastic measure: you’d like to wait and mull things over. Unfortunately, time pressure from the septic shock of an advanced bacterial infection might force a quick decision. My friend was barely conscious during this decision-making process after collapsing in the lobby of our local hospital.
When deciding whether or not to initiate gender-affirming hormone therapy, there’s a bit more wiggle room. But for a young person who’s mustered up enough self-knowledge and courage to talk to their parents or healthcare provider about wanting medication, there is still looming time pressure.
During puberty, bodies can change very drastically within a matter of months. Many of these changes are lifelong and irreversible. Waiting to evaluate isn’t just a default, low-impact choice. Hormone therapy is a big deal, but waiting will also bring dramatic, permanent physiological changes. Not to mention continued psychological turmoil, which might be compounded by the knowledge that, for all of your bravery in speaking up, you’re still not getting the help you need.
My main qualm with Bazelon’s article? For all the nuance devoted to the medical doctors’ and psychologists’ opinions, we hear very little from young people. Bazelon interviewed over 60 clinicians, researchers, activists, and historians, but only half that many of the young people whose brains, bodies, & lives are at stake. As a parent, I’m aware that children can do or say a lot of irksome, irrational things; as someone who works with elementary and high-school students, I also know that we have to recognize young people as valid knowers and thinkers.
I want to hear about the sense of urgency from young people themselves. Instead, this central issue was only passingly mentioned in a single sentence, a quote from child psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper about the process of evaluating young people for gender-affirming treatment: “If a child was on the cusp of puberty, and anxious about how their body was about to change, we tried to squeeze them in faster, which I still think is really important.”
Young people have a stake in our world. And yet – with our inaction on climate change; our mass production & sale of military-grade weaponry to anybody who wants it; our treating schools as a lower priority than bars or restaurants during the pandemic, and then keeping schools closed or disrupted even after we had data showing that these disruptions were causing children even greater harm than Covid-19 infection; our age- and wealth-based prejudices that give retirees a far greater say in the future of our country & planet than the young people who will inherit the mess – we are not only disenfranchising young people, but abjectly failing them.
Young people have not been silent. We ought to listen.
During the first year and a half of the Covid-19 pandemic, the local county jail wouldn’t admit volunteers. Incarceration in the United States sounds crummy most of the time, but most of the people I’ve communicated with have said that things were even worse during the pandemic: more fear, more tension, fewer opportunities to do much of anything either than sit & worry.
Around that time, the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project – an organization that sends free books to people who are incarcerated – received many letters like this:
“The prison I am at has us on 23 hour a day lockdown due to the coronavirus threat. We also lost access to most jobs around the prison, visits, library, and a lot of other things that help relieve stress, like sports, walking track, weight-lifting, church, etc.
So books will be a huge help, we are three-deep to a cell and I can’t say I always enjoy the company.”
And also –a la Baudelaire’s “oasis of horror in a desert of boredom” – we received some terrifying stories from people who got very sick:
“On Sept 1st I was Covid-positive, on Sept 4 shortly after 6 a.m. I was rushed to the hospital. I was on a ventilator & in paralytic coma for 6 ½ days. Both lungs free of pneumonia, I have now been diagnosed with stress-induced cardiomyopathy due to Covid. I am back at the prison. My voice sounds like a man (LOL).”
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There are almost always communicable diseases circulating through the jails and prisons. That’s certainly still been true during the Covid-19 pandemic: in southern Indiana, vaccine uptake is relatively low, especially among the population of people usually targeted for incarceration. Still, volunteers began visiting the jail again as soon as we were allowed – during stressful times, people need more support and kindness than usual, not less.
For the past few months, the administration has been letting us bring equipment to record people reading books for their kids. Then librarians at our excellent local library send the video and a paper copy of the book to the person’s kids.
After a Sunday morning recording session, someone was telling me a bit about her recent experience:
“We’ve got three levels of security in the women’s block right now, so we’re on lockdown about 22 hours a day. They only let us out to the common area one level at a time.”
“Breakfast at 4:30, why I was feeling a sleepy. They do have coffee at commissary, instant coffee. Commissary’s a little tough, the prices of everything have gone up but they didn’t raise the weekly cap, so you can get a little less each week. My parents have been putting money in my commissary, but you can’t do more than the cap.”
“My parents have been taking good care of me, thank God, not that I deserve it.”
Which always breaks my heart to hear somebody say. She deserves help. We all do.
I doubt there’s anyone among us who would be pleased to have people always associate us with the worst things we’d ever done. Or have our worst moments mulled over by judges and prosecutors and public defenders, then written up in someone else’s words and stored in a permanent file.
I’ve certainly done bad things & broken laws: I had the good fortune to not be caught. (Good fortune, plus pale skin, masculine frame, upper-class accent, apartments in wealthy, less-policed areas …) I drove with drugs in my car. And I definitely hurt people – started petty arguments, callously trampled feelings – in ways that aren’t illegal, but I’d still feel awful having those moments replayed again and again, discussed in a courtroom, treated as though those smallest, meanest moments were the essence of me, the most important thing for somebody to know about me.
In Just Mercy, lawyer Bryan Stevenson writes that:
“I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others.”
“But simply punishing the broken – walking away from them or hiding them from sight – only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.”
“I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations – over the things they’d done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst things we’ve ever done.”
“I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, you are not just a thief.”
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In jail that day, I tried to say something vaguely similar. But at the end of our recording session, I got to return to my loving family. I got to read a book to my children while hugging them.
She went back to the block, waiting for us to mail a DVD of her reading & a copy of the book to her kids. Which isn’t the same, and isn’t enough.
Many more people in the United States now identify as transgender and/or non-binary than in the recent past. This increase is most dramatic among younger generations.
There are two major causes of this change, and for political reasons it’s essential that we acknowledge both.
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My spouse was recently speaking to a colleague and (cheerfully) described the increase as being due to our nation’s changing culture. In my opinion, we still have a long way to go, but many people are much more accepting than in the recent past. As the perceived risk decreases, people will be more likely to reveal their true identities.
But that isn’t the whole story.
The chemical make-up of our world is radically different than in the recent past. As a (lapsed) organic chemist, I’m quite proud of human ingenuity and our ability to synthesize so many wondrous medicines, small molecules, and industrial materials. The technologies we have access to are amazing! We can live so much longer, and our quality of life during that time is pretty awesome.
We’ve dramatically altered the environment, though. Industrial run-off and medicinal metabolites are present at high concentrations in our water supply, including lots of “endocrine disrupting chemicals.”
Endocrine disrupting chemicals often resemble naturally-occurring hormones and signaling molecules. Many of these chemicals are known to induce non-binary sexual development among other animals – in recent years, there’s been a dramatic increase in the proportion of wild animals born with intersex characteristics.
We humans are also susceptible to this altered chemical milieu. The environment in which human brains and bodies develop during gestation is chemically different now from in our recent past.
As epidemiologist Shanna Swan writes in Countdown: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, “The changes in sexual development taking place all over the world appear to have been accompanied by an apparent rise in gender fluidity …”
Intersex is different from transgender or nonbinary. “Intersex” describes physical morphology and can be assessed for non-human animals; “transgender” and “nonbinary” describe what’s going on inside a person’s brain. But brains are a product of biological development. It’s reasonable to assume – although it would obviously be unethical to test or prove – that endocrine disrupting chemicals capable of changing external sexual morphology also impact developing brains.
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Children are more likely to self-identify as transgender or non-binary now than in the recent past, partly because they are growing up in a different culture, partly because their brains and bodies developed in a different chemical environment.
We don’t yet know how much of the shift has been caused by which factor: maybe the explanation is 10% cultural, 90% biological; maybe both contribute equally; maybe the shift is more due to culture than biology.
But it’s essential for us to acknowledge both contributions – especially because a large portion of our nation’s population espouses conservative or traditional values that decry the cultural change.
Yes, the Democratic party’s policies celebrating diversity have shifted the culture; the Republican party’s policies promoting business and minimizing environmental regulation have shifted the chemical environment.
Whether or not we are happy that gender fluidity is on the rise, it’s important to note that both major political parties in this country have contributed.
I’m no biological determinist – from my perspective as a masculine autistic person who’s chosen to focus on caretaking, I like to imagine that I’m transcending my biological inclinations – but those of us who celebrate liberal values and diversity do ourselves a political disservice if we fail to acknowledge the impact of our shifting environment on gender.
Children will be safer when we make clear that these aspects of their identities aren’t a choice. This is who they are. Personally, I think that’s great. But some people don’t. And so we need to convey that political policies that those people supported helped make children’s lives today different from the way the world used to be.
The way we speak about these issues matters. If we want to include as many people as possible in these conversations – which we must, if we’re going to move forward as a nation – we have to include the whole complex breadth of the world.
Even when it feels uncomfortable.
. . . .
Header image by Ted Eytan.
Frog image by John P Clare — although I should acknowledge that not only is this frog living in Ireland, not the U.S., but I’m also not a herpetologist and can’t tell you this frog’s biological sex. But it’s a good looking frog!
As children learn to speak, they feel out gaps in their parents’ language. Words that ought to be there, but aren’t.
On a Friday afternoon, my five-year-old might say something like “Tomorrow at school I’ll finish drawing my Snakes Waam!” (This is a series of comic books she’s making in which a family of snakes prevent monsters from burning down our city.)
My daughter knows that there’s no school on Saturday – when she says “tomorrow,” she means the next day when I am at school.
Or, on a Monday morning, she might say: “Yesterday at school we got to visit the library!”
I wish that English had the words she’s grasping for!
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Different languages sway speakers toward different conceptions of the world. In English, we typically imagine that we’re facing the future: the world to come is before our eyes.
But, as David Kishik writes in The Book of Shem, “in Hebrew forward (kadima) is related to what is ancient (kadum), just as backward (achora) is linked to what is last (acharon).” Or, as Laura Spiinny writes in “How Time Flies,” “q”ipuru, the Aymara word for tomorrow, combines q”ipa [“behind / back”] and uru, the word for day, to produce a literal meaning of ‘some day behind one’s back.’ “
In these cultures, there’s an emphasis on the past as known – things that have happened can be seen, whereas the future is a mystery. There’s also, especially in biblical Hebrew, a sense that the progression of time is coupled with decline.
In Sanskrit, I believe the future is described as being ahead of people, but in ancient Vedic thought the progression of time leads toward inevitable decay. Time flows cyclically, but during each cycle the world becomes steadily worse until it is destroyed and reborn as good again.
Within these cultural frameworks, it’s certainly possible to feel optimistic about the future, but it’s more difficult.
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I found myself thinking about how our culture might shift if English had the words my daughter wants. A set of time words that were strictly relational: a “tomorrow” that could mean “the next time I’m in school” or “the next time that I see you.”
Perhaps this would help us to maintain a more fluid perspective on time. To see that psychological time flows unpredictably and unsteadily, not like the uniform ticking of clocks (stubborn little devices that have made many people’s interior lives feel worse).
As James Gleick writes in “The Toll of the Clock,” “When the first public sundial arrived in Rome … some Romans cursed it.
“The gods damn the man who first discovered the hours and – yes – who first set up a sundial here, who’s smashed the day into bits,” wrote Plautus.
… People have been complaining about clocks ever since.”
We each contain many braids of time. The hours we spend with different groupings of people are unique strands. Time together makes relationships, a link that’s distinct from each day’s journey of the sun.
Would we put more effort into maintaining our relationships if there was no other way for “tomorrow” to come?
In Unique, neuroscientist David Linden describes the cultural associations between smell and taste.
Most people from the United States will say that vanilla, strawberry, or mint odors smell sweet.
On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense. Sweet is a taste, not a smell. A substance cannot smell sweet any more than something can sound red.
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There’s nothing intrinsically sweet about these odors – we’ve just learned to associate them with sweet taste.
As a counterexample, in Vietnam, where caramel and mint are used primarily in savory dishes, their odors are not typically described as sweet.
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This association is sufficiently powerful that its effect can be measured in the lab.
For people whose past cultural experiences have led them to associate mint smells with sweet tastes, pairing the scent of mint with a sip of sucrose solution makes them believe that the drink is more sugary than it really is. When mint scent is paired with a sip of mildly acidic water, the drink seems less sour than it really is.
This experiment didn’t assess people’s perception of alcoholic drinks, but people in the United States probably make the same mistake about the bourbon in a mint julep.
Our assumptions – particular to our own cultural experience of the world – can powerfully deceive us.
A mint julep mixed perfectly for someone from the United States would taste bitter to someone from Vietnam.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen – author of The Sympathizer, which I’ve written about previously – strives to draw attention to our cultural blindness. The way our minds’ innate self-deceptions allow us to overlook or misinterpret the experiences of others.
My spouse and I have often felt grateful for Nguyen’s work. His essay about the sinking sensation he felt after teaching his child to read was particularly beautiful. (I linked to it in my own essay about teaching a child to read.)
Which is why we felt so dismayed by Nguyen’s most recent New York Times editorial.
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Nguyen explains why he enjoys teaching over Zoom. He’s prompted with students’ names; he can see their reactions up close; student voices contribute to the lecture from the same up-front position of power as his own; typed remarks can overlap without distracting; lectures are recorded for students to review later.
All well and good. Nguyen is quite intelligent. If he thinks Zoom is good for lectures, I’m inclined to believe him.
But lectures aren’t the best way to learn.
For many subjects, project-based learning is a more effective way to educate students. Many of my spouse’s resources – designed primarily for teaching college-level biology and introductory Earth & space science with a social justice bent – are available on her website, here.
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For the better part of a decade, I’ve hosted a poetry class in the county jail. We read poems and discuss how they make us feel. Our discussions touch upon contemporary scientific research, mythology, economics – all safe enough topics, for most folks – but also religion, addiction, trauma, violence, relationships, loss – which can be tough for anyone to talk about, let alone a room full of men who won’t get to see their families for months.
Because people cycle through the county jail, I never know who will be coming to class each week until I get there. For a few months, I might be with mostly the same group of men. Other weeks, I won’t have met any of the dozen or so people previously.
And there’s a huge difference between what we can accomplish – between what sorts of things feel safe to discuss – when the people in class haven’t met me before, and haven’t been in a class like that with each other. If we haven’t built the necessary emotional connection, we can do less. The class is worse for all of us.
Recently, the jail has allowed a small number of classes over Zoom. But Zoom doesn’t let you make the same emotional connection.
People sometimes complain about the supposed invasiveness of Zoom – the camera snatches up your personal surroundings, the pictures on your wall, the books on your shelves, your family in the background – but it’s by no means the intimacy of being there.
screenshot from a video by Rose Bythrow
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My spouse says, “Over Zoom you can’t tell who’s hungry.”
It would be nice if she meant this metaphorically – that it’s hard to tell who’s eager to learn. But, no. Many students aren’t eating enough. They are hungry.
Worse, we read Nguyen’s paean to Zoom on a snow day.
Streets near my spouse’s high school school were well-salted and plowed, but we live in a sprawling, semi-rural area – the school district serves families from a mix of socioeconomic backgrounds. There are hills and valleys – not everyone can get a satellite signal at home. And the for-profit cable companies certainly haven’t connected those families to the modern world with wires.
Still, the pandemic has made “e-learning days” seem like a reliable alternative. If it snows, kids learn from home.
“What’s Zoom supposed to do,” my spouse asked, “for my students with no heat?”
This isn’t (only) a concern for fluke events like the avarice-fueled power outages and heat losses in Texas. My spouse grew up in Albany, New York. Every winter was cold. The infrastructure to heat homes there was secure – for children whose families had money.
My spouse’s family didn’t. Her father failed to pay the electric bill. The power was shut off. And then the district called a snow day.
If my spouse and her sibling had gone to school, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Warm classrooms, a hot meal.
Instead they were stuck at home, shivering. Wanting so badly to go to a neighbor’s house. But then the neighbors would know.
In the United States, where poverty is often stigmatized as a moral failing, people hide the ache of want.
Which is why Zoom is so horrible. Zoom makes it easy. When you only have to disguise a small corner of your life, you can convey the illusion that things are okay.
There’s broad scientific consensus that school closures hurt children, probably making a significant contribution to future increases in premature death.
There’s also broad scientific consensus that school closures – particularly elementary school closures – aren’t helpful in slowing the spread of Covid-19. Children aren’t major vectors for this virus. Adults just have to remember not to congregate in the teachers’ lounge.
Worldwide, a vanishingly small percentage of viral transmissions have occurred inside schools.
And … our district just closed in-person school for all children.
In-person indoor dining at restaurants is still allowed. Bars are still open.
Older people are sending a clear message to kids: “Your lives matter less than ours.”
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For at-risk children, school closures are devastating. A disruption in social-emotional learning; lifelong education gaps; skipped meals.
But for my (privileged!) family, the closure will be pretty nice. I was recently feeling nostalgic about the weeks in August when my eldest and I spent each morning together.
Our youngest attends pre-K at a private school. Her school, like most private schools around the country, (sensibly) re-opened on time and is following its regular academic calendar.
My eldest and I will do two weeks of home schooling before winter break. And it’ll be fun. I like spending time with my kids, and my eldest loves school so much that she often uses up most of her energy during the day – teachers tell us what a calm, lovely, hard-working kid she is. And then she comes home and yells, all her resilience dissipated.
Which is normal! Totally normal. But it’s a little crummy, as a parent, to know you’ve got a great kid but that you don’t get to see her at her best.
Right now she’s sad about not going to school – on Monday, she came home crying, “There was an announcement that we all have to switch to online only!” – but I’m lucky that I can be here with her. Writing stories together, doing math puzzles, cooking lunch.
Maybe we’ll practice magic tricks. She loves magic.
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Last month, I was getting ready to drive the kids to school. T. (4 years old) and I were in the bathroom. I’d just handed T. her toothbrush.
N. (6 years old) walked over holding a gallon-sized plastic bag.
“Father, do you want to see a magic trick?” she asked.
“Okay, but I have to brush my teeth while you’re doing it.”
“Okay,” she said, and opened the bag. She took out a multi-colored lump of clay. It was vaguely spherical. Globs of red, white, and blue poked up from random patches across the surface, as though three colors of clay had been haphazardly moshed together.
“So you think this is just this,” she said, but then …”
She took out a little wooden knife and began sawing at the lump. “This is just this?”, I wondered. It’s an interesting phrase.
Her sawing had little effect. The knife appeared useless. I’m pretty sure this wooden knife is part of the play food set she received as a hand-me-down when she was 9 months old. “Safe for babies” is generally correlated with “Useless for cutting.”
She was having trouble breaking the surface of her lump.
I spat out my toothpaste.
She kept sawing. She set down the knife and stared at the clay intently. A worthy adversary.
I stood there, watching.
She grabbed the knife again and resumed sawing. More vigorously, this time. She started stabbing, whacking. This was enough to make a tiny furrow. She tossed aside the knife and pulled with her fingertips, managing to pry two lobes of the strange lump away from each other.
“Okay,” she said, “it’s hard to see, but there’s some green in there.”
T. and I crouched down and peered closely. Indeed, there was a small bit of round green clay at the center of the lump.
“Wow!” exclaimed T. “I thought it was just a red, and, uh, blue, and white ball! But then, on the inside, there’s some green!”
“I know!” said N., happy that at least one member of her audience understood the significance of her trick. “And look, I might even get it back together!”
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N. started performing magic when she was four. T. was asleep for her afternoon nap.
“Okay,” she said, “you sit there, and I’ll put on a magic show. Watch, I’ll make, um … this cup! See this cup? I’ll make it disappear.”
“Okay,” I said, curious. We’d just read a book that explained how to make a penny disappear from a glass cup – the trick is to start with the cup sitting on top of the penny, so that the coin looks like it’s inside the cup but actually isn’t.
I had no idea how she planned to make the cup itself disappear.
“Okay, so, um, now you’re ready, and …” she looked at the cup in her hands. Suddenly, she whisked it behind her back. And stood there, looking at me somberly, with her hands behind her back.
“I don’t have it,” she said.
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Magic – convincing an audience to believe in an illusion.
Our species is blessed with prodigious longevity, probably because so many grandmothers among our ancestors worked hard to help their grandchildren survive.
(The long lives of men are probably an accidental evolutionary byproduct, like male nipples or female orgasms. Elderly men, with their propensity to commandeer resources and start conflicts, probably reduced the fitness of their families and tribes.)
After we reach our seventies, though – when our ancestors’ grandchildren had probably passed their most risky developmental years – our bodies fail. We undergo immunosenescence – our immune systems become worse at suppressing cancer and infections.
Frank Brown Cloud 