August 23, 2009

Who'll Hook Up With Whom

So is the take away from this that men are sluttier than women, or that women are more shallow than men? (I don't mean the question to imply there's anything negative about being slutty or shallow). Posted by armand at August 23, 2009 05:29 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Science


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I was just reading an article by Robert Wright (1994) that seems relevant. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, differences in the costs of reproduction translate into divergent sexual behavior:

"A female can reproduce much less often than a male, because she is stuck with the time-sapping job of birthing and maybe even rearing the young. Thus it makes Darwinian sense for her to appraise carefully the quality of aspiring mates--both their genetic quality and, in species with "high male parental investment," like ours, their ability and willingness to help provide for the young after birth. This quality control helps keep the female from wasting one of her rare and arduous reproductive episodes creating offspring with poor survival prospects. (A woman needn't think about these things; rather, her genetically based impulses of attraction have been shaped by this logic over millions of years; genes encouraging selectivity have flourished, while genes allowing females to squander precious reproductive episodes have not.)

For a male, in contrast, reproduction can be a frequent and low-cost affair; the more sex partners, the more chances to get genes into the next generation. Hence the massively documented fact that males in our species, when sizing up sheerly sexual (not marital) opportunities, are on average less choosy than females."

The article also cites studies of species where the male has a higher parental investment and is less promiscuous than the female of the species.

Posted by: BelowZero at August 24, 2009 11:34 AM | PERMALINK

Ah - that makes sense.

Posted by: Armand at August 24, 2009 01:59 PM | PERMALINK
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