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