Study Finds Female Choice Key to Evolutionary Shift to Modern Family | Tennessee Today

DoctorStorm · 2012-05-31T04:51:20+00:00

The publication's abstract can be found here.

The interpretation Whitney Heins and Catherine Crawley, as per the OP's link, is inaccurate, in my opinion. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, the authors have simply misinterpreted Sergey Gavrilets' research.

They (Heins and Crawley) state:

Using mathematical modeling, the associate director for scientific activities at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at UT has discovered that the transformation may have occurred when early-hominid females started choosing males who were good providers.

But Gavrilets states:

Many species would, indeed, be much better off evolutionarily if the effort spent on male competition over mating was redirected to increasing female fertility or survivorship of offspring. Males, however, are locked in a “social dilemma,” where shifting one’s effort from “appropriation” to “production” would give an advantage to free-riding competitors and therefore, should not happen.

and :

At the end, except for the top-ranked individuals, males invest exclusively in provisioning females who have evolved very high fidelity to their mates.

I interpreted this to mean that males have not, anthropologically speaking, selected females based on their fertility for two reasons primarily.

1) We cannot know if a female has a fertility rate until she has children. In other words, if a woman is 20 and has no children, then aside from extensive biological and genetic testing there is no way to determine if she is more fertile than any other 20 year old woman who has no children. We can guess, but we don't know. That being said, if the first woman has four children and the second woman has two children over the span of a decade, we still can't say for sure because women's fertility rate decreases steadily every year, 3%-5% a year after 30 to be specific.

2) Males have tended to select females based on their level of perceived fidelity. Females who have children will, if perceived to have high fidelity, have a higher chance of creating more children with the same man.

Summation: males selecting females based on their level of fertility has not influenced the evolution of our species, largely because it's not biologically feasible. Possible, but highly improbable. If anything, this phenomena is illogical, and serves as a faulty premise for any argument. Furthermore, we have shifted to pair-bonding because males are more likely to want to procreate with females perceived to have high fidelity. What this means is that over time we have become a species where the males want to procreate, and continue to procreate, with females who only want to procreate with them. Thus the shift from promiscuity to pair-bonding.

Very interesting read, and certainly worthy of intelligent discussion. The first question I'd ask here is how this has decreased male promiscuity. The research makes a strong argument for the decrease in female promiscuity, but implies that male promiscuity isn't a factor. I think the author is actually implying that this works both ways, but it isn't explicitly stated thus I'm only making an educated guess.

tl;dr Men procreate with women who want to procreate with them. Men continue wanting to procreate with the same women if these women only procreate with them. Once a woman procreates with a man and wants to procreate with another man, the next man is less likely to procreate with her. This fact, generally speaking, is what has moved our species away from promiscuity and closer to pair-bonding.

2012-05-31T11:52:16+00:00

This has been added to /r/mensrightslinks

Drainedsoul · 2012-05-31T02:28:09+00:00

How does this contribute to this sub-reddit I don't understand?

Title	Study Finds Female Choice Key to Evolutionary Shift to Modern Family \| Tennessee Today
Author	hardwarequestions
Upvotes	4
Comments	8
Date	May 31, 2012 2:22 AM UTC (14 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/ud6gq/study_finds_female_choice_key_to_evolutionary/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/study-finds-female-choice-key-to-evolutionary.1020763 https://theredarchive.com/post/1020763

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