A few weeks ago I saw the humongous ornate tree lizard that lives in our backyard. It was acting strangely. Usually it keeps at least one eye on me, if there’s a line of sight between us. But this time, it wasn’t paying any attention to me. This time it was running - but only a few feet - and then stopping - in plain sight, and swiveling its eyes behind it. It kept doing it, over and over again. Then I saw the much smaller lizard that was following it. He (I’m assuming it was a “he”) was approaching her, very cautiously, until she would scamper off in a new direction. Then he’d start pursuing again. They kept doing this, until I lost track of them.
What I saw, I think, was fitness selection: she was making sure he was a fit father, before deciding whether to mate with him. I’m no herpetologist, and couldn’t tell the difference between a male and female lizard if my life depended on it. But it seemed like a good guess, to me.
To my understanding, fitness testing is common in the animal kingdom. Peacocks, for example, display tail feathers that serve no purpose, except to advertise their fitness to peahens.
Does fitness testing play a role in human mating strategies? Do we have mating strategies? Or, as humans, are we beyond such things?
Beyond such things…? No. The only thing differing us from other animals here is that our signals have changed somewhat, but they are still along the same theme.
The more traditionalistic a country is, the more overt the fitness selection seems to be, and the less traditionalistic the more subtle or covert.
Peacocks have feathers and men have other symbols of wealth and power (which seem to be the fitness women are looking for) and women use artificial means to make themselves look like they are in a state of constant sexual arousal.
In the US I might try to impress a women by showing her I own something expensive, like a nice car, which signals I am fit to provide for her by means of having accumulated wealth. In Sweden I may go the other route and try to impress her with my sensitive nature and social skills, showing I have what it takes to navigate an information based society. Or whatever.
The whole dating and courting thing IS essentially a fitness selection trial, we’re just checking for more things than hind leg stamina since we’re a bit more complicated than lizards.
While I agree with everything Stoneberg says as generalization, of course there are some individuals who choose other traits to demonstrate “fitness”. I chose a man who makes me feel emotionally and physically safe in his presence, and who demonstrated good nurturing skills toward the children I already had, and who makes me laugh and think. He’s always broke, though. But he’s “fit” for the ecological niche I had in mind for him as my mate. That’s what made him attractive to me while we were dating.
But no matter what our personal rubric for a mate is, yes, dating is exactly how most of us go about testing whether or not a potential meets it. It’s the human equivalent of “come chase me, big boy!”
WhyNot: Your strategy seemed to have worked out perfect for you. You had children with one man, who failed to commit to you and the children, and then found another to step into that role. He fit into the ecological niche you had in mind for him when you were dating, as you say. He sounds like the perfect catch.
Exactly. And I think, maybe, one might say that, in that small sense, humans are “beyond” fitness selection, only in that we can choose what “fitness” means to us. I don’t want any more babies, and I’m comfortable supporting myself financially, so I’m choosing different traits from your lady lizard. She probably doesn’t have the kind of intelligence or forethought that would allow her to choose a lizard who she could have conversations with, instead of trying to make babies. Her mates have to meet a pretty specific definition of “fitness”. Human males have more than one way to be fit for different mates.
Well there are lots of physical fitness indicators which are considered attractive. Symmetrical features, good teeth, clear skin etc. In terms of strategy I would say virtually all human activity. Being good at sport, having a good career, having lots of friends, being witty or basically being good at anything improves your chances. In humans, reproductive fitness is usually more to do with being brainy than with being strong or fast.
Some people think that humans have much less conscious control over what they do than they think: some even go so far as to say that, for at least some people, cognition is little more that a way to rationalize whatever choices they’ve already made, or the ideologies or paradigms that control them.
I’m one of those people actually. My “real” opinion is actually that the whole “person” is in itself a form of cognitive misunderstanding. Or a stage in the evolution of consciousness if you want to put a more positive spin on it.
No. Otherwise men would be attracted to something like big breasts and women would be attracted to something like an athletic build. Oh wait, they often are…
What does that even mean? Obviously we don’t mate at random, so there must be some sort of strategy.
Why would we be “beyond” an evolutionary norm? Unless you are appealing to a religious belief, the question doesn’t even make any sense.
I agree with you. Are those the only fitness tests?
Right. But what is it? Are there multiple strategies? Is there a male strategy and a female strategy?
To answer my own question, I think humans are animals. Strange animals: but animals nonetheless. We don’t exist separate from the rest of the animal kingdom. We have conscious mating strategies and subconscious ones. By “subconscious” I mean strategies - or instincts - we may not even be aware of.
Different people have different needs in a mate. Someone who is a hunter-gatherer or subsistence farmer might value health and strength/stamina over looks, for example, because their situation requires daily physical effort. That applies to both genders. On top of that, a man’s ability to hunt might be a major consideration, or his ability to make/use tools, and a woman’s ability to gather or store food or make clothing might also be a significant factor (the making of “hope chests” was, on one level, a demonstration of a woman’s domestic skills).
A very wealthy man with access to multiple wives might well value youth and looks above all else - but keep on the older wives as they age because their experience means they are better at raising resulting offspring.
A woman might well value “reliability” and “steadiness” in a man she desires as the father of her children - but if she’s having an affair looks/physical fitness/other factors might become more important.
In general, men look for youth and good looks, which are an indicator of sorts for good health, fertility, and ability to bear children.
In general, women look for a man’s ability to provide materially (purchasing an engagement ring worth three month’s of man’s salary, for example, is a demonstration of a steady income and roughly how big it is). Also, customs like the man paying for dinner, needing to have his own car, and so forth.
But, exceptions abound. People marry infertile people. A wealthy dowager marries a young, poverty-stricken man. And so forth. So what’s going on there?
Well… there’s a meme of a young but lower-class man with money marrying an impoverished aristocratic woman - her family gets money, he gets increased social status even if she’s older and maybe not so attractive, a bit sickly, whatever. There’s a drive for social status, after all (maybe it increase his chances down the line, right?)
But, what it comes down to, is that there is more than one signifying of “fitness” for humans, and because we are not as strongly tied to instinct as some animal, it can either misfire or an individual might make a decision in defiance of it, just as some people forgo reproduction entirely despite being fertile.
Also, with human childhoods being so long, raising kids successfully often requires both partners bringing something to the relationship. It’s also why human males not only participate in child-raising but can (aside from lactation) do the same job as a female, and human females have long done “man’s work” like hunting or labor when necessary (perhaps the man is absent or deceased). If humans didn’t have that sort of flexibility a lot more kids would die before adulthood if one parent is lost or disabled. Humans with that level of flexibility left more kids than those without, until such flexibility became a common trait.
So yes, there are “agendas” and markers of fitness in general but also a LOT of exceptions. Probably because behavioral flexibility is an asset in the human lifestyle.
It’s certainly true that humans are at least more capable of overcoming or resisting their instincts than other animals - particularly since many animals operate on instincts alone. For example, the conscious choice of some people not to have children certainly has no evolutionary instinct behind it - since making no children effectively makes you an evalutionary dead end.
But I wonder if you’re excessively discounting evolutionary instincts instilled in humans over the past several million years. People are certainly capable of overcoming their instincts, but how often do they actually do it? Another way to put it is: how often do people use their cognitive abilities to rationalize their instincts,rather than overcome them?
Generically speaking, the goal of mating for both genders is the same. Have as many high quality offspring as possible, ensure those offspring survive to adulthood and when they become adults ensure the progeny mate successfully too. Humans who didn’t have this as their goal or who has tastes and preferences that didn’t match what helped accomplish this had fewer kids and are therefore less common. There is no overarching reason peacocks love feathers, human men love a good waist to hip ratio or women love men who have resources (power, money, fame). The animals who happen to like those things have more kids and soon the tastes become intuitive due to selective breeding.
Since men and women invest different things mating strategy varies by gender. Men can afford to be more indiscriminate as producing lots of kids with no parental involvement is a successful strategy. For women this is a destructive strategy. As a result cultural meme like the idea that a man who has lots of partners is to be celebrated but a woman who has lots of partners is to be shamed spring up.
There are various mating strategies both genders use. But we are more than just instincts. A lot of people end up working through or repeating childhood traumas via their mate selection. That probably has no advantage.
Having said that, there are various strategies and they can vary by environment.
For example, animals distinguish between quality of offspring vs quantity.
Some animals have hundreds/thousands of children with almost no parental involvement. Some animals (like many mammals) only have a few but those offspring require large amounts of parental involvement. It depends on the animal and the environment as well as the chances that the offspring will survive to reproductive age.
So genderwise here is my understanding of generic mating strategies. As I said earlier, humans are not just instinct.
For women:
Find a man who is genetically gifted (aka good looking, that is what we find attractive), who has resources and who also has fidelity. Mate with them and raise children together. Women want good genetics and resources (resources includes protection) but they also want fidelity as child rearing is hard work. A man who runs off after impregnation leaves a woman very vulnerable and at a disadvantage.
Get impregnated by a high genetic quality man who has a lot of sex appeal, then find a less attractive, more stable male with resources to help raise the children. This gives the best of both worlds as you get a child who is genetically gifted but many times the kind of person who will provide high quality genetic material is not the same kind of person who has resources and fidelity. I saw this a lot in high school, women got pregnant by the good looking bad boys, then found more boring men with jobs to marry later.
Procreate with many men at the same time, so none know for sure who is the father. In this age of genetic testing now you can find out with a DNA test, but in the past if a woman had 5 or 6 partners at once and got pregnant, none of the potential fathers know if it is theirs. As a result, they all have an incentive to help raise the child. So instead of 1 great father, a woman might get 6 quasi fathers for her kid.
For men:
Find a woman who is fertile and a good mother, mate with her for the duration of child care.
Impregnate as many fertile (aka attractive, aka young with good bodies) women as possible, hope they can raise the kids themselves or they will find someone else to raise your kids for you (see strategy #2 for women).
Having said that, I’m sure there are many well written, well thought out articles on the subject of human mating. But I don’t know where to find them. It is an interesting subject since mating strategy causes so much stress, suffering and confusion for humans, having some clarification about why we do it is nice.
As I said though, humans are more than just instinct. People also want someone they feel connected to and enjoy being around. Some studies by David Sloan Wilson found that after you get to know someone, roughly 60% of their attractiveness is due to their personality and how you think/feel about them. So people who are rated as highly attractive when they first meet become plain or ugly if their personality is terrible, people who are ugly or plain become attractive if they have great personalities.
Plus you have all the cultural tastes. Back when being fat was a sign of wealth and the poor were too malnourished and busy working physically demanding jobs to ever become fat, fat women and men were desirable since only the wealthy could afford the quality of food and life of leisure to get fat. Now that poor people are fat, being anorexic is a sign of being desirable (there is some speculation that the reason for this is that only the rich who enjoy lives of leisure have the financial resources and time to devote to obsessing over their weight. Regular people with jobs, responsibilities, etc. generally cannot muster the energy while the rich don’t have jobs and can hire cooks, personal trainers and nannies to help them). Basically, part of what we find attractive is cultural and that can have many reasons (maybe it is a proxy for wealth or status, maybe it is just tradition, maybe something else).
Plus you have personal tastes. Some guys like redheads, some like blondes. I used to love goth women, I’d jump over 100 cheerleaders to get to one. Zero evolutionary benefit in that, it was just a personal hangup/taste I had.
Plus you have whatever subconscious issues people have. Like I said earlier, someone who was neglected as a child may end up strongly attracted to people who are unavailable or disinterested. Someone who was abused may find themselves strongly attracted to abusers. I doubt working out your childhood traumas via mate selection has any evolutionary benefit.
Except that we, like many other creatures, are often very conservative beasties. Maybe this is just another example of progeny doing what their parents did, because it worked (well enough) for them (that is, the parents, known by Nature to be at least marginally successful breeders).
I know with food, I believe the foods you are exposed to and that you see your parents eat around age 2-4 (something like that) help determine what foods you consider off limits. In the US we look at videos of people in the amazon eating worms growing in rotten wood or we look at the Japanese eating natto, but that is because we weren’t exposed to it as young kids. It is the same argument, if the parents think these foods are ok but those foods are sick there is probably a good reason (those other foods are poisonous or have no nutrition, etc).
However I don’t see how pursuing someone who is unavailable because you were neglected as a kid has any real advantages.
My hypothesis is not that you pursue bad relationships because you experienced them. More that you’re designed to be a creature of habit in general. When it’s good, we say that you’re in a groove. When it’s bad, we say you’re in a rut.
But he’s “fit” for the ecological niche I had in mind for him as my mate. That’s what made him attractive to me while we were dating.