Behavioral Ecology Blog

Ive got some exciting news to share- a milestone has been passed in my academic career- details fourthcoming…

But 1st, let me catch up on some of the best posts form the past few weeks..

There was a post over at wonker about a photo showing Karl Rove with a Coptix folder. Coptix is a company that offers anonymous email services (errr, “a private Internet web server in a clumsy yet still illegal attempt to keep the Crime Organization’s communications out of the public eye“)- perhaps suggestive that the administration is hiding something. Well, turned out is was a hoax- but still entertaining…

Breeding like drunken ferrets, a post that reports on the disparitiy between GOP mating behavior and party enrollment data.

I wish I got email like Mike does… and another

Are All Male’s Liars And Cheaters? Yes — If They’re Crayfish!

Skin color & sexual dimorphism?

Some new data to throw into the argument about the origin of light skin (it seems that dark skin obviously arose when we lost our fur, seeing as functional constraint is strong in dark-skinned populations and unexposed skin in our nearest primate relatives is pink). From Dienekes:

Women have lighter skin than men do across a wide range of populations, even on the unexposed skin of the upper inner arm, possibly because of sexual selection by men for lighter-skinned women. If this hypothesis is true, human skin color should become more sexually dimorphic with increasing distance from the equator, since sexual selection for lighter skin in women would be less constrained by natural selection for darker skin in both sexes. Yet when Madrigal and Kelly (2006) analyzed skin reflectance data from 53 different samples, they found that the most dimorphic human populations were actually those of medium skin color at medium latitudes.

Males caring for offspring is a good reproductive strategy