Philadelphia is the place, the annual conference (www.psych.upenn.edu/~kurzban/HBES2006/) of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society is the reason, and here I am.
After the customary night of beer, wine and high-decibel chatting, the meat of the meet arrived this morning. As you might expect, talks leaned heavily toward mate attraction. Two pieces of the puzzle addressed today were displays of creativity and mating intelligence.
Is visual or verbal creativity another feather in the cap for men (or women, though most findings suggest men make more use of it) seeking mates? Uh, maybe.
Is mating intelligence its own animal (like the much-ballyhooed emotional intelligence) or is it a piece of general intelligence? For that matter, is general intelligence the foundation of all other modules of intelligence (i.e. emotional IQ) or vice versa, or are they completely separate (aka there is no overarching intelligence)? Uh, maybe!
Besides the intellectual fun, a few collected items:
David Buss, he of fame, fortune (?) and certainly above-average height and intelligence, arrived at a talk just as the question was posed: Are height and intelligence selected for together? (I think the real question is: Are taller people smarter, and do they get picked first in the mating game?).
Although it used to be that city kids could resist disease better than country kids, the roles are reversed or at least reversing in the developed world, especially when it comes to asthma. Of course, the whole room-is-too-god-damn-clean thing is a reasonable explanation for why urbanites' kids wind up sick; it just strikes me as funny that now the barefoot country kids have an edge because they are the only ones being exposed to parasites that keep them, in the long run, healthy.
More later...
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