
Females seeking partner can tell if males experienced stress during adolescence - filipncs
http://phys.org/news/2017-01-females-sex-partner-males-experienced.html
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rokosbasilisk
Horrifying read. Ive seen this play out in my own personal life.

It reallys make me wonder how of human behavior is really just evolution and
not conscious choice. some kind of just after fact rationalization

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moh_maya
Interesting as it is, and without taking away from the significance of their
work, it is important to note that this was observed in rats. Not humans.
Speaking as a biologist / geneticist, I think we should be very very cautious
about extending observations in rodent social / sexual behaviour to primates,
much less humans. Rats are, in general, remarkably aggressive compared to
mice. Huge huge behavioural differences within just mice and rats!!

Here's an interesting example of the potential risks:
[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-
utopias-1...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-
utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/)

"How 1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of Humanity"

[Edit: added link].

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tropo
The mouse utopia experiment seems to apply disturbingly well to humans. Birth
rate in urban parts of highly-developed nations (our utopia) has plunged way
below the replacement rate. That's exactly what happened with the mice.

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moh_maya
True. But not complete. Do we observe the same neglect of progeny, the same
absence of "purpose" / directed activity in an equivalent human population
(I.e., well off / socially successful individuals)?

As child rearing becomes more expensive, the number of children decreases. Do
we assume, simply because whales (or elephants) have low birth rates, that
their "societies" are living in an utopia?

A single common / overlapping data point is too insufficient, and therefore
dangerous to infer that these are parallel processes. Which is exactly my
point.

[Edit: refined language]

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cowpig
"Stress" applied to a lab rat is effectively psychological trauma.

My interpretation of this experiment is that social skills play a part in
sexual attractiveness for rats, and that traumatizing them as teenagers
adversely impacts their social skills.

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LordWinstanley
Rats != People

