The Evolution of Buttfaces Explained

While I was very very pregnant about two years ago, I posted something on this blog and then took it down the same day.

It was a labor of love and admiration for BAHfest. I didn't believe it was worthy of submission to the judges, but I thought it was worth sharing here.

But then, even given all the silliness I've posted here over seven years of mermaid-hood, seeing my b.a.h. in print was too much for me to bear and bare. Hence the embarrassment and why I took it down.

Butt now, I have good reason to post it again and for good!

It's all thanks to this news about a recent primatological study:

"Chimpanzees recognize rear ends like people recognize faces"

Here's the rub:

Because rear ends serve a big purpose in the chimp world. Female chimps’ buttocks grow redder and swollen when they are ovulating, signaling to males that it’s business time. And it’s important to know whose bottom it is, in part to prevent inbreeding. The buttocks have, in scientific parlance, a “high socio-sexual signaling function.” 

But when we began walking upright, our bottoms became fleshier and no longer broadcast our ovulation status, possibly to discourage casual hookups in favor of pairing up and sticking together for the children’s sake. On the other hand, humans — “especially females,” the researchers write — developed ruddier and thicker lips, as well as fattier faces.

So not only are chimpanzees better at recognizing butts and worse at recognizing faces than we are, which is interesting in its own right. But this suggests that our faces function like our ancestors' butts! 

Bummer? Yes and no.  On the one hand, this makes my "bad ad hoc hypothesis," re-posted below, worthy of sharing without any more embarrassment. Butt on the other hand, it means it's no longer bad enough to make BAHfest. So, instead of working on this one some more, I need to come up with an entirely new one from scratch if I'm going to have a shot at ever participating.

Butt before I go back to the drawing board (with my hot glue gun, see below), here's that old post. Like that recent news story, it's about butts driving the evolution of primate faces. In this case we're focusing on rainbow-colored monkey butts, but the theories may be liberally applied to this idea that human faces are functionally ancestral hominin butts. OK! Enjoy?

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 “No other member in the whole class of mammals is coloured in so extraordinary a manner as the adult male mandrill.”  ~  Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1874

Darwin was famously astonished by the extraordinary coloration of the mandrill monkey, Mandrillus sphinx. Because males are more striking than females, evolutionary explanations have focused on the adult male. And, as the thinking goes, it's the adult male face that's been the primary focus of selection, with duller female faces and the colorful rumps of both sexes being secondary, in evolutionary terms. 

One explanation for the colorful male mandrill face is sexual selection. Males with healthy, robust physiologies capable of building and maintaining that rainbow visage are the sexiest. And because coloration isn't as pronounced in females, that's an indication that it's less crucial for their reproductive success. But their ability to choose male mates based on good looks is, and the particular genetic mechanism which beautifies the male carries some of that beauty along in females. So that sufficiently, albeit vaguely, explains the mandrill face.

But for many of us an even more urgent question is, Why did the mandrill rump evolve to resemble the face? 

And there are a few possible answers.

There's the more-is-better explanation: those with colorful faces are seen, socially and sexually, as all right, but those with colorful faces and butts are all that. They're the real peacocks of the troop. 

There's also a potential social benefit to being visible and, better yet, identifiable, both coming and going in the dark dense forests where mandrills live. 

Then there's a strength-in-numbers sort of idea, where other groups or predators, even, will see twice as many of you. 

Alternatively, the development of rump color could be genetically linked to face color, so it could simply be an accidental byproduct of selection on the face. 

But what if we flip our view around and assume that the monkeys' rainbow hinies are the primary focus of selection? After all, we find colorful bums and privates across the primates, and in both males and females, and in species without much to match on the face. (Yet.)  This alternative perspective could free us to arrive at the real explanation for mandrill coloration. 

And this means we should ask, Why did the mandrill face evolve to resemble the rump?

Dear Reader, I'm sure you can think up all sorts of advantages to having a face that looks like a butt. 

For instance, by appearing to groom your ass, rather than eat food, you might not attract competitors to your precious food source.

And there's always the Handicap Principle:  He’s got a face like a butt, but he’s still got it going on. And if males are choosy (it's possible!) it could go the other way too.  

It's possible that having basically two rear-ends causes confusion, on the part of the male, during copulation, that can accidentally lead to some innovative, pleasurable positions that strengthen social bonds.

Relatedly, having a face like a bum could be a nice way for females to test male intelligence and choose procreative partners accordingly: If he can't distinguish which end is the business end, then no way am I making this transaction. 

There's great possibility that this coloration is a sort of menage-a-trompe-de-l'oeil. Females are more attractive if they're not one but two! And to any onlookers, this threesome is quite impressive. 

It could be as simple as mandrills getting along better with mandrills with faces that look like butts because that's just, pure and simple, the very best part of a mandrill, to a mandrill. This applies beyond the sexual and into the general social realm.

One, some, or all of the above hypotheses, and many others that I'm sure you've already thought of, could easily explain mandrill face coloration. But I now offer what I think is the best rump-first-then-face explanation of them all. 

When it comes to infants, selection pressures are on hyper-drive, so our adaptive hypotheses about babies are essentially iron-clad. Nature’s got to get infancy right for evolution to continue and nature’s got a genius way to get it right in mandrills and it’s why mandrills are colored the way they are.  

Mandrill face coloration is an adaptation to infant perception.

As mandrill neonates slowly emerge from their mothers’ bodies during parturition, they are gobsmacked by the electric coloration of her rump.

Photo of mandrill birth was unavailable.

Sure, female mandrill rump coloration is not as striking as males', but imagine if it's the first real color you ever saw... ever. So, from a neonate's perspective, this welcome to the world is probably as striking as the healthiest mandrill males' tookus is to other mandrill adults, and to us.

Look closely and you'll see the same color pattern of the male rump is there, just muted.
(captured from Arkive film)

Think about how much we as primates love colors. If you saw that booty upon your earthly arrival, you'd be enchanted. You'd want to keep looking at it, wouldn't you? 

And if it weren’t for the mother’s colorful face proximal to her teats, mandrill infants would be dangerously inclined to literally hang around at the gorgeous yet abysmal end of their only source of food and social development. Food and social boding are, of course, requirements for primate life. 

The colorful bum, alone, is just too distracting. So, mothers with colorful faces to match their butts have more success nursing their infants, and thus have more surviving offspring, that go on to have surviving offspring, than others. They can even get away with those plain whitish nipples because their faces are so enticing.

(source for pic on left)

So that explains mandrill female faces but what about the male rumps and faces? Especially since they’re even more colorful?

This crucial and intense early experience, which selects for colorful mother’s faces, affects mandrill phenotypic preference throughout their lives. 

All social and sexual realms are better with color because of the experiences of these individuals born  to colorful bums and raised by moms with colorful faces.  Colorful males are adaptive in this situation because youngsters fall in love with how they look too, ingratiating themselves with what could be a killing machine, softening his heart and preventing him from ending lineages of mothers with colorful faces who birth babies through their colorful places. 

And this could explain, in turn, why male faces look so much like male genitalia but also why male faces look so much like female genitalia, especially at their peak attractiveness.  (See photo of fertile female's rump, above.) Males with these features are attractive to other males, which promotes group cohesion and reduces tension and competition. Likewise males with these features are attractive to females because it makes them more like their mothers and sisters, that is, not just beautiful but less threatening. 

So that first splash of color that neonatal mandrills experienced is such a technicolor Oz, that they grow up preferring not just color but the most electric adults out there… Runaway selection at its finest! 

To test whether the rump or the face is the driving phenotype…

Dye the butt fur of all the mandrills to match the rest of their olive-colored bodies. All future mandrill babies will be born to a mother's dull rump. And then if selection is relaxed on the face coloration, as predicted by the rump-first approach, mutations should take over and remove the color from the face. Then next, stop dying the butt fur of the mandrills and selection should bring back the colorful face again. Unfortunately this will only answer the question as to which end, the face or the bum, is driving the appearance of the other. 

To test the Perinatal Imprinting hypothesis….

Dye the butt fur of pregnant drills (the rainbow-free cousins of mandrills) to match female mandrills' and see if (a) drill neonates spend too much time hanging around mom’s distractingly colorful butt and, thus, not enough time nursing and bonding with mother’s eyes and face, (b) mother drill's faces evolve coloration in future generations and, also, coloration evolves in drill males too. Easy.

Drill. Mandrillus leucophaeus (source)

But remember, one of the most compelling aspects of the Perinatal Imprinting hypothesis is that it cannot be proven wrong, even if other explanations are better supported. 

Concluding Remarks

Not only is adaptive coloration of the mandrill face secondary to the primary adaptive value of the coloration of the butt, but the adaptive coloration of the males is actually secondary to the primary adaptive value of the coloration in the females!  

Colorful female rumps, and the infants who love them, are responsible for the extraordinary coloration of mandrills, not competitions for sexiest male. Everyone, especially Darwin, was thinking about this all wrong!

 ***

P.S.

I recently donated to Arkive because I heavily rely on it for teaching, writing, and learning. I hope that if you use it like I do, that you'll do the same so that it continues to thrive as a resource. 

My infantile hypothesis  follows in the tradition of the wonderfully infantile ones to be born at Bahfest exemplified by this one from organizer Zach Weinersmith and also last year's winning hypothesis from Tomer Ullman. (2016 note: Dates are off because this note was written in 2014)

Hint Filmi: Jodhaa Akbar

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   3,5 saatime el koydu ama neydi öyle anam babam! Akşam başlayıp gecenin bağrına kadar sürünce haftalar geçti, mevsimler değişti sandım.

 Önce filmin videosuna rastladım youtubda, izlerken kendimden geçiverince dedim tez komple izlemeli. 

 Hrithik Roshan ile Aishwarya hatunu Guzaarish filminde beğenmemiş, yarım bırakmıştım (Belki dönerim bir ara, hâlâ ordaysalar).

  Yok yok türünde bir film bu. Tarih, aşk, görsellik, kalite... Gerçek hayattan bir hikaye. Çeşitli rivâyetler var imiş ama sonuçta gerçek. 

  16. yüzyılda geçen büyüleyici bir masal. Babür Şahı Celaleddin Muhammed Akbar ve Hindu Rajput prensesi Jodhaa, iki krallığın ittifakı içün anlaşmalı evleniyorlar. 

  Kız adına biraz zorla oluyor. Zira kız hindu, adam müslüman. Jodhaa iki şart öne sürüyor.

  İmparator Akbar için politik başarının çok da değeri yok. Onun için refah bir imparatorluğun tanımı, barış, huzur ve hoşgörü içinde yaşayan halklar. 

 Bu yüzden şartları kabul ediyor ve evleniyorlar. 

   Bir anlamda Akbar için hem aşkta hem de siyasette zorlu bir sınav başlıyor.

  İkilinin kılıçla vuruşma sahnesi beni benden aldı. Halkların Akbar'a tabi olduğunu gösteren danslı sahne ise muazzam. 

  Hrithik de, Aishwarya da filme çok yakışmış. Kostümler, tablo gibi sahneler, derinnn romantizm... 

Muhteşem misin tatlım yağğ! 

❤

Winter Wreaths

Yesterday I went in search of pine cones for my winter wreath making. If there's one place I know that's good for cones around here it's the Scots pines that stand sentinel on the tip of St. Anthony's Head.

It was a most glorious afternoon; blue sky and still air.

I found enough cones and also plenty of lichen-covered twigs that had been cut from the pathways (I never use living wood), the other essential component of my wreaths.

So much lichen growth is a good indicator of how unpolluted  the air is here, and also how moist!

Unfortunately most of the cones were pretty tightly closed, so I shall have to wait until they open up and shed their seeds before I can wire them onto my wreaths.

I use a thick, sturdy galvanised wire to make the initial ring, and then with a more supple wire take each smallish section of twig and gently secure it in place by winding the wire around the twig and the ring.

In this one I'm just starting to add some pine cones, and I've already twisted in some gold coloured beads on wires.

 Some everlasting flowers also make a nice edition.

Two wreaths completed, in which I have added a couple of chandelier drops to hang down in the centre. Making a wreath with natural but dried materials like this means that they can be used year after year!

Miami

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  Saffeeet Himmeeet Gayreeet! Bahın hele bacınız Miami'ye gitmiş!

  14 saatlik bir araba yolculuğu. Allah'tan yollar dümdüz ve doğa harikası da ona bak, buna bak derken geçiverdi zaman. 

  Canobibiş de bizleydi. Kedi ile seyahat ayrı bir yazı konusu ama ben böyle sabırlı ve sorunsuz bir hayvan görmedim. Yol boyu kucağımda uyudu. Arada dolaştı, ayaklarını açtı, geldi yine uyudu. Gerçi dönüşte son bir saat sesi durmadı ama çok görmüyorum, biz de çok yorulduk. (Kahve içmekten, sakız çiğnemekten heder olduk) 

    Yol boyu pek çok kumsal var. Bunlardan biri de Cocoa Beach.

   Miami palmiye cenneti. Havası hâlâ sıcak. Benim yaşadığım eyalete göre yüksek binaları daha çok, özellikle sahil tarafında.  Bunun dışında sanki Amerika değil. Kulağıma bir kez İngilizce kelime çarpmadı. Meksikalılar basmış. Trafikte korna da var.    Evler pek Amerikan tarzı değil, Türkiye'deki evler gibi. Müstakil evlerin pencerelerinde parmaklıklar var. Bizim burda görmediğimiz sahneler. 

   (Ayy yerleşmiş de kıyaslama yapıyör)

   Sahili muhteşem, beyaz kumlar, turkuaz rengi tertemiz deniz. (Bilgisayarlardaki arka plan resimleri var ya, hah oralar buralar işte) 

   Türkiye'deyken görüştüğümüz, Bollywood konuşup kahve içtiğimiz arkadaşımla da buluştuk Miami'de. Çok özleşmişiz, uyku dışında aralıksız muhabbet ettik galiba. Dünya küçücük ve Allah çok büyük azizim.

    Velhasıl anacım yorucu ama bir o kadden de fevkalâdenin fevkinde bir gezi oldu.

Amerika, seviyorum seni kız ❤ 

Daha çok macerağğ içün Instagram'da 

@eminebektasi 

İç Ses - 28 (Yara)

Yaralanmak anı bir an olduğu için pek anlaşılmaz. Yani insan öyle çok fark etmez yaralandığını o an, yaralanma yara olarak gözükür olduğunda fark edilmiş olur. Düşeceğini bilmeden pat diye düşersin mesela. Düştüğün için dizin yaralanır. Yaralandıktan sonra yaralanma anını fark etmiş olursun.

                                                                       ******

Küçükken çok sık düşmezdim ben. Sıkıcı ve sakin bir çocuktum. Bacaklarım yara bere içinde olmazdı yani. Ama çocuktum ben de tabi üç beş düştüm koştururken. Yaranın kabuk bağlamasını bekleyip sonra da hevesle o kabukları soydum ben de. Annem kızardı soyma o kendi iyileşir diye. Ben dinlemez koparırdım kabuğu,hem kendi acı eşiğimi ölçerdim hem de yani ne gerek vardı ki madem soyabiliyoruz o zaman soyalım mantığındaydım. Tabi çocukluk bitip, kendimi, çocukluğumu, etrafımdakileri ve hayatı anlamak için bitimsiz bir debelenme dönemi gelince değişti benim kabuk soyma şeklim.

İnsanların göremediği ama benim içimde yerini bildiğim yaralarımı fark ettim.

Bazılarıyla meselem çok uzun sürdü. Ben yoldum o yine kanadı, yine yoldum yine kanadı.

Bazıları da öyle kendi kendine iyileşti ne izi kaldı ne hissi.

Bazıları da hala bir yerlerde bazen değiyorum, değince bir yanma, bir sızı ama işte tam olarak nerede bilemiyorum.

Ki zaten insanın bedeni dışındaki yaralarını tanıması bir ömürlük mesele. Yaşla, yolla, ruhla ilgili…

Hayatı bütünüyle çakmak için daha çok yol var biliyorum ama yarayı, yarası olanı fark edecek kadar nefes aldım sanırım. Yaranın kıymetini bilecek kadar kelimem oldu.

O yüzden orada burada sıkça birbirini yarasından öpen aşıklar mizansenini görünce bir içim bulandı.

Bir yaraya dokunmak, bir kadını/adamı yarasından öpmek falan büyük mevzular yani.

Öyle buluşmaya giderken çiçek alma, elinde kalp tutan peluş hediye etme klişesine benzemez.

Yapma beceremeyeceksen kıymet vermeyi hiç elleme bile.

Yok say sen karşındakinin yarasını yola devam et.

Organ-izing against biological chaos: an advantage of multicellularity

The complex nature of most biological functions is curious.  Why would a cell ever pal up with other cells rather than slog through life alone?  Why did we big, clumsy, slow-reproducing organisms evolve in the first place?  Being stuck with other cells means (1) being larger but having lower mobility when it comes to choosing how to go about your business, (2) having to get along with the other cells, which could be a drag on your own survival, and (3) being restricted in what you do, having less flexibility.  That these issues can in fact be detriments can be seen in the likelihood that bacteria will dance on all our multicellular graves.

We usually think that bacteria are out there on their own.  But they, like other single-celled species, can aggregate and act as a single organism under some circumstances (bacterial biofilms and slime molds, sponges and others are examples).  Interestingly, the cells that make up the aggregate body are not necessarily those that shed to form another organism, such as sperm or eggs in mammals: even in a sponge, there can be separate 'body' and 'germ' cells.  The body cells reproduce within the body but, like worker bees, are evolutionarily subordinate to the queens--the few reproductively active cells. Presumably, aggregation can at least have a collective advantage even if individual cells go their own way most of the time, and there is no evidence that I know of, other than chance, that determines which of the sponge's founding cell lines will end up as reproducing cells.

Dictyostelium: Wikiwand

Cells in 'true' multicellular organisms, like humans, don't have any option of going it alone.  We begin life as one cell, and develop into a differentiated organism with many types of specialized cells (organs in animals, roots and leaves in plants).  Most of these don't reproduce, but the cells that do reproduce are genetically very closely related, so other cells aren't total evolutionary dead-ends.  Even a super-organism like a bee or ant colony has only a subset of organisms that directly reproduce, creating representative descendants of the whole group.

Not only do we have specialized organs, but they are typically comprised of a great number of cells of different types. Bacterial species can specialize in many different ways, but the cells in multicellular organisms generally specialize only in one: they are intestinal lining producers, or muscle cells, or cells of the neocortex.  That's a kind of cooperation within an organ analogous to the cooperation among organs that make the organism.

But there is a danger.  Each cell division introduces mutations that will be carried by the cell and its daughter cells for the future life of the organism. The organ in which the mutation occurs is stuck for life with the mutant cells.  The mutations are usually silent, or individually minor in their effects on the cell's behavior, but with millions or billions of cells in an organ, that has to work for a long time, at least some mutations may well have an effect, and some of those will be harmful.

A combination of such somatic mutations (SoMu) occurring over time may lead to a single cell lineage within the organ that no longer behaves properly, and in particular if it divides without the typical restraint for cell's tissue context in that organ, the changes can overwhelm the organ and that can threaten not only the whole organ but the whole individual.  Cancer is the classic example in animals.

Given this, then why would organisms with mandatory multicellularity ever have evolved?  Why not get together only when needed, as do the bacteria and slime molds of the world?

Safety in Numbers:  Protection from mutational danger.
The cells in an organism do share a common genome, the one in the founding cell of the organism (fertilized egg, or seed).  So an organism of varying specialized cells is a gang of likes, a differentiated, cooperating society of cellular kinship, which by aggregating can perhaps advance the cause of their group, their particular genotype, in a kind of Size Matters way: they can do things like exploit resources, just as bees and ants do, that an individual cell couldn't.  Specialization, and size do make a difference.  But the cost is that of the rogue members in the cellular society, whose SoMu number and sub-lineages increase with body size and age.  When one organ fails, the whole organism fails.

One aspect of the protection of multicellularity is that SoMus will have various effects, from none to organ failure and death.  Even if one cell lineage doesn't work efficiently, the organ itself is made of many other properly acting cells and even if an SoMu kills the cell, this may have no effect on the organ or the individual, with their countless normally behaving cells.  A herd can withstand the bad behavior of a few of its members.

The risks that being a multicellular organism entail are offset by the average behavior of the aggregates of cells, and it usually takes time before any rogue sub-lineage would be life-threatening to the organ or its organism, as for example cancer is.  Meanwhile, the organism can go about its business and take advantage of being a big, cooperative collective of organ functions, doing many things--travel, browse, hunt, mate and reproduce--in ways a single-celled organism can't do.

Mutations in parents, those arising in their genome and transmitted to their offspring, will either be selected against during development or will force the offspring to compete with its fellow organisms in the usual Darwinian way (see our series on the many other forms adaptation can take).

Since single-celled species, or those that spend most of their time as independents, are clearly doing very well and have done so for nearly the entire history of life (fossils of bacterial biofilms around 4 billion years old have been found).  So multicellularity was never an overwhelming advantage, even if it opened different ways of life for some--and these relative exceptions are the most visible species.

The safety-in-numbers aspect of multicellular organisms seems to be a good way that being big can be successful even in the ever-present face of mutations, most of which are harmful.  Safety in numbers may have allowed multicellular organisms to evolve in the first place.

Hampton Şöleni

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   Amerika'da bütün eğlence ve önemli kutlamalar hemen hemen yıl sonunda anacım. Zaten rahat bir millet oldukları için ışığın, sesin dibine vuruyorlar valla. 

   Halloween, yani Cadılar bayramı iki hafta önceydi. Gece olduğu için fotoğraflarım pek iyi çıkmadı, ama çok keyifliydi. Yollarda kostümlü çocuklar ve yetişkinler evleri geziyorlar. Evin ışıkları yanıyorsa bu bize gelebilirsiniz demek. Çocuklar kapıyı çalıp "Şeker mi verirsin yoksa seni korkutayım mı?" diyorlar. 

    Şükran Günü ise, bu perşembe. Kristof Kolomb Amerika'yı keşfettiğinde Kızılderililer hoşgeldin deyip hindi ikram ediyorlar. Thanksgiving olarak kutlanıyor. 

    Black Friday ise bildiğiniz gibi milletin ucuz alışveriş yapacağım diye tükan önlerinde sabahladığı, kapıların kırıldığı çılgın bir gün. O da kasım sonu. 

    Yılbaşı ise malum aralık sonu. 

  Hampton'da cumartesi günü harika bir geçit töreni oldu. Birkaç video ve bol fotoğraf çektim. Bize çok eyi geldi, izleyin, size de iyi gelecüh...