Jezebel: add

Who's Sabotaging Your Relationships? It Could Be Darwin, But You're Probably Too Distracted To Care

Moe — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:30:00 EDT

It's been awhile since I talked about my attention deficit disorder, maybe because the topic overwhelms me and the meds don't work like they used to, and I have a side of me — the side that thinks I could be "bipolar" too — that thinks ADHD is a scam cooked up by Big Pharma to sell decongestants that had been ruled unsafe as weight loss drugs, because it totally was, and yet on the really bad days it's kind of nice to think, no, I spent nine hours a night on my fifth-grade homework and dropped out of school and I lose everything — seriously, the other day on the way to getting reamed out by the Passport agency for having lost nine still-valid passports I managed to lose my three-week-old phone — because I am sick. I have a disease, a disease so hysterically crippling to my efforts to survive in society it's a wonder I made it past natural selection…Well, guess what?

I'm no longer wondering! Because today I learned, along with the fact that "natural" cures are totally worthless that ADHD is linked to some protein blah blah allele something that also cause alcoholism and eating disorders and shit but turns out to be somehow useful to nomadic tribesmen in Africa.

One hypothesis is that the behaviour associated with ADHD helps people, such as hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads, who lead a peripatetic life. Since today's sedentary city dwellers are recently descended from such people, natural selection may not have had time to purge the genes that cause it.

Dan Eisenberg, of Northwestern University in Illinois, and his colleagues decided to test this by studying the Ariaal, a group of pastoral nomads who live in Kenya. The receptor Mr Eisenberg looked at was the 7R variant of a protein called DRD4. Previous work has shown that this variant is associated with novelty-seeking, food- and drug-cravings, and ADHD.

The team looked for 7R in two groups of Ariaal. One was still pastoral and nomadic. The other had recently settled down. As they report in this week's BMC Evolutionary Biology, they found that about a fifth of the population of both groups had the 7R version of DRD4. However, the consequences of this were very different. Among the nomads, who wander around northern Kenya herding cattle, camels, sheep and goats, those with 7R were better nourished than those without. The opposite was true of their settled relations: those with 7R were worse nourished than those without it.

So now we know why Amazonian shamans don't have some magical natural cure for us in the rainforests? Because they'd be too busy competing with us for food? Well… How nice for modern civilization that I am in no danger of passing on these alleles!

The Misfits [Economist]
Weighing Nondrug Options For ADHD [NY Times]

Patient Voices: ADHD [NY Times]

We Will Eat Your Babies, Slash Your Tires

Jessica — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 19:30:29 EDT

We intimidated you with the girth of our shenises.
We threatened to gnaw on your babies.
We encouraged you to embrace the psycho within.
We mourned for a red sox widow.
We pondered the intentions of American Apparel ads.
Oprah told us that we have ADD.
After she tried to feed us tripe.
And finally, we bid a sad farewell to our fearless leader for the next two weeks, and said hello to our substitute hardened cynic.

Women Less Happy Than Men About Performing Every Single One Of Those Multi Tasks

Moe — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 11:30:05 EDT

Guess what? At any given time, during any given moment, you're probably not as happy as most dudes you know. And you're less happy than girls in the seventies!
Think it's society's sharpening emphasis on your superficialest qualities? Or your dumb minimum wage job's? Could it be PMS and the related phenomenon that is bleeding smelly coagulated blood from the same vaginas you are now supposed to wax bald once a month, or your relative difficulty getting off? Or is it the fact you make less money, or the fact that even when you make more money your tits are the whole reason, status handbags and the related fact that we meet so many fucking women who confirm all our deepest fears about women by paying stupid money for them, crap emails, the rising cost of health care, the rising cost of toilet paper, our undiagnosed cases of ADD, and getting our college gray rapist completely outdouched by our preposterously chauvinist bosses, and above and beyond all this, the absurd imperative that is multitasking all these factors at once? We were so busy doing that last part we forgot to read the article, so we did..

And yeah, it turns out we were right about everything, especially that last part. Essentially we find pretty much every activity we engage in more unpleasant than men, mainly because we are expected to engage in so many goddamn activities, and specifically spending time with those parents who want to know when we'll finally grow up and find a real job and get married and give them grandchildren so we can get on with taking care of them in old age already.

He's Happier, She's Less So [NY Times]

Prozac Advertisement Vintage by Adbusters