Men Pay the Ultimate Price to Attract Women – Yahoo! News
Personally, I like this part:
“Women live longer in almost every country, and the sex difference in lifespan has been recognized since at least the mid-18th century,” said Daniel Kruger at the University of Michigan. “It isn’t a recent trend; it originates from our deep evolutionary history.”
So, what, an observation of 250 years or so automatically generalizes to how-many-million years of human existence? That’s some good ‘science’, that.
Or this:
Males of many species must fight vigorously for the right to mate. Think of rams butting heads. Spectacular male bird plumage is another example of biological effort required to succeed, effort that uses energy and can shorten a life.
Hm, haven’t seen too many guys butting heads late…. oh, wait. Coupla guys over there right now… nevermind. Oh, and that plumage! Never seen a classier looking guy/transves… er, yeah.
Strange, though, how this kind of ‘evidence’ will probably be taken as hard scientific fact by most people. There’s not one thing in typical human male behavior, anatomy, or physiology that would suggest to me that the male body works harder at acquiring a mate than does the female. He doesn’t (usually) literally, physically butt heads with other guys, he doesn’t grow specialized feathers that are more brilliant than those of the female (doesn’t grow feathers at all, or brilliant colors, unless you want to count that ghastly Hawaiian shirt), he doesn’t secrete pheromones or anything of the like in order to attract a mate.1 I guess we’re just going to have to keep looking for mates the way we always have – through our darn good looks and dashing personalities.
Really, the high stress of our daily lifestyles and the drive to perform that nearly all men have still makes more sense with regard to our comparatively shorter lifespans than does this theory that it is our bodies somehow striving to produce something in us to make us more sexually appealing to our female counterparts.
- A study I saw recently did suggest that men and women do produce some small amount of pheromones, but it did say, too, that it wasn’t a significant enough quantity to make any kind of real difference in normal ‘mating habits’ of the typical adult human.[back]