Contemporary mate preferences can provide important clues to human reproductive history. Little is known about which characteristics people value in potential mates. Five predictions were made about sex differences in human mate preferences based on evolutionary conceptions of parental investment, sexual selection, human reproductive capacity, and sexual asymmetries regarding certainty of paternity versus maternity. The predictions centered on how each sex valued earning capacity, ambition— industriousness, youth, physical attractiveness, and chastity. Predictions were tested in data from 37 samples drawn from 33 countries located on six continents and five islands (total N = 10,047). For 27 countries, demographic data on actual age at marriage provided a validity check on questionnaire data. Females were found to value cues to resource acquisition in potential mates more highly than males. Characteristics signaling reproductive capacity were valued more by males than by females. These sex differences may reflect different evolutionary selection pressures on human males and females; they provide powerful cross-cultural evidence of current sex differences in reproductive strategies. Discussion focuses on proximate mechanisms underlying mate preferences, consequences for human intrasexual competition, and the limitations of this study.

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Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures

Male sexual jealousy

This paper explores the close similarities between Chinese footbinding and female genital mutilation and categorizes each custom as universal where practiced persistent practiced by those opposed to it a way to control sexual access to females considered necessary for proper marriage and family honor sanctioned by tradition an ethnic marker spread by contagious diffusion exaggerated over time related to status supported and transmitted by women performed on young girls generally not initiation rites believed to promote health and fertility considered aesthetically pleasing considered an enhancement to male pleasure during intercourse and related to female slavery. After noting these characteristics the paper defends these assertions by tracing the history of female footbinding in China and defining and tracing the history of female genital mutilation in Africa. The authors conclusion that each practice is a self-enforcing convention (as defined by Shelling in 1960 and Lewis in 1969) is presented through a discussion of the convention hypothesis and game theory illustrated through coordination problems. This theory illustrates how people can be stuck in an inferior equilibrium which is maintained by what people believe about each other (daughters will be forced to undergo genital mutilation if people believe this is necessary to attract a husband). Such a convention is self-enforcing and in these cases the enforcement is derived by a desire for paternity confidence by a history of imperial female slavery and by belief traps. The mechanism necessary to allow escape from an inferior convention is then covered and it is recommended that efforts to end female genital mutilation adopt the successful tactics which eradicated footbinding in China in one generation. Quick convention change can be achieved by an education campaign by use of adverse international public opinion and by forming associations of parents who pledge not to submit their daughters to genital mutilation and not to let their sons marry mutilated women.

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Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: A Convention Account

Human behavioral ecology (HBE) began in the mid-1970s with the application of optimal foraging models to hunter-gatherer decisions concerning resource selection and land use. In the 25 years since, the field has developed and successfully adapted evolutionary ecology theory and methods to a wide range of topics important to archaeology and to anthropology generally. In this review we examine the basic theory and its extensions to children’s foraging, conservation biology, demographic transitions, domestication and agricultural origins, the evolution of menopause, field processing and central place foraging, life history, male-female division of labor, mating tactics and fertility decisions, and resource intensification. Work on resource acquisition continues, but has been extended from foragers to pastoral and agricultural production systems. Studies of resource distribution, and especially intragroup processes of resource competition and transfers, now supplement and enrich those of resource production. Demographic and life history analyses have begun to show how ecological factors of production and distribution relate to those of mortality, fertility, and life course. Besides providing a comprehensive view of the field, we hope to demonstrate that HBE has established itself as a progressive research tradition,1 a question we take up in our conclusion. We note that this review supplements others. Two edited collections summarized the state of HBE in the early 1980s2 and early 1990s;3 shorter reviews have appeared as well.4–6 A pending collection carries us to the late 1990s.7 Reviews of HBE generally,8,9 as well as life history and demography,10–12 maturation,13 primate life span and litter size,14 mating strategies,15,16 reproductive ecology,17,18 resource transfers,19 resource conservation,20 and division of labor21 have appeared previously in this Journal. Evolutionary ecology studies “evolution and adaptive design in ecological context.”22 As a distinct field, evolutionary ecology emerged in the 1960s with the work of Charnov and Orians,23 Hutchinson,24,25 Lack,26 MacArthur and Pianka,27 MacArthur and Levins,28 MacArthur,29 Orians,30,31 and others. Textbooks on evolutionary ecology appeared in the 1970s, covering topics from the structural and behavioral traits of organisms to the organization of ecological communities. Evolutionary ecology shares fuzzy boundaries with evolutionary genetics, community ecology, animal behavior, and decision theory. When applied to the analysis of behavior, evolutionary ecology is conventionally termed “behavioral ecology.” Behavioral analyses have been an integral element of evolutionary ecology from the beginning, treating topics such as foraging strategies,27 mating systems,30 and spatial organization and competition.32 The first textbooks on behavioral ecology appeared in late 1970s33 and early 1980s.34 There now is a voluminous literature, including monograph series, dedicated journals (e.g., Evolutionary Ecology, and Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology), and a widely read, state-of-theart series of volumes,35–38 each edition with a new set of papers. Human behavioral ecology applies evolutionary ecology models and concepts to the study of human behavioral diversity. HBE began in the mid1970s with a small set of interpretive papers39–41 and independent dissertation projects. Initially centered on foraging theory and hunter-gatherer studies, HBE has expanded over the last 25 years to encompass diverse topics and subsistence systems (Fig. 1). Although a second generation of HBE researchers is now in academic positions, the field is young enough that its initiators remain the majority of those publishing in it. HBE’s early goals were to set the cultural ecology of Steward,42 particularly as developed in his hunter-gatherer work43 and as represented in later studies such as those by Lee,44 on a sounder theoretical footing by allying it to emerging, neo-Darwinian approaches to behavior. From the start, the proposed alliance was a somewhat wary and selective one. To varying degrees, there were attempts to distance this anthropological effort (sometimes termed “socioecology”2) from the sociobiology of Wilson,45 and Bruce Winterhalder is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Curriculum in Ecology at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He currently is working on a booklength analysis of the microecological bases of the hunter-gatherer mode of production. E-mail: winterhalder@unc.edu Eric Alden Smith is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Graduate Program in Environmental Anthropology at University of Washington, Seattle. He is currently engaged in studies of marine foraging, reproductive strategies, and social status among Torres Strait Islanders in collaboration with Rebecca Bliege Bird and Douglas W. Bird. E-mail: easmith@u.washington.edu

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Analyzing adaptive strategies: Human behavioral ecology at twenty‐five

In most social species, position in the male social hierarchy and reproductive success are positively correlated; in humans, however, this relationship is less clear, with studies of traditional societies yielding mixed results. In the most economically advanced human populations, the adaptiveness of status vanishes altogether; social status and fertility are uncorrelated. These findings have been interpreted to suggest that evolutionary principles may not be appropriate for the explanation of human behavior, especially in modern environments. The present study tests the adaptiveness of social status with actual mating and reproductive data in a representative sample of males from an industrial society. Reproductive success, even when assessed by a more reliable measure of actual male fertility than the one commonly used, fails to correlate with social status. In striking contrast, however, status is found to be highly correlated with potential fertility, as estimated from copulation frequency. Status thus accounts for as much as 62% of the variance in this proximate component of fitness. This pattern is remarkably similar to what is found in many traditional societies and would result in a substantial positive relationship between cultural and reproductive success in industrial populations were it not for the novel conditions imposed by contraception and monogamy. Various underlying mechanisms are suggested for these findings, illustrating the value of current behavioral and reproductive data in the study of adaptation. It is concluded that evolutionary explanations of human behavior remain entirely relevant in modern societies.

Cultural and reproductive success in industrial societies: Testing the relationship at the proximate and ultimate levels

When the famine in Shansi was over, and I began to consider the reasons of it, I felt I must study the causes of human suffering, not only in China but in all the world. In pondering Western civili...

Mildred Dickemann

Papers

The ecology of mating systems in hypergynous dowry societies