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Testosterone, fatherhood,

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Daniel Lende has done a nice interview with Northwestern University anthropologist Lee Gettler ("On Testosterone and Real Men: An Interview with Lee Gettler"). Gettler is a Ph.D. candidate in human biology and author of a recent paper that demonstrated a decline in testosterone levels in new fathers [1]. This paper got a lot of press attention and was a big topic of conversation at the recent AAA meetings. Lende takes the conversation deep into the science, and probes the relation of human biology to behavior.

All of human behavior is mitigated physiologically- i.e. through the actions of neuronal pathways and neurotransmitters- so there’s really no way of divorcing biology and behavior, which are in constant “flux” and “conversation” with one another. One challenge for anthropologists and other scholars studying these domains is trying in some coherent way to disentangle “the chicken” and “the egg” in the transactional relationship between biology and behavior.

I like the formulation, "All of human behavior is mitigated physiologically." See also my old post: "Allostasis in human evolution".


References

  1. Gettler LT, McDade TW, Feranil AB, and Kuzawa CW. 2011. Longitudinal evidence that fatherhood decreases testosterone in human males. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108:16194-9.

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