Where do all the women dating losers fit in to this scheme? Lord knows there is no shortage of them. Or women supporting their deadbeat baby Daddy? Are they going against their genetic code? I think not.
Also, “Demonstrated resources” seems especially misguided as it ignores all the women who partner with men with Potential. The women who stood by while they climbed the ladder. Or the women who pushed their men to greater accomplishments?
We probably all know women who fit these patterns. And it makes the whole theory seems somewhat silly, I think especially the ‘demonstrated’ part.
Let me just note that if you took a poll in 1740 of what women like to do as a hobby, you could scientifically prove that women like knitting.
Culture is still changing. Women in their 20s are now kicking ass at Halo and building things in their shed. What actual biologic differences, on the personality level, that there might be between men and women could only really be determined if you had godlike powers over society and could set up and breed people, create cultures, adjust parameters to account for physical discrepancies, etc. to compare what the one consistent core is.
There are other ways to approach the question. You can compare a trait within a sex, see if it’s correlated with prenatal exposure to testosterone or estrogens, and that would at least give you some indirect evidence that sex differences in that trait might also be biologically rather than socially caused.
Godlike powers are not needed. This study does a pretty good job undercutting the hard-wired hypothesis with no divinity involved.
The hard-wired hypothesis would predict that females prefer men with more resources/status just as much in more economically gender equal societies as is societies on very unequal gender economic footings (and conversely males more looks predominant unchanging) - the study instead found that preferences varied according to the degree of equality.
Does not actually quite do it, as again there are different factors that may each be hardwired in but competing in different circumstances. The need to have a provider and protector who is more likely to stick around may decrease as women are more equal while the “rugged” shorter term rotection becomes more important to those ancient circuits. But it is a pretty dang good start.
Things that make sense in intellectual, social, and economic terms tend to be hardwired into, say, beetles. Why not humans? There’s no reason *not *to propose a genetic link.
What I took away from the psych and sociology subjects I took in college was that people lie like fuck on surveys, and tend to answer in ways that conform to what they think they should say far, far more than one might assume. Even where the surveys are totally anonymous.
Added to that, my personal experience is that many people (myself included) have no fricken’ idea when it comes to knowing (and admitting to themselves) their relationship preferences.
It would surprise me if the studies you quote didn’t show the findings they do, because it would very much surprise me if Turkish and Finnish women would fill in a voluntary survey form describing themselves as having the same mate preferences, even if they did. People from societies with different GGI rankings are going to be differently influenced about what they are prepared to say.
A study that looked at what people actually do would be far more convincing than a study about what people say.
Having said that, even assuming that gender differences are hardwired I doubt anyone would argue they are so hardwired that cultural and economic circumstances can’t be an influence.
Are you serious? :dubious: I’m sure you of all people understand science better than this. They didn’t find that something was “true,” they said that their evidence was more consistent with one model than the other. And I’m sure they didn’t assert that it was a fact that female preferences were genetically based. No editor or reviewer of a reputable journal would allow that definite a statement without more overwhelming evidence (and maybe not even then).
You have probably noticed that human behaviors are a good deal more complex than those of beetles. Learning plays a far more important role in humans (and most vertebrates) than it does in insects; comparatively few behaviors are hardwired, and almost none as hardwired as they are in beetles.
Yes, and I don’t think any reputable journal would allow that language (“genetically based”) anyway. They’d want quantitative estimates of how much of the variation in the trait was due to genetics. Because very few psychological traits are either 0% heritable or 100% heritable (and estimates of heritability are always environment-specific anyway).
Experiment: Have a room full of women rate men for attractiveness based on a picture and profession. Then have another group of women rate the same pictures with a different, more successful, profession.
Results:The more successful group scored higher, with the man promoted from mortgage broker to venture capitalist getting the biggest boost.
Females are attracted to alpha males and vice versa. That’s an indisputable fact about a lot of animals. And it’s pretty much the way it should be.
What’s going on with humans that’s different is the way the brain and culture has developed in the last 40,000+ years.
There are total and complete loser jerks, I call them “omega males”. Hopeless as far as mating material goes. But they act like alpha males. This triggers the necessary response in females.
One key feature is that they lie a lot. Skills, wealth, etc. Other animals can’t really do that. The human brain hasn’t had enough time to adapt to sort this group out from real alphas.
Way back when, omega males would have been killed off, banished by the alphas, just plain starved to death due to their own incompetence, etc. Not so much anymore.