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Pink, Blue, and Bad Science
DocDJ writes "Ben Goldacre writes an excellent column in The Guardian called Bad Science, which regularly demonstrates how poor the mainstream media are at reporting science. He recently pointed out the flaws in the reporting of research that purported to show the evolutionary basis of 'blue for boys, pink for girls'." Another Guardian writer, Zoe Williams, has an even more acerbic take on the research.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
A slashbot article on misrepresentation. The ironing is delicious.
I long ago learned never to use science journalists as primary sources of information. First of all, these guys are part of an infrastructure that needs to sell advertising (whether via TV, newspapers, web sites, whatever), so the more sensationalistic they can make things the better. Secondly, and most importantly, they often don't understand what it is they're reporting. It's rather like having a reporter covering Congressional sessions who doesn't understand any of the rules of the house, or what Constitutional powers and limits it has. You wouldn't accept financial reporters who didn't understand the essential concepts of stock exchange, and yet it seems people who don't understand the fundementals of science are given the "science journalist" hat and sent off to report on new data and new theories and hypotheses.
There's nothing that makes me angrier than "New fossil rewrites human evolutionary history" and then when you actually go and read the source, it does not such thing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Because everyone here drives on the left there must be a genetic predisposition.
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That's a study I'd like to see done.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Getting up at 4:00 AM or so to watch the first shuttle launch.
Dan Rather, new at the job of anchoring liftoffs, said: (I am not making this up)
"The skies are clear this morning, so we should be seeing some spectacular entrails...."
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Maybe it is because pink might have a higher wavelength than blue since it is closer to red. So males can see a woman, if dressed in pink, from far away and get ready to show off or think of instant one-liners, whereas if men are dressed in blue, then women cannot see men approaching from far away and might not have their guard up on time to hear the shitty one-liner from the guy...
Blue! No, pink [SPROING] Aarrgghh!!
I have an extremely low opinion of journalism, and when I hear the term "journalistic ethic" I cringe. In addition to the reporter's biases we also have to account for their stupidity and laziness. Meanwhile, reporters run around and act like journalism is some sacred religion, exempt from the law, to be placed above God and country. Nonsense.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
"Red" and "beautiful" translate to the same word in Russian. Hence "red square". I would imagine then that red is pretty popular there, too.
In anthropological etymology, it's common for the first two words for color in a language to represent warmer colors (reddish) and cooler colors (bluish or greenish, although which one of these comes first is split somewhat). They often appear just after the words for shades of light (light/dark). As a language evolves to have more vocabulary, it's typical that finer distinctions are made among colors and more words are added to represent them. Some languages today still share a name for blue and green, while others have two names for two different sections of blues.
There are also psycho-linguistic differences as well. Russians can visually discriminate lighter blues from darker ones more quickly if they happen to fall across the divide for those two categories that is provided by their language. English speakers, having a word for blue and words for many shades of blue, but no distinct separate single-word categories for lighter blue vs. darker blue, were used as a control group. Another such experiment is between Tarahumara and English.
It's possible the color words which are perceived differently by a particular race or which made the most difference to survival (think poisonous plants and animals vs. food sources) for people at the time and place of the language's early development lead to different color words coming about in different orders. It's being studied now whether the words and the groupings the words represent themselves limit and enhance color perception ability.
Heck, in the book of Revelations in the Bible, Death rides a green horse in the original Greek. It's a black horse in most English translations. Why? Well, the "black death" plague and black being a symbol of death mean that's fitting symbolism in modern English. At the time, though, there wasn't embalming, and as this list of Bible translation corrections says, green's the color a dead body turns, just like any rotting meat. The symbolism is completely different, though, when green from the leaves of plants is considered the color of life.
So there's a lot more to thoughts about color than gender. People's eyesight is involved, the colors in nature in different parts of the world, the language those people speak, the literature and symbols they know, and personal preference all figure in. Even if gender does play a role (other than through a societal reenforcement of perceived norms), it must be in conjunction with all of these other influences.
Everyone knows that men prefer blue because it stands out against the red Martian landscape.
Women prefer pink because the thick Venusian atmosphere blocks the higher wavelengths of light.
You have the wrong horse. The "green" horse is described by the greek word "chloros." Theyer's Lexicon defines it as 1) green, 2) pale yellow. By my brief review on biblegateway, most English translations, especially the most common ones, NIV and NKJV, translate it as "pale," following the KJV, which followed the latin vulgate, which did likewise. "Pale green" is a close second, and "ashen" a close third. So if "chloros" was translated to "pale" in the 382 AD vulgate, which was a revision of multiple older latin translations, I think it's safe to assume that the earliest readers made the same inference from the context, rather than picturing a bright green horse.
The one who rode the black horse, who came before, wasn't Death, but the horseman who held the balances. The greek for his horse's color is "melas" which means black or black ink.
Ok, you're falling into the same problem that the author was complaining about in that you're attributing to biology that which is generally cultural. The reason for the ordering of colors is likely not from biological or evolutionary constraints.
Having words for light/dark (intensity) is the first and foremost necessary, as it distinguishes linguistically the difference detected by rods in the eye. Even with the rainbow of colors, we still distinguish between them internally with lighter tints, and darker shades.
Following that is red, then blue/green (as one word) then following less reliably a progression of colors. When the list typically hits blue/green again, that is when the old word is concreted to one, and the newer word is given to the other.
This does not mean that we can visually distinguish these colors better than other colors. In fact, we know by empirical biological evidence that humans can actually distinguish the variations of green the best of all shades.
What has happened here is that a language by assimilating, aquiring or generating a new word for a color or concept is now able to linguistically distinguish color or concept. While we read the rainbow as: Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Blue-Violet, Russians read it as Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Cyan-Blue-Violet, and the Japanese natively read it as Red-Orange-Yellow-Green/Blue-Violet does not mean that one is able to distinguish the difference in the colors, but rather than mentally categorizing it allows that color to be compressed as information in a category, rather than remembered for the complexity of the color it really is.
There have been tests looking for tetrachromats, people with 4 types of cones (essentially, a normal set of cones, and a color-blind set of cones) which can typically only occur in women (as the genes controling this are sex-linked onto the X gene. Yes there are males with more than one X chromosome, but of the 1:500/1000 births that rarity is, along with having only one X chromosome with color-blindness, and the mosaic property occuring in their eye... it's a vanishing small number.) Testing this, they asked women to pair colors together that match, notably giving a number of options that could only be distinguished if visually recognized by a tetrachromat. They found a few, however, the tetrachromats can't tell you why the colors don't match, because there exist no words to express the difference, despite their ability to recognize the mismatch.
It's not that Russian speakers can visually recognize more types of blue than English speakers, it's that they have an easier time categorizing the difference.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS