NATURE AND CULTURE INTERACTING

See what sort of explanation you can think of for this: Statisticians began noticing that a large number of professional hockey players in the National Hockey League had birthdays in January and February (Grondin, Deshaies, & Nault, 1984).

Maybe being born in winter makes someone love winter sports more? Getting ice skates for your birthday? But November and December should also be good for that, and those months were marked by relatively few birthdays of NHL players. Also, the same pattern began to emerge in other sports as well, especially soccer, where the effect has been found all over the world (for review, see Musch & Grondin, 2001). It is statistically undeniable. What might cause it? Astrology? No.

Th e unequal birthday pattern emerges from a curious mix of nature and culture. In hockey, as in many sports, pro athletes generally got their start while they were children. Children’s leagues are grouped by age, but rather than automatically moving from league to league on their birthday (which might disrupt teams), kids are grouped for each season based on a cutoff date—typically January 1st. Th us, when the season starts in November, if you’re already 9 or will turn 9 by the end of December, you play with the 9-year-olds, but if your birthday isn’t until after January 1st, you play with the 8-year-olds. Why does that matter? Nine-year-olds are usually bigger and stronger than 8-year-olds. Kids born late in the year grow up always being matched against others who are older, stronger, and faster, so they tend to drop out of the sport. Meanwhile, the lucky kids with birthdays in January will grow up always being among the oldest (and therefore biggest and strongest) children in their league, which puts them at a physical advantage. Th is advantage helps them be successful and makes the sport fun for them.

Political Tradeoffs

Tradeoff s are abundant in politics. Have you ever wondered why governments keep passing new laws, even though they hardly ever repeal any old ones? You would think that with the addition of more and more laws every year for hundreds of years, there would finally be enough.

One explanation is that most laws are designed to remedy an existing problem, but sometimes they create new problems. Tradeoff s are responsible for some of the problems that arise. As one famous example, in the 1990s the Ohio state legislature heard some sad stories about babies being born in prison (because their mothers were serving time). Taking pity on the babies, the government passed a new law to release pregnant women from prison. This solved one problem but created another, because all the women in Ohio prisons realized that they could get out of prison if they got pregnant, and many women would rather have a baby than be in prison. Female convicts began eagerly trying to have sex with male guards and lawyers. Some inmates would get a weekend pass to attend a relative’s funeral—but would skip the funeral and spend the weekend having as much unprotected sex as possible. Thus, there was a tradeoff between preventing babies from being born in prison and encouraging more prisoners to get pregnant. In this case, the law was repealed.

The Social Side of Sex

Like eating, sexual behavior will be featured through this book as an important category of behavior that is shaped by both nature and culture. Whereas food is needed for survival, sex is needed for reproduction.

Sex has been a bitter battleground between those who explain it on the basis of nature and evolution and those who emphasize cultural construction. Is sex a matter of genes and hormones causing people to feel desires the way nature has prescribed them? Or is culture the principal cause of who wants to do what to whom in bed?

Some features of sexuality are found everywhere and may well be rooted in nature. In all cultures, for example, men seem to desire a greater number of sexual partners than women (Pedersen, Miller, Putcha-Bhagavatula, & Yang, 2002). Sex is everywhere the main way (and usually the only way) to make babies. The same basic sex practices are known to most cultures. Sex historian Reay Tannahill (1980) observed that the sex manuals written thousands of years ago in ancient China covered almost all the same techniques one would find in a sex manual today, with only one exception (sadomasochism).