For most men, women with small feet look dainty and cute, while women with big feet tend to look clumsy or ungraceful. But what if the feet were covered by shoes, will men will prefer women with small feet even though they can’t see the feet with their own eyes?

Apparently, yes. An interesting study by evolutionary psychologists discovered that for men, women with smaller feet have prettier faces:

Atkinson and his colleague Michelle Rowe measured hand length, foot length, thigh length and hip width on 60 white female college students, then adjusted each measurement to account for individual differences in overall height. For each of 16 body-part measurements, they selected the eight women with the shortest lengths and the eight with the longest, and constructed morphs of their faces. These morphs were then rated for attractiveness by 77 heterosexual male students.

The men were three-and-a-half times as likely to pick the short-footed morph as more attractive, and almost 10 times as likely to say it was more feminine, Atkinson and Rowe found.

Similarly, they were more than 11 times as likely to pick the narrow-hipped morph as more attractive, and eight times as likely to choose the long-thighed morph..

Atkinson goes on to suggest that the features of having long thighs, narrow hips and small feet indicate that one has a healthy childhood. Poor stress and nutrition being causes of short or stunted growth.

The ability to predict the size of the feet just by looking at the face is fascinating. And its because our faces and bodies are shaped by the same hormones.

I can understand the part about longer thigh bones and smaller feet but narrow hips? I always thought that according to evolutionary science, human males were drawn to females with a certain hip to waist ratio with big hips being a sure sign of fertility and sexual vigor.

When you were a kid, what did you think of scientists? Smart people in white lab coats peering into a microscope on a table surrounded by test-tubes and strange machinery? These images are hard to shake.

A group of 7th graders visited a laboratory and these collections of hand drawn pictures show how their impressions of the profession changes after getting to know scientists in person.

Coincidences are fascinating. Are they part of a predestined reality or a pure accident cognitively generated by the mind’s tendency to favor patterns? More about the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon:

Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase “That’s so weird, I just heard about that the other day” would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof. Most people seem to have experienced the phenomenon at least a few times in their lives, and many people encounter it with such regularity that they anticipate it upon the introduction of new information. But what is the underlying cause?

In case you’re flying, know the safest place to sit in case of a plane crash.

Passengers sitting in the aisle seats near the front of an airliner and within five rows of the emergency exit are more likely to survive a crash or a fire, new research claims. The discovery was made after an exhaustive study of 105 accidents including personal accounts from almost 2,000 survivors of how they managed to escape from crash landings and on-board fires.

Predictably the safest seats are in the emergency exit rows themselves with those afforded the quickest exit being in the aisle seats.

But it also discovered that sitting at the front of the aircraft had a 65 per cent chance of survival during a fire compared with 58 per cent for other passengers.

Let’s face it. English as you know it is going to change. It’s inevitable. We don’t speak Shakespearean anymore. The transcripts you read from early medieval times are even a little difficult to understand at times. But is this linguistic evolution mostly the impact of culture (nurture)?

I came across this interesting essay on what the english language may look like in 3000AD.

Predicting the future of the English language is rather easy, in the short term. The odds are, over the next few decades its New World dialects are going to gain increasing global dominance, accelerating the demise of thousands of less fortunate languages but at long last allowing a single advertisement to reach everybody in the world.

 

Then after a century or two of US dominance some other geopolitical grouping will gain the ascendancy, everyone will learn Chechen or Patagonian or whatever it is, and history will continue as usual. But apart from that… what might the language actually look like in a thousand years time?

Incidentally, the last article I read on this topic was Wired’s piece on How English is evolving into a language we may not understand.

Scientists have recently concluded that Neanderthals were not less intelligent than our ancestors (Homo sapiens) because they developed tools that were as equally efficient. This is significant because it suggests that the lack of intelligence was not a definitive cause for Neanderthal extinction.

Blades were first produced by Homo sapiens during their colonization of Europe from Africa approximately 40,000 years ago. This has traditionally been thought to be a dramatic technological advance, helping Homo sapiens out-compete, and eventually eradicate, their Stone Age cousins. Yet when the research team analysed their data there was no statistical difference between the efficiency of the two technologies. In fact, their findings showed that in some respects the flakes favored by Neanderthals were more efficient than the blades adopted by Homo sapiens.

Some quick notes about Neanderthals, a species which inhabited Europe and parts of Western/Central Asia:

1. They had a larger cranial capacity – brains might be larger.
2. They were exclusively carnivorous
3. They co-existed with humans up to 15,000 years after Homo sapiens migrated into Europe.
4. Their overall population might not have exceeded over 10,000 individuals.

Some resources:

• Neanderthals – Ice people – 200,000 years ago
• Wikipedia Page (Neanderthal)
• Documentary on Youtube (link to 1st of 5 parts)

The NY Times has an interesting article on female sexuality, which one researcher refers to a continuum between heteosexuality and homosexuality:

Heterosexual women, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.

What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality.

One hundred and sixty-five eminent thinkers, researchers, and communicators, at the annual request of the edge.org website, answered the following question: “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?” Many of the names here are well known to the interested public—the physicist Freeman Dyson, the “genome decoder” Craig Venter, the biologist Richard Dawkins (author of the controversial book The God Delusion), the Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman. Other participants, such as actor Alan Alda or the musician Brian Eno, may be surprising departures, but are just as interesting. And there are a number of science journalists, as well, including Steve Connor of the Independent, Roger Highfield of the Telegraph, and Philip Campbell, editor of Nature. The following are some examples of the ideas that they are re-evaluating.

History Shows That Famous Thinkers Also Get It Wrong. And they admit it