Yes At least over 100 generations in Drosophila melanogaster vinegar flies. “Male cognitive performance declines in the absence of sexual selection” proclaim Brian Hollis and Tadeusz Kawecki in the title…
- Scientia Professor of Evolution, UNSW
There’s a video out there on the intertubes that’s got conservatives cheering and lefties in a lather. Actually such videos are legion, but I’m talking here about a particular one with the rather broad…
Happy Darwin Day! Is that even an appropriate thing to wish somebody? Especially so close to Valentine’s day? Darwin Day, according to the International Darwin Day Foundation, is “a global celebration…
Few acts in the living world involve more intimate cooperation than sex. Two individuals combining their DNA to create a new and unique individual. And that’s only conception. In long-lived species, especially…
Studying sex differences seldom gets boring. While the origins of differences in behaviour and cognition remain fiercely - and quite rightly - disputed, we don’t sweat quite as much about why women and…
With each passing year, technology percolates further into academic life. The year 2013 might look, in hindsight, like the year academic social media use went mainstream. Numbers of tweets and Facebook…
When is a selfie a selfie? And when does it become act of war? Over at mamamia.com, Bec Sparrow has the answer. When the selfie is of six-packing fitness-blogging Norwegian Caroline Berg Eriksen posing…
Over the last few evenings, I inhaled Robert Harris’ novelisation of France’s infamous Dreyfus affair. Told from the point of view of Colonel Georges Picquart, the intelligence officer whose scrupulous…
Are you a feminist? It’s a question I ask of my third-year Animal Behaviour class every year. I ask the question in a lecture, near the end of the course, about human sexuality. It’s a part of the lecture…
Hasn’t Malcolm Gladwell had a busy fortnight? His latest book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, shipped on the first of October. And the deluge of reviews washed out…
Why do religious beliefs vary so broadly? I’m not talking here about the near-cosmic diversity in the content of religious belief, number and identity of deities, or types of practice. Rather, I’d like…
Dads are important. Pardon the motherhood statement about … fatherhood. Just sometimes, even self-evident things need to be said. All else being equal, fathers who are involved in their children’s upbringing…
Like most academics and several other Conversation authors, I imagine, I’m irritated at the Coalition’s recently stated intention to micro-manage ARC Granting outcomes. Irritated, but in no way surprised…
All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. All these bad books have one thing in common: they don’t ring true. (Robert Harris: The Ghost) The same can be said, probably more so…
My research group is always looking for subjects for our internet-based studies in which we measure how certain traits enhance or detract from an individual’s attractiveness. And we worry, like other researchers…
News just in, guaranteed to stir smug nods from non-believers and incite irritation among the devout: intelligence correlates negatively with religious belief. You may have seen similar - or contradictory…
This week has seen an embarrassment of riches for a columnist with my interests. I’ve been torn between the “Gucci Handbags as a means of female-female competition” and the rather tragic unravelling of…
Today, I have just learned from Katherine Feeney’s column in the Sydney Morning Herald, is National Orgasm Day (NOD). What that is and how you celebrate it remains a little opaque to me*. Will there be…
Few subjects more predictably animate furious disagreement and cross-purposes discussion than the origins of human warfare. Are people “naturally” belligerent? And what does that even mean? The question…
That’s the message uber-cerebral Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman wants to spread. He’s crowdfunding a music video and short documentary in support of what he calls the new Golden Rule of Sex. How cool can…
This week I’ve been wrestling with a particularly large writing project which has kept me away from posting in this column. But, staring into my Twitter feed in procrastination, I spotted much outrage…
“This,” as I believe it is now fashionable to say, “is actually a thing.” Where by this I mean Sexcereal. A his and hers line of wholefood cereals that tout themselves as the world’s first all-natural…
Why would an otherwise healthy animal stop reproducing? Natural selection usually favours genes that elevate reproductive success because the very act of reproduction is how genes proliferate. So adaptations…
If you spend any time, as I do, in that strange and confusing place we call “The Internet” or that only marginally less strange and confusing place called the USA, you might have noticed an unholy row…
Becoming a parent isn’t easy. Okay, conceiving can be far too easy. But I mean all that stuff about nappies and midnight feeds, and the germs they bring back from daycare, and trying to understand school…
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