I realized yesterday that I've never heard anyone talk about neediness in the context of evolution. I've heard fear, sex, love, gender, and intelligence, among many other topics, but never neediness. Yet neediness is such a key concept in the PUA world. One of the first things people learn is how to not be needy. This is because it is incredibly clear that neediness is unattractive. Bringing in evolution, if neediness is unattractive, it should be something that gets reduced from generation to generation. However, I look around and see a tremendous amount of people, both men and women, who are stuck on the needy train.

In trying to resolve these conflicting beliefs, I've seen 2 possibilities, but I'm hoping you have more.

The first possibility comes from David D's Man Transformation program. The idea is that we have some kind of genetic switch in us that allows us to go from "beta" to "alpha" behavior, from needy to secure, and this switch gets flipped when we get into power, happiness, or something else (I don't know how it would work). This possibility is basically using the "beta" or "alpha" behavior as an indicator of status, driving people to mate with higher status people, and thus seems to help the higher status.

The other possibility is that our western culture has created either a disgust of neediness, or an inclination for people to be needy. If you look back at dating in the early 20th century, it looked very different, and I think neediness wasn't really encountered. But that brings up the question of what was the change to bring about neediness.

There are holes in either possibilities, so hoping for other suggestions on how neediness interacts with evolution, or for you to point the holes out in the arguments presented.