It’s time to take an internet-y jaunt around the world of science and extract nuggets of wisdom from the minds of your betters.
Womanizers live fast, die young.
Promiscuous males are so intent on pursuing sexual partners that they can neglect even essential tasks such as eating, says a new study published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
The finding suggests that male promiscuity is not more common – despite its potential evolutionary advantages – because it is subject to natural limitations: playboy males have stunted growth and go to an early grave. […]
When the male fish were regularly supplied with new unfamiliar females throughout their life, they spent less time looking for food and more time pursuing the females. Males living with unfamiliar females also grew more slowly and to a smaller adult size, and tended to die sooner.
In contrast, males living with a single partner ate regularly, grew steadily throughout their lives and lived longer.
“The considerable costs of promiscuity to the individuals involved reveal a natural limitation on promiscuous behaviour, previously undescribed in vertebrates,” says Jordan. “Perhaps those who wish for a more promiscuous existence will see this as a warning.
Sure, this is a study of fish, not humans, but it may be relational. I can recall during my most deliriously promiscuous months I suffered from frequent colds and exhaustion. My health regained its footing when I settled into serially monogamous relationships.
There is one possible way out of this trade-off between promiscuity and health: be a late bloomer. If you start your womanizing career after you have fully grown and gained your maximum size, strength and constitution, you may not suffer the deleterious health consequences of chasing a wonderful variety of pussy. Vitamin D helps also.
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Femtard fave bonobos aren’t the free love communitarians originally thought:
A team of researchers led by Gottfried Hohmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has discovered that the higher up a male bonobo is placed in the social hierarchy, the greater his mating success is with female bonobos. But even males who are not so highly placed are still in with a chance of impressing females.
Researchers reported for the first time direct support from mothers to their sons in agonistic conflicts over access to estrous females. Martin Surbeck from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology discovered that the presence of mothers enhances the mating success of their sons and thereby causes mating to be more evenly distributed among the males. As bonobo males remain in their natal group and adult females have the leverage to intervene in male conflicts, maternal support extends into adulthood and potentially affects male reproductive success. (published in: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences)
Variation in male mating success is often related to rank differences. Males who are unable to monopolize estrous females alone may engage in coalitions with other group members to chase higher ranking males off these females and to thus enhance their own mating success.
High status male bonobos get more sexual access to females, just as in chimpanzee tribes. Here, there is the additional influence of high ranking bonobo mothers helping their sons get a screw. Mothers benefit because sexually successful sons give them more grandchildren.
In addition to rank, the presence of mothers does indeed enhance the mating success of sons and thereby reduces the proportion of matings by the highest ranking male.
Mothers and sons seem to be inseparable and mothers provide agonistic aid to sons in conflicts with other males. As bonobos are male-philopatric, i.e. males remain in their natal group, and adult females occupy high dominance status, maternal support extends into adulthood and females have the leverage to intervene in male conflicts. The absence of female support to unrelated males suggests that mothers gain indirect fitness benefits by supporting their sons. “Females do not grant this kind of support to unrelated males. By helping their sons the mothers may likely increase the number of their own grandchildren”, says Martin Surbeck.
It never made sense to believe that mothers wouldn’t have some influence over their sons’ reproductive success. It is, evolutionarily speaking, in mom’s interest to see her son do well with the ladies. There are parallels to human families. Mothers of murderous sons nearly always absolve, excuse or defend them. Mothers, despite having an almost universal lack of game knowledge, do exert a sort of primitive effort to set up their sons with “good girls”. Sometimes these efforts even work. I imagine in more matriarchal societies, like sub-Saharan Africa where fathers are generally less involved in family matters, mothers play a big role in increasing the status of sons and helping fight off (not necessarily physically) competitor males who could vie for sexual opportunities with the same women as their sons.
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Single moms take note: if you want help from the bastard spawn of your first badboy lover in raising any future spawn, you had better have the future children with the same badboy.
Help from earlier offspring in rearing a subsequent brood should evolve more easily when the mother is strictly monogamous. A comparative study of birds provides evidence in support of this view.
Cooperative breeding, in which more than two individuals combine to rear a single brood of young, has evolved repeatedly in animals, and most commonly in insects and birds. This situation poses an evolutionary paradox: because individuals have only two parents, some of the carers in these cooperative societies are helping to raise young that are not their own.
A related study shows that promiscuous females reduce a society’s cooperativeness.
Theory predicts that the evolution of cooperative behaviour is favoured by low levels of promiscuity leading to high within-group relatedness. However, in vertebrates, cooperation often occurs between non-relatives and promiscuity rates are among the highest recorded. Here we resolve this apparent inconsistency with a phylogenetic analysis of 267 bird species, demonstrating that cooperative breeding is associated with low promiscuity; that in cooperative species, helping is more common when promiscuity is low; and that intermediate levels of promiscuity favour kin discrimination. Overall, these results suggest that promiscuity is a unifying feature across taxa in explaining transitions to and from cooperative societies.
So, a society of sluts = Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. POF’s fiancé wept again.
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Women are more compassionate than men because it benefits their health. File under: the eternal solipsism of the female body.
The research demonstrates that concern for the well-being of others does, indeed, benefit the self. By increasing the effectiveness of social support, compassion served a stress reduction function for women in the study.
Signaling, stress reduction, SWPL membership dues… call it what you like, it’s clear that compassion is not exactly the noble human trait our pious poseurs and puritanical lefties would tell you it is.
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Women, do you want to marry a man who won’t cheat on you? Then make sure he has higher economic status than you.
The more economically dependent a man is on his female partner, the more likely he is to cheat on her, according to research to be presented at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.
“But for women, economic dependency seems to have the opposite effect: the more dependent they are on their male partners, the less likely they are to engage in infidelity,” said Christin Munsch, a sociology Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, and author of the study, “The Effect of Relative Income Disparity onInfidelity for Men and Women.”
What’s going on here? Two explanations jump to mind: one, lower earning men cheat because their higher earning wives emasculate them either through withdrawal of sex or by snarky verbal slapshots. Thus, they seek the reinvigoration of their testicular fortitude in the flaps of another woman’s vulva. Or, the higher earning wives fell in love with the sort of lower earning but charming ne’er-do-wells who are more apt to cheat because they can. Either way, it’s in both men’s and women’s interest, if faithful, long term marriages are their goals, for the wife to be hotter than what the husband has previously dated and for the husband to be higher status — as measured by income, social standing, or some other status variable like fluency with game — than the wife.
But this is not the whole story.
Ironically, men who make significantly more than their female partners were also more likely to cheat. “At one end of the spectrum, making less money than a female partner may threaten men’s gender identity by calling into question the traditional notion of men as breadwinners,” Munsch said. “At the other end of the spectrum, men who make a lot more money than their partners may be in jobs that offer more opportunities for cheating like long work hours, travel, and higher incomes that make cheating easier to conceal.”
So basically, men will cheat under a lot of different conditions. Alert the media! Men like a variety of pussy! Unless the woman is exceedingly hot — like a 9 or higher — she should avoid marrying a much higher earning man if she doesn’t want to endure the pain of infidelity over and over and over…
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Trusting people aren’t necessarily more gullible than skeptical people.
People high in trust were more accurate at detecting the liars—the more people showed trust in others, the more able they were to distinguish a lie from the truth. The more faith in their fellow humans they had, the more they wanted to hire the honest interviewees and to avoid the lying ones. Contrary to the stereotype, people who were low in trust were more willing to hire liars and they were also less likely to be aware that they were liars.
Moral of the study: If you are going to aspire to be a manwhore taking advantage of innocent blondes of Northern European descent, you had better have a good poker face.
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For the men (you women should lift too, but I don’t want you getting any ideas that the 2.5 pound pink dumbbells are gonna make much difference to your cellulite ridden asses): you can build just as much muscle doing high rep light weights to failure as doing low rep heavy weights to failure.
Current gym dogma holds that to build muscle size you need to lift heavy weights. However, a new study conducted at McMaster University has shown that a similar degree of muscle building can be achieved by using lighter weights. The secret is to pump iron until you reach muscle fatigue.
“Rather than grunting and straining to lift heavy weights, you can grab something much lighter but you have to lift it until you can’t lift it anymore,” says Stuart Phillips, associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University. “We’re convinced that growing muscle means stimulating your muscle to make new muscle proteins, a process in the body that over time accumulates into bigger muscles.”
I have put on sixteen pounds of muscle in the past five months lifting very heavy weights, two sets for each exercise of approximately 6-10 reps and 4-7 reps each. My routine is formed around a core of the big four: deadlift, squat, bench and wide grip pullups. I also take whey protein, creatine, and an assortment of peer-reviewed legal supplements, and my diet is 80% paleo. (Note: I have nothing against steroids.)
I’ve done both the high rep light weight and low rep heavy weight methods to failure, and I find that the latter leaves me feeling more aggressive and torqued. The former gives me more of a pump, which quickly subsides after a half hour. I like the feeling of accomplishment I get from incrementally lifting heavier weights, so I will stick with that method. Perhaps a mixed routine incorporating both methods is the way to go.
