Because women build babies in their wombs, they need more vitamin D to produce extra calcium for the baby’s bones. Could that explain this difference: When scientists look at the underarm skin of men and women in every color group of humans, the women on average are always lighter than the men. Are the ladies lighter to produce a little extra Vitamin D for the babies?
Posts Tagged ‘Social History’
How Valentine’s Day Traditions Got Started
Saturday, February 14th, 2009Where did Valentine’s Day come from? (Think naked Romans, paganism, and whips.) What does it cost? And why do we fall for it, year after year? Read on.
Valentine’s Day History: Roman Roots
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Cherubs float like balloons in an 1880s Valentine’s Day card produced by a Boston, Massachusetts, company. Valentine’s Day cards–then mostly handwritten notes–gained popularity in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War. Mass production started in earnest in the early 1900s.
More than a Hallmark holiday, Valentine’s Day, like Halloween, is rooted in pagan partying. (See “Halloween Facts: Costumes, History, Urban Legends, More.”)
The lovers’ holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The annual pagan celebration, called Lupercalia, was held every year on February 15 and remained wildly popular well into the fifth century A.D.—at least 150 years after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
“It is clearly a very popular thing, even in an environment where the Christians are trying to close it down,” Lenski said. “So there’s reason to think that the Christians might instead have said, OK, we’ll just call this a Christian festival.”
The church pegged the festival to the legend of St. Valentine.
According to the story, in the third century A.D. Roman Emperor Claudius II, seeking to bolster his army, forbade young men to marry. Valentine, it is said, flouted the ban, performing marriages in secret.
For his defiance, Valentine was executed in A.D. 270—on February 14, the story goes.
While it’s not known whether the legend is true, Lenski said, “it may be a convenient explanation for a Christian version of what happened at Lupercalia.”
Valentine’s Day 2009: What Recession?
Even as the economy crumbles, today’s relatively tame Valentine’s Day celebration is expected to generate some $14.7 billion in retail sales in the United States.
The average U.S. consumer is expected to spend $102.50 on Valentine’s Day gifts, meals, and entertainment, according to an annual U.S. National Retail Federation survey—down from $122.98 per person in 2008. “If anything, [people] are probably scaling back on more discretionary purchases, so that they can feel comfortable spending on Valentine’s Day,” said Ellen Davis, the federation’s vice president.
About 92 percent of married Americans with children will spend the most money on their spouses: $67.22.
The remainder goes to Valentine’s Day gifts for kids, friends, co-workers, and pets, according to the survey.
Valentine’s Day Cards
Greeting cards, as usual, will be the most common Valentine’s Day purchases. Fifty-eight percent of American consumers plan to send at least one, according to the survey.
The Greeting Card Association, an industry trade group, says 190 million Valentine’s Day cards will be sent. And that figure does not include the hundreds of millions of cards schoolchildren exchange.
“Giving your sweetheart or someone [else] a Valentine’s Day card is a deep-seated cultural tradition in the United States,” said association spokesperson Barbara Miller. “We don’t see that changing.”
The first Valentine’s Day card was sent in 1415 from France’s Duke of Orléans to his wife when he was a prisoner in the Tower of London following the Battle of Agincourt, according to the association.
Valentine’s Day cards—mostly handwritten notes—gained popularity in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War. Mass production started in the early 1900s.
Hallmark got in the game in 1913, according to spokesperson Sarah Kolell. Since then—perhaps not coincidentally—the market for Valentine’s Day cards has blossomed beyond lovers to include parents, children, siblings, and friends.
Valentine’s Day Candy: Cash Cow
An estimated 45.8 percent of U.S. consumers will exchange Valentine’s Day candy, according to the retail federation survey—adding up to a sweet billion dollars in sales, the National Confectioners Association says.
About 75 percent of that billion is from sales of chocolate, which has been associated with romance at least since Mexico’s Aztec Empire, according to Susan Fussell, a spokesperson with the association.
Fifteenth-century Aztec emperor Moctezuma I believed “eating chocolate on a regular basis made him more virile and better able to serve his harem,” she said.
(Related: secrets of ancient candy.)
But there’s nothing chocolaty about Valentine’s Day’s most iconic candy: those demanding, chalky little hearts emblazoned “BE MINE,” “KISS ME,” “CALL ME.”
About eight billion candy hearts will be made in 2009, the association says—enough to stretch from Rome, Italy, to Valentine, Arizona, and back again 20 times.
(Also see in Traveler magazine’s Valentine’s Day special: best U.S. cupcake bakeries.)
What Is Love? Evolution and Infatuation
Valentine’s Day is all about love. But what, exactly, is that?
Helen Fisher is an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of several books on love, including Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.
Fisher breaks love into three distinct brain systems that enable mating and reproduction:
• Sex drive
• Romantic love (obsession, passion, infatuation)
• Attachment (calmness and security with a long-term partner)
These are brain systems, not phases, Fisher emphasized, and all three play a role in love. They can operate independently, but people crave all three for an ideal relationship.
“I think the sex drive evolved to get you out there looking for a range of partners,” she said.
“I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, and attachment evolved to tolerate that person at least long enough to raise a child together as a team.”
Valentine’s Day, Fisher added, used to encompass only two of these three brain systems: sex drive and romantic love.
But “once you start giving the dog a valentine, you are talking about a real expression of attachment as well as romantic love.”
WATCH VALENTINE’S DAY VIDEO: LOVE ON THE BRAIN:
1930s Lessons: Brother, Can You Spare a Stock?
Saturday, February 14th, 2009In the worst of times, which are the best of stocks?
So many readers have emailed me to warn that we are going into another Great Depression that I decided to find out which companies and sectors did best after the Crash of 1929. With the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index down 39% last year and another 8.5% this year, it can’t hurt to learn what separated the winners from the losers back then.
![[1930s Lessons: Brother, Can You Spare a Stock?]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MI-AV080_INVEST_DV_20090213152544.jpg)
Heath HinegardnerThe good news is that some stocks and industries did indeed do much better than average. The bad news is that the average was ghastly, and even the best stocks had three rotten years in a row.
With the help of the Center for Research in Security Prices, or CRSP, at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, I sought to answer this question: If you had invested on Jan. 1, 1930, after the crash already had destroyed a third of the stock market’s value, where would you have gotten the greatest gains?
The short answer: In 1930, 1931 and 1932, nowhere. There was no real refuge in the storm; even Benjamin Graham, the great value investor, lost 60% over those three years.
According to CRSP, only one industry had positive returns from 1930 through 1932: logging. The two stocks in that tiny sector, Diamond Match and Mengel Co., whittled out a cumulative gain of 40% for the three-year period. Diamond turned timber into matchsticks; Mengel made trees into packing materials, primarily for daily necessities like tobacco and soap.
To find a major sector with significantly positive returns, CRSP needed to stretch our measurement period into a fourth year, 1933, when the market finally rebounded partway from its earlier losses by rising a record 54%. Even then, out of 120 industries, only 13 managed to generate gains from 1930 through 1933.
The only clear winner: cheap vices. Among the sectors with positive returns were cigarettes, cigars and tobacco, sugar and confectionery products, and fats and oils, which each gained between 1.6% and 7.5% annually. Those gains were better than they look, because deflation raised their purchasing power by an annual average of more than 6% over this period. It seems there was good money to be made investing in guilty pleasures that people could afford even in the hardest of times: sweets, smokes and fried food.
Complete article at:
Your Family May Once Have Been A Different Color
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
In high doses, ultraviolet light can damage skin and DNA molecules, but the body does need some UV light to help us produce vitamin D. Our bodies use melanin to regulate how much UV light our skin lets in.
Courtesy George Chaplin
Ultraviolet Light And Pregnancy
To begin, please point your elbow to the ceiling.
Then imagine yourself naked.
Then look at the patch of skin on the inside of your upper arm, the part of you that almost never sees the sun.
Whatever color you see there is what experts call your basic skin color, according to professor Nina Jablonski, head of the Penn State Department of Anthropology.
And that color, the one you have now, says Jablonski, is very probably not the color your ancient ancestors had — even if you think your family has been the same color for a long, long time.
Different Place, Different Color
Skin has changed color in human lineages much faster than scientists had previously supposed, even without intermarriage, Jablonski says. Recent developments in comparative genomics allow scientists to sample the DNA in modern humans.
By creating genetic “clocks,” scientists can make fairly careful guesses about when particular groups became the color they are today. And with the help of paleontologists and anthropologists, scientists can go further: They can wind the clock back and see what colors these populations were going back tens of thousands of years, says Jablonski.
She says that for many families on the planet, if we look back only 100 or 200 generations (that’s as few as 2,500 years), “almost all of us were in a different place and we had a different color.”
Over the last 50,000 years, populations have gone from dark pigmented to lighter skin, and people have also gone the other way, from light skin back to darker skin, she says.
“People living now in southern parts of India [and Sri Lanka] are extremely darkly pigmented,” Jablonski says. But their great, great ancestors lived much farther north, and when they migrated south, their pigmentation redarkened.
“There has probably been a redarkening of several groups of humans.”
Why We Change Color
The repigmenting process is increasingly well understood.
“Humans started in Africa,” Jablonski says, the part of Africa near the equator where it is intensely sunny with lots of ultraviolet light.
Ultraviolet light, or UV, in high doses can age the skin and damage the DNA molecule, which makes it harder to build a fetus. Not to mention that ultraviolet light can sometimes cause skin cancer.
On the other hand, if a human is plopped down in, say, Norway, where the days can be short and there is precious little ultraviolet light, this creates problems, too. All vertebrate animals need ultraviolet light to help produce vitamin D. Vitamin D helps us absorb calcium from our food to build strong bones. If we don’t get enough ultraviolet light, we’re less likely to survive to reproductive age to produce strong-boned babies.
Thus the dilemma: People who live in sunny climes around the equator have too much UV. People who move away from the equator eventually have too little UV.
Hooray For Melanin
The solution is what Jablonski calls “a really cool molecule”: melanin. In different concentrations, melanin makes skin lighter or darker. Kind of like a Venetian blind, it can let UV light in or keep it out.
Melanin has evolved in many different animals. Humans have had it for a long, long time and what Jablonski and others have learned is that when early humans migrated from the equator, their melanin levels changed.
That doesn’t mean they lost their tans. It means they had very specific genetic changes that allowed them to live and successfully reproduce in less sunny places. Darwin teaches that these changes began randomly. Somebody in the population at some point had a baby, and that baby, just by chance, had a little change in its DNA that made her skin, for example, a little lighter. When that baby moved north to Europe, lighter skin gave her an advantage as a grown-up, because it helped her produce strong-boned babies who could survive and have babies of their own.
Successive mutations created successive generations of lighter and lighter people as they moved north.
“This, in short, really created the gradation of skin color that we see in modern humans today,” says Jablonski. Her map of UV radiation levels on Earth closely mirrors the array of skin colors on Earth.
Skin Color Is A Fleeting Thing
The big surprise is how fast these changes can occur.
“Our original estimates were that [skin color changes] occurred perhaps at a more stately pace,” Jablonski says. But now they’re finding that a population can be one color (light or dark) and 100 generations later — with no intermarriage — be a very different color.
Figuring 25 years per generation (which is generous, since early humans walked naked through the world — clothes slow down the rate), that’s an astonishingly short interval.
It’s “a blink of an eye,” she says.
Audio & More available at NPR (Click Below)
