Judgement Day

From the Telegraph
Why men will judge a woman in milliseconds
Men take a fraction of a second to decide if they are attracted to a woman or not - but they should not be called shallow because they are genetically programmed to do so, scientist say.
Men weigh up potential partners almost instantaneously based on their appearance because their "ancient" genetic preference for attractive mates leads them to, experts claim.
In contrast women take longer to decide their feelings for a man because they need to weigh up whether he will be a committed partner who will provide for them well – part of their survival programming.
And they needed experts and a study to find this out?

The most amusing thing about this article is the underlying tone
"men are not shallow...no really they're not"

Is Monogamy A Sign Of Evolutionary Intelligence?

Are Monogamists smarter?

From The Frisky

According to a new study, there may be a practical way to find out if your man is going to be faithful to you … test his IQ. If you’re a wise lady, then you should be looking for a very smart man, because researchers in the U.K. have discovered that high IQ and the ability to be monogamous are related in men. Why? Because intelligent men are more evolved. Yeah, tell us something we don’t already know. The evolutionary psychologist who ran the study theorizes that the smarter a man is, the less susceptible he is to indulging in his primal urges to impregnate as many women as he can. Also it’s just straight-up smart not to piss your woman off.

Since we can basically find a behavioral report that we can extrapolate just about anything from, I'm not quite buying the statistical significance of this study. How large was the sample I wonder?

But I think that the higher the IQ, the more likely both men and women can keep up the appearance of monogamy.

And further on the subject of behavioral studies that are in need of being contested...

Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ

Really? What about ultra orthodox Jewish men or devout conservative Catholic men.

Nonsense, total nonsense.

How Sex Drives Spending or Happy Valentine's Day

From Smart Money via Instapundit
So Happy Together: Sex and Spending

Valentine’s Day...may be a multibillion-dollar industry. But the larger driver of economic progress is the sex drive itself.
What drives us to create and produce? What drives us to consume? Why are love and money so intimately intertwined?

...let’s look at how sex drives people’s spending.

There are obvious ways sex gets people to spend more money (flowers, presents, dates… not to mention the direct, usually illegal, purchase of sex), but a tremendous amount of economic activity also goes into what’s called “signaling” — buying things to communicate one’s status, and thus one’s desirability as a mate.

Ah, so it's all about signalling. How do women and men differ at this?

Even more revealing, however, is how men and women respond in an economic experiment when “romantically primed” — that is, when they are shown pictures of attractive people of the opposite sex and then asked to make various consumption decisions.

Romantically primed men, in a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2007, proved much more willing to splurge on things like flashy watches and expensive cars (while they showed no difference in their spending on boring, non-flashy things like tissues and headache medicine).

Women, meanwhile, didn’t adjust their consumption at all when romantically primed. Instead, romantically primed women indicated that they were more willing to spend time volunteering (such as at a children’s hospital or a homeless shelter).

So all this time I thought that women signalled through getting all gussied up with botox and blow drys and boob jobs...

But as it turns out men use stuff and women use actions to signal

What does all this tell us? It tells us that these consumption decisions are most likely about signaling: for men, of status and access to resources; for women, of altruism. Romantic priming made men no more likely to want to spend time volunteering; and romantically primed women only wanted to volunteer more when their effort would be visible, not when it would be inconspicuous.

So one way or the other, at least for women and their altruistic actions, it is all about the show.

The article goes on to discuss the evolutionary ramifications of all of this and suggests that men are at their prime, in terms of their creative output, when they are around 30 years old, because that period coincides with their greatest competition from other men for finding mates.

Personally, I'd like to leave all the analysis out of Valentine's Day...and the flowers and the chocolate....and just celebrate with caviar and champagne.