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Saturday, August 15, 2015

"Many want to believe that women and men are identical in their underlying psychology, but the genders differ strikingly in their evolved mate preferences..."

Gosh, you don't say?  How unsurprisingly obvious.  Biology, biochemistry and evolution 101.  Genders Differ Dramatically in Evolved Mate Preferences | UT News | The University of Texas at Austin: "Men’s and women’s ideas of the perfect mate differ significantly due to evolutionary pressures, according to a cross-cultural study on multiple mate preferences by psychologists at The University of Texas at Austin. The study of 4,764 men and 5,389 women in 33 countries and 37 cultures showed that sex differences in mate preferences are much larger than previously appreciated and stable across cultures...

Many want to believe that women and men are identical in their underlying psychology, but the genders differ strikingly in their evolved mate preferences in some domains,” said co-author of the study and psychology professor David Buss. “The same holds true in highly sexually egalitarian cultures such as Sweden and Norway as in less egalitarian cultures such as Iran.”"

The researchers suggest that these patterns of mate preferences are far more linked to gender than any individual mate preference examined separately would suggest. 

Researchers found that they could predict a person’s sex with 92.2 percent accuracy if they knew his or her mate preferences. 

According to the study, men favor mates who are younger and physically attractive. Women seek older mates with good financial prospects, higher status and ambition. 

“Because women bear the cost of pregnancy and lactation, they often faced the adaptive problem of acquiring resources to produce and support offspring, while men faced adaptive problems of identifying fertile partners and sought cues to fertility and future reproductive value,” Conroy-Beam said."

In other news, men like asses.  Lumbar curvature: a previously undiscovered standard of attractiveness - Evolution and Human Behavior:  "This paper reports independent studies supporting the proposal that human standards of attractiveness reflect the output of psychological adaptations to detect fitness-relevant traits. We tested novel a priori hypotheses based on an adaptive problem uniquely faced by ancestral hominin females: a forward-shifted center of mass during pregnancy. The hominin female spine possesses evolved morphology to deal with this adaptive challenge: wedging in the third-to-last lumbar vertebra. Among ancestral women, vertebral wedging would have minimized the net fitness threats posed by hypolordosis and hyperlordosis, thereby creating selective pressures on men to prefer such women as mates. On this basis, we hypothesized that men possess evolved mate preferences for women with this theoretically optimal angle of lumbar curvature...

"In Study 1, as hypothesized, men’s attraction toward women increased as women’s lumbar curvature approached this angle. However, vertebral wedging and buttock mass can both influence lumbar curvature. Study 2 thus employed a forced-choice paradigm in which men selected the most attractive woman among models exhibiting the same lumbar curvature, but for different morphological reasons. Men again tended to prefer women exhibiting cues to a degree of vertebral wedging closer to optimum. This included preferring women whose lumbar curvature specifically reflected vertebral wedging rather than buttock mass. These findings reveal novel, theoretically anchored, and previously undiscovered standards of attractiveness."

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