Sexual Selection in the Wodaabe Tribe

Perhaps human aesthetics emerged through runaway sexual selection, with aesthetic tastes evolving as part of female mate choice. In this view, some female hominids just happened to have certain tastes concerning male ornaments. The artists best able to fulfill these tastes inseminated more aesthetic groupies and sired more offspring, who inherited both their artistic talent and their mothers' aesthetic tastes. Something like this still happens among the Wodaabe people (also known as the Boro...

 The Romantic View of Birth

You're lying in bed in the labor room of the hospital and you're about as exhausted, as utterly worn out, as you'll ever be. Giving birth is this peculiar combination of determination and compulsion. It's you pushing, and you push in a more concentrated, focused way than you've ever done anything, but in another sense you don't decide or try to push or even want to. You are just swept away by the action. It's like a cross between running a marathon and having the most enormous. shattering, ir...