Week 14 Blogging Assignment

While studying for my biology midterm exam this upcoming Tuesday, I came upon a trend in homonin (humans & species closely related to it) that is called "reduced sexual size dimorphism". In essence, it describes how the discrepancy of size (ie. height) between males and females has greatly reduced since earlier & common ancestors (for example: in some species, the males are 4x as big as females, compared to 1.2x in humans). I thought this was a very interesting aspect in that, evolutionary, male's dominance or physical appearance of intimidation has greatly reduced compared to other animals in the kingdom. So socially, humans are more likely or more able to request equality because they are physically about the same size as males. Physically, males have a harder time exerting control over a female because they are about the same size. The association between physical size and social mobility/change is proportionally & positively correlated.

My SI leader even described how the presence of bipedalism (walking upright on two feet) is hypothesized to be the reason why we have monogamous relationships today. This is because when animals walk on all fours, the first thing you see is the butt and sex was back to front. However, bipedalism has allowed for face to face sexual relations and therefore males will see and be more attracted to breasts instead of ass. (Another theory states this is why breasts look so similar to a butt). Bipedalism has also lead to monogamous relationships because the way our pelvis is structured makes it more difficult to have babies and with larger brains, we had more of a capacity to focus on love as an emotional thing instead of just the sexual act. Therefore, we became more selective of our partners and decided to have monogamous relationships. I think this is a very interesting take of looking at love, sex, and emotion, and essentially how social relationships may have changed based on evolutionary or physically different traits/attributes. I would have never made the connection myself between the two, although it makes perfect sense when looked at. So next time I try to reason over certain gender relationships I will refer to evolutionary adaptations as a possible reason or explanation. Grace Huang.