Monday, November 19, 2007

Blue eyed ice queens and brown eyed tarts?   posted by Razib @ 11/19/2007 01:10:00 AM
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I'm interested in blue eyes. Specifically, I wonder why they're around at all. Unlike blonde hair, there's only one region of the world where blue eyes are extant at high frequencies, and there is a pretty regular drop off as a function of distance. It seems that variants of OCA2 are associated with blue eyes in Europeans. If you check Haplotter it looks like the region around this gene has been subject to a powerful bout of recent selection (i.e., within the last 10,000 years). Why this selection? Well, there's no definitive explanation yet. But I don't want to focus on hypotheses for why OCA2 has been subject to selection as much as what correlates there seem to be with the phenotype of blue eyes. Specifically, behavioral correlates.

There's a fair amount of recent work in this area, but reading Racial Adaptations I stumbled upon some older studies, and, a model to explain the outcomes which I'm not really qualified to judge. So I'm going to report and let you decide, and hopefully, inform (especially those of you with cognitive neuroscience backgrounds).


So here I go. From page 66:
...eyes of different colors are related to differents in perception and innate behavior, as psychologists have discovered.23 Some of their tests have shown that dark-eyed persons are more aware of color and lighter-eyed ones of form; the former prefer bright hues and the latter lighter ones. Light eyes tend to envision panoramas, dark ones to concentrate on details


I don't know anything about fashion or design, but I wonder if those of you who know this area (assman?) might be able to map some macrosocial trends back to these individual differences? After all, the vast majority of Scandinavians are blue eyed, and they've produced a fair amount of modern design. While Italians are well represented in the world of fashion and the arts. And the frequencies of eye colors are probably inverted in these two populations.

In any case, moving on, later on the page:
Behavioral variations are focused on the differences between "self-paced" and "reactive" responses to sudden stimuli. In the first subjects follow a well-known plan of animal behavior of pausing and deliberating before decision. In the second the subject flies into instant action (in animals), to attack or to flee. Of course, these behaviors are elaborated in man to govern many more-complex and subtler actions in speech and deed.

Light-eyed subjects are more likely to be self-paced, dark ones reactive. These differences are statistically significant and are patently genetic because they are equally represented in all age groups from kindergarten through professional life. When the iris color categories are extended from two to three, the subjects in the middle, with the mixed, green-to-hazel eyes, are found to share the benefits of the two extremes.

In one experiment ten of each of blue-eyed male, brown-eyed male, blue-eyed female, and brown-eyed female college students were wired to polygraphs and shown arousing pictures of sex and violence with appropriate sound effects. The brown-eyed subjects and the females responded more emotionally than the blue-eyed and male ones did.24

In another test, the same investigator gave Rorschach tests to forty blue-eyed and forty brown-eyed males. The blue-eyed ones fared better with form than with color and vice versa.25 In both tests only pure blue-eyed and pure brown-eyed persons were used.


That's a lot to throw at you, but pretty much line with more recent work. The author does note that these studies were performed upon subjects of European ancestry. Whatever differences one can see between groups of blue and brown eyed Europeans, obviously it wouldn't predict to other genetic backgrounds. East Asians tend to exhibit some of the same behavioral tendencies vis-a-vis Europeans that blue eyed Europeans exhibit vis-a-vis brown eyed ones. Obviously brown eyes can't explain this since East Asians have brown eyes. This isn't that strange, lots of the recent research in regards to human evolution suggests that East Asians and Europeans can converge upon the same phenotype via alternative genetic pathways. Blue eyes may simply be a byproduct of selection for another phenotype.

But on to the author's model, which requires some knowledge of cognitive neuroscience and brain chemistry to evaluate. From page 74:
Few people other than ophthalmologists seem to have looked at retinas, nor to have considered it remarkable that the fundus is of virtually the same color as the person's skin and for obvious reason that the underside of the retina is epidermis


At this point the author draws upon some photographs of the retinas of various racial groups, and observes the variation in color. He takes lithographs of these photos and basically measures the amount of light which can penetrate them. Here is the exposition that is relevant:
The Negro and the mulatto get 1.75 fcp; the Hindu and the American Indian 1.16 fcp; the brunet European 0.66 fcp; and the Chinese, the blond and the albino get 0.22 fcp. The Negro's and the mulatto's retinas let through eight times as much light as did those of the Chinese, the blond, and the albino.


OK, here's the part where he lays out his argument for color and behavior:
Once inside the cranial cavity, neural impulses produced by the visible light that has passed through the retinal screen follow one of two paths. One lot goes to the hypothalamus...This part of the brain is the primary control tower of the central nervous system for almost all of the self-starting and self-regulating activity of the body-the sleep cycle, body temperature, the digestive process, fighting and loving.

These activities are managed by the production inside the hypothalamus of regulatory hormones. In some cases directly, but more commonly indirectly, these hormones control the fabrication and release of other, more specialized hormones in the pituitary, or "master gland," seated in its bony saddle at the base of the braincase.

Two of these pituitary hormones become the raw material for making MSH (melanosome-stimulating hormone), so named because it darkens the pigment in amphibia and other cold-blooded animals. In man as in other mammals, it has yielded its pigment-darkening role to the built-in enzymes of the melanosomes themselves. Its only retention of its earlier function is to darken melanosomes.

Meanwhile, the rest of the neural impulses flow through a complicated channel into the brain's third ventricle. From there they continue through several different parts of the brain stem into the pineal gland.

...Among other hormones, the pineal makes melatonin, which flows onto the cortext...Melatonin is an inhibitor; MSH is a stimulator, and one of its results is the secretion of a substance that switches melatonin making in the pineal on and off in countermeasure with is own rate of flow. Thus, the more light the retina lets in, the more MSH will be secreted and the less melatonin.

MHS has two divisions...one affects the peripheral nervous system only, the other may reach the brain, while melatonin bathes only the latter...all else equal, the stronger the light that penetrates the retina the more automatic are the responses to it, and the weaker the light the more the same responses fall under the control of the learning and thinking part of the brain....

To show those who may doubt that MSH and melatonin really affect the behavior of mammals...the National institute of Child Health and Human Development of Bethesda, Maryland, removed the pineal glands from some black rats (hair color, not skin color), pretended to do so with others, and left a third lot unscathed. The victims of real surgery became hyperactive and nervous, but when she injected melatonin into them they calmed down; both the other lots behaved normally throughout.29 Other researchers have given their animals shots of melatonin without operations. These injections reduced their avoidance responses,30 making them pause in the face of danger, rather than fight or flee. These are the "self-paced" and "reactive" responses found among blue-eyed and black-eyed students.

But not all our melatonin is made in the pineal gland. In daylight the choroid, which encases the retina, makes more of this hormone than the pineal does, and in darkness the pineal secretes more than the eye does. This discovery was made by experiments on chicks and rats.31 If one seeks to apply it to man, it might be well to remember that the stroma, or outer part of the iris lying above the lens, is mesoderm and an extension of the vascular choroid, also mesoderm, in contrast to the retina, which is ectoderm, like the pigmented layer of the skin. An investigation along this line might possibly explain the differences found in reactions blue blue- and brown-eyed subjects by psychologists mentioend earlier, because blood from the choroid flows direclty into the main bloodstream, some of which feeds the brain.


That was a lot to throw out there, but the main reason I'm posting this is so that cognitive neuroscience people can throw cold water on this model or not. Obviously a lot has happened in neuroscience since the 1970s, when the author thought this idea up. Myself, I tend to get confused on the various biochemicals which modulate brain chemistry and all the different pathways and modulations, so clarification would be nice too. Two points I'd also like to point out. 1) the Chinese clustered with the blond European in terms of the retina light values. 2) If the amount of light which manages to get through the retina is a major issue, that can explain variation by latitude and climate in terms of temper and personality, since obviously the amount of sunlight and radiation which reaches the surface varies a great deal.

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