kevin, your breakdown was hilarious and totally right on. you should be paid for this.

while the article was yet another fake science, “defending dominant hegemony” pile of poo, it makes me very happy to read folks’ intelligent, thoughtful replies. thank goodness there are spaces like this. i take comfort in knowing that there are other people out there who also have bruises on their foreheads from banging their heads on their desks.

“I bet all you women of color out there didn’t know that you secretly long to look like Barbie?”

All I can say about that is (my favorite phrase at the moment)… “Oh my sweet curly head !”

I read that male embryos and infants are less robust than female embryos and infants, I think in one of my early uni classes. Poor economic status is perhaps more likely to correlate with poorer maternal health and poor/absent antenatal and postnatal health care, which might make it harder for less robust male embryos/infants to survive. That seems more like a comment on how crap and classist health systems in even the most wealthy developed nations are, than anything about wealth = evolutionary advantage.
[Having said that, this statement is based on a dim memory. The “less robust” part may relate to the male XY chromosomes, the male carrying an affected X, and being the expresser of a lot of recessive conditions that the female XX can carry but not express due to the healthy X).
Either way, stupid article, loved the analysis and discussion.

I minored in genomics and I’ve been increasingly horrified to see ‘evolution’ used to justify the most hateful nonsense, like the article you found. I usually have to put up with the male superiority myths, but I given the men I know… well, they need something to believe in.

Sexual selection no longer works on humans. Beautiful people marry beautiful people and have beautiful children. Ugly people marry ugly people, and have ugly children. There’s nobody too ugly to have children, and this has been true for thousands of years.

The article was obviously wrong anyway – the prettiest girls are redheads with green eyes. Blondes are just redheads in whom the fire has faded.

sigh.

but #4: Most suicide bombers are Muslim.

As proof of that, they reference Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta saying when religion is involved, it is always Muslim.

err. first, that “fact” doesn’t automatically led to point number 4. If I only ever eat lettuce at dinner, it doesn’t mean that most of my dinners are lettuce.

but second – it’s just not true – the Tamil Tigers are not muslim, and until 2000 could take credit for more than half the suicide bombers out there. Granted, a lot has changed since then, but their “most” implies something significantly larger than is true.

but having Hindi suicide bombers kinda blows their theory about why people become suicide bombers out of the water.

That rag publishes some of the funniest things. I go their for things to make fun of. It’s scary because people grab it thinking they are getting something authoritative when what they are getting pop culture psychology written for entertainment.