When Jack was young, he began inflicting harm on animals. It started with just pulling the wings off flies, but eventually progressed to torturing squirrels and stray cats in his neighbourhood. As an adult, Jack found that he did not…
Workers of the world can have their International Labour Day, or Workers Day or whatever. But the month of May belongs to an equally fundamental dignity: masturbation. The fact that a whole month is devoted to self-pleasure raises two important…
How confident are you that the man you call dad is really your biological father? If you believe some of the most commonly-quoted figures, you could be forgiven for not being very confident at all. But how accurate are those…
If you haven’t been outdoors in a few years, you might not have noticed that beards are back. Back in such a big way that apparently many New York hipsters are paying north of US$8,000 for “facial hair transplants” to…
How does alcohol consumption affect romantic life? Let me count the ways. If popular advertising is to be believed, the consumption of high-end spirits almost guarantees a steady variety of glamorous amour. I was always surprised that James Bond –…
My Sunday night ritual of planning what I hope to do each week almost always involves listening to Leonard Cohen. My father listened to Cohen’s “Best of” album on Sunday nights when he did a similar week-planning exercise. I’m comforted…
Yes At least over 100 generations in Drosophila melanogaster vinegar flies. “Male cognitive performance declines in the absence of sexual selection” proclaim Brian Hollis and Tadeusz Kawecki in the title of a paper out this week in Proceedings of the…
There’s a video out there on the intertubes that’s got conservatives cheering and lefties in a lather. Actually such videos are legion, but I’m talking here about a particular one with the rather broad and even-handed title of The Economics…
Happy Darwin Day! Is that even an appropriate thing to wish somebody? Especially so close to Valentine’s day? Darwin Day, according to the International Darwin Day Foundation, is “a global celebration of science and reason held on or around Feb.…
Lee, A., Dubbs, S.L., von Hippel, W., Brooks, R.C. & Zietsch, B.P. 2013. A multivariate approach to human mate preferences. Evolution & Human Behaviour published online early 23 January 2014. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.01.003