NASA’s Nature

Updated 13 October 2009

Outer space is apparently not public space; but is it ‘masculine’ space?

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

NASA is set to crash two unmanned (and presumably also ‘unwomanned’) spacecraft into the moon today. According to NASA, the purpose of the crash is to reveal whether there is water on the moon’s surface:

‘Earth’s closest neighbor is holding a secret. In 1999, hints of that secret were revealed in the form of concentrated hydrogen signatures detected in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles by NASA’s Lunar Prospector. These readings may be an indication of lunar water and could have far-reaching implications as humans expand exploration past low-Earth orbit. The Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission is seeking a definitive answer.’

LCROSS was launched on an Atlas V rocket in June, and ‘the LCROSS shepherding spacecraft and the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket executed a fly-by of the moon on June 23, 2009 and entered into an elongated Earth orbit to position LCROSS for impact on a lunar pole. On final approach, the shepherding spacecraft and Centaur will separate. The Centaur will act as a heavy impactor to create a debris plume that will rise above the lunar surface. Following four minutes behind, the shepherding spacecraft will fly through the debris plume, collecting and relaying data back to Earth before impacting the lunar surface and creating a second debris plume.’ ‘As the ejecta rises above the target crater’s rim and is exposed to sunlight, any water-ice, hydrocarbons or organics will vaporize and break down into their basic components. These components primarily will be monitored by the visible and infrared spectrometers. The near-infrared and mid-infrared cameras will determine the total amount and distribution of water in the debris plume. The spacecraft’s visible camera will track the impact location and the behavior of the debris plume while the visible radiometer will measure the flash created by the Centaur impact.’(1)

From an environmental perspective, the news raise at least two issues. The first involves two of the fundamental boundaries that have long been disputed by environmental activists: the boundaries that separate the private from the public, in both the economic and the ‘social’ senses of the term. On the one hand, environmental campaigners have long sought to stop private corporations (as well as state entities) from abusing public spaces and their resources. On the other hand, and as I explained in Mediating Nature, a significant task for environmental activists has been to reveal the mentioned abuses when they occurred away from the public eye, in the relative privacy of remote places, or areas in which the public were not allowed access.

Greenpeace’s inaugural campaign to stop the U.S. from testing nuclear weapons on one of the Aleutian Islands (Amchitka) is a case in point. But perhaps the best example of the politics in question was the battle over the Shell Corporation’s efforts to dump its Brent Spar oil storage and tanker loading bouy in the North Atlantic, some 250 kms off the west coast of Scotland. Greenpeace’s task in that campaign was firstly to bring the event to public attention, and then to dispute Shell’s right to sink, or as Greenpeace put it, dump the Bren Spar in the Atlantic. As Campaign Director Chris Rose explained in a press release in 1996, ‘The public knows it is wrong to dump old cars in the village pond – and it’s wrong for the Government to let the oil industry treat the sea as its rubbish dump. The UK Government must rule out dumping at sea and abandon the so-called case-by-case approach.’

This context sheds an interesting light on NASA’s plans to smash a part of a rocket, and then a satellite into the moon. It seems that outer space is truly ‘outer’ in the ethical sense: the kind of issues that might be raised about the dumping, let alone the deliberate crashing of vehicles into a public space—or what might be regarded as a public space—simply don’t seem to apply. On the contrary, the experiment is being celebrated for its capacity to reveal one of nature’s ‘secrets’, a revelation which even amateur astronomers are being invited to witness if they have telescopes 10 to 12 inches or wider. NASA, and of course other countries’ space agencies in effect treat outer space in much the way that the U.S., France and other countries treated several Pacific islands during the testing of nuclear devices in the 1950s, 60s and 70s (in fact, the French had another go as recently as the 90s). No one lives on the moon (yet), and presumably radioactive contamination is not an issue; but will anyone ever look back on the ethics of these and other experiments as an example of NASA using or abusing the moon as if it were the proverbial village pond?

The reference to the revelation of nature’s ‘secrets’, and indeed the fascinating use of the term ‘ejecta’ raises a second set of issues. I am reminded of the critiques offered by feminist environmental historians—especially, Carolyn Merchant, whose magisterial The Death of Nature (2) revealed a key discursive and ideological basis for the modern domination of nature. According to Merchant, during the scientific revolution,

‘The mechanists transformed the body of the world and its female soul, source of activity in the organic cosmos, into a mechanism of inert matter in motion, translated the world spirit into a corpuscular ether, purged individual spirits from nature, and transformed sympathies and antipathies into efficient causes. The resultant corpse was a mechanical system of dead corpuscles, set in motion by the Creator, so that each obeyed the law of inertia and moved only by external contact with another moving body’ (p.195).

The simultaneous birth and death of this nature marked the beginning of the end of the predominance of ancient circuits of anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism, my term for the circular process by means of which a set of representations of nature come to be seem natural to a group, and thereafter are employed to confirm that the own values or beliefs correspond with the character of ‘nature itself’.  In effect, nature is represented in a manner that reflects the values of a particular cultural group, but when the representations become a matter of habit, they appear to become, to that group at least, ‘nature itself’. This ‘nature itself’ (in fact the nature represented by the particular cultural group) then becomes a cultural mirror that appears to confirm the natural nature of the group’s values.

This arguably what happened with the rise of a mechanist cosmogony in the Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries. Far from simply reflecting the workings of the universe ‘itself’, mechanism was strongly indebted to emergent bourgeois values, and to new forms of patriarchy. While Sir Francis Bacon protested that the new ways of knowing were to be for the benefit of ‘mankind’, this was clearly an instance of utopian reasoning with an explicitly ideological role.

First,  it is quite clear that the new mechanistic imaginary helped to pave the way for the individualism that was to be associated with societies dominated by bourgeois classes; it is no coincidence that in Leviathan, Hobbes described not just an atomistic society, but a society whose mechanism was meant to keep in check the individuality of subjects whom Hobbes regarded as being naturally greedy: while Nature ‘hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind’, ‘she has also made them competitive, diffident, and vainglorious’.‘Hereby it is manifest, that durng the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is every man, against every man’.

Second, and as Merchant has documented, the new discourse of nature was articulated in the language of an early modern form of patriarchy. During this period women became at once the object of a kind of instituted wrath, and the unwitting protagonists of the new circuits of anthropomorphism. Where earlier so-called ‘organic’ cosmogonies had long gendered nature with images of a benevolently maternal figure, the discourse of mechanism gendered nature with images of sexual violence and exploitation. Merchant reveals, for example, how the narratives of Bacon and other philosophers of the time mixed metaphors for the study and control of nature with those for the sexual domination of women. In one of the most extraordinary passages of her book, Merchant explains that Bacon, who was James I’s Lord Chancellor, suggested to the king that nature’s ‘secrets’ might be discovered by using the same methods employed by James I to reveal the secrets of witchcraft by inquisition: ‘For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterward to the same place again. Neither am I of the opinion in this history of marvels that superstitious narratives of sorceries, witchcrafts, charms, dreams, divinations, and the like (…) should be altogether excluded’ but ‘A useful light may be gained, not only for a true judgement of offences of persons charged with such practices, but likewise for the further disclosing of the secrets of nature. Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object—as your majesty has shown in your own example’(Bacon, quoted in Merchant p. 168).

Back to NASA: many centuries after Bacon, it is striking to note the continued relevance of the image of the revelation of nature’s secrets, as well as the use of terms such as ‘ejecta’, and the quest to penetrate ‘holes’, albeit, this time in the form of craters. Of course, ‘ejecta’ has a particular meaning in astronomy—it refers to the debris that is produced when an impact crater is formed. But the term also has a medical meaning, which refers to any material ejected from the human body. It might further be argued that one does not have to be a semiotician to note that the moon has traditionally been gendered as female, and that cylindrical objects are being crashed into it. Lest we forget, the centaurs are, in Greek mythology at least, the warrior progeny of Centaurus, who spent his adulthood mating with the mares of Thessaly.

Doubtless these kinds of meanings were far from the minds of the NASA scientists and engineers who conceived and described the LCROSS mission. But this does not contradict, in itself, the idea that centuries after the Holy Inquisition ended, we still employ aspects of the discourse of Bacon—the discourse that has arguably been so fundamental to the modern domination of nature.

When this issue is considered in relation to the first (regarding the use of ‘public’ space), it suggests that a critical environmental consciousness is light years, or at least, many ejecta away from the minds of the people who conceive and carry out experiments such as LCROSS.

Update 13 October 2009: anyone who wants to read about another example of the anthropomorphic nature of the work of astronomers and planetary scientists should read Felicity Mellor’s excellent article about asteroid collision mitigation technologies. See ‘Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space’ in Social Studies of Science 37/4 (August 2007) 499–531.

References

1) NASA – LCROSS: Mission Overview, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/overview/index.html, accessed October 9, 2009.

2) Merchant, C. (1980) The Death of Nature, New York: Harper

© Copyright 2009 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

On the Recombinant Ecology of Panama’s Barro Colorado Island

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

Imagine a lake that was once never a lake. Then imagine an island on that lake that was once never an island. Imagine, finally, a forested hilltop on the island that is no longer a hilltop, and you may begin to form a reasonably good image of the magnificently ‘unnatural’ history of Panama’s Barro Colorado Island.

As this description begins to suggest, Barro Colorado Island occupies a paradoxical space. The island is covered by a seasonal tropical forest, parts of which are likely to be similar to those encountered by the first Spanish conquistadores in the early 16th century. It is fortunate, in this sense, that the island was transformed into a biological reserve in 1923, and that it is now a part of the world-renowned Barro Colorado Nature Monument.

And yet, the island lies next to—indeed exists thanks to—one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes: the Panama Canal. Unsurprisingly, the Panama Canal Authority regards the Canal as Panama’s foremost industrial zone. A visit to the island indeed affords views of tropical forest, but also of the many container-laden behemoths that continually make their way past Barro Colorado. As one field agent for the Panama Pacific Line evocatively put it in a 1932 edition of the magazine Ocean Ferry,

‘An island where fierce black monkeys climb tall trees to shake their fists and howl defiance at passing airplanes; where animals nearly as big as bears pass their whole lives upside down, clinging to limbs, where there are 55 varieties of snakes, 33 of lizards and 47 of frogs and toads, where animals live on crab-meat—but why proceed? […] Such an island easily might be located in the land of fancy where men had but one eye, and that in the middle of the forehead. It might be, but it is not; for it is in the Panama Canal Zone, and every passenger who goes through the Canal on a Panama Pacific liner passes close enough to its shores to toss a penny from the ship’s deck to the land, if so inclined’(1).

* * *

The origin of this paradoxical space may be explained with reference to the design of the Panama Canal. Prior to the construction of the Canal, Barro Colorado was a forested hilltop along the Chagres River Valley. The Chagres River rises in the Cordillera de San Blas and flows west-southwest until it reaches the present-day town of Gamboa. Until 1910, the river turned at this point and flowed in a northerly direction before draining into the Caribbean Sea. Before the Canal’s construction began, anyone climbing the tallest tree on Barro Colorado’s highest point would have been afforded a view of mostly unbroken tropical forest extending as far as the eye could see.

All of this changed when U.S. engineers decided to abandon the original French plans for a canal ‘à niveau’. Instead, the engineers opted for a canal that used gigantic locks to raise ships coming in from the Caribbean (or the Pacific) to an inland waterway that crossed the Panamanian isthmus. A further set of locks then lowered each ship to the ocean (or sea) on the opposite end of the canal. The required waterway was constructed by damming the Chagres River at a point close to its mouth on the Caribbean side of present canal. The resulting Gatun Lake—then the largest man-made lake in the world—replaced the views of forest with views of emerald waters even as it solved three problems for the Panama Canal’s engineers: first, and as I have just noted, the new lake’s waters served as a major part of the waterway that linked the locks on either end of the Canal. Second, it allowed the engineers to control the Chagres’ extraordinary force, a force that, during the raining season, wreaked havoc first on the French, and then on American efforts to build the canal. And third, the Gatun provided the extraordinary volumes of water required to fill the locks for each ship’s transit—estimated at some 98,500,000 litres (or 26,000,000 US gallons) per ship.

So it was that, in 1907, a massive dam began to be built close to the Chagres’ mouth. In 1910, the diversion channel that was used to enable the construction of this dam was blocked, and the lower reaches of the Chagres River Valley began to flood. The Gatun Lake began to form, and as its waters rose, the surrounding hills became shores. By 1913, the highest hilltop in the Gatun had become the lake’s largest island: the 1500-hectare Barro Colorado Island.

Today the island is part of a biological reserve that is the site of a tropical research station administered by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution. All that remains visible of the submerged forest is the odd tree stump that stands as a silent witness to the life that once surrounded the hilltop-turned-island. Actually, some of the stumps are rather noisy havens for colonies of chestnut-headed oropéndolas (Psarocolius wagleri). The birds have discovered that the stumps constitute the ultimate snake-proof nesting site: they are surrounded by water, but are located a stone’s throw from the island’s forested shores. The stumps may, in this sense, be regarded as a metaphor for the island as a whole; Barro Colorado’s circumscribed nature is part of what led the earliest naturalists to propose that it be set aside as a biological reserve, and to this day, that very nature is part of what protects it from the destruction that the mainland forests have suffered.

* * *

Many if not most contemporary accounts of Barro Colorado emphasize the continuity between the island’s contemporary forest and its ancient forebear. In fact, a strong case can be made that today’s forest is both very similar to, and very different from the one encountered by the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century.

Very similar: paleobotanical research conducted by Dolores Piperno in a central area of the island known as the 50-Hectare Plot suggests that the forest in this part of the island is at least four to five hundred years old; that before the Spanish conquest, it was not subject to agricultural slash and burn techniques; and that even though some areas were cleared for human settlement between 400 and 1500 AD, an ancient forest continued to exist around such settlements. As Piperno puts it, a ‘mosaic-like image’ emerges from the paleobotanical register, with areas of forest and of clearing. The clearings corresponded to primary ‘residential zones’, while some of the forest around these clearings appears to have been left relatively undisturbed (2).

Very different: the Spanish conquistadores would not, of course, have reached today’s island-which-was-not-an-island by boat. Nor would they have walked along the trails that now crisscross the island. Even if the region’s aboriginal groups had some of their own trails, Balboa and the rest of the Spanish explorers that arrived in the region in the 1510s would not have seen the hundreds of artifacts associated with today’s research projects, and which are found along the contemporary trails. Indeed a walk along parts of the present trails can be something of a surreal experience; even as one appreciates the striking beauty of the forest, many of the trees and plants in the understory have fluorescently coloured ribbons that mark the places where scientists have conducted experiments. By the Smithsonian’s own account, Barro Colorado Island is probably the most intensively researched tropical forest on Earth. One doesn’t have to believe in the fabled ‘butterfly effect’ posited by chaos theorists to suggest that the hubbub of scientific activity is itself likely to have had significant effects on a number of aspects of the island’s ecology. For example, the trails made for the scientists are also used by some of the non-human mammals, and this may have directly or indirectly affected the distribution of these species, if not of those they feed on. The more intensive presence of scientists working in some areas of the island may well have led some species to either vacate those areas, or on the contrary, to seek food or shelter there. Last but not least, if parts of the island had already been modified by a modern human presence when the Canal was built, the very effort to erase such a presence would have had an effect, however benevolently conceived, on the surrounding forest. From this perspective, the question is not whether the scientists and modern culture more generally have had an effect, but the precise nature and extent of that effect.

* * *

In the report that I am currently writing about my research on Barro Colorado, I employ the notion of a recombinant ecology to refer to the interaction of any such transformations with what are likely to be the much longer durations of most evolutionary dynamics on the island. Readers familiar with the second part of ‘Showing to Save: A Critique of Natural History Documentaries’ may recall that I defined such an ecology as ‘the biological communities assembled through the dense comings and goings of urban life, rather than the discrete and undisturbed relations between particular species and habitats that are the staple of conservation biology’. This definition, which I borrowed from Sarah Whatmore and Steven Hinchcliffe(3), is hardly suitable for the ecology of Barro Colorado. In some respects, the island is almost as far removed from Panama’s urbanity as is the forest along the Colombian border. And yet, as noted by W.H. Allee, one of the island’s earlier naturalists, ‘One can commute from civilization at Ancon and spend from 9:15 to 3:30 on Barro Colorado’, and ‘Probably the greatest value of this new station for biological research lies in its ready accessability and its nearness to the highly civilized cities of the Canal Zone’(4).

It is not just the location of the island that begins to transform it into a rather modern setting. Anyone who visits the island’s impressive science laboratory, and finds out about its remarkable research projects may well come away with the sense that the island is the site, if not for a conurbation, then certainly for an utterly modern set of activities. Amongst other aspects, the use of sophisticated communications facilities and the wonders of radio telemetry mean that an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), or indeed a bee traveling through the forest can be monitored from an office in Princeton University. In this sense if not in others, Barro Colorado seems every bit as wired up as a modern city, where any mobile phone user’s location can be precisely pinpointed by way of an analogous system. From this perspective, the island’s ecology is best regarded as a monument to a remarkable interaction between that most modern of projects—engaging in the scientific study of an object, from afar—and a habitat which has managed to survive, apparently relatively undisturbed, in the face of extraordinarily complex, powerful, and extraneous forces. The notion of a ‘recombinant’ or ‘hybrid’ ecology may and must be adapted to refer to such interactions away from urban spaces, sensu stricto.

When one begins to think about Barro Colorado in this way, it becomes apparent that the island’s history, as much as its present, is steeped in such hybridity. As will have been evident from my earlier account of the Canal’s construction, the island’s very existence as an island is the result of a modern project, par excellence. The construction of the Panama Canal was not only one of the great engineering feats of the early 20th century, but also one of several 19th century projects (the Canal began to be built by the French in the late 19th century) that signaled a quintessentially modern impatience, not to say intolerance with ancient physical barriers. In the first half of the 19th century, it was horses that were the victims of this impatience. As noted by Wolfgang Schivelbusch,

‘As long as the conquest of space was tied to animal power, it had to proceed within the limits of the animals’ physical capabilities. One way of gaining an immediate perception of the distance travelled was to observe the exhaustion of the draught animals … Steam power, inexhaustible and capable of infinite acceleration, reversed the relationship between recalcitrant nature (i.e. spatial distance) and locomotive engine. Nature (i.e., spatial distance) … now succumbed to the new mechanical locomotive engine of the railroad that, in a frequently used metaphor, “shoots right through like a bullet”. “Annihilation of time and space” was the topos which the early nineteenth century used to describe the new situation … Motion was no longer dependent on the conditions of natural space, but on a mechanical power that created its own new spatiality’(5).

The building first of the Suez Canal and then of the Panama Canal arguably signaled an even more ambitious determination to use mechanical power to confound the constraints posed by natural space. If steam locomotives in the first half of the 19th century displaced horse power, the building of the Panama Canal showed a willingness to displace an entire continent: at a stroke, the Canal obviated the need to sail around the treacherous Straight of Magellan.

I say ‘at a stroke’, but in this as in so many other contexts, the modern quest for speed took a terrible toll: tens of thousands of people died building first the French and then the American versions of the Canal. The homes and livelihoods of the inhabitants of dozens of villages along the flooded Chagres River Valley were destroyed, and beneath the Gatun Lake’s 425 square kilometres there lies the remnant of a vast forest, most of whose inhabitants were slowly transformed into lifeless bottom dwellers when the Chagres was stopped in 1910. From this perspective, Barro Colorado is something akin to the tip of a tropical iceberg of destruction, a tip, like so many other similar tips across the world, that serves as a reminder of a nature that once was.

* * *

It might be inferred from this account that the most significant transformations stopped when the building of the Canal ended. In fact, a case can be made that far-reaching changes were to continue long after the Gatun reached its present level. If in the first years the island became a veritable Noah’s Ark, with a possible superabundance of species of animals capable of climbing or flying onto the island, this would presumably have had short-, medium- and long-term effects on the distribution of many of the island’s plant species. By contrast, in time some of the species (plant or animal) would have found it difficult to survive in what might well be regarded as a forest fragment. There is evidence, for example, that the number of bird species on the island has declined since the island became an island (6). While some animal species have shown a surprising ability to establish their own migratory channels to and from the mainland, others are incapable of swimming or even flying across a comparatively short stretch of open water. To these transformations we must add, as I began to suggest earlier, those generated by the activities of the island’s contemporary human dwellers.

Even as the mentioned transformations have taken place, small and large ships have navigated almost continuously past the island. Anyone standing at the end of the Fairchild Trail on a trade wind-blown day will have wondered how if at all decades of diesel smoke (and before that the soot of steamers) might have affected this corner of the island. In 2007, scientists from the Smithsonian expressed their concern at the rather larger scale effects that the looming enlargement of the Canal might have not just on the Barro Colorado Nature Monument itself, but on the biological exchange that has long taken place in the Panamanian isthmus. For some 3 million years, the Panamanian isthmus has been a kind of biological bridge between North and South America. Might the growing Canal, or rather the adjacent Canal development zone, block that bridge?

* * *

I have emphasized the discontinuity between today’s Barro Colorado, and the ancient forest. But anyone who visits the forest and is willing to look past the fluorescent ribbons is likely to be awed by the permanence of a world that, however transformed by modernity, continues to provide evidence of dynamics that existed long before the first Spanish conquistadores made their way across the isthmus. Every morning, the ‘dawn chorus’ is sung as much by birds as it is by howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata). A walk along the Smithsonian’s immaculately kept campus is as likely to provide vistas of giant ships as it is of creatures that treat the concrete paths and buildings as yet another natural structure upon which to carry on with the battle for survival: here the leaf-cutter ants (Atta colombica or Atta cephalotes) file busily along the walkways, there a vested anteater (Tamandua mexicana) snuffles along the storm drains looking for other insects. A small group of Chestnut-Mandibled Toucans (Rhamphastos swainsonii) swoops by even as a boat’s horn announces the last ferry’s departure. In the evening the fishing bats (Noctilio leporinus) make their runs along the edge of the research station’s piers, and the male Tungara frogs (Physalaemus pustulosus) begin to call out for mates. The continued presence of such animals and their complex inter-relations, let alone the growth of the island’s magnificent trees, act as a warning to any cultural theorist inclined to dismiss the notion of nature as no more than an artifact of a Western imagination.

That said, I have begun to explain why the opposite tendency—to focus entirely on the ‘natural’ nature of nature, with little or no regard for the influence of humankind—is equally problematic and must also be avoided. The predominant popular representation of scientific inquiry continues to try to hold onto the myth of a science that has no influence whatsoever on the objects that it studies. In fact, in Barro Colorado as in other parts of the world, many if not most of the scientists intervene as enthusiastically in the lives of a variety of plants and animals as many of the plants and animals intervene in the epidermises of the scientists. The point is not to deny that aspects of the forest continue to be structured by relationships that have hardly been modified by the activities of Homo sapiens v. barro coloradensis. Rather, the point is to suggest that the overarching narrative that establishes a neat opposition between nature and culture, researched object and researching subject, urbanity and wilderness is perhaps even more difficult to sustain on Barro Colorado than it is in other biological reserves. From this perspective, the fascination of the island, at least for this (social) scientist, lies as much in everything that appears not to have changed, as in everything that has changed, and continues to change thanks to the extraordinary juxtaposition of the spaces and times of an ancient forest, and the spaces and times of modern culture.

References

(1) Winfield M. Thompson (1932), ‘Isle of Upside Down is Barro Colorado’ in Ocean Ferry, Dec. 1932, pp. 5-6, 13.
(2) Piperno, D. (1990) ‘Fitolitos, arqueología y cambios prehistóricos de la vegetación en un lote de cincuenta hectáreas de la isla de Barro Colorado’ in E. Leigh, A. Stanley Rand, D. Windsor (Eds) Ecología de un Bosque Tropical: Ciclos estacionales y cambios a largo plazo. Panama: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, p. 156. Translation from the Spanish by the author of this post.
(3) Whatmore, S. & Hinchcliffe, S. (2002) ‘Living Cities: Making Space for Urban Nature’, in Soundings: Journal of Politics and Culture. No. 22.
(4) W.C. Allee (1924) ‘The Barro Colorado Laboratory’, Science, 59:1, pp. 521-522
(5) W. Schivelbusch (1986) The Railway Journey: the industrialization of time and space in the 19th century. Lemington Spa: Berg Publishers.
(6) See for example, W.D. Robinson (1999) ‘Long-term changes in the avifauna of a tropical forest isolate, Barro Colorado Island, Panama’, in Conservation Biology 13:85-97.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

‘Romantic Red’ and the Claims of Evolutionary Psychologists

Is it the ’science of attraction’, or is it the ‘attraction of science’?

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

Every so often the news media come up with a headline that suggests that scientists have proven that some social stereotype—or what might be described more generally as an ideological relation—is a matter of nature, that is to say, of our ‘natural’ biology. Sexism seems to be a particularly attractive ideology. In the BBC alone, the following are some of the headlines that have appeared over the last few years: ‘“Hormonal” women most attractive’; ‘Attraction “determined by walk”’; ‘Slim waist holds sway in history’; and ‘Hourglass figure fertility link’. It would appear, in this sense, that there is a ’symbiotic’ relationship between a group of psychologists engaged in what is often described ‘the science of attraction’, and some media editors who apparently are willing to publicise whatever ’science of attraction’ is sent their way. In such cases it would seem that ‘sex sells’, as combined with ‘science must be true’, is irresistibly attractive—I’m tempted to say, tongue in cheek, ‘biologically attractive’—to some journalists. The result is a dynamic that may well develop and sustain rather disturbing conceptions—ideological conceptions—of the nature of sexuality.

A week ago a number of different news media carried the latest installment of this kind of story, and in this essay I would like to offer an analysis that explains why we should treat most, if not all such stories with the deepest skepticism.

In the installment in question, the BBC news online claimed that ‘Wearing red boosts attraction’ and this was followed by a series of equally extraordinary statements:

‘Women who don a little red dress before going out with a man may find their date more attentive and generous, according to scientists.’ ‘Men said they would spend more money on a woman pictured in red, compared with the same woman wearing a blue shirt.’‘Experts say that red signals ovulation or attractiveness in other species.’And ‘The researchers say that their study is clear evidence that the colour red makes men feel more amorous – even if this is only on a subconscious level’(1).

Part of the power of such statements is that they combine tacit appeals to what seems like good common sense with the authority of science: ‘the researchers say’, ‘there is clear evidence’, ‘according to the scientists’,'experts say…’ and so forth. This would appear to be a win-win situation for everyone: the journalists can claim that they are reporting on scientific findings, a practice which is likely to be especially lauded by those who want to see more ‘educational contents’ or ‘high culture’ in the media; a real or imagined public can learn about research that might have a direct bearing on their everyday lives; and of course, the scientists might well get a career boost by being able to boast that their research has ‘made headlines’. In fact, such coverage is actually a ‘lose-lose’ situation for at least two groups: the members of the public that get conned into thinking that human sexuality is hard-wired to our ‘biological heritage’; and whatever social group ends up being objectified by any ‘ism’ that is allegedly ‘proven’ by the scientists: racism, ethnocentrism, or in this case, sexism.

After seeing all the media coverage, I decided to acquire the original essay from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Andrew J. Elliot & Daniela Niesta’s ‘Romantic red: red enhances men’s attraction to women’). What I read confirmed my fears: the research was sociobiological in its orientation, and engaged in the kind of quasi-scientific reasoning that is so often the hallmark of the type of psychology in question.

* * *

Let us begin this critique with the basics. Sociobiology refers to the members of a de facto movement that includes the scientists and social scientists who employ positivist research methods in an effort to demonstrate that one or another aspect of human social practice is biologically determined. The movement includes such household names as Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape), Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker) and more recently, Robert (Lord) Winston, the doctor and TV presenter who fronted The Human Instinct and several other BBC series. Perhaps its most widely admired advocate, and arguably the founder of the movement, is the renowned myrmecologist, E.O. Wilson (Sociobiology and On Human Nature), who summed up the movement’s discourse when he told another sociobiologist (Steven Pinker) that ‘everything that’s in the body, including the brain and the action of the mind, is obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry as we understand it[sic]’. According to Wilson, ‘there is a unity of the sciences’—a ‘consilience’ —‘through a network of cause and effect explanations in physics, biology and even the lower reaches of the social sciences.’ In the same interview, Wilson suggested that he is intent on conducting a re-examination of ‘the basic theory and contents of sociobiology, beginning with insects and eventually coming back to humans’(2).

If we adopt a sufficiently cosmic perspective, this must be a valid perspective. Think, for a moment, of the sheer vastness of the universe. Then think of the minute time and space that we humans occupy in that universe. Does it not make good sense to say that the differences between an ant and a human are insignificant when considered in the context of such an incomprehensibly vast space and time? And, given the verity of this observation, should we not also accept that we humans must be subject to the kinds of forces described by what Wilson refers to as a ‘network of cause and effect explanations’?

On one level of analysis—the level or perspective defined by the sociobiologists themselves—the answers to all of the above questions must be affirmative. Indeed, some would perhaps argue that it is dangerous to contradict the sociobiological logic at a time when religious fundamentalists the world over are arguably doing their best to return us to what might eventually become a form of theocracy. Not all sociobiologists oppose science and religion, but I hope I’m right when I say that sociobiologists sharply (and rightly) oppose the kind of literal interpretation of the Bible that would have our forebears munching on illicit apples in pretty gardens just a few thousand years ago.

The problem is that the level of analysis determined by many if not most sociobiologists is fundamentally biased when it comes to explaining humans—biased in favour of a biologically determinist world view, and a positivist conception of science. Move beyond either of these ‘isms’, and zoom in on the different species a bit, and you will suddenly find that, actually, we humans are quite different from ants, and that maybe we should use rather different forms of explanation to account for many, if not most aspects of each other’s behaviour.

* * *

Let us go back to ‘Romantic Red’. Those who have studied and critiqued sociobiology (as applied to humans) over the years will soon recognise a familiar modus operandi in the research of Elliot and Niesta. A detailed account of this pattern would transform this already long essay into a very long essay, so I will try to be brief. If the mentioned modus operandi can be summed up as a series of ’stages’, then the following is a sketch of the stages.

The first stage involves choosing some social practice to research. It could be any social practice, but many sociobiologists tend to choose practices that involve social stereotypes, and/or some form of social objectification–one infamous example involved trying to ‘prove’ that Blacks are indeed ‘less intelligent’ than Whites. In the case of Elliot and Niesta, the subject chosen for analysis is what they describe as the hypothesis that ‘red leads men to view women as more attractive and more sexually desirable. Red is hypothesized to serve as an aphrodisiac for men because it carries the meaning of sex and romance in the context of heterosexual interaction’(3). This choice means that, from the outset, the researchers have adopted the predominant, conventional, and homocentric stance regarding matters of sexual attraction: even if the focus is ostensively on men, the ultimate object of research is arguably the reception of the biology, or what is represented as the biology, of women.

I will return to the fateful character of this choice below. Here it is more important to note that the second stage in sociobiological research of this kind typically involves deciding, mainly if not entirely on the basis of circumstantial evidence, that the practice to be researched is ‘universal’. Doing so is a prerequisite for a biologically determinist discourse: if it’s ‘natural’, it must be ‘universal’ to humans (unless, of course, one subscribes to a racist view of humans, which some sociobiologists do).

In the case of Elliot and Niesta’s essay, the hypothesis is justified in a manner that reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges’ famous reference to a ‘Chinese’ [sic] encyclopaedia. I quote in its entirety the passage with the ‘evidence’ of the ‘universal’ nature of what the authors describe as ‘societal use of red’:

‘In some of the earliest rituals known to anthropologists, red ochre was used as face and body paint on females to symbolize the emergence of fertility (Knight, Powers, & Watts, 1995; Kohn, 1999; Lee, 2006). Red often appears as a symbol of passion, lust, and fertility in ancient mythology and folklore (Barua, 1962; Erdoes & Ortiz, 1984; Hupka, Zaleski, Otto, Reidl, & Tarabrina, 1997; Hutchings, 2004; Jobes, 1962). In literature, red has repeatedly been associated with female sexuality, especially illicit sexuality, most famously in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic work The Scarlet Letter. Likewise, in popular stage and film, there are many instances in which red clothing, especially a red dress, has been used to represent passion or sexuality (e.g., A Streetcar Named Desire, Dial M for Murder, and Jezebel; Greenfield, 2005). Red is paired with hearts on Valentine’s Day to symbolize romantic affection and is a highly popular color for women’s lingerie. Red has been used for centuries to signal sexual availability or “open for business” in red-light districts. Women commonly use red lipstick and rouge to heighten their attractiveness, a practice that has been in place at least since the time of the ancient Egyptians (10,000 BCE; Regas & Kozlowski, 1998)’(4).

Societal use of red, indeed. The above paragraph is an excellent illustration of the kind of poor common sense that sociobiologists frequently muster to defend what tends to be, from the start, little more than a universalising discourse. If this is the kind of ‘evidence’ that the research is based on, then every other aspect of the research must be suspect. The point is not to deny that a certain association between ‘red’—a huge and by no means unproblematic category or abstract singular(5)—and sexuality might be present in more than one cultural context. The point is that if one is going to make the kinds of universal claims that the authors make, it had better be based on much, much stronger evidence. And a key aspect of this must involve a far closer, and contextual analysis of the possible meanings of different uses of different reds in, and across, cultural contexts.

The third stage is to suggest that the practice in question is ultimately a function of nature, i.e. of a biology conceived in opposition to, or at least as transcending, contemporary social practice. This operation involves an exceedingly slippery politics. One the one hand, the research effectively seeks to reduce social practice to its ostensibly ‘natural’ causes; in effect, the ’social’ becomes no more than a kind of continuous ‘function’ of the biological. But at the same time, sociobiologists cannot help but oppose culture and nature on the level of their own discourse. I noted this contradiction in the work of E.O. Wilson himself in my book Mediating Nature (see pp. 19-20). Amongst other philosophers, Kate Soper has done an excellent job of revealing the extent to which the nature-culture opposition remains a tacit, if much reviled aspect of modern discourses about the nature of nature. As she puts it, ‘Whether… it is claimed that “nature” and “culture” are clearly differentiated realms or that no hard and fast delineation can be made between them, all such thinking is tacitly reliant on the humanity-nature antithesis itself and would have no purchase on our understanding without it’ (6). One of the philosophical problems of sociobiology is that many of its advocates try, discursively speaking, to have it both ways: in the interview mentioned earlier, Wilson, for example, makes the case that we humans are little different from ants, but in his very beautifully written book, The Diversity of Life, he himself speaks of ‘the nonhuman world’(7).

In the case of ‘Romantic Red’, the authors have no sooner made a common sense case for universal ‘societal uses of red’, than they engage in a similar form of argumentation to suggest that the ‘red-sex link’ is a matter of our ‘biological heritage’:

‘Although it is possible that the red–sex link is a product of societal conditioning alone, there is reason to believe that it may also have roots in our biological heritage. Many nonhuman female primates display red on their genitals, perineum, chest, or face when nearing ovulation (Dixson, 1983; Gerald, 2003; Hrdy & Whitten, 1987; Setchell, Wickings, & Knapp, 2006). This reddening of the skin is due to elevated estrogen (relative to progesterone) levels; increased estrogen enhances vascular blood flow under the skin surface that is manifested as red coloration (Dixson & Herbert, 1977). In some species, these displays are highly conspicuous, such as the exaggerated red swelling of the perineum in baboons, chimpanzees, and macaques, whereas in other species these displays are far less prominent, as in the slight reddening of the vulva in gibbons, gorillas, and strepsirhines (Barelli, Heistermann, Boesch, & Reichard, 2007; Sillen-Tullberg & Moller, 1993). The precise function of red coloration in female primates, both across species and across various manifestations, remains a matter of debate (Nunn, 1999; Setchell & Wickings, 2004; Stallman & Froehlich, 2000), but there is widespread consensus that it represents a sexual signal designed to attract mates (Deschner, Heistermann, Hodges, & Boesch, 2004). Research has shown that male primates are indeed particularly attracted to female conspecifics exhibiting red, as indicated by increased masturbation and copulation attempts (Bielert, Girolami, & Jowell, 1989; Waitt, Gerald, Little, & Krasielburd, 2006)’[8].

Several aspects of this argument are worth deconstructing. The authors accept that, as they put it, ‘the red–sex link’ may be ‘a product of societal conditioning alone’. But note that the expression arguably has the paradoxical function of normalizing what has by no means been proven, viz. that there is a universal ‘societal’ ‘red-sex link’. Note also that the authors acknowledge, albeit in passing, that not all nonhuman female primates display red on their genitals, perineum, chest, or face when nearing ovulation. They also acknowledge that ‘the precise function of red coloration in female primates, both across species and across various manifestations, remains a matter of debate’. Yet this counter-evidence is, in effect, swept under the carpet of the following suggestions: first, that there is in fact a ‘consensus’ in favour of a definite ‘red-sex link’ in primates; and second, that there is additional evidence that ‘male primates are indeed particularly attracted to female conspecifics exhibiting red (Witcher, Campbell, & Green, 1998)’.

As far as I can tell, the authors’ own arguments suggest that, in the best of cases, the evidence for a ‘red-sex link’ amongst nonhuman primates is ambiguous. The implication, as we are invited to read on about humans’ biology, is nonetheless that we humans ‘also’ have such a link, albeit a less conspicuous one:

‘For human females, ovulation is not advertised in a conspicuous manner, but researchers are beginning to document the presence of subtle physiological, psychological, and behavioral markers of reproductive status. As with other female primates, women’s estrogen–progesterone ratio is elevated near ovulation, which enhances blood flow (Fortney et al., 1988; Lynn, McCord, & Halliwell, 2007). In addition, women’s general skin tone lightens mid-cycle (Van den Berghe & Frost, 1986), and women near ovulation tend to wear clothing that leaves more skin visible (Grammer, Renninger, & Fischer, 2005; Haselton, Mortezaie, Pillsworth, Bleske-Rechek, & Fredrick, 2007). Furthermore, women at mid-cycle report more sexual interest and are more easily sexually aroused (Bullivant et al., 2004; Slob, Bax, Hop, Rowland, & van der Werflen Bosch, 1996), meaning the red blush of flirtation (on the face, neck, and upper chest; Eibl-Eiblsfeldt, 1989; Keltner & Buswell, 1997) and the red flush of sexual excitation (which begins on the lower chest and spreads to the upper chest, neck, and face as excitation increases; Katchadourian, 1984) are more prevalent at this time. As such, it is likely that women, like other female primates, display red more often and more prominently when nearing ovulation. We also think it reasonable to posit that men, like their more primitive male relatives, are predisposed to interpret a display of red by a female conspecific as a sexual signal and to respond accordingly’(9).

Here again, the paragraph begins by admitting that in humans, female ovulation is not advertised in a conspicuous manner. Pursued to its logical conclusion, this point alone might bring the scaffolding for any biologically determinist interpretation of the ‘red-sex link’ crashing down. Instead, the authors pursue the evidence, if it can be called that, of ‘subtle’ changes associated with human ovulation. Several of the changes seem to be based on unhelpful generalisations in their own right: for example, what is the relevance to the argument that there is ‘a lightening of skin tone’? To be sure, does such a lightening happen to all women, and would it be perceptible in all women? Is it really the case that all women near ovulation (‘near ovulation’?) ‘wear clothing that leaves more skin visible’ in all contexts? Does ‘sexual interest’ or even ‘sexual arousal’ automatically lead to a ‘red blush of flirtation’ (or to reverse the order, does flirtation always involve a red blush)? And is any such blush really ’subtle’? If one is going to use such terms in the context of a positivist epistemology, one had better develop pretty discrete and measurable categories (to be clear, I’m not arguing in favour of such categories; I am simply picking up where the authors’ own use of positivism has significant problems.)

To return to the researchers’ argument: even after the authors admit that women don’t have the kind of conspicuous changes associated with some primates, they seem to suggest that women do, in effect, become red, or at any rate, redder during ovulation: ‘As such, it is likely that women, like other female primates, display red more often and more prominently when nearing ovulation(emphasis added)’. Eh? As far as I can tell, either there is a contradiction here—are humans like other primates, or aren’t they?— or the authors need to develop a theory of tacit, unconscious, or unselfconscious ‘displays’.

Towards the end of the section that justifies the hypothesis, Elliot and Niesta bring together the two theoretical houses of cards in one sweeping statement, the italicized aspect of which establishes a typically sociobiological hierarchy, and order of priority:

‘In sum, red is clearly linked to sex in the context of heterosexual interaction, and this link is viewed as emerging from both societal use of red and a biologically engrained predisposition to red. These two sources may contribute to the red–sex link in joint fashion. That is, we posit that the societal use of red is not random, but actually derives from the biologically based predisposition to perceive red as a sexual signal. For example, the aforementioned use of red lipstick and rouge may represent, at least in some instances, an attempt to mimic the vascularization present during ovulation and sexual excitation (Low, 1979). Likewise, red may be used in red-light districts because it is the color that appears on the sexually aroused female body (not only in the publicly visible sexual flush, but, more intimately, in the engorgement of the labia minora; Luria, Friedman, & Rose, 1987). As these examples illustrate, the societal use of red can be seen as not only reinforcing the inherent meaning of red, but also as extending the application of this meaning beyond the tether of natural bodily processes’(italics added, 10).

The next stage in the sociobiological modus operandi is usually to ‘prove’ the hypothesis by way of the hypothetico-deductive method, i.e. employing one or more experiments designed to enable the experimenter to deduce whether some universal ‘law’ is valid or not.

In the case of ‘Romantic Red’, there is clearly nothing like a ‘law’ to be proven. But the manner in which the ‘proof’ itself is conducted is revealing. In this post I will merely mention one particularly glaring deficiency: it might be assumed that a research project involving a huge claim regarding the universality of the ‘red-sex link’ would involve thousands, if not tens of thousands of research subjects spanning cultures across the globe. Instead, the researchers use 27 ‘male undergraduates in the United States’ for the first experiment; 63 male and female undergraduates for the second experiment; 37 male undergraduates for the third experiment; and 31 male undergraduates for the fourth experiment. More than the tiny numbers—given the universality of the claims—what is striking is the sociological, to not say statistical naiveté of the researchers, and presumably of those who conducted any peer review of the essay. Do they really believe that 181 members of a relatively homogeneous social group—young people, all of them presumably studying in the same university—can be used to make such huge claims about the ‘red-sex link’? (I say 181, but the number might actually have been a lot lower if some of the respondents were allowed to participate in more than one experiment; to be sure, the claims of the research are arguably as good as any one of the experiments, in which a maximum of 37 male respondents participated.)

* * *

I think I’ve said enough about the logic of the research to show just how seriously flawed it is. Let us now move on to consider to what happened to the research after it was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This is typically the next, and ‘final’ stage in this kind of research: as noted earlier, many sociobiologists seem to be very good at getting the news media to publicise their research; or at least, many seem to be very good at producing research that appeals to some of the news media. This step is crucial because it ensures that the research acquires a salience that it wouldn’t attain otherwise. And with that salience there arguably comes power—potentially, academic promotion, but also, a certain cultural authority that goes with wide social recognition. The point is not to criticise Elliot and Niesta for seeking a wider audience for their research, if indeed they were at all involved in the publicity (PR departments in universities frequently take over this process, and academics don’t necessarily control how their research is promoted or recontextualized). In the case of ‘Romantic Red’, it is nevertheless possible to see how the two dimensions (the research, and its representation) came together in a way that might well facilitate sexual objectification, i.e. what is commonly known as sexism.

On the one hand, the research sets out to prove, in effect, that what matters most in sexual attraction is the biology of women, as perceived by men. There is arguably a double whammy at work here: not only is the explanatory focus on women’s biology, but men are tacitly portrayed as the ones that do the perceiving of, or gazing upon, that biology.

On the other hand, the BBC article not only echoes this standpoint, but amplifies and extends it: red becomes a ‘booster’ for sexual attraction—full stop—and somehow, a ‘little red dress’ becomes a part of the equation. For good measure—and this is an aspect that the authors themselves have put into their research methodology—it is claimed that wearing red will also get the men to spend more money on the women. All other mediating aspects are eliminated, in favour of just one ‘factor’: wearing red, or rather, women wearing red. In a seemingly effortless recombination, sexual objectification and capitalism are made mixed, matched, and legitimised. What matters, or so the article suggests, as ‘backed up’ by the research, is for the woman to make herself sexually attractive by way of red, and this will ensure that the money and the ‘amorous feelings’ get going. Thank god (and/or complex evolutionary processes) that life is not so simple.

* * *

I can well imagine what the sociobiologists’ rejoinder might be: are you suggesting that our biology is not an important aspect of sexual attraction? No; of course it is important. The problem emerges when certain social and cultural aspects are ignored; or when the social aspects are reduced to little more than a natural function of an ‘underlying’ biology, a ‘biological heritage’. This is what is known as methodological functionalism at its worst. If the power of the social aspects is ignored, or if false claims are made about the power of ‘nature’, and such claims are then taken to be an ‘objective truth’, then someone is likely to end up being misled, if not disempowered. After all, it is widely assumed that what is ‘natural’ cannot be changed. In the case of ‘Romantic Red’, what is, by the authors’ own admission, potentially ‘a product of societal conditioning [sic] alone’, is in the end reduced to a matter of biology: ‘we posit that the societal use of red is not random, but actually derives from the biologically based predisposition to perceive red as a sexual signal.’ In the paper’s conclusion the authors further state that

‘The practical implications of our findings are striking in the extent of their reach. That red is an aphrodisiac for men is not only valuable information for both men and women in the mating game, but should also prove of considerable interest to fashion and image consultants, product designers, and marketers and advertisers, among (many) others. Given the subtlety of the effect (men show little awareness of it) and the ease with which the effect may be evoked (via a 5-s glimpse of red), it is easy to imagine red having a widespread influence in daily life’(emphasis added, 11).

Easy to imagine, but not so easy to prove: the authors belatedly recognise towards the end of their essay that further research might need to consider the social context. With some effort, a case might be made that the journalists should have noted this in the recontextualisation of the research. This, however, is somewhat disingenuous. On the one hand, the entire research methodology and epistemology is biased in favour of biological determinism. On the other hand, it is not exactly a secret that many journalists tend to accentuate and caricature much of the science that they popularise. In the context of a society that arguably remains deeply if subtly sexist, it is hardly surprising that the BBC reporter(s) have not only reproduced the biologically determinist and universalizing orientation of the research, but have actually extended its claims: as noted earlier, it is not only that ‘Wearing red boosts attraction’—a headline that might lead men to start wearing red shirts!—but also that ‘Women who don a little red dress before going out with a man may find their date more attentive and generous, according to scientists’ (BBC, as per the earlier quote).

Earlier, I mentioned that sociobiology, as applied to humans, is premised on a positivist epistemology. This is perhaps the most grievous aspect of the research design. Despite the authors’ early suggestions to the contrary, the research continues to be haunted by its reliance on what one scholar has described as the ‘rule of phenomenalism’(12)—simplifying somewhat, the notion that essences are no different from phenomena, or, put even more simply, that any given practice is more or less unidimensional in the sense that its meaning is fixed. ‘Romantic Red’ arguably constitutes a de facto return to the rule of phenomenalism in so far as it effectively tries to affix the meaning of ‘red’ to an allegedly biological function—a function which either transcends, or is itself expressed by, any social practice. Such a fixing—in every sense of the word—is potentially dynamite from the point of view of sexual politics. I have noted elsewhere the way in which modern institutions have silently humanized ‘nature’ only to project the humanized nature back onto cultural groups via procedures of cosmomorphism (see Mediating Nature, p. 42ff). Such a circuit of anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism might well be one of the consequences of ‘Romantic Red’. What chance, one might ask, does a more liberated, and progressive sexual politics have if many men and women believe, on the back of this kind of research, that when it comes to sex—or at least ’sex’ as it relates to ‘red’—we are no more (and no less) than gibbons, macaques or chimpanzees? The problem is not to twist science in favour of a certain sexual politics, but rather to make sure that a certain science does not end up twisting our sexual politics.

References

(1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7693708.stm, accessed November 5, 2008. The research attracted the attention of several other news media. See for example, the Los Angeles Times coverage at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2008/10/color-red-is-an.html.
(2) in http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wilson03/wilson_print.html, accessed November 5, 2008.
(3) Elliot, A.J. & Niesta, D. (2008] ‘Romantic red: red enhances men’s attraction to women’ in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5): 1150-1164, p. 1150.
(4) Elliot & Niesta Op. Cit., p. 1151.
(5) Williams, R. (1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised edition. London: Fontana.
(6) Soper, K. (1995) What is Nature? Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 15.
(7) Wilson, E.O. (1992) The Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, p. 9.
[8] Elliot & Niesta Op. Cit., p. 1151.
(9) Elliot & Niesta Op. Cit., p. 1151.
(10) Elliot & Niesta Op. Cit., p. 1151.
(11) Elliot & Niesta Op. Cit., p. 1161.
(12) Kolokowski, L. (1972) Positivist philosophy : from Hume to the Vienna Circle / Leszek Kolakowski translated [from the Polish] by Norbert Guterman.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved