Yes, look, I know that India is a little more uptoght about these things than many other countries but that headline really goes a tad too far.

Sex rather rocks for everybody: it’s designed to be that way, to ensure that there’s another generation to have it in their turn.

Sheesh!

A fascinating piece of research I think you’ll agree, a study of playmate college majors.

Yes, really. someone’s done it. Gone through the lists of Playboy playmates for the past few decades and, where possible, noted what was their major when they went to college.

You’ll need to click through here for the full results of the playmate college majors survey (yes, it’s OK, safe for work). But there’s something incredibly appropriate about this:

What is amazing is how there is not one, NOT ONE COMPUTER PROGRAMMER OR PRE-MED OR PHYSICS OR OR ACCOUNTING OR ENGINEERING MAJOR (bar Cindy Crawford who spent 1 quarter in chemical engineering, but never graduated). The majority of playmates pursue degrees in utter fluff, the biggest pulls being “psychology,” “acting/theater,” “journalism,” “communications,” “education,” “junior college,” and that weak pathetic worthless degree that tries to score some credibility as passing itself off as a “business major;” marketing.

Someone might want to tie this together with our recent information on the prevalance of virginity at college compiled by major perhaps?

In English English (my own affliction) we actually call those “fluffy” course “fluffy bunny” courses: something which seems all too appropriate when talking about Playboy really.

But I must admit that the thing that made me laugh like a drain was this comment about economics:

Ironically, and VERY SADLY, the best source for finding playmate majors was Wikipedia, and I did not see one, NOT ONE naked chick!

Only in economics can you conduct a study of playboy playmates and not see anything.

A couple of days ago I looked at the prevalence of assortative mating and used the example of academic couples to give some numbers.

One professor (married to another) has seen the same information and come up with a solution to the problem, if it is indeed a problem. Chris Blattman:

Thoughts from readers on how the academy could change? Here’s one I doubt is in the report: dating services for PhDs, so that they meet people other than their classmates.

Clever people these professors, no?

Something of an interesting result was presented recently: that polygamy makes men live longer. This sounds like a cue for the old joke really: having multiple wives doesn’t in fact make you live longer, it just makes it seem that way. However, there’s another thing wrong with the analysis.

A new study from a British university seems to suggest that men who are polygamists live longer than those with just one wife - 12% longer, in fact. But before we rush off to the wife market (or “Yates’s Wine Lodge”, as it is called over here), we should consider the possibility that the scientists have got things the wrong way around.

In societies where polygamy is common, it is the most fit, healthy and affluent men who have more than one wife. Women are disinclined to get themselves hitched to men who are likely to croak within a few years or months - they do that only in the West, where the laws of inheritance are somewhat different.

So it is not the case that having lots of wives enables men to live longer - they would have lived longer anyway, even without the profusion of ghastly wives whining at them all day long, telling them to put up shelves in the mud hut and stopping them smoking in the bedroom.

It is more accurate to think of these multiple wives instead as a sort of progressive tax on happiness, designed to spread the load of human misery.

Apologies for the somewhat misogynist tenor of that particular report: you wouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that this specific journalist, a certain Rod Liddle, has recently been though a somewhat tempestuous divorce? No, you wouldn’t would you….

But in his basic point he is of course correct. Causality runs the other way. In a polygamous society of course it is only the alpha males who get the multiple wives and we all know that alpha males live longer than betas anyway.

It’s long been almost an item of faith that alpha males have more children than beta males: thus the very behaviour of those alphas. As the basic aim of the evolutionary process is to maximise the spread of your genes, arrogance, high handedness and at least an attempt to impregnate any passing woman (very much alpha traits) work in this sense.

New research shows that this might not be true:

Genghis Khan spread his seed so liberally that nearly a tenth of men now living in the former Mongolian empire trace their ancestry back to the 13th-century warrior. However, a new analysis suggests that most socially dominant males contribute no more to the genetic pool than do their supposed inferiors.

“An individual really doesn’t have the opportunity to set up things so their genetic information pervades the gene pool a long time in the future,” says mathematician Joseph Watkins, of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It could happen because life is chaotic.”

OK, and?

To determine whether dominance could last more than a couple generations, Watkins and a team of anthropologists and geneticists sifted through the DNA of 1269 males from 41 Indonesian communities.

They honed in on stretches of the male-inherited Y chromosome that change little from generation to generation. This allowed Watkins’ team to peer back more than 3000 years.

Their search paid no attention to genetic traits that might offer an evolutionary boost and instead focused on “junk” DNA that flows exclusively from father to son.

Out of 41 communities, from Bali to Borneo to mainland Indonesia, only five showed evidence of long-term dominance by a few male lines.

Three of those communities were in Sumba, a remote island where males are polygamous and clans vie for status and resources.

Hmm, well, as I see it there’s two problems with this research. The first is that they are researching people living now: that is, people who were pretty obviously the children of men who had children. We’re pretty sure that the majority of men who ever lived did not in fact have children: only some 40% did, according to some estimates (60% by others to be sure).

So by looking at the genes of those extant now we are by definition looking at those who are the children of alpha males (to at least some extent). The beta males, those who didn’t have children, cannot of course be studied by this method.

The second problem is that the research doesn’t show that alpha males cannot add more to the gene pool than others. What is does show is that alpha males can indeed do so: but they need to be in a polygamous society to do so. If being an alpha male gets you the best of the available wives (roughly the situation in our own society) then sure, given that there’s a rough one wife to one husband thing going on (even the very richest and most alpha of men in current western societies rarely have children by more than two or three women) then sure, the alpha’s addition to the gene pool three generations down the line isn’t going to be that much greater than any other man’s.

However, if we look at a society where there is polygamy (to be more precise, polygyny), then being an alpha male has a much greater genetic pay off. For by monopolising the child bearing of 5 or 10 women (or in cases like the Khan, thousands, or Ibn Saud, hundreds) one is not only increasing the number of one’s own genes in the next generation: one is reducing the number of all those beta males.

Thus my point that this research doesn’t in fact show what the researchers themselves say it does. Sure, the way western societies are currently set up, being an alpha male doesn’t have all that much effect. But change the set up of the society and it can have an enormous one.

Which leads to an odd but rather interesting conclusion. Both Donald Tump and Warren Jeffs (of that Moromon break away group, the FLDS) are alpha males. Trump has had huge success in this world, Jeffs not so much. But because while one has been serially monogamous, the other serially polygamous, Jeffs is going to have a much greater influence on the future human gene pool than Trump.

Finally, we find out what it is that creates bad girls.

A study has found that adolescent girls who go through puberty early and do not have parents who talk to them or show interest in them are more likely to display aggression, get into fights and bully other children.

The research carried out by a team at the University of Alabama, in America is published in the August issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Over 300 girls, with an average age of 11, were interviewed about their behaviour and how much their parents talked to them about violence, smoking and sex.

And the parents were also questioned about how well they knew their child’s friends or what their hobbies were.

A quarter of the girls matured early, defined as beginning menstruating a year earlier than average for their racial group.

Those who matured early and also had low levels of parental involvement, communication and knowledge were more likely to be aggressive.

Just to make this clear: if it’s your daughter hanging around the mall, bare midriff showing off various body piercings, if it’s your daughter running the gang that picks on the goodie two shoes, if it’s your daughter weliding the axe as she gleefully wades into a fist fight, yes, it’s your fault.

Really.

Just thought you might be comforted to know that.

Of course, other research soon to be published shows that talking to pubescent girls also has the same effect so really your mistake was made some years earlier when you decided to try for one of the little darlings….

This is an excellent talk (if, at nearly an hour, a little long for casual viewing) on the point that we are all at root female. Being female is nature’s default position: whether we’re XX or XY, we all start out in the womb as being developmentally female, most especially in our brain, and it’s the surge of testosterone that can happen during pregnancy which makes some of us male.

An overview of the argument in written form:

Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female - female is nature’s default gender setting. If you were to watch a female and a male brain developing via time-lapse photography, you would see their circuit diagrams being laid down according to the blueprint drafted by both genes and sex hormones. A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers. If the testosterone surge doesn’t happen, the female brain continues to grow unperturbed. The fetal girl’s brain cells sprout more connections in the communication centers and areas that process emotion. How does this fetal fork in the road affect us? For one thing, because of her larger communication center, this girl will grow up to be more talkative than her brother. Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand. For another, it defines our innate biological destiny, coloring the lens through which each of us views and engages the world.

This is an extremely important point about our basic thought around here, Simon Baron Cohen’s views on the spectrum of brain types. If brain type is solely a matter of whether one is XX or XY then how can there be a spectrum? How can men (XY) have the brain type associated with women? Or vice versa of course?

But if we all start out with one brain type, female, and then there are developmental influences upon that which move some to a different position upon the spectrum then we can see that we can indeed have a number of different types.

Now, precisely how this works isn’t quite clear to me yet: there’s two possibilities. It might be that there is this surge of testosterone at 8 weeks in every pregnancy, but only those amenable to its influences go on to deveop the male brain. (This would, I think, depend upon androgen receptors, although I’m not sure about that, although we do know that certain people, whether male or female, can be more or less receptive to such influences). Or it could be that the surge of testosterone is triggered by the presence of the Y chromosome and thus only happens to men: but that this is a very faulty trigger, not always going off and sometimes going off when perhaps it shouldn’t.

But our basic thought, that there are indeed “male” and “female” brains is bourne out by this. We may all start out with female ones, but that doesn’t mean that we all end up with them.

It’s been quiet around here, hasn’t it? Too quiet….that must mean the natives are about to attack, no?

Actually, no, it’s been our friends the technical bubbas playing with the site. I’ve only just managed to gain access after a week….so, we’ll be back tomorrow with more!

At least, middle aged men are happier than middle aged women.

Researchers looked at data spanning several decades, and concluded that after the age of 48, men are generally happier than women.

Men are most miserable in their 20s, but grow more satisfied as they get older, marry and earn more money, they found.

Women on the other hand are happier than men in early adulthood, but the glow wears off with time.

Hmm, not entirely sure here. The researchers do try and give a number of reasons as to why this might be so but none strike me as being particularly strong. We’ve all heard of the empty nest syndrome which might be part of it although it’s not mentioned.

However, there is a reasonable and entirely simple explanation which isn’t touched upon either. Almost all of the people they were studying were in a long term relationship with someone of the opposite sex.

So the real explanation could be just that it’s more fun to live with a middle aged woman than it is with a middle aged man.

That might not be the most amazing newspaper piece of all time you know. But it is what the Globe and Mail ran with.

No, really, they thought that this was a new enough, important enough, announcement that they went out and slaughtered a few thousand trees to tell everyone about it.

Sigh.

The book they were reviewing had added insights like this one:

“One of the biggest things for me to come out of the book was the idea that we absolutely need to communicate more with our partners,” says Ms. Sauers, 54.

Isn’t that amazing? Such a boon to all concerned I’m sure. The idea that in the course of a sexual relationship someone might in fact mention what and when it was about sex that she enjoyed.

Personally I find it quite startling. How has the human race managed to procreate over all these generations without this vital knowledge?

The truth is of course that this isn’t news at all. It’s so blindingly obvious that it would better be called “olds” (to steal one of Terry Pratchett’s jokes).

Although maybe things are different up in Canada: it’s cold up there isn’t it? And they’re not generally known as a wildly inventive people, are they?