Petri Town Brotherhood, family, science and culture in life's big experimental dish.

Woman #1: “…And then Ronald said, ‘You aren’t going out in that. I believe I see at least forty-eight percent of your skin in that dress! They’ll think you’re some kind of trollop! Change at once!’”

Woman #2: “So you put on that instead?”

Woman #1: “It still shows off a good 30 percent of me.”

Woman #2: “Tell it to the friar, Sister.”

A new study out of England finds out just how much flesh women should be revealing in order to optimize … ehrm, I guess to optimize guys hitting on them. Researchers observed men approaching women in nightclubs in the city of Leeds and counted the number of approaches per woman relative to how much skin was showing.

The researchers then tabulated, perhaps on one of those room-sized computers with spinning reels, that women who bare forty percent of their bodies have the greatest success attracting men, twice as much as the dames who get wild after a mojito and roll down their turtleneck a bit. And the forty-percenters apparently have more success even than those women who wear less clothing, as these are considered to be the unfaithful type. A matter of great concern, presumably, to all those men who come to clubs looking for wives amongst the tubetop set.

Important to note that the forty-percenters who were most successful at luring males combined that magic ratio with, in the words of the Telegraph, “tight clothing and provocative dancing.” Proving that proper mating behaviors are still as important as the plumage.

So ladies: get out your slide rules when deciding on that strapless bra, cause we men are thinking with our little accountants!

While the study is a bit frivolous, it does prove that science is still a guy’s world: notice there was no similar research on males, perhaps because no man — no man! — wants to be told that keeping your hand down your pants 40 percent of the time will repel a woman.

Nov 18th, 2009 2:33am

This whole project, and maybe even the motivation behind my coming to Petri Town in the first place, was in service of a question: If there is a cure for Fragile X, who would it turn The Boy into?

Questions of identity and the “I” are pretty salty ones, and whereas it was once the province of men in togas and the French, now the self can be subjected to neurological study — and modification, via genetics and medicines. So what happens if a Fragile X cure appears in the next few years affects all our selves. The Boy may become The Boy 2.0, and then, through the wireless signals of family, I too would have to upgrade my operating system.

These issues have circulated more widely in the last decade, in slightly different forms, in the autistic community. As has been discussed, the debate about whether vaccines cause autism was once just a discursive blob; it then split into two cells: those who believe vaccines cause autism and those who don’t. But there is a third faction whose existence begins to answer that first question of mine.

As higher functioning autistic and Asperger’s folks (autie and aspie in the parlance of our times) begin meeting online and appearing more in media coverage, so too does a name for this community arise, out of necessity or, more likely, our need to categorize. The first reference to Neurodiversity is in an Atlantic story in 1998 in which writer Harvey Blume suggests that “[n]eurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment? Cybernetics and computer culture, for example, may favor a somewhat autistic cast of mind.”

The media begins to like the taste of this; in June 2000, the question of How the Autistic Fit Into Society is broached by the New York Times. And slowly, slowly, as the autistic find one another online and recognize that they have a collective identity, they also realize that their identity is synonymous with disease. In order to change this, their Community will have to become a Movement.

Whether they know it or not, the time is coming when a Celebrity Spokesperson will have to be named.

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It occurs to me that I’ve never actually told The Boy’s story, and therefore a story of my family, from the molecular level.

That story begins at the far end of the human genome, at the 23rd pair of chromosomes, where X, as always, marks the spot.

Fragile X — it’s the most common heritable form of mental retardation and the most common known cause of autism. If autism’s boat is being buffeted by the storms of controversy and debate, Fragile X has found safe harbor from the high winds. Because Fragile X is unerringly genetic, its diagnosis unambiguous amidst the bluster of potential causes for the majority of autism cases. Fragile X is a mutation on the X chromosome that delays development, impairs cognition, and can cause a range of health problems and, of course, autism.

In all the turbulence of the autism debate, where no one can agree, where no compass reliably points north, still it is accepted that Fragile X is the cause of some five percent of autism cases. And consequently no one talks about it. Fragile X is practically lost in that cove away from the storm. Because while the cause of the Fragile X mutation is not clear, its effects are well-documented. How uninteresting. So, ironically, being understood makes it unknown.

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I think this thing, this whole Fragile X/autism/society/vaccines/conspiracy thing, is now getting out of control. Maybe the debate has long since escalated to outright conflict, but I fear there will come a time when someone will shoot someone on the other ideological side, and then this debate — about vaccines, about autism, about what causes this thing that affects so many people — will start to seem a lot like other conflicts. It may be too late, it may be that people are already too polarized to see anything but their own fears, to regard the other side with anything but hate and disgust, though I hope not. And I hope I’m not alone in hoping that there can be a resolution of goals before the polarization is complete and reconciliation becomes, like Democrat and Republican, like evolutionist and creationist, like that other debate about parents and offspring, impossible. People seem happy to take sides — maybe tribalism is so deeply encoded that we need only a single stimulus to begin building fences and cutting spears from the small trees that grow between Us and Them.

I think there are a lot of people speaking in reasonable voices about unreasonable things. And vice versa. I think I’ve finally reached a point where I can ask, as someone with a brother like The Boy, as someone as affected by autism as as any other player in this debate, that people start acting and thinking like 21st-century human beings. By all means let us debate these things. Let us explore the potential causes of autism, be they genetic, environmental, both, or neither. But cease the unwarranted indignation. Cease the anger that blinds, cease the threats and name-calling. Cease, ye bastards!

Consider this my appeal to reasonableness and dialogue, a warning against polarization.

Meanwhile, this week I’ll be rolling out a series on the world of neurodiversity, the voices of the autistic who object to autism being labeled a disease. I’ll begin tomorrow with a look at Fragile X and its connection to autism — and the treatments that might be applied to both. Also there will be a little something on evolution and the turbulent seas of our own genes a little later in the week.

Clutch ye hot chocolate and gather round. Gather, ye bastards!

Nov 8th, 2009 2:30pm

The Garden of Eden is getting pretty crowded. With creationism on the rise in Islamic countries, evolution better quick produce its own ancient texts to get people believing in science’s story of the rise of life on Earth.

And science better get a good editor, too. Because look at how the big difference between Christian creationism and Islamic creationism reveals the power of word choice. Many Christians believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old, taking the timeline of the Bible literally. Islamic creationists, meanwhile, are willing to believe the Earth is much older, a hugely significant ideological difference. And all thanks to a few choice words —

[T]he Koran, the holy text of Islam, says the universe was created in six days, the next line adds that a day, in this instance, is metaphorical: “a thousand years of your reckoning.”

See the power of the metaphor? See the power of the ancient well-placed clause, the teleological caveat? See how much easier things would have been had the founders of Western religion just written in a more open-ended style?

The concept of evolution is still in danger, though, since nobody thought to include it in early religious texts and now creationism is catching on in yet another big Western outfit.

So how to write a religion that allows for interpretation? For a broader view of the universe? If it were me, I’d do a little hemming and hawing, something like: “And so it was that the universe was created in a [coughcoughgargle] days by a great [snrffcoughflagl]. And it was good (enough).”

But I’m taking suggestions. Give me your “In the beginning”s. Allow for the wisdom of the past, but leave room for the knowledge of the future.

I kind of like tests. Especially ones that ask weird questions. Like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a standard personality test for the sane and slightly-less-so. Amongst its True/False gems are statements such as these:

I have diarrhea once a month or more.

My hands and feet are usually warm enough.

I would like to be a singer.

Evil spirits possess me at times.

At times I feel like swearing.

My soul sometimes leaves my body.

I am a good mixer.

I have not lived the right kind of life.

I am an important person.

Get yourself a guitar, a couple more of these and you’ve got yourself a career as a folk singer. (True to Statement 3!)

Me, I tend to lie on these kinds of tests; chalk it up to a deep-seeded paranoia about the men in dark rooms reading my results and assigning me my fate in a South African diamond mine. But I tried to be as honest as possible when taking the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, a test designed by Simon Baron-Cohen and others at the Cambridge Autism Research Centre to determine degree of autism in adults. I guess part of me sort of assumes that since Baron-Cohen is Sasha’s cousin, any minute now a gay Austrian fashionista or Eastern-bloc journalist will kick down the door and do something strange and kind of funny with his genitalia. Why this assuages my paranoia I have no idea; perhaps there’s a test for it. Perhaps it makes me feel like an important person.

Anyway I took the AQ and scored a 15. Which means I’m probably not autistic. Why don’t you take the test and let me know how you did — I’d love to find out what my autistic readership is.

Hell, I’d love to find out if I have a readership, or if it’s all the evil spirits swearing at me.

Nov. 2nd, 2009 7:47pm

The giddiness and abandon of the mask-wearing holidays — Halloween, Mardi Gras, Carnival, etc. — has everything to do with the changing of identities. A man dons a mask and behaves as he normally would not, because after all it’s not really him that had a dalliance in that alley, or rode a large dog down the street, or started a minor revolution. It was his other, the self let loose when his face, his identity, was concealed.

The night becomes that much weirder still when everyone is wearing a mask, and he staggers through the crowd without recognizing a single face. What a strange parade that would be.

Many autistic people move through this strange festival atmosphere every day of their lives, because many autistic people have face-blindness. Prosopagnosia is a curious condition on its own, but when combined with the other communication difficulties experienced by the autistic person (speech problems, social anxiety and so on), can further isolate them from the world.

The confusion of the mask is easy to understand; face-blindness, less so. Simply put, it’s the brain’s inability to recognize the particular orientation of eyes, nose, cheeks and mouth that makes up a unique human face. The autistic person sees the face, but can’t get the brain to assign those qualities to a known person. The best way I’ve seen it described is with stones.

Part of the joy of abandoning the identity during the festival season is that it will be regained in the light of day. How much stranger would it be to wander the streets of the carnival among its endless madmen and not know the way out?

Oct 31th, 2009 7:07pm

This was a good week for your friend me. I had five good ideas. One was for a bar, one was for a movie, two were for stories and one was for a TV show. I still consider this kind of thing important. Sadly I cannot share the nature of these ideas with you, patent pending and all that, but I will say that the bar would be very cool here in Petri Town and involves conveyor belts.

As for the TV show, it’s a way to make science interesting to the pop-culture-starved masses. Which rather makes me think of Symphony of Science, which has done just some excellent work in that same area.

To wit:

And furthermore:

Guys like Carl Sagan had like nine good ideas a day, so you can imagine why they’re inspirational to your friend me.

Oct 29th, 2009 7:07pm