Mrs. Weer’d sends me this double entendre!
Researchers at Emory University used an MRI to measure the gonads of 70 lucky biological fathers, age 21 to 43, in the Atlanta area. (Yes, they got paid for this.)
The scientists also studied each dad’s brain pattern as he viewed photos of his child, a stranger’s child or an adult stranger.
They were looking for activity in a part of the brain believed to be “involved in the motivation to approach and nurture offspring,” said Emory anthropologist James Rilling, one of the study authors.
Meanwhile, the men’s partners answered questions about how involved they were in taking care of their infant children. Do they take them to doctor visits or put them to bed?
The researchers then crunched — sorry, bad choice of verbs — the data.
“Fathers’ testicular volume and testosterone levels were inversely related to parental investment,” the study says, “and testes volume was inversely correlated with nurturing-related brain activity when viewing pictures of their own child.”
When I learned of this study, I immediately feared what could happen if it gets taken out of context.
Dystopian future headline: “Deadbeat Dads Blame it on Large Family Jewels!”
Junk science involving junk. Small sample size (heh, another one for ya!), coupled with arbitrary qualitative measurements linked to quantitative measurements. I’m just not buying it at all.
I wonder who wrote the grant, and approved it for this crap!
As Instapundit stated, “heh.”
He also pointed out that Obama is supposed to be a VERY good father……..
Beyond the problems you noted, my biggest issue in reading this is that they’re measuring two separate factors – testicular size and testosterone levels – and appear to be coming to some sort of combined conclusion. Do the two even correlate? How? What combinations correlate to this ambiguous “low parental investment”? There are so many variables and uncertainties here that massaging the numbers to support one particular pet theory would probably be pretty easy.
Also, “They were looking for activity in a part of the brain believed to be “involved in the motivation to approach and nurture offspring,”” tells me that they’re just guessing about the link between the three (four?) factors they’re measuring. They’re inferring a correlation from a correlation they’re not actually sure of in the first place.
A proper experiment tests one thing at a time!