Is she hot or not? Science On The March!

I’ve been thinking a lot about physical attraction lately, and what a controlling and corrupting role it plays in our sexually repressed society. It was with great amazement, then, that I found this article last week in the November 2007 issue of Evolution and Human Behavior. Even if you don’t ordinarily read scientific literature, you may really enjoy reading this. Essentially, these researchers from the University of New Mexico Department of Psychology (Miller, Tybur, and Jordan) compared the tip earnings of dancers in a New Mexico strip club with their menstrual cycles. What they found was the first really convincing evidence for estrus (heat) in humans: there was a clear spike in a dancer’s earnings during the shifts worked while ovulating. This goes contrary to the generally held assumption among biologists that humans do not go into heat, that estrus was lost somewhere in human evolution. Now without reading the study, you would legitimately have a lot of questions, for example about how it accounts for things like birth control drugs that supress ovulation. In my view, the researchers have done a bang-up job of designing this study to account for a number of complicating factors.

Now, don’t go rushing off to shady websites to buy “human pheremone” in a bottle just yet. The study doesn’t identify the medium through which the signals of sexual fertility are transmitted. It remains unknown whether the signal is biochemical, visual, or some combination of both. It’s exciting to think that we may be sensing and acting on cues too subtle for us to consciously perceive. What makes one person attracted to another is one of the most complicated and taboo (but inherently interesting!) questions for modern biology and psychology. Don’t worry, you romantics, we’re unfathomably far from decoding the mystery of love. But we’re a lot closer now to decoding the mystery of ohhh-yeah-fuck-fuck-fuck!!!

Who knows what we’ll find out next? Stay tuned to the world of science, kids! Until next time, I’m simian - and thanks for reading.