When the new release accompanying a science paper immediately alludes to lap dances and twerking, attention must be paid. That doesn’t happen all the time. And, incredibly, the study in question, which appeared last week in Evolutionary Psychological Science paper, actually lived up to the hype! It really does mention “female erotic lap dancers” and “twerking, which appears to be a simulated copulatory act, performed while dancing,” all in the service of mathematically determining just how sexy an arched back is. We get it; it's not curing cancer or devising methods to travel to deep space, but who are we to determine which questions are worth asking?
Let’s back up a moment. Biologists have long known that many mammals, from ferrets to primates, curved their spine a certain way when they were ready to procreate. That curve, the lordotic posture, also occurs in human women, when their hips pop out ...
