Tag: science

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Are Life History Trade-Offs Based On Function? A New Study [IN BUGS] Suggests Caution of Basic Theoretical Assumption

When I get to my office in the morning, I go through my email and read my journal alerts of the newest academic papers published. I often come across papers that are interesting, but today I came across a paper that really blew me away. Why? Because it used a clever research design to yield big theoretical implications — my favorite kind of paper.

The paper, “A Weapons-Testes Trade-Off In Males Is Amplified in Female Traits,” by Christine Miller, Paul Joseph, Rebecca Kilner, and Zachary Emberts published in Proceedings B caught my attention. My lab recently published a paper on trade-offs in male ejaculate quality using a life history framework, so I was interested to see how the findings of this new paper contributed to this broader research area. The research did not disappoint. The results certainly found trade-offs between weapons and testes as the title implies, but with a significant twist, humbly reflected by the last part of the title “amplified in female traits.”

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This article was originally published on my Medium account on 1 August 2019.

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Why Men Have More Sex Partners Than Women

I got to my office the other morning with the goal of organizing my last data set needed for my PhD dissertation. The study is a small survey data set of 52 heterosexual couples, mostly adults in their 20s, who reported on a variety of self-report sexuality and relationship measures — pretty standard psychological research.

My topical expertise in psychology centers primarily around human sexuality. After years of studying in this area, there are two observations about human sexuality that I have more or less taken for granted at this point:

(1) Men have more sex partners than women, on average. This means that if you approach a random man on the street and ask him how many people he’s had sex with, his answer is likely to be larger than a random woman’s answer to the same question. (I don’t recommend using this approach strategy, however.)

(2) The variance, or range, of the number of sex partners within the sexes is different, with men as a group having a greater range as compared to women as a group. This means that it is likely that the most sexually successful man you know has a much larger number of sex partners than the most sexually successful woman who you know.

After my data were organized, I ran a simple analysis comparing the mean average number of lifetime sex partners between men and women to see if these basic observations held. It was unsurprising to see that my data conformed to both points: In my sample, men had a higher mean and a larger variance compared to women in their response to the question, “How many partners have you had sexual intercourse with in your lifetime?”

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This post was originally published on my Medium account on 16 July 2019.