Episode 32: Disagreeing About Disagreement

I'm a very good man. Good man.

They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man.

I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.

Chapter six. Fucking making straight up decisions now, dude. As my epic comeback nears its zenith, I can't help but look back at the low times when there was no hope for light. It's an old expression that has guided me through the dark valleys and hazy cul de sacs of life. Nut up or sack up. It means when life gets you all swirly and thought ridden, shut it out. Let the two spherical sperm factories underneath your dick take over. They don't think. They don't get confused. They churn and attack. Not everyone can achieve their dreams in this world. That's because most people have things like feelings and sentimental attachments, nagging shit that keeps them from making the tough decisions that are necessary to get to the ultimate top. Unfortunately, in the rocket ship of fame, there's only room for one. Any added baggage will just weigh you down, holding you back from shooting for the fucking stars. Blast off, bitch.

Welcome to very bad wizards. I'm Tandler Summers from the University of Houston. Dave. According to a recent study, you can either be a good father or have big balls, but not both. Which of those categories are you in?

I'm David Pizarro from Cornell University Theory Falsified, one of the only theories in behavioral science that I've been able to falsify this easily. Count this as a victory for Carl Popper.

What we're referring to, actually, is a study. Well, it's described in Salon, you may be a terrible dad because you have enormous testicles. No, it's better than that study colon. You may be a terrible dad because you have enormous testicles.

So the name of the actual paper in PNAS that came out in September, testicular volume is inversely correlated with nurturing related brain activity in human fathers. The important thing to note first is that this is observational correlational. They didn't jack up ball size and then measure how it influenced parenthood. They didn't influence parenthood and see whether it had an effect on testicle size. And even more importantly, they didn't actually measure parenting. They measured brain activity that is related to paternal caregiving.

What? Yeah, I didn't know that really?

Well, I'm trying to look right now to see if they actually had any measure of it, really is activity in parts of the brain related to Caregiving was founded. So they essentially showed fathers pictures of their own children and measured their brain activity. And fathers with smaller balls had like, whatever the correlate of warm emotions for their own kids is. So this is just exactly the kind of study that is going to get a lot of action, but in reality, it's showing something very limited.

What's the point of this study? First of all, I don't know my ball size, honestly. I have a good sense of where I stand penis wise, but I have no idea where I stand ball wise. And now this is telling me that if I'm a good father, which I believe myself to be, and I think I am, that means that I have smaller balls and I have to feel like, I don't know.

Yeah.

Do you start treating your kids like shit and then your balls grow? Or how does it work?

Yeah, that's probably exactly how it doesn't work. At least I hope so. This is one of those hypotheses that comes straight out of the sexual selection. Yeah. That part of evolutionary psychology that's about sperm competition, sexual selection. The idea is that because sperm are low in cost for men, we could just spread our seed and we can propagate our genes by not really having to do parental investment, but actually just by fucking lots of women who will bear children. But there's another strategy that's also good.

For your genes, and that is to Marty.

Sort of. Yeah. That strategy is to actually invest in the kids that you do have at the expense of spreading your seed. Both of these are viable strategies. And so the prediction is that men who choose the second strategy that have high principal investment, who knows what the causal direction is, but they would be lower in testosterone and have a lower sperm or less powerful testes to generate the amount of sperm that you would need had you chosen the first strategy.

I see.

Right.

This is something that I think needs to be pointed out, and none of the press really is pointing this out, which is so they measure testosterone level and testes size. And the assumption here is somehow these are causing good or bad parental strategies, or maybe that the parental strategy that you choose is then going to affect you. But there is plenty of evidence that new fathers have a reduction in their testosterone levels. So even though some people say, well, maybe it's because of this evolutionary theory, there's a very parsimonious reason why this might be the case. And that is the amount of sleep that you get is related to how much testosterone you produce. And the more involved you are in your child's life, as you and I know, the less sleep that you're going to get as a father. So that's actually a direct mechanism that could explain the effect. So you really are a nurturing father, which means that you trade off getting up in the middle of the night with your wife, and that actually because of a lack of sleep. It means that you produce less testosterone.

Yeah, I mean, I guess they would have to control for all those kinds of things like sleep, how much sleep you get. And you also wonder if this is because it sounds like it's just toddlers that they're talking about. Just to read some of the headlines from this, I just Googled it. So this is the most responsible one from Science Daily. Testes size correlates with men's involvement in toddler care. Okay, that's la. Times. Men with smaller testes make better fathers. Great dads have smaller testicles. Study suggests that's from CBC. AW, nuts. Nurturing dads have smaller testicles. That might be the best. Nurturing dads have smaller testicles.

Oh my God, that is just so corny.

That was NBC.com.

Well, for those of you who are interested, we'll link to at least the original article so that we could be responsible.

This might be the most irresponsible one. Want to know if your partner will be a good dad? Measure his testicle.

Oh, my God.

And again, I don't know how women like, are women aware of relative?

That's the thing, it's such a relative. Yeah, it's like, how the hell do you get a good sense of testicle size?

So I guess the idea is all of our female listeners, and I hope there are many of them out there, before you get married, make sure you measure their testicles. Before you do, compare it with whatever, it's average and you'll know exactly right.

There should be little charts.

Like decent father, but will go away on a lot of business trips. Is this size?

It really kills me that they even bother to measure actual behavior. There's just like a brain activity associated with this is like the most rough shot measure of actual and maybe I'm being unfair to the researchers because I haven't actually read their measures, but were there other pictures that were controls? Like pictures of just any kids? Or was it the pictures of their own?

I could see this leading to a lot of fights, right?

Maybe the I'm a great father. I know, because your balls are these.

Tiny ass testicles and you're still a bad father.

I'm a great father. My balls are small. Science.

Science, bitch. And then you could also have the guy being like, yeah, I'm sorry, I can't be there for the recital.

Look at these. I can't help it. God, you know, it would be hilarious because it's so hard to know comparatively and because of this above average effect, if a guy was like, I mean, check