Ed Hagen

@edhagen

Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University. Faculty page: Views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or other organizations I'm affiliated with.

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¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y edhagen.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

Ed Hagen@edhagen· 22d

My neck of the woods a few years back:

Folks playing golf with a huge forest fire in the background

Ed Hagen@edhagen· 23d

The Apple password manager syncs to your devices, and the good commercial ones do, too (so you always have local copies). Also, password managers can create and use passkeys, which are more secure than passwords:

Passkeys are a safe, easy replacement for passwords that let you log into apps and websites using your fingerprint, face scan, or screen lock.How Passkeys WorkTwo keys: Your device makes a pair of cryptographic keys. One key stays private on your phone or computer. The other public key goes to the website.Device lock: You prove it is you by unlocking your phone with your face, finger, or a PIN.No shared secrets: The website never sees or saves your private key, so hackers cannot steal it from a server.Why They Are BetterNo phishing: Passkeys only work on the real website they were made for, meaning fake login pages cannot trick you.Fast and simple: You do not have to create, remember, or type hard passwords.Safe from data leaks: Even if a company gets hacked, your login info is safe because they only store a public key.

Ed Hagen@edhagen· 24d

Paywalls are a scourge. Here's the whole article:

Ed Hagen@edhagen· 24d

Eminent evolutionary biologist David Haig weighs in on the sex binary controversy 🧪 link.springer.com/article/10.1... His conclusion:

Research into sex and gender is currently under political attack in the United States but the politicization of such research preceded the most recent presidential election. Researchers interested in biological sex differences, especially differences of the mind, sometimes came under sustained attack from within the academy as purveyors of a politically-suspect biological determinism and their motives were impugned. Other researchers who were interested in questions of gender non-conformity but who did not accept that there should be “no debate” about certain modes of care came under even more sustained attack and their motives impugned. Speech codes were enforced to regulate the terms used to talk about the constellation of sex and gender differences. As academics, we should defend our colleagues whose research has come under attack but we should also put our own house in order and accept that hypotheses with which we strongly disagree can be investigated in good faith.

Ed Hagen@edhagen· 26d

That's my plot, and I didn't control for age. Both T and grip have small declines with age, but there is also probably some T supplementation in older ages. Also, age was restricted to 18-60, where everything is pretty flat. Here's the linear model of grip strength by T:

Ed Hagen@edhagen· 29d

The relationship between testosterone and grip strength, an index of physical formidability, in a representative sample of US adult men (point sizes are survey weights). 🧪

A scatterplot of combined grip strength (y-axis) vs. serum testosterone (x-axis) in 3498 US adult men (18-60) from NHANES 2011 - 2014. A polynomial smooth regression line is completely flat. Combined grip strength is the sum of grip strength in both hands. Point sizes are survey weights.

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jul 17

Just a reminder that even if most faculty in Academia are left-wing, the training and research that most of them provide supports a center-right constituency: business & industry. 🧪 #AcademicSky Data from all PhD-granting US universities from 2011-2020: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Table showing the number and percentages of faculty members in Applied Sciences (10.4%), Education (4.7%), Engineering (10%), Humanities (17.2%), Math and Computing (8.8%), Medicine and Health (18.6%), Natural Sciences (24%), and Social Sciences (12.9%).

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jul 7

Just a reminder that, in an era when trust in many US institutions is low, trust in science and higher ed is pretty darn high 🧪 news.gallup.com/poll/692633/...

Ranking of confidence in 18 US institutions with science at #3 and higher Ed at #5

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jul 7

Higher Ed is near the top, actually, and confidence has increasing a bit since 2024 (+5-6% pts): news.gallup.com/poll/692633/...

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jul 5

Looks like a hyphen (-) to me, but could be an en dash (–), or possibly a small em dash (﹘), I guess. For reference: The em dash (—), vertical em dash (︱), small em dash (﹘), two-em dash (⸺), three-em dash (⸻)

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jul 2

11. Main findings: As ALB increases, fertility goes up but w/ more mouths to feed, energy balance goes down, even w/ kids' production. Food transfers from older to younger parents are necessary to maintain energy balance. Yet w/ late ALB older parents don't have surplus to share

Plot with two panels. Top panel: Family size across the wife's lifespan, for varying ALB's. Family size increases as the wife grows older and has children every 3-4 years, with maximum family sizes being larger for longer with later ALB's.

Bottom panel: Cumulative energy balance across the wife's lifespan. With later ALB's, total fertility goes up but cumulative energy balance goes down, becoming negative after around age 40

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jul 2

10. In the 2nd model I simulated hunter-gatherer nuclear family energy consumption and production from the mother's age at first birth (20) to the end of life (80), varying the age of last birth (ALB, menopause) from 30 to 60 years.

Plot showing simulated energy conxumption, production, and balance (production minus consumption) across the mother's lifespan for different ages of last birth. Energy balance is increasingly negative as ALBs increase

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jul 2

9. In the 1st model I computed if, given the total energy consumption & production across the population, production equalled or exceeded consumption with, & without, juvenile production. Main finding: juvenile production was essential to maintain energy balance, but food transfers still necessary:

Plot showing that population energy balance is substantially lower, and often below zero, without juvenile food production

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jul 2

8. To test this theory I simulated two models of ancestral foraging across the lifespan, taking into account age- & sex-specific mortality, energy consumption, and energy production, the latter w/ various rates of foraging skill acquisition & max productivity levels based on contemporary foragers 👇

Avergage male and female daily energy production in 10 hunter-gatherer societies

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jul 2

7. But, recent studies find that hunter-gatherer children can often produce enough food to support themselves. Maybe food from grandparents wasn't necessary!

Scatterplot showing foraging kcals/day for Hadza children

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jul 2

6. I investigate a lesser-known theory: According to the two-sex model, both parents stopped reproducing ~40 & worked together to support grandchildren because foraging skill was at a maximum & the risk of poor pregnancy outcomes after age 40 was high nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Learning, menopause, and the human adaptive complex. This paper presents a new two-sex learning- and skills-based theory for the evolution of human menopause. The theory proposes that the role of knowledge, skill acquisition, and transfers in determining economic productivity and resource distribution is the distinctive feature of the traditional human ecology that is responsible for the evolution of menopause. The theory also proposes that male reproductive cessation and post-reproductive investment in descendants is a fundamental characteristic of humans living in traditional foraging and simple horticultural economies. We present evidence relevant to the theory. The data show that whereas reproductive decline is linked to increasing risks of mortality in chimpanzees, human reproductive senescence precedes somatic senescence. Moreover under traditional conditions, most human males undergo reproductive cessation at the same time as their wives. We then present evidence that after ceasing to reproduce, both men and women provide net economic transfers to children and grandchildren. Given this pattern of economic productivity, delays in menopause would produce net economic deficits within families.

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jul 2

1. A long post-reproductive lifespan is exceedingly rare in wild animals, so why do humans have one, i.e., menopause? In my new paper, I find that menopause averted a midlife energetic crisis: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... 🧪 #BioAnth 🧵

A chart showing the long postreproductive lifespans of humans and toothed whales, and the very short ones of non-human primates

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 19

Median ages of women's 1st intercourse (a related but different Q) in 74 countries from the 1960s through the 1990s. The left-hand edge of the bars is the median age of 1st sexual intercourse. The orange line is the median age of heterosexual experience in Mead's data. 2/4 doi.org/10.1016/S221...

Plot of the women's ages of first sexual intercourse to ages of first union in 74 countries. Left hand panel: Asia, Latin America, North America, Europe. Right hand panel: Africa and West Asia.

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 19

Were Margaret Mead's data on the ages of girls' heterosexual experiences out of the ordinary, and therefore she must have been hoaxed? Here is a plot of her data. Pastor: girls living in a pastor's boarding school 🧪 #BioAnth, 🧵 1/4

A logistic regression model of self-reported heterosexual experience vs. time since puberty, with a term for living in the boarding school. Girls living in the boarding school have a lower probability of heterosexual, ranging from close to zero near the onset of. puberty, to around 50% five years later. Other girls have a probability of around 37% near the onset of puberty to close to 90% five years later.

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 17

I'm in camp Steve. Here is part of his 2019 statement on Jerry Coyne's website, where he doesn't deny knowing the letter was for Epstein, but the part on the lack of payment is *very* carefully (too carefully?) worded: whyevolutionistrue.com/2019/07/12/t...

In the interests of full disclosure, there was another connection. Alan Dershowitz and I are friends and colleagues, and we taught a course together at Harvard. He often asks me questions about syntax and semantics of laws, most recently the impeachment statute. While he was representing Epstein, he asked me about the natural interpretation of one of the relevant laws, and I offered my opinion; this was cited in a court document. I did it as a favor to a friend and colleague, not as a paid expert witness, but I now regret that I did so. And needless to say I find Epstein’s behavior reprehensible.

Since some of the social-media snark insinuates that I downplay sexual exploitation, it may be worth adding that I have a paper trail of abhorrence of violence against women, have celebrated efforts to stamp it out, and have tried to make my own small contribution to this effort.

My review of the history of rape and battering in The Better Angels of Our Nature begins:

“Rape is one of the prime atrocities in the human repertoire. It combines pain, degradation, terror, trauma, the seizure of a woman’s means of perpetuating life, and an intrusion into the makeup of her progeny. It is also one of the commonest of atrocities.”

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 16

Folks in hunter-gatherer and other small-scale societies typically don't keep track of numerical ages. Just something to think about. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Accurate age estimation in small-scale societies.
Significance
Understanding demographic and evolutionary processes shaping human life history diversity depends on precise age estimations. Inferring age is a challenge in small-scale societies, and especially in those societies that do not follow a calendar year. Our method opens possibilities in demographic and life history studies allowing cross-sectional data to be incorporated in cross-cultural comparisons and a better understanding of the adaptive importance of human life history variation.

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 15

Mead was in the field for 9 months, and she says she spent 6 months interviewing these girls. Searching through Mead's book, I couldn't find her claim that none of the girls got pregnant, but that doesn't seem unreasonable for that amount of time.

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 15

Here are Mead's data, which do indicate that 12 of the 25 girls claimed to have had heterosexual experiences:

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 15

Chris, thanks for the link. I tracked down O'Meara's claim to this article: anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...

Given the same data, reasonable people may calculate the probability of truth or falsity of an argument differently. Sometimes the subjective element is large. For example, when judging the veracity of the tales of sexual intrigue told to Mead by her young informants, different people hold widely different opinions on the probability that Mead could have been duped. Another test of the same question may have a very small subjective element. For example, there would be more unity ofopinion on the probability that 12 menstruating and thus presumably fertile girls could have engaged in sex for periods ranging from two months to four years without a single pregnancy occurring, as Mead claimed (1928).

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 15

And those for Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, which are 10x to 20x higher, so I guess Mead is winning 🙂

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 15

It seems interest waxes and wanes. Here are the yearly citations of Freeman's Hoaxing book from google scholar.

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 15

She also had a rough control group (p. 210):

The existence of the pastor’s boarding school for girls past puberty provided me with a rough control group. These girls were so severely watched that heterosexual activities were impossible; they were grouped together with other girls of the same age regardless of relationship; they lived a more ordered and regular life than the girls who remained in their households. The ways in which they differed from other girls of the same age and more resembled European girls of the same age follow with surprising accuracy the lines suggested by the specific differences in environment. However, as they lived part of the time at home, the environmental break was not complete and their value as a control group is strictly limited.

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 15

Mead interviewed 68 girls from middle childhood to late adolescence and early adulthood. I'm curious how it would be possible to determine that none of them were sexually active or got pregnant while Mead was in the field. p. 223 here: archive.org/details/in.e...

This study included sixty-eight girls between the ages of eight and nine and nineteen or twenty - all the girls between these ages in the three villages of Faleasao, Luma, and Siufaga, the three villages on the west coast of the island of Tau in the Manu’a Archipelago of the Samoan Islands.

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 15

Pretty respectable population growth in this timeframe: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demogra...

Ed Hagen@edhagen· Jun 14

Chris, according to Shankman, based on the complete transcripts of the informant's interview in the 1980's where the hoaxing claim was made, she was not one of Mead's sources on Samoan sexuality. But the point of my post is that little hangs on the hoaxing claim. www.francoposa.com/wp-content/u...