#socialization

Ryan Burge at Graphs About Religion:

I’ve got two sons - one is thirteen and the other is ten. I remember when my wife and I were thinking about having children, we talked all the time about the best type of birthing plan (I distinctly remember becoming intimately aware of something called the cascade of intervention). Then it was breastfeeding versus bottle feeding and cloth diapers versus disposable diapers. It felt like it was consuming most of our conversations for a period of time. You just want to make sure that you are making the best decisions for your children so that they can hopefully grow up to be decent, productive human beings. Then we went through the preschool stage. How often should we send them? What school is best for their needs? That was certainly a rousing debate in our household. Then, public school vs private school - why wife is Catholic, after all. It seems like there’s no end to all the decisions parents have to face and every life stage gives way to another set of questions that don’t have any easy answers.

Now we are in the phase of cell phones, screen time, and socialization. The best way that I can describe my goals for my boys is that they don’t become the weirdos who have no understanding of pop culture but are also not glued to their screens every waking moment. Good luck finding that balance. There’s an empirical reason for my concern - the data about the social lives of high school students is incredibly bleak and honestly makes me very worried for the next generation. Let me show you what I mean by generating a handful of graphs from this great dataset called Monitoring the Future. They’ve been asking questions of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders since the mid-1970s. What an amazing way to track what teenagers are doing with their time over the last couple of decades. Let me start by focusing on a question that asks high school seniors how often they go on dates in a typical month. In 1995, the vast majority of seniors were going on dates several times a month. In this data, just about one third of them said that they were going on zero or one date per month. Between 1995 and 2010, the share who dated very little rose to just below 50%. Let’s call that an increase of 15 points in about 15 years. From 2010 through 2021, the share who barely went on dates rose to 72%. That’s an increase of 22 points in just 11 years. In other words, the rate doubled in recent years. But I know what you are going to say - COVID explains some of it. Yes, I agree with you - there was a noticeable decrease in dating frequency during 2021 and 2022. But in 2010, 48% of 12th graders were dating rarely. In 2019, it was 63%. That’s a fifteen point jump in just nine years. That cannot be explained by a global pandemic. Dating among high school seniors slowed significantly during the 2010s. Now, what’s interesting about that to me is that between 1995 and 2021, religion among high school seniors also fell off a cliff. A very workable theory is that religious organizations can have a suppressing effect on romantic relationships between teenagers. If that hypothesis was true then we should see dating rise as we see religion decline. But we see the exact opposite.

[...]

Another question in Monitoring the Future asks how often 12th graders go out for fun or recreation in a typical week. That’s about as generic as it gets. This data points in the same general direction as the prior analysis. In 1995, just 22% of high school seniors were hanging out with their friends no more than once a week. That figure did creep up just a little bit in the next 15 years, but not by much. In 2010, it was up to 26% - an increase of just four points in fifteen years. Certainly a worrying trajectory but definitely a very slow moving trendline. By 2012, that figure moved to 30%, and it was up to 35% by 2014 and only continued to climb from there. Even before the pandemic hit, it was just above 40%. In 23 years, the share of teens who barely hung out with their friend nearly doubled. In the data collected during 2020 and 2021, the figure was exactly the same - 46%. Yes, there was a noticeable decrease in socialization due to the pandemic, but it was only five percentage points. I just don’t know how you can look at this graph and not think that this has a lot to do with the rise of the smartphone. It took 18 years to go from 22% to 32%. Then it took five years to go from 32% to 41%. What else could explain this increase? Anyone who says that social media has connected us more is just not facing the facts. Young people are not using all their messaging apps to arrange opportunities to hang out in real life, they are just seemingly content to digitally communicate.

[...] The one big takeaway for me is that those who never attend religious services are also the least likely to do other types of socializing. That makes sense, logically. One type of socializing is related to another type of socializing. Going to church means you are often given the opportunity to hang out with other kids in the youth group on another day of the week. That happened a lot when I was a teenager. But I do want to highlight the fact that never attenders really became an outlier on this metric around 2014 or so. It seems like there was a clear “socializing gap” that began to emerge about ten years ago. As I’ve written a dozen times - dropping out begets dropping out. [...] I want to point two things out that I think are crucial about this graph. The first is that the average high school senior is just incredibly less social in 2022 compared to a 12th grader from the 1990s. It’s at least 3-4 fold increase in the share who are completely antisocial. Kids aren’t hanging out. But the other thing is that religious attendance does make a difference here. The 12th graders who are the least social are those who never attend religious services. The ones who are the most social are those who attend religious services on a monthly basis. Hanging out begets hanging out. I am going to be clear on this - church is not some type of panacea to get kids to be more social, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

I know that "socialization" isn't a black and white "girls vs boys" thing, and that everyone is taught misogyny and transphobia etc etc. But is it not true that children perceived to be "boys" are, either directly or indirectly, taught that they are inherently superior over anyone perceived to be a "girl/woman" on the basis of their biology? That "men are inherently superior, it's just biology" or "men have always been the better sex" or something like that?

How does that not present a different thought process/personal belief that needs to be unlearned in people designated "AMAB" that other people typically don't? And vice versa for people designated "AFAB", of having to unlearn seeing themselves as biologically inferior and engaging in sideways misogyny to their peers ("one of the boys", "I'm not like other girls", etc) - something that is typically not taught to people designated "AMAB"?

Like, I know there are probably instances where this isn't the case, but I think it's the vast majority due to the nature of the society we live in. I'm just overall confused about the conversation, really. Can you help me understand?

Pachydactylus rangei, commonly known as the Namib sand gecko, is a unique type of lizard that can be found only in the Namib Desert, which stretches across Namibia, Angola, and South Africa. This species is especially common along the arid coastal region known as the Skeleton Coast.

Above: Pachydactylus rangei

This is one of the only geckos in the world that is known to have fully-webbed feet; the unique morphology allows the gecko to run atop the sand and dig beneath the dunes, and it's able to escape from the blistering heat of the desert by burrowing down into the sand during the day and then emerging only at night, when the temperature finally drops.

Above: a close-up of the gecko's webbed foot

Namib sand geckos are covered in translucent scales, but their bodies often have a strangely colorful appearance, because their circulatory system, spinal column, internal organs, and optical membranes are partially visible through their skin. Those underlying structures produce various shades of pink, blue, purple, orange, and yellow.

Above: the colorful appearance of Pachydactylus rangei

These geckos also have very distinctive markings that fluoresce when exposed to UV light (including moonlight) which causes them to emit a bright, neon-green glow. The fluorescent dermal markings are unique to this species, and Pachydactylus rangei is the only terrestrial vertebrate that is known to have an iridophore-based form of biofluorescence.

Above: the patterns glowing under UV light

Researchers believe that the biofluorescent markings might allow the geckos to locate one another in the vast, desolate expanse of the desert, as this article explains:

The fluorescent areas of Pachydactylus rangei are concentrated around the eyes and along the lower flanks. This positioning is practically invisible to predators with a higher perspective (e.g. birds and jackals) but highly conspicuous from a gecko’s perspective. As Pachydactylus rangei is sociable but generally solitary, and occurs at low population densities, such a signal might serve to locate conspecifics over greater distances.

Above: a Namib sand gecko licking drops of condensation from its face and eyes

These lizards obtain moisture by licking the condensation that forms on their own bodies and on the bodies of other geckos, and they've been known to engage in social behavior with other members of the same species:

Encounters in Pachydactylus rangei might serve purposes beyond mating opportunities: as the Namib desert has extremely low precipitation, fog is a key water source for its flora and fauna. Fog condenses on the bodies of the geckos, and they lick it from their faces. In husbandry, we have observed individuals licking water from conspecifics, taking advantage of a much greater available surface area.

Additionally, after short periods of isolation, the geckos run to meet each other. The combination of vital hydration with socialisation might reinforce signals that enable such meetings, and the cost of visibility to predators with higher vantage points, might constrain the signals to regions best visible from eye-level and below.

Above: the photo at the top shows a Namib sand gecko emerging from its egg, while the photo on the bottom shows a freshly-hatched gecko screaming at the universe

Namib sand geckos can produce complex vocalizations, including squeaks, clicks, croaks, and barks, especially when they're startled, threatened, or attempting to attract a mate.

Above: close-up of Pachydactylus rangei

This species is also known as the web-footed gecko, Namib dune gecko, or palmatogecko.

Sources & More Info:

National Geographic: The Web-Footed Gecko

Animal Diversity Web: Pachydactylus rangei

Scientific Reports: Neon-Green Fluorescence in the Desert Gecko Pachydactylus rangei Caused by Iridophores

Tropical Zoology: Substrate Excavation in the Namibian Web-Footed Gecko and its Ecological Significance

Journal of Arid Environments: The Lizard with Kaleidoscope Eyes: Population Characteristics of the Namib Web-Footed Gecko, Pachydactylus rangei

Snakes and Other Reptiles and Amphibians: Web-Footed Gecko

Dr. Mark D. Scherz: A Neon-Green Glowing Gecko