This Is a Post for the Ladies
But fellas, listen closely.
Today in the WSJ is the best news I've read in a long time. Their regular "Science Journal" feature is titled, "Darwin Revisited: Females Don't Always Go for Hottest Mate."
The topic is sexual selection, which is actually a neat concept. Imagine that you're a female trying to maximize the chances of survival for your genes. One way is for your sons to have a lot of sex, and thus a lot of children (the article calls this the "sexy son hypothesis"). Success becomes self-reinforcing: a male who screws lots of females becomes, by that very fact, more attractive to them. Certain traits help males have a lot of sex, and those traits don't necessarily have to do with individual survival.
In fact, the very nature of sexual selection allows for absurd results. Say that females randomly like males with slightly long tails at some point in time. Females can do well by mating with males with long tails, simply because other females will favor their sons. As a result, not only do long tales get "selected for," so does the desire to mate with a long-tailed male. Over time, females want longer and longer tails, and males supply them.
Sexual selection helps explain why attractive men can have a lot of sex (also successful men: as Jon Stewart quipped when George Clooney won an Oscar, "That's the kind of thing that could really get a guy laid.").
That's why the column is such good news. It says that females can actually maximize reproductive success by having sex with ugly males. "The studs were so busy mating that they had no time to raise offspring," the column notes. Whatever maximizes reproductive success, meanwhile, will prove irresistable to females as a result of natural selection. So there you have it: according to the Wall Street Journal, I'm irresistable to the ladies. Finally, the mainstream media takes note of what I've been saying all along.
Today in the WSJ is the best news I've read in a long time. Their regular "Science Journal" feature is titled, "Darwin Revisited: Females Don't Always Go for Hottest Mate."
The topic is sexual selection, which is actually a neat concept. Imagine that you're a female trying to maximize the chances of survival for your genes. One way is for your sons to have a lot of sex, and thus a lot of children (the article calls this the "sexy son hypothesis"). Success becomes self-reinforcing: a male who screws lots of females becomes, by that very fact, more attractive to them. Certain traits help males have a lot of sex, and those traits don't necessarily have to do with individual survival.
In fact, the very nature of sexual selection allows for absurd results. Say that females randomly like males with slightly long tails at some point in time. Females can do well by mating with males with long tails, simply because other females will favor their sons. As a result, not only do long tales get "selected for," so does the desire to mate with a long-tailed male. Over time, females want longer and longer tails, and males supply them.
Sexual selection helps explain why attractive men can have a lot of sex (also successful men: as Jon Stewart quipped when George Clooney won an Oscar, "That's the kind of thing that could really get a guy laid.").
That's why the column is such good news. It says that females can actually maximize reproductive success by having sex with ugly males. "The studs were so busy mating that they had no time to raise offspring," the column notes. Whatever maximizes reproductive success, meanwhile, will prove irresistable to females as a result of natural selection. So there you have it: according to the Wall Street Journal, I'm irresistable to the ladies. Finally, the mainstream media takes note of what I've been saying all along.
posted by James | 11:54 AM
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