Final Exam Questions
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Post 'em here. Feel free to answer other students questions if you're able.
I keep telling myself that I should stop going to CNN's website because there are too many news stories related to child death. But, this story is directly related to a discussion we had a while back about whether instances of infanticide were due to random psychopathology or evolutionary pressures. What do you think?
If selection pressure are heaviest on sex organ morphology, aren't we flirting with danger by cutting on the penis? The American Academy of Pediatrics now says that there's no health-related justification for rutine circumcisions. There is significant pain associated with this surgery and in the week following. Interesting that in european cultures where insurance doesn't rutinely pay for circumcision, most people DON'T get circumcised. So, is there a pricetag associated with our circumcision value?
This from Linda...thoughts?
In class today, we talked about the male and female differences in birth, and I found an interesting paper on the topic. It talks about a relationship between partnership-status and resultant offspring sex. The writer of the paper found a ratio which correlates to what we were speculating would be the percentage: when the mother had a spouse/partner, there was 51.5% male births. However, the percentage was 49.9% male births mothers who weren't living with a spouse or partner at conception. Anyways, while this paper doesn't exactly explain the genetics involved, it provides some support for the idea of conditions impacting the success of male vs. female babies.
Eugina found the following interesting article. What's your explanation for this?
I found this article, which says that women are attracted to men who look like they would be good fathers. In this study, women thought that men who looked like they would be good fathers were generally less masculine. Doesn't this kind of contrast what we've been learning about mate selection, esp. the article we discussed today? How can women simultaneously prefer dominant, masculine men and less masculine men if resources and parental investment are both important? Does it have anything to do with the dual mating strategy?
I was just thinking the other day about the degree to which culture grows out of evolutionary drives. For example, marriage (a meme) emerging from evolutionary pressures toward monogamy 1 million years age. I'm still facinated with this finding of earlier menarche in lower SES urban areas. For sure, there are cultural factors such as greater educational (both sex-ed and otherwise) levels in middle/upper class populations of suburbia, who presumably abstain from sex for a longer period of time ......
and are less likely to get pregnant at an early age.
But, one has to wonder whether the cultural influence of sex-education is in part borne out of the same environmental conditions that would naturally select for early menarche. That is, in middle/upper income populations your future financial/resource environment in your 30s is more promising and stable than it is in your teens. Indeed, getting pregnant at an early age could be detrimental to your reproductive fitness, because it could be an obstacle to your establishing a career that would provide more favorable financial resources in your 30s.
In contrast, for lower income populations the promise of greater financial resources in one's 30s is considerably less certain. This would put evolutionary pressures to have children and thus menarche at an earlier age. There is some increased risk of pregnancy complications with increasing maternal age, but middle/upper income women (more so than lower SES peers) might be better able to offset such risks due to greater financial resources (e.g., improving diet and prenatal education).
So, the question is then posed again: is ealy menarche purely a cultural thing, or is it an observed cultural difference (between SES classes) that is borne out of an evolutionary pressure?
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