The Buzz: Science in Sex

i-7f2cbc481a227069ce86497c6e4bb92b-banana1.jpgThere's no denying that sex is important for most creatures biologically. For humans, the biological imperative of sex has seeped into our psyches over thousands of years worth of evolution, making it more essential than we realize. On The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer reports on a new column in Mind Matters positing that love and lust have cognitive benefits, significantly affecting test subjects' abilities to solve logic and insight puzzles. Over on Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong reports on an exceptionally atypical case of invertebrates that have "abandoned sex altogether" for some 80 million years. Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily covers a study on our responses to emotional and sexual infidelity, which found that women are more sensitive to emotional infidelities and men more sensitive to sexual philandering--largely due to natural selection. PZ Myers praises the physiological phenomenon of the cervix on Pharyngula.

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There's no denying that sex is important for most creatures biologically.

I deny it! Most organisms are completely sexless. We can start with the bacteria, add in the archea, and toss in a whole lot of eukaryotes (both micro and macroscopic). Hell, there are many organisms that have given up on sex completely, despite having once partaken. Just because sex is a fixation of many people, does not a universe make.