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It doesn’t pay for animals to miss out on reproductive opportunities. That’s why when a female baboon is at the peak of her fertility cycle, her buttocks get red and swollen, thereby alerting males to their reproductive opportunity. Cattle, too, try to take advantage of fertility, with females getting quite frisky when they are in heat. In fact, the word estrus, which scientists use to denote the fertile part of a female’s cycle, is derived from the Greek word “oistros,” which means gadfly. The word captures the frenzied behavior of cattle being pestered by insects.
Baboon buttocks. Cow hyperactivity. That’s how animals behave. Clearly we humans have evolved beyond such primitive behavior!
Well, yes and no. Yes, we seem to have evolved beyond such heat-ish behavior. We humans are unusual in the animal kingdom for having sex even when females are not fertile, for example. (I am happy to call such behavior more highly evolved, but then again, I’m a dude!)
But that doesn’t mean human females have completely avoided behaving differently when they are fertile. Consider a recent study in Psychological Science, documenting women’s wardrobe color as a function of the fertility cycle. Researchers from the University of British Columbia discovered that women who reported wearing red or pink shirts on any given day were significantly more likely (than women wearing other colored shirts) to be at high conception risk – at the most, ahem, impregnable part of their ovulatory cycle.
Here is a figure from that study:
(Figure 1)
Yet another reminder that evolution has not torn us away from our primal past. We are first and foremost animals. Our behavior is influenced by unconscious forces programmed into our DNA.
