Science Web Zen: "Just like penguins and other primates, people trade sex for resources."
From the best-titled press release ever, we have news that -- just as female penguins have sex with males who bring them nest-building pebbles, and female hummingbirds trade for flower access -- people buy and sell sex.
Not in the Elliott Spitzer sense -- well, that too -- but in the manner of 475 University of Michigan undergraduates, of whom especially commerce-minded men tended to buy sex, and women to sell it. Transactions only occurred about one-quarter of the time, perhaps because the students offered things like "tickets to the U-M versus Ohio State game; studying assistance; laundry washed; a Louis Vuitton bag; and voice lessons."
If the impulse underlying this exchange -- "referred to by scientists as nuptial gifts," and here given a consumer-age update -- really is, as the researchers suggest, biologically "hard wired," and not produced by social dynamics, then I suspect that many of these U of M undergrads are faultily programmed.
Laundry? Voice lessons? "I found you a really tiny, busted pebble! And here's a flower that don't bloom no more!"
Just like penguins and other primates, people trade sex for resources [press release]
Young Adults Attempt Exchanges in Reproductively Relevant Currencies [Journal of Evolutionary Psychology]
Image: Alistair McDiarmid
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