So the question I have is why do people consume what they consume? And I want to start you off by asking,

why would evolution program animals, humans for consumption? Right. So evolution does not program for the

modern consumatory behaviors that we see. Rather, it programmed certain behaviors that would have been

adaptive in our environment of, you know, our ancestors, which now we see their signatures in

contemporary settings. So let me give you an example. So we know, for example, that across many

species, when females of a species are sexually receptive

and other species, not humans, they will go into estrus, meaning during that period, they are open

to mating and other periods they are not. Well, we know that females in those species will engage in certain

signaling behaviors to say, hey, I'm interested in potential mating. Well, so then I take this

principle and argue, well, we know that, of course, humans are a high form of an animal. Could we

see similar behaviors in human females?

And so I have a study that I did many years ago with one of my former doctoral students where we

looked at how women will alter how they dress, how they beautify themselves as a function of

where they are in their ovulatory cycle,

their menstrual cycle. And so what we found, as you would exactly expect from an evolutionary

perspective, is when they are maximally fertile in their menstrual cycles, this is when they

engage in the most amount of sexual signaling. They're more likely to wear high heels. They're more

likely to be more scantily clad in their dress. They're more likely to put makeup on. And so

it's not that evolution has programmed women to wear lipstick. It's that evolution has programmed

women to engage in sexual signaling as a

function of where they are in their menstrual cycle, which we then see a modern manifestation

of that behavior in contemporary settings. So it's kind of like evolution programs you with a set

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