So, did you see that recent paper in Evolution and Human BehaviourI fixed the spelling for them there. about the different ways that men and women evaluate attractiveness in potential long- and short- term partners? You’d remember the title: “More than just a pretty face“. If you didn’t, or don’t want to follow the link, here’s the abstract: Studies of… Read more →
Tag: evolutionary biology
A Horror Movie Waiting To Happen
That’s an image from the “Blood Falls”, a five-story, blood-red waterfall that pours very slowly–the falls are frozen, and so flow slowy–out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. That multi-coloured bump in the lower left is a tent, if that helps you get an idea of scale The falls were first observed around a hundred years ago,… Read more →
Conventional Wisdom Validated
Some things I have always posited as true: Women, in general, are more attractive than men. I.e. looking at the average woman, is a more aesthetically pleasing experience than looking at the average man. Men, on the whole, are more interested in appearance in a potential partner than women are, generally speaking. And now there’s some research that seems to… Read more →
The why of your eye, and the tricking of it also
This week when I was picking up comics at the shop, my daughter talked me into buying Jay Hosler‘s latest science comic, Optical Allusions, to read with her. This was a pretty easy sell, considering my previous enjoyment of Hosler’s Clan Apis and Sandwalk Adventures (both of which, it occurs to me just now, are good candidates for being pulled… Read more →
Aside
See, this is the kind of thing I read popular science articles for: not only do we have single-celled organisms the size of grapes (!), and the seemingly ridiculous possibility that they move under their own power, but the consequent possibility that the entirety of conventional wisdom about the fossil record can be called into question. All in around 7 paragraphs.
Minor Meditations On Religion and Neurobiology
There’s lots to think about in the write up on recent studies into the relation between neural wiring and the concept religion at the New Scientist. A really simplified version would be that the brain has a couple of built in biases that make the concept of religion arise almost naturally. One is that we have different cognitive systems for… Read more →
Darwinist Dating
Manipulation and self-interest suffused relations between the sexes even when gentlemen strode the earth; a few pages of Edith Wharton should disabuse any doubters on that score. The lengthy article on modern dating, Love in the Time of Darwinism, at City Journal raised several reaction in me while I was reading it. The only thing I reacted positively to was… Read more →
Picking At Religion Again
And now for your intermittently recurring muttering about the extremely religious. Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was… Read more →
Organizational Pathology
Did you see the ACLU press release today about how the American terrorist watch list now has more than one million people on it? “America’s new million record watch list is a perfect symbol for what’s wrong with this administration’s approach to security: it’s unfair, out-of-control, a waste of resources, treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought, and… Read more →
I knew it all along!
You know, I’ve always suspected that it wasn’t just that most “nice guys” are insecure, codependent cases. And science has vindicated my suspicion: New Scientist: Bad guys really do get the most girls NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial… Read more →
I don’t know about ‘blessed’, but it sure makes you happier
I knew it all along, but it’s nice to have some science to back it up Spending on Happiness — HBS Working Knowledge Can money buy you happiness? Yes—so long as you spend the money on someone else. According to new research, giving other people even as little as $5 can lead to increased well-being for the giver. That’s the… Read more →
Am I Getting More Childish?
One of two things is true: either my sense of humour is regressing, or the quality of the humour purveyed by Cracked in the Internet age is much improved from the last time I read the print magazine (approximately 21 years ago). I remember Cracked magazine as an inferior reflection of Mad magazine–itself not known for highly intelligent humour (horrible… Read more →
