Understanding the mating psychology of humans is one of the holy grails of the seeker of knowledge. For when it comes to sex and relationships, the stakes are high. A healthy coupling with another person can be a source of immense joy and can improve the quality of our life. But when a mating attempt fails, or a relationship turns sour, sorrow, pain, feelings of betrayal, divorce and financial ruin, can result. Evolutionary psychology is a fairly new field that is shining light on the mating psychology of men and women. In this 2-part series, we explore some of the interesting, helpful, unsettling, and controversial insights that have emerged from this field of study. In this first video, we introduce the concept of sexual selection and unravel the evolutionary logic that lies behind the mating psychology of women.
In the Evolution of Desire, David Buss, one of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, writes:
“Modern people today deploy their mating strategies on Internet dating sites and in bars rather than on the savanna. Nevertheless, the same sexual strategies used by our ancestors operate today with unbridled force. Our evolved psychology of mating, after all, plays out in the modern world because it is the only mating psychology we mortals possess.”
David Buss, The Evolution of Desire
Evolutionary psychology pulls together findings from disciplines such as anthropology, primatology, ethology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and sociology, in order to understand how the human mind has been shaped and sculpted by evolution.
“The mind is an adaptation designed by natural selection.”
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
In his 1859 work, “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin put forth his theory of evolution via natural selection. According to this theory, every organism differs from other organisms of the same species; it possesses what are called variations. Some variations improve an organism’s capacity to survive. For example, a hummingbird with a beak that is longer than other hummingbirds of the same species has a variation that allows it to reach the nectar in elongated flowers. If elongated flowers are plentiful in the environment, this variation improves the hummingbird’s ability to survive in this environment. If this variation is also heritable, there is the likelihood it will be passed onto offspring, and over many generations, spread throughout the hummingbird species. Or as Lynn Saxon writes in Sex at Dusk:
“…evolution works via the mechanism of natural selection: traits spread in a population down through generations because they aid survival in particular environments better than the alternative traits.” (Sex at Dusk).
Lynn Saxon, Sex at Dusk
Darwin’s theory of natural selection instigated a paradigm shift in our understanding of why species are the way they are, and how they change over time. However, Darwin encountered an obstacle to his theory of natural selection. He observed that the traits of some species were more a hindrance than a help to survival. The most famous example is the peacock. Darwin couldn’t understand why peacocks had such large and colorful tails. It seemed to him the tails were cumbersome and calling for the attention of predators. He was so troubled by the problem the peacock posed to his theory of natural selection that he wrote: “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it makes me sick!”
Eventually, Darwin realized the peacock’s tail was an evolved adaptation that aided reproduction, rather than survival. Peahens prefer to mate with peacocks with large and colorful tails, as the tail is an indicator of genetic fitness. It requires energy to grow, it makes the male more visible to predators, and so a peacock who survives with a large tail likely has good genes. Females who mate with large-tailed males are thus more likely to have genetically healthy offspring who themselves inherit the genes for large tails, and the preference to mate with large-tailed males. This process whereby mating choices and preferences drive the evolution of a species, Darwin called sexual selection.
“In contrast to the theory of natural selection, which focused on adaptations that have arisen as a consequence of successful survival, the theory of sexual selection focused on adaptations that arose as a consequence of successful mating.”
David Buss, Evolutionary Psychology
Or as David Buss echoes in The Evolution of Desire:
“The evolution of characteristics because of their mating benefits, rather than survival benefits, is known as sexual selection.”
David Buss, The Evolution of Desire
The human body and mind have been shaped by natural selection and sexual selection over vast eons of evolutionary time. As most of human evolution took place in hunter-gatherer environments, our mating psychology consists of adaptive solutions to the problems our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced in attracting a mate and reproducing. While the modern mating environment is radically different from the mating environment of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, evolutionary adaptations occur over hundreds or thousands of generations, and so there has not been enough time for our mind to evolve new mating adaptations. In other words, we operate with a hunter-gatherer mating psychology as we try to navigate the never-before-seen realities of modern mating. Or as Buss explains:
“…human sexual psychology evolved over millions of years to cope with ancestral adaptive problems, just as our food preferences evolved to meet ancestral food conditions. We still possess this underlying sexual psychology, even though our environment has changed.”
David Buss, The Evolution of Desire
