N.Y. Times Magazine Year in Ideas

For the last six years, in December the New York Times Magazine has been publishing a round-up of the most interesting/important new ideas of the previous year. This year, there were 74 new ideas. I was interested to see that, with all the new inventions and technology being developed, ten of the new ideas were from the realm of psychology--and a great many of them from neuroscience. Just to add to the impression that this is really a "hot" topic, Deborah Solomon's weekly interview was of a "neuropsychiatrist."
I could not find the article free of charge on the web, but I did find a list of previous Times' great ideas of the year--and a lot of them were about psychology as well!

Here's one I found interesting...

Darwinian Literary Criticism
By D. T. MAX


For many years, literary study has been divided among various arcane philosophies, from deconstruction to postcolonialism. The next hot theory comes not from France or Slovenia but from American laboratories -- by way of evolutionary theorists like E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker. According to Joseph Carroll, a professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and its foremost practitioner, ''Literary Darwinism seeks to understand the way literature is produced by human nature and reflects human nature -- basic human motives like mating, parenting, gaining social status, acquiring resources.''

Here's how it works. Take the ''Aeneid,'' as David Barash of the University of Washington did in a recent article. In Barash's hands, the ''Aeneid'' is no longer Virgil's attempt to mythologize the founding of Rome. Nor is it a prefiguration of Christianity. It's about a virile man trying to make sure his genes are passed on. How else to explain why Aeneas abandons the older Dido in Carthage? Or the warm welcome Aeneas and his Trojan crew receive from Eryx, a relative otherwise unknown to him? Or the repeated emphasis on events Aeneas himself will not live to see, on the ''fame and fate of his son's sons''? Understanding Darwinian drives, Barash argues, helps us understand what really motivates literature's most famous characters. Similarly, Robin Fox of Rutgers University has argued that ''Madame Bovary'' and ''Anna Karenina'' should be viewed centrally as narratives of ''sexual competition'' involving the humiliation of a ''dominant older male.''

In an age in which science now holds the glamour spot in academia -- Derrida is out, the M.I.T. Media Lab is in -- literary Darwinism is an understandable development. And you can see why literary critics would search for a science to undergird their impressionistic endeavor.

But just when I was getting excited about how important all this is, I scrolled down to the last great idea(in alphabetical order)only to read

Women Are Just as Jealous as Men
By SUSAN DOMINUS


hen it comes to betrayal, the tradition goes, men fear sexual infidelity (think of Othello or his fellow paranoiac, Leontes), whereas women fear abandonment (consider Penelope or that pathetic French lieutenant's woman). According to evolutionary psychologists, all these archetypes reflect some basic caveman economics: a man, it is said, must keep a careful watch on his woman lest he end up hunting and gathering for the offspring of some other man's gene pool, but a woman can forgive indiscretions as long as her mate cares enough to return to her and the little ones back at the cave.

This year, some prominent psychologists have challenged those assumptions (and dozens of previous studies) about pining women and seething, controlling men with new evidence that suggests sexual jealousy is an equal-opportunity obsession. David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University, administered a questionnaire asking subjects which would be more upsetting: to learn that their partner had cheated on them or that their partner had fallen in love with someone else. And while the subjects were answering, he gave them a string of numbers to memorize and recall. With the addition of this so-called cognitive load -- a technique that aims to bypass complex pro-con reasoning and cut to the gut response -- the gender discrepancy that previous researchers had found disappeared altogether. Several other prominent studies being published this year produced similarly gender-neutral results: when deprived of the chance to weigh the long-term effects or to guess what response might be the more appropriately feminine, women proved just as brutishly possessive as men.

The findings are interesting in and of themselves, but they also have implications for some basics of evolutionary psychology. For one thing, it weakens the supposed link between sexual jealousy and parental uncertainty. (Women may have their own problems, but at least they know their children are their own.)