Side Note to our Polygyny Debate:

The Economist has an article this week about the inter-relation between lifespan and monogamy. Apparently there is new scientific research to suggest that male members of monogamous species outlive their male counterparts from polygynous species. Adds an interesting dimension to our earlier debate about the causes behind human societies' universal condemnation of polygamy! Here are excerpts:

In the cause of equal rights, feminists have had much to complain about. But one striking piece of inequality has been conveniently overlooked: lifespan. In this area, women have the upper hand. All round the world, they live longer than men. Why they should do so is not immediately obvious. But the same is true in many other species. From lions to antelope and from sea lions to deer, males, for some reason, simply can't go the distance.

One theory is that males must compete for female attention. That means evolution is busy selecting for antlers, aggression and alloy wheels in males, at the expense of longevity. Females are not subject to such pressures. If this theory is correct, the effect will be especially noticeable in those species where males compete for the attention of lots of females. Conversely, it will be reduced or absent where they do not.

To test that idea, Tim Clutton-Brock of Cambridge University and Kavita Isvaran of the Indian Institute of Science in Bengalooru decided to compare monogamous and polygynous species (in the latter, a male monopolises a number of females).

In 16 of the 19 polygynous species in their sample, males of all ages were much more likely to die during any given period than were females. Furthermore, the older they got, the bigger the mortality gap became. In other words, they aged faster. Males from monogamous species did not show these patterns.

Most students of ageing agree that an animal's maximum lifespan is set by how long it can reasonably expect to escape predation, disease, accident and damaging aggression by others of its kind. If it will be killed quickly anyway, there is not much reason for evolution to divert scarce resources into keeping the machine in tip-top condition. Those resources should, instead, be devoted to reproduction. And the more threatening the outside world is, the shorter the maximum lifespan should be.

There is no reason why that logic should not work between the sexes as well as between species. And this is what Dr Clutton-Brock and Dr Isvaran seem to have found. The test is to identify a species that has made its environment so safe that most of its members die of old age, and see if the difference continues to exist. Fortunately, there is such a species: man.

Dr Clutton-Brock reckons that the sex difference in both human rates of ageing and in the usual age of death is an indicator that polygyny was the rule in humanity's evolutionary past—as it still is, in some places. That may not please some feminists, but it could be the price women have paid for outliving their menfolk.

--excerpted from "Live fast, love hard, die young," The Economist, Oct 18th 2007 ed.

More J. RBG Bits from 10/19/07

-On whether the government should regulate speech: The best way to fight hate speech is with good speech -- not with repressing freedom of expression.

-On squabbles between the Court and Congress: We shouldn't worry about them too much -- they are ultimately healthy, and they are as old as the Republic! The venerable case of Marbury v. Madison is a perfect example: it was argued in 1801 but wasn't decided until 1803. Why? Because Congress was angry at the Court and would not appropriate enough money to allow the Court to sit in the year 1802. The two branches have been at loggerheads since the very beginning.

-On Minnesota v. White, a case invalidating limits on the content of speech by judicial candidates in a contested election, which drew a strong Ginsburg dissent: RBG called this a "Gertrude Stein" case. G. Stein famously said, "A rose is a rose is a rose." RBG thinks the majority in White believed an election is an election is an election, and that's just not the case. Judicial elections are a special animal and the state legislature has a right to treat them that way. The Justice noted, however, that although she thinks White is "quite wrong," it is also quite narrow if read properly. In short, she said, "It is a wrong decision but it can be contained."

Lily's overall impressions of Justice Ginsburg (or her public persona, anyway): She has a reputation for being austere and/or severe, but I think that is just an overblown reaction to her natural reserve. She was serene, unhurried, and seemed unflappable. She was above all dignified. When someone asked her a question, she generally let the silence stretch for several seconds before answering; but then she would come out with an articulate, well-organized, and complex response. It was this practice, as much as anything, that I found personally educational -- so often I find myself replying immediately to a question with a torrent of disorganized thoughts! I would like to be less eager to please in my responses, and better organized. For this concept alone, the conference was worth attending.

“Bush v. Gore Was In A Class Of One” – An Evening with Justice Ginsburg

This evening I had the opportunity to attend a dinner reception featuring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. During the course of a conversation moderated by Professor Suzanne Reynolds from Wake Forest Law School -- which included time for Q&A with the audience -- the Justice spoke with remarkable frankness about her life at the Court. Here are some of her most interesting points:

-- On the shrinking docket of the Supreme Court (i.e. the Court is consenting to hear fewer and fewer cases each year): This is a good development. Having extra time to hone the opinions gives the Justices more time to achieve consensus on the cases they do hear. We can notice that the Court is not issuing the same number of confusingly split opinions that they once were, because they are taking more time to craft compromise language that enables everyone to get on board. The end result is less dissenting and concurring, and fewer instances where justices will write things like, I agree with Parts 1, 5, and 6 of the majority opinion but write separately to dissent as to part 2 and concur as to part 4.

-- On the Supreme Court’s cert pool (i.e. why they choose to hear the cases they do): The Supreme Court has made a decision that it is not an error correction court. There are plenty of lower courts doing a fine job taking care of the everyday administration of justice in this country, and we do not need yet another layer of correction. Instead, the Court has chosen to prioritize conflict resolution. The justices think it is important to have the law be uniform across the country. So they are looking to grant certiorari on cases where the federal circuit courts have split with each other or split with the state courts.

-- On Bush v. Gore and the politicizing of the Court: Bush v. Gore was completely unique – in a class of one, as she put it. It was an exercise in endurance because of its short time frame – cert was granted one day, briefs were due the next day, the following day was oral arguments, and the decision came out the day after that. It is a telling fact that, in the years since BvG, the Court has never once cited it. It is essentially limited to that particular situation and those particular facts. She thinks the Justices will not allow politics to be the basis of their decisions under normal circumstances. BvG was a special case. (Is this a tacit admission that it WAS a politically motivated decision? Lily couldn’t tell!)

-- On Hillary Clinton being the first woman to mount a serious campaign for President: "Brava!"

-- On Justice Scalia: He is one of her closest friends on the Court. The Ginsburg and Scalia families have a tradition of spending New Years together. The two Justices share a love of opera. She described J. Scalia as a “wonderful raconteur of stories and a great teller of jokes.”

--When asked what is the single biggest threat to the Rule of Law in our country, Justice Ginsburg replied immediately that it is fear -- fear engendered by terrorism and the tragedies of 9/11. She said that if we allow this fear to condone unwarranted intrusions on civil liberties and (as she put it) "encourage the government to spy on us," we will fundamentally change who we are as Americans and our enemies will have completely triumphed.

I am scheduled to attend a CLE featuring Justice RBG tomorrow, along with many female judges and justices from across the country. I’ll attempt to follow up here on OR with more details about what they have to say! Stay tuned!

Lunch on the rocks

Disinterestedness, of the good sort

Stanley Fish writes for today's Times. The column rightly, to my thinking, notes that the head-administrator at an academic institution ought to restrain from taking political-like stances:

The obligation of a senior administrator is to conduct himself or herself in such a way as always to bring honor and credit to the institution he or she serves. Just what this general imperative requires will vary with the particular situations an administrator encounters, but at the very least we could say that an administrator who brings attention of an unwelcome kind to a university is probably not focusing on the job. He or she may be doing some other job – speaking truth to power, standing up for free speech, protesting against various forms of injustice – and those jobs may be well worth doing, but they belong to someone else.

I agree; though I got the hunch that Mr. Fish sounds more controversial than the point of his lines.

After reading the piece, isn't he arguing for disinterestedness? Such behavior, or lack thereof I reckon, is the hallmark of the academic pursuit; and seems to be the point of an academic administrator's job--as Fish would say.

Any event- the disinterestedness to which we aspire to is that condition wherein we can think of a subject, listen to and understand the inputs of information (arguments from different perspectives), and make sound conclusions unaffected by prior-held convictions. That disinterestedness (free from the interest of bias) is the academic standard from which Columbia's president fell recently (in remarks preceding Ahmadinejad's talk.