So Much Like Us
bushwells | March 3, 2009A friend in another galaxy far away, when presented with photos of another friend's wide-eyed infant, remarked that the cute (and she truly is) baby made her icy heart melt.
In today's New York Times, Natalie Angier discusses primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's forthcoming book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Hrdy posits that our capability of cooperating with others, our ability to empathize, and our attempts to see another's perspective likely arose from the selective pressures of being part of a cooperatively breeding social group.
Also noted is the…
bushwells | April 4, 2008Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Spook, has a new book debuting this month: Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. To promote her new book, Roach is making the interview rounds. Check out her interview with Katharine Mieszkowski for Salon: Getting it on for science.
An excerpt pertaining to sexual arousal in women follows:
Edited to add a video of Mary Roach discussing Bonk; be sure to check it out, particularly her remarks on Danish swine sex! Thanks to Steve C. from W.W. Norton for providing the clip.
There can be a split between what the sex researchers measure happening in…
bushwells | September 27, 2007I mentioned in my previous entry the sense of transcendence I feel when I observe the green light passing through a tree's leaves. My neighborhood woods on Princeton Ridge is full of tall trees, including beeches which are my favorite arboreal species. Part of that sense of wonder stems (har) from my knowledge of the inter-relatedness of the tree and myself, my lack of chlorophyll notwithstanding.
John Stiller of East Carolina University contends that we humans are more closely akin to plants than we are to fungi. The following article from ABC Science (that's the Australian Broadcasting…
bushwells | September 25, 2007I previously confessed that I subscribe to that glossy hardcopy glut of advertising called Vanity Fair. Invariably, the mag contains photo spreads of ripple-ab'ed dudes hawking various men's cologne. All this to mask delicious or stinky or neutral 5alpha-androst-16-en-3-one (androstenone); based on one's genetic variation in the olfactory receptor that binds this steroid, it will smell sweet or icky or not at all. Razib at Gene Expression already covered the recent article in Nature - please see a world of sensory difference.
The Nature article addressed genetic polymorphisms of the…
bushwells | March 21, 2007Just as a toddler who persisently pokes the light socket with a fork, looking for the forbidden jolt, so I invariably open spider links on Live Science. This latest salacious spidey-bit did not disappoint. I'm beginning to think that spider sex on Live Science is equiavlent to the cheesecake shots in Rupert Murdoch tabloids.
Creepy: Spiders Love to Snuggle by Jeanna Bryner.
Excerpts below the fold...
While not usually considered paragons of tender, familial love, some spiders do have a touchy-feely side. Scientists have discovered two arachnids that caress their young and snuggle together…
bushwells | February 13, 2007As the grizzled matriarch of the Chimpanzee Refuge, it behooves me to call attention to tonight's Nova: The Last Great Ape. Our close cousins, Pan paniscus, the bonobos, are featured.
The PBS site's interview with Frans de Waal is worth checking out, and if you have yet to read his book, Our Inner Ape, de Waal's responses are a nice prelude to his expanded posit that we Homo sapiens, possess a little chimpanzee and bonobo within us.
I'll also take this opportunity to mention that today is my birthday, so I eagerly await my grooming session, and hope to see a lively bout of penis fencing…
bushwells | January 31, 2007Way back when I had a time to maintain a freshwater aquarium (pre-career and pre-children), my favorite fish were a pair of firemouth cichlids, Thorichthys meeki. This happy couple reproduced and guarded their eggs faithfully, only to have the plecostumus hoover 'em up when Mr. and Mrs. Meeki let down their guard one night. Cichlids are fascinating, and seem to me to be among the more intelligent and "personable" of home aquarium fishies.
Biologists at Stanford have confirmed my suspicions that cichlids aren't just a pretty scale or two. Logan Grosenick et al. report in the January 25…
bushwells | January 11, 2007As an arachnophobe (see Do I Get a Badge for This?), the title alone, Spider Cries Out During Sex, was enough to give me a powerful case of the heebie jeebies. Then I started reading the article from Live Science:
While mating, female Physocylus globosus spiders emit high-frequency squeaks to let males know what they should be doing, a new study finds.
Called stridulations, the shrill cries sound like squeaky leather and are made in response to the rhythmic squeezing actions of the male's genitalia from inside the female during sex.
But wait! There's more! You can listen to the audio of…
bushwells | November 24, 2006Male chimps apparently dig older females as reported recently in LiveScience. Young chimpanzee tarts cause nary a second look from the guys according to Martin Muller, an anthropologist at Boston University:
"The stereotypical view of human mating involves males wanting to be promiscuous and females being coy, but in chimps you see young females being very interested in mating with all the males, maybe going male to male and presenting their sexual swellings, sometimes grabbing their penis and playing with them, and the males just ignore them..."
Older females are more desirable according…
bushwells | November 13, 2006
An eye-opening publication in the Journal of Human Evolution garnered some press as noted here in The Economist, Eyeing up the collaboration, and Why eyes are so alluring from LiveScience.com
Michael Tomasello and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute report that whereas great apes like gorillas, chimps and bonobos are influenced by head position when trying to follow another's gaze, humans take cues directly from eye movement. Thanks to the whites of our eyes and other high contrast features, our gaze is easier to follow.
What is the the evolutionary driver for white sclera? One theory…