gibbon

Benjamin Franklin once quipped, "Where there's marriage without love there will be love without marriage." His affairs are well known in American history, however this founding father may have been stating a truth extending to evolutionary history as well. Christopher Ryan (author of the forthcoming Sex at Dawn) offers some thoughts on the role of novelty in the sex lives of our favorite primate. He suggests that men are drawn to variety in sexual partners while women are drawn to variety in technique: When researchers decided to look at this issue to develop a Sexual Boredom Scale, they…
Studying the way an animal moves by looking at its ears might seem like a poorly thought-out strategy. After all, short of watching it directly, most biologists would choose to look at more obvious traits like tracks, or limb bones. But while an animal's limbs may drive it forward, its inner ear makes sure that it doesn't immediately fall over. By controlling balance, it plays a key role in movement, and its relative size can tell us about how agile an animal is. When we walk, the image that forms on our retinas changes quite considerably. But no matter how fast or erratically we move, our…