Salon spoke by phone with Gaulin, which is why the common one of the ingredients in a lot of our food is making us fat, why women are very different from men when it comes to health and weight loss, and how it really it pays to think like an evolutionary biologist.
You and William Lassek co-authored the book. It is surprising that the two men would co-author a book on women's health. How each one of You come to focus research on this topic?
When I was teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, they have a policy that if you're over 55 and You cannot try to collect credits for a degree, you can take the courses you want. Will, who have retired, appearing in the course of my introductory level, sex and evolution. From the first day he started asking questions that so far over the heads of students. So I told him to come to me, instead of confusing all of my students with dialogue, Ph.d.-level. Something that we started to discuss is this found that people have a preference for women with small waists and hips. There is nothing that really explains why men should have a strong preference for this form, and it was not immediately interpreted in terms of comparison with our close relatives. For example chimpanzees women do not have a shape and a male chimpanzee does not seem to care nothing about the shape of women when they married. So it's a bit of a puzzle. It is a question that made us start and finally led us to the work relating to the type of the female body and weight.