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Sexual selection and mate choice in evolutionary psychology

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Abstract

The importance of mate choice and sexual selection has been emphasized by the majority of evolutionary psychologists. This paper assesses three cases of work on mate choice and sexual selection in evolutionary psychology: David Buss on cross-cultural human mate preferences, Randy Thornhill and Steve Gangestad on the link between mate preferences and fluctuating asymmetry, and Geoffrey Miller on the role of Fisher’s runaway process in human evolution. A mixture of conceptual and empirical problems in each case highlights the general weakness of work in evolutionary psychology on these issues.

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Notes

  1. A Google Scholar search revealed over 500 citations of The Evolution of Desire and "Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences" since 2000.

  2. The observed mean value was actually 36 min. Kitcher (1985: 138–141) discusses different approaches to resolving the discrepancy between observed and predicted values.

  3. See Earman (1992) for a Bayesian explanation of the ability of several independent predictions to raise the posterior probability of a hypothesis.

  4. Lewontin (1974)

  5. See Kruuk et al. (2003: 102) for additional phenomena to be expected from the assumed relationship between FA and genetic quality.

  6. Good explications of the process by which certain alleles can become correlated (as well as the process of runaway in general) are provided by Arnold (1983: 77–79) and Shuster and Wade (2003: 79–81).

  7. Explanations of the features mentioned here, where not included, can be found in the references provided.

  8. E.g. Servedio and Kirkpatrick’s (1996) mate choice copying model, where the copying allele spreads even when it causes females to copy a choice for low-viability males.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Center for Philosophy of Biology, Duke University, 201 West Duke Building, Box 90743, Durham, NC, 27708, USA

    Chris Haufe

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Haufe, C. Sexual selection and mate choice in evolutionary psychology. Biol Philos 23, 115–128 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-007-9071-0

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