The study was actually about neither of those things, as I explained in another post. The authors of the study don't mention "laziness" at all in their abstract. I don't think Lindy read the original research paper. Voluntary wheel running is just one way to measure motivated behaviour in rats. Motivation and emotion…

Oh, boy. This study said nothing about a "laziness gene". It's about selectively breeding for certain motivated behaviours and then looking for differences in the physiology of animals with low or high levels of said behaviour. I realize it sounds like two sides of the same coin, but the study is looking at…

Thank you.

This was right on. Seconded.

LOL!

Yes. This. As I mentioned elsewhere, this was a terrible summary of the study. The io9 article was much better. And I say this as a woman in science.

Definitely, and this is a good point. Eventually, counterselection will prevent the penis from evolving to such a large size that it actually reduces fitness. Otherwise, runaway sexual selection might indeed lead to penises too big to fuck. For further reading:

I don't even know where to begin with this article. First off, I will say that I'm a graduate student in psychology. I work for a supervisor who has spent the bulk of his career studying penises, although that is not what I study. Now, sexual selection is (according to some) a special kind of natural selection that…

Yikes, do you personally feel that way?

As a graduate student in psychology who studies evolution, I can assure you these MRA types are completely full of shit. Natural selection does not equal "survival of the fittest".

I'm a graduate student who studies circadian rhythms and the "clock genes" that control them. Several genes have actually been identified that control the period (i.e. the length) of your internal clock, and therefore the onset of sleep, to put it briefly. Hamsters with a mutation in one of these genes had an internal…