Truth and verifiability, as we have learned, are on the fritz. Last week bore revelations that the world’s premier reference source, Wikipedia, is every bit as trustworthy as, say, Judas. No, make that Judas with a blog.

(That guy just won’t quit. Over at blogspot, Mr Iscariot is still making up silly words like “Islamofascism” and insisting that his 4WD is actually good for climate change.)

In the foul rag and bone shop of truth, it makes sense that we should look to the hard sciences for relief. Right? So, imagine my delight when I ambled across a scientific truth today.

If the work of clicking through is too fatiguing, here’s an abstract: Science has found that old blokes need young tail. It’s biological, dude. Well, that’s very nice for Science.

This study of the s-xed-up Swiss has been published in the journal of the UK’s Royal Society, Biology LettersNext to research on Contagious Yawning in Children and a particularly saucy précis on the use of horns in intras-xual competition for female Soay sheep (honestly, I didn’t make that up), this bombshell caught the eye of the world.

Or, at least the eye of sagging male editors seeking a justification for (a) having the horn for young Sharon from Marketing or (b) popping pictures of young hotties with old wrinklies in their newspapers.

In this research prepared by a vet and an anthropologist, you too can find an elaborate rationale for your wildest Nabokov leanings. Reproductive cycle, blah. Those p-nises just never quit, blah. Specious assertions that even a dolt like me can see through, blah.

Now, let it be said clearly: I take no issue with the legal and considerate chasing of young tail. Anyone, male or female, who can actually tolerate the inchoate ranting of a 25-year-old has my total reverence. If you can actually get them to have s-x with you between text messages and iPod shuffles, then: respect.

Further, I am not unfamiliar with the lure of the Older Gent. I mean, PHWOAR, have you seen Tony Eastley from the AM program? Every time he walks into the ABC building, there is a palpable hormonal shift.

Actually, I think it’s nice and quite a conquest that anyone has any kind of pale fire at all anymore.

What is not, perhaps, so nice is an apparent return to biological essentialism in research. David Suzuki is one of several geneticists to have written against this sort of investigation. The “science” of socially constructed truths has been used to justify slavery, genocide and the preclusion of suffrage.

And now, Science turns its attention to tail.

When not trying to find a fag gene, Science is giving us permission to be slavering old dirty bastards. Perhaps science would like to go and find out something about, I dunno, cancer?

Or turn its attention to the digital realm and lock twits out of Wikipedia.