What’s this? A new column? Surely The Iron Warrior has enough columns already? In fact, isn’t it fair to say that we are inundated with columns no one but the author’s mother gives a damn about? (Hi Mom!) Well, my dear friend, inundation is exactly the problem. There is too much research going on, much of it made under oppressive circumstances by addicts who will publish anything for just one more hit of alcohol or, even worse, caffeine. That is why I am here. Every two weeks, I pledge to crawl through the congealed mass of muck that is the corpus of scientific research to find the real gems that are have been suppressed. Some are hidden to obscure their great brilliance. Others are simply left to rot in the mid-400s of a 1000-page periodical. Whatever the reason, the lack of knowledge of these ideas is a travesty that I demand be rectified.
For this, my first issue, I decided to play it safe and rummage through a journal whose name just screams excitement and hidden gems: PLOS ONE, published by the Public Library of Science. Oddly, the Public Library of Science (or PLOS, as I assume they do not like to be called) seems keen to distance themselves from their journal; my brief tour around the homepages of PLOS ONE didn’t even mention the Public Library of Science. It wasn’t until after some desperate searching that I found an encyclopedia entry on PLOS ONE on one of the publicly-created web-based digital encyclopedias. Unfortunately for the long-suffering Public Library of Science, their name was the seventeenth-through-twentieth words of PLOS ONE’s entry.
With the mystery of the paper’s sponsor sorted, I was ready to delve into the crap pile to find my buried chest of dragon-pirate gold. And I was not but twelve search pages in when I found my gallium cookpot: a spectacular piece by Janelle Wagnild and Cara M. Wall-Scheffler. (If you combined your name with your partner, widow, and re-marry then do you end up with three last names?) It was, as I predicted above, buried below a horribly dull article about the surprisingly effective use of vitamin B12 to fully treat obesity in hours. I had found it. My white whale. My dyad, as it were. (That was a joke. It will make sense once I tell you the title.) “Energetic Consequences of Human Sociality: Walking Speed Choices among Friendly Dyads.”
Truly, Wagnild et al. had made a marvelous work. Indeed, I would like to reprint the work in full, but Canadian copyright law being what it is, I doubt that would fall under fair use. Instead, let me regale you with some of my more favourite lines.
Walking, as the abstract of the paper makes abundantly clear, is a serious business. In fact, it is such a serious business that all humans “have an optimal walking speed…” which they rigorously adhere to. Furthermore, since this walking speed is dependent upon the geometry of each individual’s body, if a group of humans were to walk together, some (or perhaps all), would have to adopt sub-optimal walking speeds, which is “an energetic dilemma [especially] for mixed-sex walking groups.”
The authors of the study go on to describe their experiment, in which they investigate the method by which the simplest possible human social group, a dyad, overcomes the energy dilemma. Their findings are truly spectacular, so I will cite this portion of the abstract in full (and give new-to-InDesign Editor-in-Chief Vince Magas the opportunity to flex his skills trying to set up the long-neglected “large quote” format):
“Our findings show that males walk at a significantly slower pace to match the females’ paces (p = 0.009), when the female is their romantic partner. The paces of friends of either same or mixed sex walking together did not significantly change (p>0.05). Thus significant pace adjustment appears to be limited to romantic partners.”
To be clear, my engaged readers, so far I have told you of nothing but the abstract. The paper itself, as I said before, is quite long, so I can only share with you some highlights. Rest assured, however, that their research is comprehensive and complete. For instance, instead of just assuming that romantic couples will walk closer together and therefore more slowly than non-romantic couples, “[leading] to an energetic impact for both sexes,” they find two different sources to reinforce their claims. Such rigor would be well-observed by the co-op students who will be half-assing their work reports in just a few short months. And lest you be concerned about coercion and intimidation by the study authors affecting the results in any way, I can assure you that the participants “signed written informed consent forms approved by Seattle Pacific University’s IRB Committee” before any walking was undertaken.
The depth of the research performed for this paper is immense. The researchers tested seven different types of walking that could occur, ranging from a pair of same-sex or opposite-sex friends walking together to a heterosexual romantic dyad (I expect the applicability of this phenomena will be extended to homosexual partnerships in a follow-up work) to a heterosexual romantic dyad holding hands. (On that note, I rescind my derisive comments on the consent forms, recognizing the intense emotional pressure these couples suffered to bring us these results.)
The authors, much to their credit, are keen to discuss the limitations of their findings. For instance, it would not be applicable to some participants: “Unfortunately, not all Partners (sic) had Friends (sic)…” Nevertheless, their conclusions are serious and far-reaching. For instance, the observation that men slow down for their romantic partners is consistent with the thrice-supported fact that “the female reproductive system is sensitive to even the slightest energetic perturbations.” (Curiously, the fact that sperm production is independent of energetic expenditure is only once-supported.)
Perhaps most significantly in a world that is increasing fraught with mass-migrations of people fleeing wars, famines, and oppression, the researchers find an unfortunate conclusion. With that in mind, I shall end my paper as they ended their abstract: “In energetically demanding environments, we will expect to find gender segregation in group composition, particularly when travelling (sic) longer distances.”
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