Smartphones appear to be hindering our natural human instinct to procreate, if I had to draw a conclusion from this recent study conducted by TeleNav.

The study found that large numbers of smartphone users would rather give up things such as sex, computers, caffeine, shoes, and chocolate for a week than go without their mobile devices for seven days.

Where is Charles Darwin when you need him? How little sense does this make? I could understand the chocolate thing, maybe. And alcohol. But sex? Shoes? 25 percent of people would rather go shoeless than not have a smartphone for a week. Owies.

Seventy percent of the respondents who said they would rather give up sex than their smartphones were women. (Ahem.) And iPhone (News - Alert) users were the worst offenders. Forty-three percent of iPhone users were the ones who said they’d rather give up shoes. (I can’t wrap my mind around this. Maybe it’s because a lot of them are hipsters and want people to ask them why they aren’t wearing shoes so they can say something trendy such as, “I really needed to keep up with my Words With Friends games?”)

iPhone owners get even weirder. “40 percent wouldn’t mind giving up their toothbrush. Ironically, 83 percent of iPhone users would rather have another iPhone owner as a romantic companion.” Clearly, because once you give up your toothbrush, you’re going to need to be romantically involved with only other people who also do not use toothbrushes.

Our dependency on smartphones and their many uses has obviously reached new heights of ridiculousness. When we are willing to forgo basic necessities such as oral hygiene tools, or evolutionary practices to make sure we can still check Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) at every possible moment, we should probably re-examine our priorities.

On a related note, TMC’s Chris DiMarco reported about how Android and iPhone users can’t even get out of bed before checking their social networks via mobile devices.