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Pretty Women Scramble Men's Sense Of The Future
Adam_Trask writes "Psychologists in Canada have finally proved what women have long suspected - men really are irrational enough to risk entire kingdoms to catch sight of a beautiful face." The methodology is not air-tight, but how many scientists figure out a way to use Am I Hot or Not at work? See also "Women Live Longer Because Men Are Dumb."
When a man chooses a partner, he chooses to invest a lot of energy into rearing her offspring. If, however, she is impregnated by another man, all that energy is wasted, from the point of view of his own genes, because the other man's genes are propogated. The woman, however, can still be used to propogate his genes. Overall, the best behaviour for your genes is to get furious at anyone who tries to mate with your woman, not with your woman.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
I would have found it much more interesting
if the study had included the impact of exposure
to statistically attractive males and females
to both male and female subjects.
Clearly the interest of advertisers lies in
gaining a favorable irrational reaction.
But I notice that advertising geared toward
women generally includes images of attractive
females, not of attractive males. Thus I
think the negative results obtained by
exposing females subjects to statistically
attractive males is unsurprising.
I found the reasoning of the sociobiologist
interviewed in New Scientist to be facile.
If this study had been done 50 years ago,
they would have interviewed a psychoanalyst
and obtained a similarly affected "expert"
deep analysis.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
You're just as likely to see the female go after the other woman at the same time she defends her love for the man that just cheated on her.
Women have been exploiting this built-in feature in men for years!
Unfortunately there are no vendor patches available at the time beign. A temporary fix is not to have any contact with these 'women' (this should not be a problem for usual /. reader)!
NOTE: Even pr0n should be avoided while doing important decisions.
Knowing these facts helps preventing such exploitaition in the future.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
It may be hardly surprising from an evolutionary standpoint, but it doesn't mean that the study wasn't worth doing. The problem with Evolution as a Behavioural Theory is that it's very difficult to falsify. It's pretty easy to take existing data and fit it into an evolutionary theory, but it's very difficult to find data that proves that the behavior does not come from evolutionary factors. So it's a neat theory, and it's fun for TV shows and parties, but it's not all that useful from a scientific perspective.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
Not necessarily true. In general, females invest more directly in the rearing of the young, but males often have a considerable investment in courtship and in keeping rivals away from their mate. They may even have special structures (antlers, horns and the like) or coloration that serves no other purpose than to attract a mate and/or intimidate rivals. If that's not investment in reproduction, I don't know what is.
That may be, but getting them to do their job (i.e. procreating) successfully can be very expensive.
The fact is that reproduction is costly, regardless of whether one is male or female, and regardless of whether that cost is paid before or after the young are born/hatched/whatever.