Looks like I am breaking a trend (“So, this is probably the last post for a while, unless I break from that trend.“). It probably has something to do with free cycles when the Windows CE emulator is slowly doing (or not doing) its thing. So, why not a weekend post on a weekday?
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I found this post interesting.
Interesting research at Yale:
Dr. Brennan argues that elaborate female duck anatomy evolves as a countermeasure against aggressive males. “Once they choose a male, they’re making the best possible choice, and that’s the male they want siring their offspring,” she said. “They don’t want the guy flying in from who knows where. It makes sense that they would develop a defense.”
There are some researching biology and psychology that believe that we have evolved the brains we have because of the competition around sexual reproduction. Some part of these views says that our brains serve as a means to both impress potential mates and select from potential mates. Courtship provides one means of communicating these brainy capabilities, establishing whether someone really is worthy of reproduction. And, there is lots of advertising of these capabilities, like music, poetry, paintings, maths, etc.
Side note, this is even more interesting in combination with things like the reality it generally takes couples trying to have a baby on the average of a few months to achieve pregnancy. Such drawn out periods seems to protect against a number of attacks, such as misrepresentation and quick judgement – for example, it exposes potential mates that seem good at first glance but aren’t quite so good once a closer look is provided.
Anyway, ignoring the multitudes of other factors around this sort of evolutionary understanding, it can be said that at least some part of our brains evolution seems like the result of a bit of an arms race. Our brains evolving more and more powerful capabilities for impressing potential mates (offensive capabilities) while at the same time evolving more and more powerful capabilities for selecting from potential mates (defensive capabilities). It could be that we are a product of “our own” attempts to secure reproduction. Cool beans.
And, even looking at the brain as much more than just an arms race, it can easily be acknowledged that reproduction is a drive wired into our brains. Which means, take physical beauty and combine it with a brain particularly adept at impressing others (e.g., charm), and you have an attacker that can strike at the core of the human factor. Somewhat amusingly though, that human factor is also our best defense at preventing such attacks.