just so stories

There's quite a bustle among my colleagues about the deficiencies of recent studies about whether X female thingie evolved as a strategy to prevent rape. My favorite such study is one that seems to think that the only critical thing that happens when women ovulate is that they might get raped. The (probably bullshit) increase in strength, for example, one study showed couldn't be part, say of making sex more fun, could it? Mike the Mad Biologist as always makes a cogent analysis of the general limits on that study while Greg Laden critiques speculation about tears being used to limpify…