Posts by Agustín Fuentes

Sequencing of a fetal genome from parental samples demonstrates how we have advanced in genetic analyses, but the title of a June 6 article in The New York Times, “DNA Blueprint for Fetus Built Using Tests of Parents,” gives me pause. While the content does reflect a few interviews where researchers caution against overemphasizing what…

Most starting running backs in the NFL are black and most CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are white. Men dominate in the economic and political worlds and women excel at child rearing and caring for the home… These and many other patterns of difference and inequality between sexes and races are just a part of…

Everyone knows that men and women are really different. We think differently and act differently because we are wired differently. I mean look at our brains and genitals: they are just plain different. Right? Wrong. What if many of the things we assume about the biology of difference are not so different at all? What…

It’s a good thing when pop culture and good science get together Anyone reading my blogs and articles immediately notices that I think being human is messy…and this is not a bad thing. Humans have amazingly rich lives and ridiculously complex social and evolutionary histories that structure the way we see the world: we are…

Morality is not in our genes, but evolutionary approaches can help No we are not “moral animals,” we are moral humans, and there is a difference. We are a kind of animal, specifically we are primates, and share much with other social mammals. We are a particular kind of primate that manipulates ecosystems and organisms…

Similarities between the sexes can be as important as differences. OK, we all know that men and women do not always see eye to eye. We can have different goals, desires, ideas and actions … sometimes. Other times, we are very much in synch. If you stop and think a bit about biology, it turns out…

Humans bond, love, and marry heterosexually and homosexually. Most people in the USA identify marriage as a natural goal for humans, with love as a necessary component. After all, Frank Sinatra sang “love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage” and informed us that “you can’t have one without the other.” With…

Checking ourselves when thinking about human nature. My graduate advisor, Phyllis Dolhinow, once started a lecture on understanding behavior by warning us not to fall into the trap of “I would not have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.” A fair warning indeed, for if we already know how the world “is,” it’s hard…

Aggression is not our nature, but it is in our potential. At the recent American Association of Physical Anthropologists meetings in Portland, I sat through an interesting talk about lethal aggression in chimpanzees. The presenter, Michael Wilson from the University of Minnesota, did a good job of laying out a substantial overview of all the data we…