evolution

Avoiding your dad's call? Hanging up faster? Hiding in your room until menopause? It's because you don't want to have a baby with dear old dad. Which, while disturbing, is really better than the alternative.

While ovulation may be a good time to schedule a first date, it's a bad time to hang out with your father, at least according to your mating instincts. A new study looked at women's phone bills to determine they were less likely to call their dads when fertile and more likely to hang up earlier. This sounds totally ridiculous, but the average call while fertile lasts 1.7 minutes compared to 3.4 during times of low fertility.

I thought maybe women weren't talking much to anyone on these days, but researchers thought of that and found women actually call their mothers more and talk longer. Since my parents usually tell me the same things, maybe talking to mom renders dad irrelevant? Or maybe she just passes him the phone? I'll believe anything that makes this less gross.

Next time you spend Saturday night home alone you can seek comfort not in chocolate but in knowing you're not alone. Millions of people around the world are in the same position, home alone on a Saturday night because they "don't possess the qualities that members of the opposite sex seek in potential mates."

That's Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa's theory. The evolutionary psychologist is famous for his controversial declarations on human nature, such as ugly people have more sons, liberals are smarter than conservatives, and most suicide bombers are Muslim men because polygyny (like polygamy but with an allowance for mistresses and concubines) creates a surplus of sex-starved men. So this sweeping generalization is just another provocation disguised as tough love.

Dr. Kanazawa explains his home-alone theory by saying what men and women want in a mate is universal. Men seek youth and beauty; women seek power and wealth. A little inferring and a lot of generalizing leads to this reductive "truth": if you're not out socializing then you're not desirable.

That's weird. Because I see undesirable people out all the time on Saturdays.

Laughing too hard is my favorite reason to cry. A wedding might be my second favorite tearful occasion. And like most everyone else, I've also cried when stressed, sad, or in pain.

Humans have plenty of causes to cry, but we're the only species that sheds tears for emotional reasons. This has prompted psychologists to look into evolutionary explanations for why we cry. They found that crying helps us get what we want, release tension, elicit compassion, and communicate our emotions to others.

This got me wondering: when's the last time I cried (and why)? It was this past Saturday during the emotional climax of the book I was reading — The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, if you're curious. When was the last time you cried? During a sad movie? Over a breakup? Share your woeful or joyful tale of tears in the comments.

Source: Flickr User hapal

If speed ain't your thing, don't worry — humans aren't really built to go fast. As we evolved and moved out of the trees, humans began to walk upright with obvious benefits to "hands-free" locomotion — look how far we've come. But one major drawback about becoming bi-pedal: it slowed us down. A recent article on the subject on NPR explains that "in a tiger-eat-monkey world, two legs were slower than four."

The upside of our being upright, however, is endurance. Anthropologist Daniel Lieberman feels humans evolved to outrun quick prey over long distances. One of the advantages we have over four-legged creatures is we cool down by sweating, while possible prey like a gazelle must pant while sprinting, which adds up to overheating and an eventual slowing down. We may lose the speed race, but we can maintain a quicker pace over a longer period of time, giving us a different advantage.

To learn how the "new" movement toward barefoot running fits into the evolutionary process, read more

Anxiety may take its toll on the body, but it could make you the first one off the boat in a crisis. A recent study found evolution has divided people's attachment styles down the middle — half are emotionally secure and the other half are emotionally insecure — for a reason.

People with secure attachment styles worry less and view the world as a safe place; while the insecurely attached are hyperaware of the slightest problems because they're either never alone or are entirely self-reliant. A study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science found the best group to handle a crisis situation is a mix of secure and insecure individuals. The worst? All securely attached people. "Secure people have disadvantages," said experimental psychologist Tsachi Ein-Dor of the New School of Psychology in Israel. "They react slowly and then act slowly because they need to first get organized."

So while the insecurely attached's relationships might not last, if trouble comes, their lives will.

Dance can be taught, but it can't always be learned. When it comes to rhythm and grace, most either have it or they don't. I've never thought much about why, but I imagine it's an arbitrary genetic trait like rolling your tongue or wiggling your ears.

Turns out I am right-ish. Scientists know that dancing used to be a matter of survival. A 2006 study in the Public Library of Science’s genetics journal says prehistoric humans bonded and communicated through dancing, especially during troubled times. And just 1.5 million years ago humans were still dancing to attract mates.

What's it mean today? While it's been proven that dancers have better body symmetry, it really means nothing unless you're pining over someone with a dancer fetish. In fact, if dancing has lost its evolutionary purpose, then aren't those who can't dance more advanced?

Source: Flickr User sweti

A new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, argues that hot food, and not sex, is the reason human beings originally paired up in domestic relationships.

According to author and Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, early marriages were really a trade off for hot food (prepared by the women) and protection (provided by the men). Evidence from primitive societies, including the fact that society tolerated women sleeping around but ostracized them if they ever cooked for men besides their husbands, is used to support the conclusion.

It seems that a domestic convention that is considered backward today actually made us move forward evolutionarily. Let's hope modern men won't use this finding as a reason to expect women to do all the cooking!

A cadre of scientists has determined that evolution is driving women to become more beautiful while "men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors."

Scientists claim that attractive couples (based on ”objective assessments of physical attractiveness”) tend to have more children and those children are more likely to be female. Those adult daughters may marry and mate with attractive men, have lots of daughters . . . and so on and so on. Over generations, the scientists conclude, women have become steadily more aesthetically pleasing.

What do nonscientists think of these findings? If the comments section of this article is any indication — not much! Responding to the claim that women are getting more beautiful, Elizabeth Payne wrote, "Not where I'm living they aint......!!!!" What does Graham Mitchell think? "Women are getting more beautiful? Yes. And alcohol is getting stronger." Ha!

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