In agriculture, monoculture is the practice of relying extensively on one crop with little biodiversity.  In the 1840s, a famine in Ireland was caused by a disease that hit potatoes, the crop on which Irish people largely relied.  At Understanding Evolution, an article reads:

The Irish potato clones were certainly low on genetic variation, so when the environment changed and a potato disease swept through the country in the 1840s, the potatoes (and the people who depended upon them) were devastated.

The article includes this illustration of how monocultures are vulnerable:

The Irish potato famine reveals how choices about how to feed populations, combined with biological realities, can have dramatic impacts on the world.  In the three years that the famine lasted, one out of every eight Irish people died of starvation.  Nearly a million emigrated to the United States, only to face poverty and discrimination, in part because of their large numbers.

The article continues:

Despite the warnings of evolution and history, much agriculture continues to depend on genetically uniform crops. The widespread planting of a single corn variety contributed to the loss of over a billion dollars worth of corn in 1970, when the U.S. crop was overwhelmed by a fungus. And in the 1980s, dependence upon a single type of grapevine root forced California grape growers to replant approximately two million acres of vines when a new race of the pest insect, grape phylloxera (Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, shown at right) attacked in the 1980s.

Gwen adds: The Irish potato famine is also an example of a reality about famines that we rarely discuss. In most famines there is food available in the country, but the government or local elites do not believe that those who are starving have any claim to that food. In the years of the Irish potato famine, British landowners continued to export wheat out of Ireland. The wheat crop wasn’t affected by the potato blight. But wheat was a commercial crop the British grew for profit. Potatoes were for Irish peasants to eat. We might think it would be obvious that when people are starving you’d make other food sources available to them, but that’s not what happened. In the social hierarchy of the time, many British elites didn’t believe that starving Irish people had a claim to their cash crop, and so they continued to ship wheat out of the country to other nations even while millions were dying or emigrating. Similarly, in the Ethiopian famines of the 1980s, the country wasn’t devoid of food; it’s just that poor rural people weren’t seen as having a right to food, and so available food was not redistributed to them. Many people in the country ate just fine while their fellow citizens starved.

So famine is often as much about politics and social hierarchies as it is about biology.

In early American history, male circumcision was very uncommon.  In the 1950s, however, about 90% of newborn boys were circumcised in the U.S.  Today, the number is just over 50%.

The International Coalition for Genital Integrity has put together a slideshow that traces developments in research and argumentation about male circumcision alongside rising and falling rates of the practice in the U.S., the U.K., and the world from 1832 till today.  

It’s interesting how rates of circumcision change drastically over time in the U.S., but stay relatively stable (low) in the U.K. 

It is also neat to see some of the arguments about circumcision that were made over time.  For example, the long-standing belief that circumcision cured sexual excess (like wet dreams and masturbation), the explicit support for circumcision on the basis that it reduced sexual sensitivity (and that was good), and the belief that circumcision could cure paralysis, bedwetting, crossed eyes, deafness, tuburculosis, cancer of the tongue, and more.  Dovetailing with American racism, in 1894 an article argued that circumcising the “Negro” would reduce the rape of white women by black men.

Over at Everyday Sociology, Janis Inniss posted about interracial relationships and she offered a graph showing 30 years of marriages of white men to black women and black men to white women.  Describing it, she writes:

Looking at the graph below, you will see that the black female/white male pairings of today are about what they were 30 years ago for black male/white female dyads. (The blue line represents black husband/white wife). In other words, today, white men and black women marry at about the same rate that black men and white men married about three decades ago.

So, why would there be a difference in the marriages between white men/black women and black men/white women? I suspect that this has to do with the intersection of gender and race. Consider: according to American cultural stereotypes, black people, both men and women, are more masculine than white people. Black men are seen as, somehow, more masculine than white men: they are, stereotypically, more aggressive, more violent, larger, more sexual, and more athletic. Black women, too, as seen as more masculine than white women: they are louder, bossier, more opinionated and, like men, more sexual and more athletic.

If men are supposed to be sexy by virtue of their masculinity and women sexy by virtue of their femininity, then black men and white women will be seen as the more sexually attractive than white men and black women.  So, while white men may not find black women particularly attractive, white women may very well find black men attractive.  In this is so, we might see the patterns that Inniss demonstrates with her table.

These concrete statistics, as well as the cultural stereotypes that position black women as undesirable, help explain why interracial dating is politicized by many in the black community.  It is not trivial that black men can date outside of their race and black women are less able to do so.  It means that many black women have less opportunity to form long-term relationships.

Chris Uggen put together a pie chart of U.S. arrests (FBI statistics 2007) in order to show that “only a small proportion of arrests involve violent crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault” (see it here):

In 2007, only 4% of arrests were for violent crimes; another 12% were for crimes like burglary, theft, and arson; drug offenses (including drunkenness and DUIs) accounted for 31% of arrests.

Uggen mentions that he shows this data, in part, to talk about the way in which arrests for drug offenses disrupt families and neighborhoods.  Low income neighborhoods are devastated by the transfer (to put it nicely) of huge numbers of adult males to jails and prisons.  Those men are not overwhelmingly committing violent crimes (as stereotype suggest), but are imprisoned because of the intensive policing of drug crimes in those neighborhoods.  In another post, we put up a table that showed how the “drug war” that started in the 1980s disproportionately affected blacks.

For more on crime and imprisonment, see this post on the ineffectiveness of racial profiling, this table on the percentage of children with parents in prison by race, and this table that compares incarceration rates across countries.

I am curious as to what you, Readers, think of the recent rash of advertising capitalizing on Obama’s “brand.” Here are some examples (found here, here, here, and here).

Budweiser American Ale:

A language school in Israel:

Ikea:

In other posts we’ve suggested that ads that appropriate feminism trivialize gender inequality and ultimatly undermine feminist efforts to attain social justice for women (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).  Like many of the “feminist” ads, these ads seem to be genuinely celebrating Obama’s election.  Do they?  Or do they trivialize everything he claim to stand for and the difficult road ahead for both him and the country? Something in between? Something else entirely?

What do you think?

NEW: Breck C. pointed out the Obama Chia Pet:

Amid a controversy that the Obama Chia pet was racist, Walgreens pulled the product.

The New York Times put together an interactive graphic showing, for each U.S. President’s in augural speech, a word cloud with the most used words, with larger words being used more frequently than smaller words.  Click here to see the whole thing and look at any specific speech.

Here is Obama’s speech.  The words in yellow (“generation,” “crisis,” “hard,” “job,” “women,” and “endure) were used more by Obama than in the average inaugural speech:

This is interesting because it helps us see what is being emphasized by different President’s at different times, and also how language changes. For example, for George Washington in 1789, the word “God” was not among his most used  He does, however, use the word “pecuniary” (of or relating to money) a lot.

Via infosthetics.

In this video, from the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof argues that sweatshops are, despite their drawbacks, the best option for many people in many places… and that anti-sweatshop activists should keep that in mind.

Two readers, Muriel M. M. and Lauren D., sent in this advertisement for the Oslo Gay Festival.

Three thoughts:

First, notice how the narrative reproduces the idea of the goal-oriented sentient sperm.  (We’ve got a fun post on that idea here, and here’s another good one.)  Remember, sperm do not have goals; they do not have ideas; they do not think.  It’s just chemistry.

Second, I think it’s interesting how this video associates anal sex with gay men.  How do gay men have sex?   Well, they must copy straight people as closely as possible.  Therefore, they must put the penis in an opening “down there.”  Ah ha!  I bet they all have anal sex all the time!  I’m sure some gay men do have anal sex, but some surely don’t, and lots of straight couples do!  I bet a lot of lesbian couples find a way to do it, too.  I’m just sayin’.

Third, for what it’s worth: It also occurred to me that, in that this commercial celebrates the infertile sex act, we’ve come a long way from the Christian ethic against wasting your seed.