Posts by Agustínfuentes

Humans have a distinctive, messy, and elaborately cognitive way of having sex. Sex can lead to fun, fights, babies, break-ups, make-ups and sometimes even disease. Why is a basic biological behavior like sex so complicated for humans? Is that just part of our nature? Well, yes and no. Sex is complicated for nearly all organisms that engage…

Intercourse, and lots of it, is fundamental to being human…can we get it online? Humans love intercourse. We like it in pairs, in groups, in the house and in the woods. We seek it out during the day and at night, in person and online. To be human is to want to do it, to need…

Does our evolutionary history condemn us to social inequality? The top 1 % of USA citizens control nearly 35% of the country’s wealth and 22% of American children live in poverty. President Obama calls income inequality a defining issue and Mitt Romney tells us that the nearly half of the US population who don’t make enough to pay income taxes…

Be yourself and do something in the world. Is there a “normal” way to be aged? Should we want to fit in with mainstream expectations of society? Is there a “right” way for aged individuals to act? As one moves from the third age (healthy, active but past job and parenting obligations) into the fourth age (dependency, memoryloss,…

Love ≠ romantic relationship ≠ monogamy ≠ pair bond We often think of “love” as the center of understanding romantic relationships but that is not the whole, or the most accurate, picture. We know that humans pair bond and are frequently in monogamous sexual and social relationships, but that does not mean what you think it does:…

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…