The Trouble with Testosterone
Page 24
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Endnotes
1 This has given rise to a T-shirt that I saw being worn in the Castro District of San Francisco: “The only thing small about me is my third interstitial nucleus.” It’s great to see when neuroanotomy begins to influence fashion.
2 I discovered a wonderful example of this recently. In the Sierra foothills there are the California Caverns, a gigantic cave system that begins, after an initial narrow twisting descent of 30-some feet, with an abrupt 180-foot drop (now navigable with either a staircase or a tourist-friendly rappel). The Park Service found scores of ancient human skeletons at the bottom of that drop, dating back centuries, millennia. Knowledge of the Native American cultures living there at those times argued strongly against these being human sacrifices. Instead, they were explorers who took one step too far in the gloom. And the skeletons are always of adolescents.
3 Ironic ending department: after Burke was caught and executed, his own skull was turned over to phrenologists for examination, in hopes of their detecting some scientific explanation for his heinous crime.
4 And there was often the disturbing suggestion that some individuals might even have hastened along the demise of their relatives for the sake of the transaction.
5 Amid this generally grim story, I was amused to note that by the late 1920s, this “disease” was so well established that new ground was being broken in describing the distinctive and striking behavioral features of infants who would later be found to have died of status thymicolymphaticus. They were characterized as having “phlegmatic” dispositions—presumably because these were normal kids and thus were phlegmatic about their imaginary illness.
6 A more jargony term for that equilibrium, one that everyone got tossed at them in ninth-grade biology, would be “homeostasis.”
7 Testosterone is one of a family of related hormones, collectively known as “androgens” or “anabolic steroids.” They all are secreted from the testes or are the result of a modification of testosterone, they all have a similar chemical structure, and they all do roughly similar things. Nonetheless, androgen mavens spend entire careers studying the important differences in the actions of different androgens. I am going to throw that subtlety to the wind and, for the sake of simplification that will horrify many, will refer throughout to all of these related hormones as “testosterone.”
8 An example of physics envy in action. Recently, a zoologist friend had obtained blood samples from the carnivores that he studies and wanted some hormones in the sample assays in my lab. Although inexperienced with the technique, he offered to help in any way possible. I felt hesitant asking him to do anything tedious but, so long as he had offered, tentatively said, “Well, if you don’t mind some unspeakable drudgery, you could number about a thousand assay vials.” And this scientist, whose superb work has graced the most prestigious science journals in the world, cheerfully answered, “That’s okay, how often do I get to do real science, working with test tubes?”
9 And no one has shown that differences in the size or shape of the amygdala, or differences in the numbers of neurons in it, can begin to predict differences in normal levels of aggression. Same punch line as with testosterone.
10 And if that’s not friendship, what is? This is not Disney cutesying of animals—instead, these patterns are discerned with rigorous, quantitative data by some of the best primatologists around. Moreover, it is not anthropomorphic to use terms like “personality,” “community,” or even “culture” when discussing primates either. As but one example of this (and some references are given at the end of this piece for more reading on these subjects), chimpanzees in the wild are now known to make a variety of tools, an observation in and of itself that has to be among the most provocative scientific findings of the century. Primatologists are now observing that there are differences in different chimp populations in the style of tool construction and use. There’s not some sort of hard-wired instinctual drive in chimps to construct hedge trimmers for use in the rain forest. Instead, they learn, experiment, improve with their tools in a way that reflects regional differences in tool-making cultures.
11 Naturally, not his real name. “Odhiombo” is a common East Africa surname, the rough equivalent of “Smith” or “Jones.”
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Copyright © 1997 by Robert M. Sapolsky
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The Library of Congress has catalogued the Scribner edition as follows:
Sapolsky, Robert M.
The trouble with testosterone : and other essays on the biology of the human predicament / Robert M. Sapolsky.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
(alk. paper)
1. Psychobiology. I. Title.
QP360.S268 1997
6l0’.1—dc21 96-52357
CIP
ISBN 0-684-83409-X
ISBN 0-684-83891-5 (Pbk)
eISBN: 978-1-4391-2505-2
“How Big Is Yours?”; “The Young and the Reckless”; “Junk Food Monkeys”; “The Graying of the Troop”; and “The Dissolution of Ego Boundaries and the Fit of My Father’s Shirt” were previously published in Discover. “Primate Peekaboo”; “Measures of Life”; “The Solace of Patterns”; “Poverty’s Remains”; “The Burden of Being Burden-Free”; and “Curious George’s Pharmacy” were previously published in The Sciences.