Evolutionary Psychology
sastyk | January 25, 2011There's quite a bustle among my colleagues about the deficiencies of recent studies about whether X female thingie evolved as a strategy to prevent rape. My favorite such study is one that seems to think that the only critical thing that happens when women ovulate is that they might get raped. The (probably bullshit) increase in strength, for example, one study showed couldn't be part, say of making sex more fun, could it?
Mike the Mad Biologist as always makes a cogent analysis of the general limits on that study while Greg Laden critiques speculation about tears being used to limpify…
sb admin | December 24, 2007 "Why do those holiday tunes get stuck in your head so much?" I was invited to pose this question to Dr. Robert Zatorre, Co-Director of the BRAMS: Brain Music and Sound lab at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University. Dr. Zatorre is a leading expert in neuroscience research on the biological basis of music; if anyone is able to explain why Jingle Bell Rock is haunting me, it's him.
Commonly known as earworms, some songs repeat in our mind. They are "typically annoying," said Dr. Zatorre. We often can't control it, the sounds won't go away, and they loop, repeating a refrain or…
omnibrain | September 17, 2007A ground breaking new study from Florida State University has determined that we look at attractive people! Who woulda thought!
But really:
In a series of three experiments, Maner and his colleagues found that the study participants, all heterosexual men and women, fixated on highly attractive people within the first half of a second of seeing them. Single folks ogled the opposite sex, of course, but those in committed relationships also checked people out, with one major difference: They were more interested in beautiful people of the same sex.
Ok.. for reals.. It is a pretty interesting…
omnibrain | September 14, 2007In what sounds like a whole lot of hand waving (but hey! I study vision what do I know!), scientists have 'discovered' that creepy old men running after their daughters friends has led to an increase in life expectancy for human kind. Just think that people like Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, David Letterman, and Michael Jackson have led to your grandma living a much longer life. Ok.. maybe not M.J. since he likes little boys and they don't have babies but Woody Allen - totally!
Basically...
Human ability to scale the so-called "wall of death"--surviving beyond the reproductive years--has…
neurontic | January 4, 2006I recently started reading Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker, an MIT psychologist, much lauded for his poetic approach to science writing.
There can be no doubt, the man's a great writer. But he's also far smarter than the average bear (i.e., me) and I occasionally get lost in the dense thicket of his ideas. Still, I'm always drawn to his work, because he's willing to confront the scientific fallacies born from political-correctness. He doesn't shy away from the notion that there are inherent physiological differences between men and women, for instance--differences that may account for men's…