Men and women are two extremely conflicting creatures found in nature.

Example: Men want women with ‘guy humor’…

[via AOL News] Time:

What’s the fast way to a man’s heart? Through his funny bone, according a study by the dating website eHarmony. The online poll asked 331,138 eHarmony users to name what comedic style men appreciate in the opposite sex, Time reports.The top answers were sarcastic, juvenile, geeky and raw, which are brands of “guy humor,” according to the survey’s tabulators. [Read More]

While women want men with NO ‘humor’.

[via Medical Xpress] Women find happy guys significantly less sexually attractive than swaggering or brooding men, according to a new University of British Columbia study that helps to explain the enduring allure of “bad boys” and other iconic gender types.

The study – which may cause men to smile less on dates, and inspire online daters to update their profile photos – finds dramatic gender differences in how men and women rank the sexual attractiveness of non-verbal expressions of commonly displayed emotions, including happiness, pride, and shame.

Very few studies have explored the relationship between emotions and attraction, and this is the first to report a significant gender difference in the attractiveness of smiles. The study, published online today in the American Psychological Association journal Emotion, is also the first to investigate the attractiveness of displays of pride and shame.

“While showing a happy face is considered essential to friendly social interactions, including those involving sexual attraction – few studies have actually examined whether a smile is, in fact, attractive,” says Prof. Jessica Tracy of UBC’s Dept. of Psychology. “This study finds that men and women respond very differently to displays of emotion, including smiles.”

In a series of studies, more than 1,000 adult participants rated the sexual attractiveness of hundreds of images of the opposite sex engaged in universal displays of happiness (broad smiles), pride (raised heads, puffed-up chests) and shame (lowered heads, averted eyes).

The study found that women were least attracted to smiling, happy men, preferring those who looked proud and powerful or moody and ashamed. In contrast, male participants were most sexually attracted to women who looked happy, and least attracted to women who appeared proud and confident.

“It is important to remember that this study explored first-impressions of sexual attraction to images of the opposite sex,” says Alec Beall, a UBC psychology graduate student and study co-author. “We were not asking participants if they thought these targets would make a good boyfriend or wife – we wanted their gut reactions on carnal, sexual attraction.” He says previous studies have found positive emotional traits and a nice personality to be highly desirable in a relationship partners.

Tracy and Beall say that other studies suggest that what people find attractive has been shaped by centuries of evolutionary and cultural forces. For example, evolutionary theories suggest females are attracted to male displays of pride because they imply status, competence and an ability to provide for a partner and offspring.

According to Beall, the pride expression accentuates typically masculine physical features, such as upper body size and muscularity. “Previous research has shown that these features are among the most attractive male physical characteristics, as judged by women,” he says.

The researchers say more work is needed to understand the differing responses to happiness, but suggest the phenomenon can also be understood according to principles of evolutionary psychology, as well as socio-cultural gender norms.

For example, past research has associated smiling with a lack of dominance, which is consistent with traditional gender norms of the “submissive and vulnerable” woman, but inconsistent with “strong, silent” man, the researchers say. “Previous research has also suggested that happiness is a particularly feminine-appearing expression,” Beall adds.

“Generally, the results appear to reflect some very traditional gender norms and cultural values that have emerged, developed and been reinforced through history, at least in Western cultures,” Tracy says. “These include norms and values that many would consider old-fashioned and perhaps hoped that we’ve moved beyond.” [Read More]

BUT… (last bolded statement)

We haven’t.

Shocker.

See?

The relationships between men and women?

Confusing, conflicting and downright crazy at times.

Heck, given our contrary natures…

I’m surprised the human race has found ways to get together and procreate at all.

Then again, if it ever gets to a point for the human race where the ‘conflicts’ are just too much and procreation is NOT happening?

I have little doubt that somehow…

[via Nobel Intent] The animal kingdom has evolved a remarkable number of ways to have sex. Males and females, hermaphrodites, and parthenogenic females that get by without males were all familiar to me, but this week’s PNAS introduced me to a brand new one: androgenesis, in which a species reproduces using only the DNA from sperm. Now, researchers have looked into the genetics of some androgenetic clams, and found that this method of reproduction has turned them into a bit of a species factory, and kept them from building up too many harmful mutations in the process.

To get some insights into the origin of this unusual form of reproduction, the authors of the new paper looked at DNA from a variety of Corbicula species, some of which reproduced as hermaphrodites, others exclusively as males. To get a clearer picture, they looked both at a pair of nuclear genes and at the mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited solely from the egg.

The results, to understate, were a bit confused. The nuclear and mitochondrial genomes produced very nice phylogenetic trees, but they simply weren’t the same trees. Attempts to get them to align produced a confused criss-cross of lines rather than a simple, linear relationship. In fact, there was confusion even within the nuclear genome. All of the androgenetic species shared a copy of a closely related set of sequences, suggesting that the species themselves were all closely related, and descendants of a single event that brought about their new form of reproduction. But the copy of the same gene on the other chromosome was often distantly related, and lined up much more closely with the same gene in species that reproduced as hermaphrodites.

The simplest way to sort this out would have been to sequence more genes and hope something easier to interpret became apparent when more information was available. But the researchers chose to put their brains to work instead of the sequencing machines, considering a variety of models for the pattern they saw, and rejecting most of them as inconsistent with either the data or the biology of the clams themselves (one possibility was rejected because the habitats of different clam species don’t overlap enough to make it realistic).

The model that was left standing proposes one or possibly two origins for androgenetic reproduction, with that origin having been in the relatively recent past. For the most part, different lineages from these origins have been reproducing asexually and slowly building up minor genetic differences as a result. On rare occasions, however, an androgenetic sperm will run into the egg of a female of a different species (clams generally mate by releasing their sperm into the currents) and undergo sexual reproduction, creating a hybrid species. [Godzilla, is that you?] From there, androgenetic reproduction takes over again, and the hybrid continues to reproduce asexually. [Read More]

Nature WILL find a way.

It always does.

And sometimes, like in the case of the clam above…

Mother Nature does it in the creepiest way imaginable.

I mean, come on – Mutant, hybrid species?

Yikes, Mother.

Note: I prefer my hybrid mutants on the big screen not in the flesh.

Well, unless they are in y clam chowder.

Then?

I’m a lot more accepting.

Especially if I have crackers.