Evolution is boring. Or at least that is what it is made out to be by studies that explain why older men marry younger women. To have lots of physically fit children men look for partners who are younger and obviously fertile, and women go for older men because they are economically stable and therefore potentially good providers. And men and women have come to this “evolutionarily”, because this is something that happens all over the world. All this is mind-numbingly dull: everyone always knew that men go for the young and the nubile and never think that they need excuses to do so. How else would the myth of the pretty young secretary make it to fiction? And everyone also always knew that women are supposed to like money, trinkets, shopping in Singapore and fulltime domestic help for the many healthy kids they produce. But even in this ‘scientific’ elucidation of a hackneyed practice, women come out, “evolutionarily”, as smarter than men.

Having worn out a couple of magnifying glasses to discover what exactly is new in this ‘new’ study, it is possible to say that the difference lies in differences. Ideal age differences have been argued over in more ancient versions of this kind of study — sometimes it is four years, or six, or perhaps 2.34 or 3.82. This time the ideal age gap is said to be around 15 years. The woman in the case must be looking at a lot of economic stability here, since the numbers of healthy children she produces would have to be provided for as she expects long after the husband’s retirement age. But social and material considerations are irrelevant when research is looking to gift men with an unanswerable excuse for one of their best-known tendencies. The Sami, “reindeer people” of Finland, are “natural” enough for the researchers to feel that they demonstrate “evolution” in the raw. These hunting, fishing people tend to marry women younger by 15 years or more, because they need to produce many healthy children. Or so the researchers say. The poor Sami have been denied the evolution of their own society and its specific practices, but that is neither here nor there.

When a non-Sami person, such as a canny man in India, marries a girl 15 years his junior it is usually to sell her off or to make sure that she earns for him and for the children he produces. That, again, is neither here nor there. But the problem with evolution is that it does not happen only to men who marry younger women. It also happens to women — who were always cannier, to social attitudes, even to boys. Pairings like that of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher are not as uncommon in the advanced world as they were before. Women may not want to be looked after and men may like women with substance on whom they can depend. Is that “evolutionary” or not? Or is the phenomenon too exciting to be attributed to evolution?