Posts by Agustínfuentes

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…