Not My Fault

The other day my wife caught me looking at a young lady with a cute derrière. In my defense, I told her I couldn't help it. I was hardwired that way due to thousands of years of evolution.

She didn't buy it, but now I have science (Yay Science!) on my side.

Evolution May Explain Why a Curvy Bottom Drives Men Wild

Men are naturally drawn to a woman with a curvy backside, a new report suggests.

The "theoretically optimal angle" is a 45.5-degree curve from back to buttocks -- not necessarily a big butt, the University of Texas at Austin researchers determined.

These curvaceous gals would have had an evolutionary advantage, in that they appeared able to bear multiple children easily, the researchers said.

"These women would have been more effective at foraging during pregnancy and less likely to suffer spinal injuries," (study leader David Lewis) said in a UT Austin news release. "In turn, men who preferred these women would have had mates who were better able to provide for fetus and offspring, and who would have been able to carry out multiple pregnancies without injury."

Just what I was looking for in a bride - the ability to bear multiple offspring while foraging effectively.

This preference evolved over thousands of years and is likely to persist for a long time, the researchers noted.

In all seriousness, one intriguing aspect of the research is the implications it has for our modern day standards of beauty.

"What's fascinating about this research is that it is yet another scientific illustration of a close fit between a sex-differentiated feature of human morphology -- in this case lumbar curvature -- and an evolved standard of attractiveness," study co-author David Buss, a UT Austin psychology professor, said in the news release.

"This adds to a growing body of evidence that beauty is not entirely arbitrary, or 'in the eyes of the beholder' as many in mainstream social science believed, but rather has a coherent adaptive logic," he said.

Ah, science. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, it is the cause of, and the solution to, many of life's problems...

Because SCIENCE!