First of all, I think it is worth noting how often we returned to the seemingly simple fact that we are studying humans here.  We sometimes got frustrated with how this limited the scope of experiments that could be done—you can’t treat humans like mice and therefore it is more difficult to get the type of quantitative data on humans that you can on mice.  The studies we read overcame this difficulty, but we often found ourselves wanting to test subjects more strenuously, e.g., to have them actually choose a mate from a specific array, not just say which woman or man was “most attractive.”  But it is precisely the fact that we were looking at sexual selection in humans that makes this subject so fascinating.  Call me self-centered, but I find my own species to be the most exciting one to learn about because I am learning about myself and my fellow humans.  Studying sexual selection in humans is in a large part learning about what it is to be human, but we can’t harm humans in the quest to gain this knowledge.

See? Not the same.

We also often wanted the studies we read to be repeated cross-culturally. The C-Word—culture—throws another monkey wrench in the study of humans and human evolution.  So females imprint on their father figures in Hungary and then pick mates that look like these (adoptive) fathers (See “Sexual Imprinting in Human Mate Choice” in Proceedings: Biological Sciences, Vol 271 No 1544 by Bereczkei, Gyuris, and Weisfield; Arielle’s summary here). One could easily argue, especially if one was of a particularly nurture-over-nature bent, that in Hungary fathers are valued very highly and this wouldn’t hold true in any other society.  There would be no literature to prove this assertion wrong because the study has only been done in one culture! This is the kind of thing that could drive us crazy.  This study was just an example; the issue with lack of cross-cultural comparison as defense against evolution naysayers is wide reaching, including in the articles we read.

Over the course of the class, we came up with many harebrained ideas for experiments we would like to see done or concepts we’d like investigated. A couple of these worth noting follow.

1. Do babies actually look like their fathers or do people just say that they do? We’ve noticed that when people say “Oh he looks so much like…” of a baby, they usually finish the sentence with his father.  It makes sense that a father would want reassurance that his baby is in fact his because paternity, unlike maternity, is not certain in humans.  We wonder if babies actually do look like their dads: have we evolved this way because more children that looked like their fathers survived because the fathers were surer of their paternity and thus more likely to invest parental care? Or could it be the evolved or cultural behavior of adult humans to reassure fathers of their paternity?  We would like to see someone do this experiment, perhaps using computers to judge the similarities of babies’ and dads’ faces and then human subjects to say which parent they thought the child looked like.  Would there be significant differences in the percentage of babies that actually (computer) looked more like their dad than their mom and the percentage of babies that human subjects said looked more like their dad? Does this work cross-culturally?
2. In reading the articles for class, specifically Robert J. Quinlan’s article on the evolution of human pair-bonds (“Human Pair-Bonds: Evolutionary Functions, Ecological Variation, and Adaptive development,” Evolutionary Anthropology 17:227-238, 2008), I began to wonder about a specific variety of human pair bond—the arranged marriage.  Arranged marriages have traditionally been a big part of human’s reproductive strategies, existing in societies from that of the !Kung hunter-gatherers to that of the Renaissance monarchs of Europe.  Thanks to the existence of this mating strategy in foraging populations, it is not too much of a stretch to assume that arranged marriages have been around—even prevalent—for a significant amount of human history.  How does the institution of arranged marriage affect sexual selection? Have men evolved to appeal to older folks, those the same generation as their parents? Have women? Are these questions testable in any practical sense?

This is just a small sample of the things this course has made me think about and the questions that are currently floating around my mind.  Another huge theme is sexual dimorphism in intelligence in humans, but that deserves its own post.  Please keep reading our blog; I’ve found lots of interesting articles to post and plan to continue mulling over my questions here in the hopes that you will mull with me.