The festivities begin Monday with a two hour workshop on relationship communication, starting at 6:30 p.m. in 235 Dwinelle. They go until Thursday, but the main attraction happens Wednesday on Upper Sproul Plaza at noon.

As always, there will be raffles, free lubricants and—this sounds juicy—fun activities. Ambiguity aside, the “activities” are probably not what you’re thinking. Or are they?

Like last year, we leave you with the option of taking Planned Parenthood’s Condom Quiz. Choose wisely!

Image Source: Darkone under Creative Commons
National Condom Week [UCBLJ]
Planned Parenthood Golden Gate [Website]
Earlier: Score! National Condom Week Comes Home

For simplicity’s sake, we’ll assume you all have the option of spending next Saturday with that special someone who brings out your embarrassing tendency to fart uncontrollably during lecture. Note that we could have phrased it to assume you’re not sad, sexless sacks of students, but we didn’t!

In either case, there are plenty of ways to celebrate that universally panned holiday of lusty love. Check it:

*UC Choral Ensembles is selling singing candygrams for a fistful of dollars. What better way to admit your adoration for your roommate/professor/boss/person who is all three? Candygram for Mongo!

*The Hearst Museum is having a—and we quote—massive jewelry sale. Get 10-ton gold rings for your sweetheart while precious metal reserves last!

*UC Berkeley students get free admission to a symposium on the healing function of love. Not included: tickets to the annual rhythmic ceremonial ritual whereby you travel back in time to watch your parents fall in love.

*Valentine’s Concert put on by the music department at Hertz Hall. That’s the power of love.

*For the youngins: high tea at the botanical garden! Awww.

*Take the Daily Cal’s anonymous sex-themed survey. Results will be published in next Friday’s issue.

Have any events we missed? Comment the love.

EDIT: Fixed for accuracy.

Image Source: corazón girl under Creative Commons, modified by Evante Garza-Licudine

… about a novel new theory in evolutionary biology, that is. A paper co-authored by a UC Berkeley professor of computer science and a Stanford professor of biology suggests that sexual reproduction isn’t about maximizing “fitness” so much as “mixability.”

“This idea of genetic mixability … hits on the difficulty evolutionary biologists have had in understanding sex,” writes ScienceDaily.

The difficulty is in part due to the idea that an “organism,” or “thing,” can end up as the cumulative result of many generations of gene-swapping and fitness-maximizing, only to fail to pass on many of its super-duper qualities to Generation N+1.

The solution, according to the paper, is not in trying to find the best combination of genes, but in trying to find genes that can be friends with everyone. Or at least friends with a lot of others. Let’s not get unrealistic here.

In terms of people, it’s sort of like being the friendly guy everyone can talk to and everyone knows as opposed to the douchy guy who’s always complaining of how hard his 18-unit schedule is. Thus is born the idea of mixability.

To extend the comparison a bit more, the paper found that asexual reproduction is much better for finding the “best” combination of genes, so that by the “douchy guy” analogy, one could infer … but we’ll leave that up to the reader.

As a consequence, it turns out that sexual reproduction is better on average, and so why you’re not likely to see cats exhibiting mitosis on a macroscopic scale. Crisis: averted?

Image Source: Lynn (Gracie’s mom) under Creative Commons
Flexibility Trumps Fitness In Sexual Reproduction, Says New Theory In Evolutionary Biology [ScienceDaily]