
Strategies of Human Mating (2006) [pdf] - networked
http://www.weimag.ch/micha/dc/05_Buss_Strategies%20of%20Human%20Mating.pdf
======
swframe
We focus on the mating but the real challenge is keeping relationships
interesting when we're not mating.

~~~
godmodus
exactly. that's a life skill no one can ever teach you. very few of us are
lucky to have a perfect match - but the rest need to learn the hard way how to
make a relationship work - how to resist temptation when your hormones are
acting up and that cute new girl is giving you the look.

it's especially difficult in modern times, where so many people are
discouraged from settling young and experimenting till you are into your late
20s or early 30s - while ignoring emotional well being and stability that are
so important later on.

sex-ed is generally fubared in almost every country on the planet.

~~~
user5994461
> how to resist temptation when your hormones are acting up and that cute new
> girl is giving you the look.

The best way to resist temptation is to give in to it :D

~~~
IgorPartola
Yup. We are meant to form pair bonds with extra couplings. This is why I
practice responsibile non-monogamy.

~~~
Chris2048
We are also "meant" to batter our competitors to death with a club.

~~~
IgorPartola
Not really. We get PTSD when we do that.

------
zxcvvcxz
What's great about evolutionary biology is that there is a science that
explains sex differences and thus traditional social constructs that have
existed for millenia.

> Because in humans fertilization occurs internally within women, men can
> suffer a lack of certainty in their paternity. In contrast, women are always
> 100% certain that their offspring are their own. Sexual infidelity, of
> course, is the event that can compromise a man’s paternity in offspring.

> Although women have never confronted the problem of maternity uncertainty,
> an infidelity by a woman’s mate can be extremely damaging. The woman whose
> husband is unfaithful risks losing his time, resources, and commitments, all
> of which could get channeled to a rival female and her children.

> For these reasons, evolutionary theorists have predicted that men, more than
> women, would get upset about signals of sexual infidelity. In contrast,
> women, more than men were predicted to get upset about signals of emotional
> infidelity

> In an American sample, 61% of the men, but only 13% of the women judged the
> sexual infidelity aspect of the betrayal to be the most upsetting.
> Conversely, only 39% of the men, but 87% of the women, judged the emotional
> attachment to the other person as more upsetting. Similar sex differences
> have been obtained in Korea and Japan (Buss et al., 1999), China (Geary et
> al., 1995), and Sweden (Wiederman & Kendall, 1999). In studies of memory,
> men can more easily recall cues to sexual infidelity, whereas women can more
> easily recall cues to emotional infidelity.

Men and women are not the same, and this is why they place differing values on
sexual fidelity and the often-correlated concept of promiscuity.

And as female promiscuity increases in various developed parts of the world,
you will absolutely see a decline in marriage rates, as men subconsciously
process a greater evolutionary risk to their genetic investments.

EDIT - oh boy, this article really is full of gems that would offend the
sensibilities of the egalitarian crowd:

> Married men tend to engage in especially vigorous mate retention efforts
> when their spouse is young in age and physically attractive. In contrast,
> women tend to engage in especially vigorous mate retention efforts when
> married to men who have good jobs, high incomes, and devote a lot of time to
> status striving.

What we value in a nutshell, whether we want to admit it or not.

~~~
koder2016
>> In contrast, women tend to engage in especially vigorous mate retention
efforts when married to men who have good jobs, high incomes, and devote a lot
of time to status striving.

That is unless government steps in to guarantee 50% claim of men's resources
regardless of retention efforts.

~~~
danieltillett
If only it was 50%.

------
nether
> Men and women experimenters approached total strangers on a college campus,
> and said “Hi, I’ve been noticing you around campus, and I find you very
> attractive.”

I've got to try this.

~~~
sanjeetsuhag
Saying "I've been noticing you around campus" to a stranger is a great way to
get a restraining order.

~~~
cperciva
I'm surprised this passed ethics approval. I doubt you'd be allowed to perform
such an experiment on random strangers these days.

~~~
belorn
Interesting question, but I would not that surprised if it did pass ethics
approval. In some way, its no different from AB testing on a
website/store/road/other public areas. The question that should be asked is if
there is any harm caused, and asking how reasonable it is that someone gets
psychological harm from the complement and the information that it was part of
a sociology experiment with an opt-out choice afterward to not be included in
the record. I recall that Mythbusters did several such experiments, like the
"is yawning contagious" test.

~~~
cperciva
Mythbusters doesn't have to go through university ethics boards. And I'd say
that "yawn in front of someone" is considerably less intrusive than
"proposition someone".

------
a3_nm
Any discussion of scientific studies of this kind of sensitive subject should
be understood with the appropriate disclaimers. In particular, the is-ought
fallacy: if experimental studies find out, backed with experimental
explanations, that men and women tend to behave differently, it does not
follow that discriminating them (by law or by social customs) is desirable or
acceptable. It's very hard to avoid falling in the trap, but any factual thing
that science tells us about humans cannot, in itself, be the justification of
any kind of policy.

~~~
s_q_b
"The Naturalistic Fallacy": Simply because something is natural does not make
it good.

Lava is natural, and food coloring is synthetic. Of which would you prefer to
eat a pound?

 _Version 1.2_

~~~
rosser
When Ralph Nader called plutonium "the most toxic substance known to man",
physicist Bernard Cohen challenged him thusly: "I'll eat as much pure
plutonium as you do caffeine, and we'll see who dies first." (Paraphrased.)
Nader declined.

Also, a man named Albert Stevens was injected with 131kBq of Pu. He died 20
years later of heart disease, having accumulated a lifetime dose of some 64
Sv.

It's not just the dose that makes the poison, it's the method of
administration.

~~~
XorNot
Sadly it took me a while to realize how you could possibly make this
challenge, but of course - it's all about bioavailability. Plutonium isn't
actually all that dangerous radioactively (gamma emitters aren't very harmful
internally).

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Interesting question: could you survive swallowing a 1mL plutonium ball?

Because the LD50 of a 200lb/91kg human is about that amount of caffeine (20g).

~~~
danieltillett
Why we don't have any human data on the LD50 of plutonium, it is not likely to
be any more toxic than uranium which has a LD50 of around 5g for the soluble
salts.

A 20g plutonium ball should be harmless if swallowed. 20g of caffeine on the
other hand won't be pleasant.

------
jondubois
>> "Successful mating requires solutions of a number of difficult adaptive
problems."

Haha. Almost sounds like you need a PhD to do it.

~~~
Kenji
Why? Even a toddler can solve a number of difficult adaptive problems. Like
walking or catching a ball. We tend to forget that what is difficult with
machines, the body does with ease sometimes.

~~~
pizza
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox)

 _Moravec 's paradox is the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics
researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning
requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require
enormous computational resources._

------
otabdeveloper
What they call (incorrectly) 'sex' is not mating.

Having kids is strongly inversely correlated with 'having sex'. (People who
are most successful at reproducing are also the people with the fewest sexual
partners and a less active sex life.)

~~~
erikb
You probably intended to say something reasonable, but what you wrote just
doesn't make much sense.

~~~
otabdeveloper
The people having 4-5 kids aren't the people who got laid in highschool.

Moreover, some of the most successfully reproducing people are those who have
sex once a year.

'Sex' is, by definition, something that's supposed to lead to reproduction.
Whatever you're discussing here isn't.

------
Tharkun
Didn't anyone review this prior to publication? There are so many typing
errors that I can't take the text seriously.

------
eoirs
There is something very wrong in the fact that sex is the only form of
pleasure that you obtain from others.

~~~
projektir
Well, don't forget belonging, love, etc...

~~~
eoirs
that does not create the pleasure response that our brains are wired for, its
only food and sex.

~~~
projektir
It's a lot more pleasurable than just sex for a lot of people. I think your
definition of "pleasure response" may be be a bit limited.

~~~
eoirs
If you really think people love others unconditional with no prospects of
gain, then you are living in a fair tail my friend.

