Only a couple of articles this month as I’ve been distracted by other stuff. Both happen to be about biology and more specifically about females. The first one deals with the attraction of the color red. Psychologist Daniela Kayser of the University of Rochester and her team conducted a study in which heterosexual males were separately shown photos of the same moderately attractive woman. Half of the participants were shown a photo in which the model was wearing a red shirt. The other half were shown the same photo, except that this time her shirt was green. The men were then asked to select five questions out of a total of twenty four provided that they were told would be sent to the woman.

The team found that the men who saw the woman in red tended to choose more intimate questions. In a follow up study, another group of men were shown the same photos but this time they were tricked into believing that the woman would be coming into the room with them and they were instructed to arrange the two chairs in the room. The men who were shown the photo of the woman wearing red chose to put their own chair closer to where they thought the woman would be sitting. Apparently, it works for men too as the team has also found that men wearing red were rated by women as being more attractive and of higher status.

The second article deals with the well-known question of why it is that women tend to live significantly longer than men. It’s written by a gerontologist, Thomas Kirkwood, and is more of a general overview than coverage of a specific new finding. It starts with listing and then dismissing some common ideas, such as that men live more stressful lives and that men tend to have less healthy living habits. But its main point is that men may live shorter lives simply because they are biologically more disposable.

According to the author, one prevalent theory of aging is that it is caused by the build up of many individually tiny faults in the body such as damage to DNA strands or a malfunctioning protein molecule. Various mechanisms in our bodies constantly rectify this damage, but some of the damage is left alone and accumulates over time, eventually resulting in catastrophic failure. Some organisms have better repair systems than others, and these tend to be ones who have bodies that are less disposable, because considerable biological resources have already been devoted to make it more survivable.

Following this line of thought, Kirkman argues that men have more disposable bodies than women because all that matters is that a male be able to attract a mate and conceive offspring. After that, even if the male dies, the offspring will be not too badly bad, but women are needed to care for and bring up children, so it is critical that they stick around longer. It’s a cruel conclusion perhaps, but sometimes that’s just how biology works.