Mate choice is one of—if not the—most popular topics of study in evolutionary psychology. Much of this research has focused on sex differences in mate preferences, and has been claimed to be supportive of “universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources”. Consistent with this, Walter et al. (2020)
One way I'd push back is by arguing that resource preference seems to be what WEIRD women do when seeking a mate for a permanent relationship. When seeking casual sex it seems they go for what is physically attractive. I've heard but can't confirm that a lot of west African society is actually like this-farming is fairly easy for women, they raise the children on their own and so they basically just choose males based on who is the most physically attractive while doing the providing and child rearing themselves.
I see several references in their argumentation to Catholic missionaries. This makes me wonder to what extent their argumentation has been crafted specifically to target those missionaries.
I seem to remember you sharing somewhere a chart that compares the variance of reproductive success of males vs females across many societies. Do you recall the table?
I'm interested in the neolithic y chromosome bottleneck. Some of the models that explain this make claims about reproductive success that are quite fantastic (1:17 effective male:female reproductive population size). I'd like to compare that to even the most extreme documented cultures.
Good job unpacking a complex topic. I suspect the neolithic farming revolution magnified this evolutionary trait. What I would like to know is whether the same is true of involuntary human labor resources. Killing a man in battle, then taking his wife to help farm your manioc, is a sound survival strategy in the Stone Age. If you are Mesopotamian, you might have the revolutionary idea to keep the man alive and put him to work, too. Maybe by the time you have built a civilization for your children, they will have enough resources to obsess over their looks and invent bank accounts. We are such dreamers, we humans.
Good article-best to force any theory through the grind of gathered empirical knowledge. Whatever passes is strong. Still seems theres a way to rescue the evo psych hypothesis though. At the very least the vast difference in mate behavior in western nations where they have the most freedom ever (civil, financial, security etc) seems to suggest the differences are rooted in biology.
One way I'd push back is by arguing that resource preference seems to be what WEIRD women do when seeking a mate for a permanent relationship. When seeking casual sex it seems they go for what is physically attractive. I've heard but can't confirm that a lot of west African society is actually like this-farming is fairly easy for women, they raise the children on their own and so they basically just choose males based on who is the most physically attractive while doing the providing and child rearing themselves.
I see several references in their argumentation to Catholic missionaries. This makes me wonder to what extent their argumentation has been crafted specifically to target those missionaries.
I seem to remember you sharing somewhere a chart that compares the variance of reproductive success of males vs females across many societies. Do you recall the table?
I'm interested in the neolithic y chromosome bottleneck. Some of the models that explain this make claims about reproductive success that are quite fantastic (1:17 effective male:female reproductive population size). I'd like to compare that to even the most extreme documented cultures.
Good job unpacking a complex topic. I suspect the neolithic farming revolution magnified this evolutionary trait. What I would like to know is whether the same is true of involuntary human labor resources. Killing a man in battle, then taking his wife to help farm your manioc, is a sound survival strategy in the Stone Age. If you are Mesopotamian, you might have the revolutionary idea to keep the man alive and put him to work, too. Maybe by the time you have built a civilization for your children, they will have enough resources to obsess over their looks and invent bank accounts. We are such dreamers, we humans.
Good article-best to force any theory through the grind of gathered empirical knowledge. Whatever passes is strong. Still seems theres a way to rescue the evo psych hypothesis though. At the very least the vast difference in mate behavior in western nations where they have the most freedom ever (civil, financial, security etc) seems to suggest the differences are rooted in biology.