4 ms·

Having Frequent Diarrhea as a Child Shapes Your Adult Mate Choice

1 points by lkrubner 12y ago

anigbrowl 12y ago
This is one of the worst-written articles I have ever encountered - I feel like I'm trapped in an elevator with an annoying 12 year old. Scientific American continues its long sad decline into tabloid dreck. What actually matters: The hypothesis for de Barra and his colleagues’ study was therefore pretty clear-cut. Adults who are sickly in childhood grow up to prefer opposite-sex faces displaying exaggerated sex-typical features: testosterone-forged faces in men, that’s to say, and ultra-feminine faces in women. They used a longitudinal study from Bangladesh where diarrhea is closely monitored because it's a leading cause of mortality in children as the source data and found that people who suffered badly from illness as children developed a strong preference for hypertypical gender features compared to a control group. Diarrhea was selected as a proxy for childhood malaise because of its commonality.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  I thought the part informing us that men cannot be inseminated was particularly educational and reflects the high levels of experimental research being conducted on behalf of this fine publication. Though it does perhaps lack a certain rigor, as surely there is nothing to stop men being inseminated. It is merely that they are unable to then become pregnant after insemination, as other visitors to this planet can surely attest from their long running experiments on unlucky country folk. Which will no doubt be the subject of next months exciting issue.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Exactly. I have a chip on my shoulder abot this because up to about 15 years ago SA used to be incredibly good- a solid digest of non-specialist science education for about $100 year. I would happily have paid more, I considered the time and dollar cost involved well worth it for the intellectual exercise it provided. Then they went downmarket in search of a circulation boost and it's been in decline ever since. I stopped reading the month I noticed that I had consumed the new issue in 3 hours rather than the usual 6, and took out an issue from a few months earlier to compare - turned out that they increased the font size and line spacing to produce a magazine with the same number of pages and the same price but about 30% less text. I hope an asteroid lands on their offices and reduces them to a smoking crater in the ground.
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      I stopped bothering with it ever since they cut the amateur scientist column. I remember they used to cover stuff like sonoluminescence in there - http://techmind.org/sl/ http://techmind.org/sl/ - it was awesome. Let me know if you ever want help working out candidate asteroids and how to achieve the required trajectory adjustments. just found this though :) - https://archive.org/details/TheAmateurScientist https://archive.org/details/TheAmateurScientist
      - anigbrowl 12y ago
        Good finds! Feel free to drop me a line via (same name) at gmail - nice to find a fellow spirit.

1 points by lkrubner 12y ago

This is one of the worst-written articles I have ever encountered - I feel like I'm trapped in an elevator with an annoying 12 year old. Scientific American continues its long sad decline into tabloid dreck. What actually matters: The hypothesis for de Barra and his colleagues’ study was therefore pretty clear-cut. Adults who are sickly in childhood grow up to prefer opposite-sex faces displaying exaggerated sex-typical features: testosterone-forged faces in men, that’s to say, and ultra-feminine faces in women. They used a longitudinal study from Bangladesh where diarrhea is closely monitored because it's a leading cause of mortality in children as the source data and found that people who suffered badly from illness as children developed a strong preference for hypertypical gender features compared to a control group. Diarrhea was selected as a proxy for childhood malaise because of its commonality.

lotsofmangos 12y ago
I thought the part informing us that men cannot be inseminated was particularly educational and reflects the high levels of experimental research being conducted on behalf of this fine publication. Though it does perhaps lack a certain rigor, as surely there is nothing to stop men being inseminated. It is merely that they are unable to then become pregnant after insemination, as other visitors to this planet can surely attest from their long running experiments on unlucky country folk. Which will no doubt be the subject of next months exciting issue.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Exactly. I have a chip on my shoulder abot this because up to about 15 years ago SA used to be incredibly good- a solid digest of non-specialist science education for about $100 year. I would happily have paid more, I considered the time and dollar cost involved well worth it for the intellectual exercise it provided. Then they went downmarket in search of a circulation boost and it's been in decline ever since. I stopped reading the month I noticed that I had consumed the new issue in 3 hours rather than the usual 6, and took out an issue from a few months earlier to compare - turned out that they increased the font size and line spacing to produce a magazine with the same number of pages and the same price but about 30% less text. I hope an asteroid lands on their offices and reduces them to a smoking crater in the ground.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    I stopped bothering with it ever since they cut the amateur scientist column. I remember they used to cover stuff like sonoluminescence in there - http://techmind.org/sl/ http://techmind.org/sl/ - it was awesome. Let me know if you ever want help working out candidate asteroids and how to achieve the required trajectory adjustments. just found this though :) - https://archive.org/details/TheAmateurScientist https://archive.org/details/TheAmateurScientist
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
      Good finds! Feel free to drop me a line via (same name) at gmail - nice to find a fellow spirit.