Category: Evolutionary Psychology

  • Incest vs. polygamy

    Today in Slate there’s an argument for why society should discourage first-degree incest. The main thrust of the piece seems to be broadly utilitarian, in that incest is destructive to the family unit and society has a rational motive in discouraging the practice. The reason that the argument is even made is because of analogies…

  • What era are our intuitions about elites and business adapted to?

    Well, just the way I asked it, our gut feelings about the economically powerful are obviously not a product of hunter-gatherer life, given that such societies have minimal hierarchy, and so minimal disparities in power, material wealth, privileges of a…

  • Blind men prefer thin-waisted women

    The waist-to-hip ratio research has been done to death, but an interesting twist, Blind men prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio:Previous studies suggest that men in Western societies are attracted to low female waist-to-hip ratios (WHR). Several explanatio…

  • The Mating Mouth

    Gingival Transcriptome Patterns During Induction and Resolution of Experimental Gingivitis in Humans:A relatively small subset (11.9%) of the immune response genes analyzed by array was transiently activated in response to biofilm overgrowth, suggestin…

  • Height doesn’t always matter….

    How universal are human mate choices? Size doesn’t matter when Hadza foragers are choosing a mate:It has been argued that size matters on the human mate market: both stated preferences and mate choices have been found to be non-random with respect to h…

Razib Khan