Let Me Count the Ways

Everybody knows sex sells. It's all over television, magazines. Music videos are often soft-core porn. Sex sells newspapers, and sex makes people read articles. I'll bet my Google ranking just went up 10 percent by writing sex three, no four, times.

Science is a tough game. Even the soft sciences, like psychology, sociology and the like. Tenured jobs are scarce in academia; the competition is fierce. Once in a tenure track job, the new professor has to negotiate department politics and hustle for grants. To qualify for grants, he has to publish. And to publish, it pays to choose topics carefully.

It's not a big leap of logic to see that some enterprising scientists can make hay with studies somehow involving sex. Enter the Findings column at the Times. Which of the thousands of tenure track offerings would you choose? Bingo. The current Findings got on the "most e-mailed" and "most viewed" lists with a piece on the sexual attractiveness of fertile women -- or is it the other way around?

Let's get serious. Any article about science has to look at stuff like this with some skepticism. Not witless skepticism, but in terms of "publication bias" and "media bias". These are well-studied phenomena that explain the erratic behavior of these studies, where dramatic and bizarre results cannot be duplicated.

To have any idea if the premise holds, a reader must go back to the original. In this case, there is a link (not always in the Times), but the link is merely to an abstract and the careful reader would have to shell out money to read it. No thanks.


The Threatening Scent of Fertile Women

But the Times is vast. Compare this sexy piece with the report on a study of cell phones and brain activity. That story has perspective, and of course, a summary of the statistics behind it, the dreaded numbers.

Cellphone Use Tied to Changes in Brain Activity

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