In a recession, we all have less to spend. But are men
genetically programmed to keep on spending money
anyway?
Bling, foreclosures, rising credit card debt, bank and auto
bailouts, upside down mortgages and perhaps a mid-life crisis
new Corvette are all symptoms of compulsive overspending,
and despite the female "Sex and the City" reputation for
drowning their sorrows in shopping, the truth is that men
indulge in this more than women do. Researcher Daniel Kruger
looks to evolution and mating for an explanation.
Kruger theorizes that men overspend to attract mates. It all
boils down, as it has for hundreds of thousands of years, to
making babies. He tested his hypothesis in a community
sample of adults aged 18-45 and found that the degree of
financial consumption was directly related to future mating
intentions and past mating success for men (but NOT for
women).
Financial consumption was the only factor that predicted how
many partners men wanted in the next five years and also
predicted the number of partners they had in the previous
five years, Being married made a difference in the frequency
of one-time sexual partners in the last year, but not in the
number of partners in the past or desired in the
future.
If you plan on having lots of kids, it helps to have smart
sperm, and new research suggests that smarter men also
have better quality sperm. When psychiatrists analyzed data from I.Q.
tests given to soldiers during the Vietnam War, they found
that those who with the highest scores also had more?and
more mobile?sperm (this doesn?t mean that the kids they
produced are smarter, even though intelligence is?to some
extent, at least?genetic, although
environment is important too).
This could be because, inside the womb, the brains develop
about the same time as the testicles (some women would say
that male brains are INSIDE their testicles!) BBC News quotes
fertility expert Allan Pacey as saying, "The fact that it's
possible to detect a statistical relationship between
intelligence and semen quality in adult men probably says
more about the co-development of brain and testicles when
the man was in his mother's womb, and therefore how well
they both function in adult life, rather than suggesting that
playing Sudoku can somehow stimulate more sperm to be
produced."
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