If I may put forward a slice of personal philosophy, I feel that Man has ruled this world as a stumbling, demented child-king long enough! And as his empire crumbles, my precious Black Widow shall rise as his most fitting successor!

"It's Monday night," said Evangeline van Holsterin, head barmaid at the Old Entomologist, "so the Com-post [Wellington's paper of record] will have reprinted a press-release from some university,written with one sentence per paragraph, assuring people that whatever they thought all along is now validated by SCIENCE."

"Monday?" I said, shaking my watch. "I could have sworn it was only half-past Sunday. How time flies -- ow!"

"Don't mention the Time Fly project," Another Kiwi reminded me in a whisper. "People don't need to know. They just ask awkward questions."

"Is this about the bar tab?" I asked.

"Just saying," said E.v.H., "that it will soon be Tuesday, and some of us have homes to go to, and those who don't should probably hie themselves to the Riddled office and write a post assuring people that whatever they thought all along about the laziness of churnalists and the intellectual timidity of their confirmation-bias-addicted readership is now validated by SCIENCE."

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So this is the paper being currently pimped from "Evolutionary Psychology for Dummies", a.k.a. Evolution & Human Behavior:

As the journal's name suggests, it is devoted to the principle that any cultural norm experienced by researchers becomes an immutable, evolutionary-hard-wired fact of human nature if it can also be found in a subject group of college students from the same culture. Another E&HB paper recently made it to the big time Pharyngula for proving that a specific spinal conformation in human female buttocks, if prefered by human male college students, must therefore be optimal for reproduction.

Anyway -- "Spiders at the Cocktail Party" singles out Latrodectus spiders as being sufficiently deadly, or at least (because they are not actually very deadly) as sufficiently annoying to our ancestors to explain arachnophobia as the evo-psych hardwiring du jour. The authors gloss over the absence of Latrodectus species from East Africa (where humans evolved) by referring us to a paleontology paper which does not mention spiders.

Now there is evidence from toothmarks in fossil skulls -- not to mention common sense -- that our prehuman ancestors were more preyed upon by members of the Felidae such as leopards. Causing Evolution to give us dedicated neural mechanisms for detecting, and an instinctual terrified response to...

OOOHH LOOK A KITTY

"Spiders at the cocktail party are not my idea of a horse doover," AK vouchsafed.

"It is bad enough," I agreed, "when they give you bits of cheese and pineapple on a toothpick and they fall off in the akvavit martini."

"Perhaps they are part of the gut macrobiome we keep hearing about."

"It is the thin edge of the slippery slope of the white elephant," I said. "I read a case study about arachnophagy in older females. The introduced species disrupted the patient's intestinal ecology and she was forced to swallow a succession of larger animals in ultimately futile attempts at biological control."