Brendan Zietsch

Brendan's PhD studies were based in the Genetic Epidemiology Laboratory at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, where he investigated the genetics of sexual behaviour. He joined UQ in 2010 on a UQ Postdoctoral Fellowship, followed by an ARC DECRA and then an ARC Future Fellowship. His work focuses on understanding the evolutionary and genetic underpinnings of human behaviour, in terms of what humans are like in general and what makes individuals differ from one another. Topics include personality, sexual and romantic preferences and choices, mental and physical determinants of attractiveness, sex differences and masculinity/femininity, and evolutionary modelling. evolutionary and genetic underpinnings of human behaviour, personality, sexual and romantic preferences and choices, mental and physical determinants of attractiveness, sex differences and masculinity/femininity, and evolutionary modelling

[2026] Can the parochial cooperation hypothesis explain the evolution of human cooperation? Quantifying cooperative investments in an agent-based model [2026] The significance quest model of love does not make evolutionary sense [2026] The gender attractiveness gap [2026] No evidence of genetic basis to variation in human offspring sex ratio [2026] Follow the evidence: A comment on Del Giudice (2025) [2026] Do social judgements made from facial photographs predict those made in-person? [2026] Single-mindedness dataset [2026] The attractive personality: like me, but better [2025] Life without sex: large-scale study links sexlessness to physical, cognitive, and personality traits, socioecological factors, and DNA [2025] Assortative mating is a natural consequence of heritable variation in pr