A couple of decades ago Jered Diamond (of Guns, Germs, and Steel fame) postulated that male risk-taking, which his research suggested is pervasive and prevalent across cultures, is adaptive and has been preserved in the human genome.

I don’t know if that hypothesis has ever been tested, or if there’s anything to it at all, but I think back to my little brother devouring an entire jar of hot peppers when we were boys, and I wonder.