Erratum

The recently reported research on big versus small asses was a little, um, half-assed.

In the "Correspondence" section of the January 7, 1999 issue of Nature, there is a letter regarding the above-alluded-to article, which was summarized with my usual degree of reverence in a recent Journal Club. That article, you will remember, told us all that a "primitive" Peruvian people with a degree of isolation from the Western media "about as high as can be obtained today" would have picked Kate Winslet over Kate Moss in a walk, and then tried to make excuses for the fact that these poor Western-media-deprived folk were choosing the mate with the greater chance of acquiring chronic disease. Great story, guys, except that the admirable Thomas Getty of the Kellogg Biological Station in Michigan contributes the following insight, which he came upon while trying to prepare materials to lecture on this very article:

"At a [World Wide Web] site maintained by E. Russo, who collaborates with Shepard [one of the two authors of the original article], there is a photo of a Matsigenka couple, Mateo and Aleja. Mateo is holding an ocelot. Aleja is wearing a Bart Simpson T-shirt."

Well, I do declare. As Getty notes (in a burst of humor uncharacteristic of a scientist), "The Matsigenka's isolation may be 'about as high as can be obtained today,' but they are not isolated enough to escape Bart Simpson.'" And, franky, I don't want to think of some simple village tribe going through life without Bart Simpson, or Homer, or Apu, or especially Willie the janitor. Everyone has some curiosity about the world outside them, and what better show to satisfy it than "The Simpsons," renowned for its realism and sensitivity in depicting ethnic stereotypes? Still, this does make a bit hard to explain why the Matsigenka like a more round woman than the rest of the Western-media-saturated world. Perhaps they also have Sir Mix-A-Lot CDs.

Or perhaps they read another recent article in Nature and are just avoiding anything that looks like an old infertile British aristocrette. It says here in the 24/31 December issue of that magazine that "Human longevity [comes] at the cost of reproductive success," in an article of that title (minus the brackets). "Reproductive success," of course, means how many babies you produce (if you are female), and the results of this joint Dutch-UK team show that the likelihood that you will live a long time goes up as your number of children goes down. Hey, it apparently works for fruit flies. The group being studied, though, is not fruit flies but the British aristocracy, over a period of (get this) 1200 years.

Now, I'm no scientist, as should really be apparent by now, but do you really think the British aristocracy is that much like the rest of the human race that this result should be put on the cover of the magazine? I've read those P.G. Wodehouse novels. Besides, almost everyone I've noted this to can name a counterexample, like my friend Reychel whose great-grandmother had 10 kids and lived to be 100. I have to say that, given the advanced state of inbreeding in the British aristocracy's gene pool at some points during this milennium, the women who avoided producing progeny may have been excercising some taste, or at the very least a basic survival instinct.

In other news, appealing to our society's (America's) seemingly latent survival instinct, some other authors have published in December 23/30th's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) a report confirming for us all that outlaws use their legal guns. It's old scuttlebutt that people who have been convicted of felonies are more likely to committ crimes involving firearms than people who haven't been thus convicted; this was the rationale behind the Brady Bill. Now, however, the result has been extended to the common misdemeanor, including loitering, public drunkenness and of course the ever-popular parking violation. This report contains the following sentence: "Misdemeanors are less serious crimes than felonies; they are punishable by incarceration, typically in a local facility and for one year or less." Thank you for clarifying that. I don't think JAMA readers from Mars were aware of that.

In any case, there is an accompanying breathless editorial by Sarah and Jim Brady basically saying "Look how many people's guns we can take away with the moral imperative NOW!" Well, I urge America to take a hard look at the implied proposed policy. It may sound reasonable, but remember: If all outlaws are forbidden to have guns, then the only guns outlaws have will be illegal.

That doesn't make an incredible amount of sense. But please don't shoot the messenger.

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