Dr. Buss mentioned that a person’s mate value will change over the course of their lifetime. What does this mean for the mate selection process in older divorced persons? If its true that men value youthful physical attributes in a mate, shouldn’t older divorcees have more trouble finding a mate among the older, more financially settled divorced males? At first glance, I wouldn’t think this is the case.

But that line of reasoning goes to mating. What about the coupling side of purgatori’s mating/coupling model? We see younger females in the coupling phase of their lives (before settling on a mate) opting for physical attributes in the male that are much like the physical attributes males seek in females. In short, if a female is looking to couple, she prefers Lars (who owns a Harley). If she’s looking for a mate, she likes Irv (who owns stock options).

All of this chauvanistic, unenlightened talk leads to the same point. I think there’s tension between our ‘hard-wired,’ evolutionary drives and our higher-level, societal drives. I think the best avenue of endeavor would be to study how much of our behavior is driven by nature and how much by nurture. And how the ratio changes as we age. I think this research is more vital than most of us realize. So does Steve McNair.

While falsifiability is an issue, it does seem logical that evolution, and the factors that drive it, has at least *some* hand in determining how our day to day mental life plays out. In the same way that evolution has had at least some hand in determining what our ideal diet should be. No one, that I know of, is claiming that evolutionary psychology is some sort of grand unified theory.

While some theories of evolutionary psychology will obviously be shown to be wrong, the field is, I believe, “ahead of it’s time”. It is also largely beyond human perspective (which is of course limited by in part by our evolved “state”). “Ahead of it’s time”, in the sense that many of these theories make many people uncomfortable, whether consciously or unconsciously. I’m speaking specifically about the “confirmation bias theory”, which I believe has far reaching implications. At it has had far reaching implications for my views over the years.

Thanks for the great podcast…
Cheers

Has anyone tried to study whether there is any evolutionary predictor for which people would not give the shocks? Potentially, these people could be more altruistic, a trait which seems pretty hard to nail down in evolutionary psychology, since it involves helping others at a cost to yourself.

Re: identifying the ‘mate value’ of men, you raise some interesting points. My personal observations are that, while status is probably the strongest predictor of a man’s mate value, it is not the only one. Male mate value is easier to predict, IMHO, in less complex species’. Further, my experiences indicate that womens’ mate value is easier to predict than mens’.

Here’s a hypothesis which deals with your observation:
– Women have a need to mate early because they have a limited period of time when bearing young is optimal
– Given the prevalence of monogamy, they generally need to find mates who are young,
– Because the high status males have already found mates
– Forcing them to guess which of the younger males will, in the future, achieve high status
– High status for males varies in stable societies (where men can accumulate wealth); in those societies, high status males are strongly linked accumulation of wealth, and wealth can be measured many ways.
– However, for hunter-gatherer societies, this may not have been true, as they may not posses formal means of measuring wealth, and they may not be able to store their wealth.
– Depending on what type of society a male lives in, his status might linked to physical abilities such as hunting/fishing prowess, horsemanship, ability to defend the family etc.
– I could speculate and postulate that some of these physical attributes could be hard-wired. Women always like tall men.
– Male status could also be linked to mental abilities such as the ability to negotiate with other tribes, the ability to predict animal behavior, the ability to form coalitions with other males, or the ability to write music, all depending on what is valued in the society the male lives in.
– Depending on what kind of society they live in, different mental attributes can be predictors of future status.
– This makes it very confusing for women to assign mate values to men.
– In a society like ours, which is very dynamic, there are many paths to success for men, and thus many predictors of mate value. That would explain why you find it hard to determine your mate value.

How could we test my hypothesis?
Part 1 – Does the lack of unmarried, high status, males require women to try predicting which of the available males will become successful?
1) Identify societies where successful (high status) men are either
– Allowed to have more than one wife, or
– For some reason the men are not married at the age at which they have been able to prove their status
2) In the selected society, tests to see which men are most sexy to women, choosing strangers but making the measurements take into account their status as well as their physical attributes.
3) Also, in societies where divorce is possible, does the rate at which women ‘upgrade’ their mates vary depending the success of their current mate (probably need to control for women with children).

Part 2 – Do the predictors of success in a given society increase a man’s mate value? In other words, if trait x is associated with future high status in men, does presence of that trait increase a man’s mate value?
1) Identify stable traditional societies where success is predicted by a simpler set of skills. Perhaps isolated tribes that depend only on fishing, such as the Inuit. Hunter-gatherers in complex places like New Guinea, who depend on many sources of food, are thus not suitable because of the large set of available predictors.
2) The ideal society would also know which traits make good fisherman (or whatever the means of support is).
3) Find a trait (mental or physical) associated with that means of support that is well known in the society to be strongly linked. Maybe good fishermen are known to be strong rowers or good navigators.
4) Assuming such a trait (or set of traits) is identified, set up a test with unmarried women so they rate men for sexiness and check whether the traits we are studying are correlated with the results.