Last night, I agreed to watch "Love Actually" with the Sciencette. For those of you that don't know, it's a movie about British people...actually loving...and stuff. Per Julia's orders, I paid pretty close attention, but sometimes I swear those limeys aren't speaking English. Also, it has that one dude that was the head vampire from "Underworld" in it, but I think he turns out gay at the end or something. I sort of didn't like how they swear a lot around little kids either. Swearing makes baby Jesus cry.
Anyway, there's this one British guy that can't get any lovin', so he goes to America. He reasons that American chicks will bone anything with an accent, and it turns out that he's right in the movie. From personal observation, I'd say that it's a correct assumption in real life too.
The whole thing got me thinking. Is the attraction to someone with an accent driven by evolution?
Think about it. A healthy population of organisms needs to have a lot of variation in its genome so that one disease can't come along and wipe out the whole species. To achieve such variation, it's advantageous to introduce genetic material from distantly related organisms. It's also why you don't marry your sister; you'd eventually end up like those awesome Civil War style mutants on the X-Files.
Maybe being attracted to someone that's different (i.e. different accent, hair, skin color, etc.) is actually a trick that Mother Nature uses to shuffle around genes and whatnot for new combinations of DNA badassery.
Wanting to shag some wanker British guy from the dodgey part of town is Evolution Actually.
A Place to Play
2 weeks ago
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8 comments:
"Home" is the best X-files ever. When the last Peacock son/brother/father climbs out of the trunk and drives away to Johnny Mathis singing on the radio....oh my god, that is the most disturbing moment of all X-files time! Love. It.
Finally, a voice of reason!
Interesting commentary. What about the implications of 'out-breeding depression' where local adaptation is high and interbreeding with different individuals actually causes the loss of locally advantageous alleles?
I defer to your superior knowledge of evolution.
I defer to Edmands, S. 2007. Between a rock and a hard place: evaluating the relative risks of inbreeding and outbreeding for conservation and management. Molecular Ecology 16(3):463-475.
You're pretty much writing your thesis on here right now.
nerd alert!
Thank you for alerting us to your presence.
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