He is Michael Lombardo, Professor of Biology at Grand Valley State University in Michigan in the United States. His paper On The Evolution of Sport graces the ever-stimulating online Evolutionary Psychology.

My encounter with his bright ideas, of which more in a moment, came just days after, with zillions of other blokes, I'd watched, thrilled, the Arthur Beetson Trophy rugby league match between the NRL All Stars and the Indigenous All Stars.

Football-mad, I am exactly the kind of primitive man whose evolution the professor has written about. In so many areas of the conversation of mankind I affect a kind of intellectual aloofness appropriate in a tertiary-educated senior citizen and Living ACT Treasure but when it comes to football I'm just the sort of primitive, under-evolved chap Professor Lombardo is discussing.

Back to Professor Lombardo in a moment, but first to the aforementioned Arthur Beetson Trophy match and to the way in which the TV coverage of it featured one of the commentary crew, one of the tragic Johns brothers, doing on-pitch interviews with the players while the match was under way. All of these interviews seemed bizarre and wrong (the players plainly thought so) and especially the one with a renowned goalkicker about to take a conversion kick at goal, which, interview-distracted, he duly missed.

This innovation brought out my inner fogey, and of course it is exactly change, departure from the sacred way things have always been, that stokes fogeyism in people of my age. Anxious not to descend into fogeyism, I've trained my mind to be fogey-vigilant and sure enough, as I fumed against on-pitch interviewing, vowing to write to the Editor about it, my fogeyness alarm went off. I woke me up to myself. The hero and role model of the fogey-prone ought to be the great writer Evelyn Waugh who late in life noticed in himself a serial urge to write angry letters to The Times about almost everything. Waugh condemned these fogey urges of his as just ''a senile itch'' and did his heroic best to fight them.

What upsets the football-mad inner fogey about on-pitch interviews is that a football match is a drama, a play, an opera, a ballet, so that interviews like these interrupt and spoil the spell the drama is casting. What if, during a performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the drama was suspended so that someone could interview Hamlet? ''Prince Hamlet, you've just seen your father's ghost. How do you feel? What do you plan to do to avenge his murder?'' What if, during Puccini's Madama Butterfly, the opera stops while one of the Johns brothers asks Butterfly how she feels about the discovery that Pinkerton, father of her child, has abandoned her and married another? ''Butterfly. How do you feel? Do you feel suicidal? OK. Have a nice day.''

But back to Professor Lombardo and to the question, gentlemen, of just what evolved urge will be driving you when you flock to the Raiders' and the Brumbies' matches this winter and find yourself fanatically engaged.

Lombardo takes several thousand words to make his case, but, to bonsai it, he says that ''sport began as a way for men to develop the skills needed in primitive hunting and warfare, then developed to act primarily as a [male ritual] where athletes display and male spectators evaluate the qualities of potential allies and rivals''. This is why, Lombardo saith, the most popular male sports are the body-contact, biffing and running ones (the football codes) in which the players demonstrate ''the skills needed for success in male-male physical competition and primitive hunting and warfare''. Then, ''men pay closer attention than do women to male sports so they can evaluate potential allies and rivals; and male sports became culturally more important when opportunities to evaluate potential allies and rivals declined as both the survival importance of hunting and the proportion of men who experience combat decreased''. What's new about his argument is that we used to theorise that male sports were all about males' sexual displays, to agog females, when of course we ought to have asked ourselves why it's men, not women, who are football-besotted.

So, gentlemen, when this winter we're thrilled by a Josh Dugan zig-zag dazzling run or a David Shillington tackle that pulverises an opponent it may be because you're subconsciously choosing Josh as a hunting companion who'll be able to chase down an antelope and David as just the kind of rhinoceros-like warrior (he's 194cm tall and weighs 114kg!) you want with you when your battalion charges the enemy.

Correction. In a senior moment I wrote in last week's column that Beethoven was born in 1790 when he was born in 1770. My mistakes mortify me but my consolation (all journalists notice this) is the pleasure a writer's mistakes gives those readers who, twitching with righteous delight, leap to point them out but never leap to address any of the ideas in the piece. Professor Lombardo, why have readers (and especially Canberra ones) evolved to be like this?