The Economist has an article with a new twist on efforts to understand the evolutionary implications of homosexuality. (I'm sure y'all don't need me to tell you that gay sex is not all that successful on the reproductive front.) A few years ago, there were some studies that demonstrated a link between male homosexuality and female fecundity. There was also a study that found that the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay. As well as left-handedness being more likely among gay people. But this new study is saying this:

[Brendan Zietsch of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues] think that genes which cause men to be more feminine in appearance, outlook and behaviour and those that make women more masculine in those attributes, confer reproductive advantages as long as they do not push the individual possessing them all the way to homosexuality.

There are also data which suggest that having a more feminine personality might indeed give a heterosexual male an advantage. Though women prefer traditionally macho men at the time in their menstrual cycles when they are most fertile, at other times they are more attracted to those with feminine traits such as tenderness, considerateness and kindness, as well as those with feminised faces.

. . . When the relationships between twins were included in the statistical analysis (all genes in common for identical twins; a 50%overlap for the non-identical) the team was able to show that both atypical gender identity and its influence on the number of people of the opposite sex an individual claimed to have seduced were under a significant amount of genetic control. More directly, the study showed that heterosexuals with a homosexual twin tend to have more sexual partners than heterosexuals with a heterosexual twin.

If a woman prefers a long-term relationship with a slightly feminized man and slightly masculinized women have more sex partners then what I am inferring from this little bit of information is that female mate choice is driving the existence of homosexuality. Wait, does that mean that our moms DID make us gay?!

The Tyrolean Iceman has offered up another mystery. (The first one being: who stole his genitals?) He is from a human lineage that is no longer in existence, and scientists don't know what to make of that.

The so-called Tyrolean Iceman, a 5,000-year-old mummy found in an Alpine glacier roughly two decades ago, lived in an era when people were smelting copper and living in cities. But a recent study of his mitochondrial DNA — circlets of genetic material passed on solely through mothers — revealed something astonishing about this recent human ancestor. He is from a distinct genetic group that mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps no one sharing his genetic lineage survived into the present day. Or perhaps humans are evolving so quickly that even our close ancestors are genetically distinct from us in significant ways.

This new information might be in line with recent evidence that human evolution is accelerating.

There was an "The Iceman No Longer Cometh" joke trying to be written here, but it seems kind of mean now that we know he doesn't have any family. Poor guy's been through enough.

Via DoorQ:

I wanted to take a moment to provide some meta information about not just our election struggle, but the ongoing, and probably eternal, conflict between various interest groups. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has some insights into the factors at the core of that struggle.

Haidt studies morality and emotion in the context of culture. He asks: Why did humans evolve to have morals -- and why did we all evolve to have such different morals, to the point that our moral differences may make us deadly enemies? It's a question with deep repercussions in war and peace -- and in modern politics, where reasoned discourse has been replaced by partisan anger and cries of "You just don't get it!" Haidt asks, "Can't we all disagree more constructively?" He suggests we might build a more civil and productive discourse by understanding the moral psychology of those we disagree with, and committing to a more civil political process. He's also active in the study of positive psychology and human flourishing.

In this video, taken from the endlessly fascinating TED series of lectures, Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.

And Haidt is surprisingly funny.

Via Daily Kos:

An exciting, recent fossil find suggest Texas was a hotbed of primate evolution 45 million years ago. Unfortunately, as the Texas Freedom Network has been blogging for months, recent history suggests Texas is leading the rest of the nation backwards in our understanding of science in general and evolution specifically.

The Young Earth Creationists just aren't having it, though. Their, uh, version of a scientific theory is being put in the ring with Science. Dentist, op-ed contributor, Young Earth Creationist, and head of the Texas Board of Education Dan McLeroy has written an especially optimistic piece for The Waco Tribune. Mr. McLeroy writes:

All we must do to maintain science’s credibility and to decide if there are weaknesses in the evolutionary hypothesis is 'to use evidence to construct testable explanations' and see where the evidence leads. Let the best scientific explanation win.

Someone is totally gonna get hurt.

Seed Magazine has a great article on how we evolve. Not just how we got to where we are, but where we're going and how we got pointed in that direction at all.

Benjamin Phelan writes:

When the previous generation of life scientists was coming up through the academy, there was a widespread assumption, not always articulated by professors, that human evolution had all but stopped. It had certainly shaped our prehuman ancestors — Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the rest of the ape-men and man-apes in our bushy lineage — but once Homo sapiens developed agriculture and language, it was thought, we stopped changing . . .[but] the colossal amount of information suddenly available has spurred a revision of the old static picture that will render it unrecognizable. Harpending and a host of researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.

Some of the ideas presented have a history of misinterpretation and misapplication, but the reseachers Phelan quotes are meticulous in pointing out the fallacies that might arise from a misunderstandng of the data. One of the more elegant sentences from Phelan, "High intelligence is to great apes as the wing is to birds." I love the transformation of a process into something physical. The full article is available over at Seed.