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Science and scientists are not the same thing. Did “our hands evolve to fight” and does evolution explain why “women love to shop and men don’t”? University of Utah researchers claim to have shown that humans (actually, men) have hands evolved for fighting, and researchers at the University of Michigan assert that gendered shopping behavior reflects ancestral foraging adaptations. However, this…

How Barbies, Hollywood, and fruit flies push gender stereotypes ‘Tis the season for gender enforcement. This is a time of year when we venture forth to buy gifts for kids and are surrounded by action heroes and Barbies, pink toy ovens and blue toy trucks, fully clothed Santas and scantily clad female helpers. What we buy for children…

A forthcoming article by two economists says it is. These economists tell us that relative genetic diversity is a major factor impacting societies’ development and economic success. But their association between human genetic diversity, history, and economic development and success is superficial and built on a framework of poor assumptions and mistaken interpretations of what…

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…