Evolution: Sex: Is Love in Our DNA?

Is Love in Our DNA?

Consider this...

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Evolutionary psychologist Nancy Etcoff points to Henry Kissinger (here with his wife) as an exemplary high-status male.

Because ancestral women faced the tremendous burdens of internal fertilization, a nine-month gestation, and lactation, they would have benefitted tremendously by selecting mates who possessed resources ... Because hierarchies are universal features among human groups and resources tend to accumulate to those who rise in the hierarchy, women solve the adaptive problem of acquiring resources in part by preferring men who are high in status ... The contemporary evidence across many cultures supports the evolutionary prediction that women key onto this cue.
--David Buss, The Evolution of Desire, 1994

On the question of mate preferences, evo psychos rely on surveys, most of them compiled by David Buss ... Surveys show that surveys never lie. Lest you think that women's mate preferences change with their mounting economic clout, surveys assure us not ... Secretary or CEO, Cinderella wants her Rockefella ... There's another reason that smart, professional women might respond on surveys that they'd like a mate of their socioeconomic status or better. Smart, professional women are smart enough to know that men can be tender of ego -- is it genetic? -- and that it hurts a man to earn less money than his wife.
--Natalie Angier, Woman, 1999

Our notions of the best mate are sculpted by the culture around us. Women are especially vulnerable to the dictates of family and society. In almost all societies around the world, women have little economic or political power. And so women often want husbands with high socioeconomic status because women usually can't get money and power themselves. A cultural anthropology colleague of mine, however, pointed out, "The sentence 'Women want men who have power and money' works just as well if you erase the words 'men who have.'"
--Meredith Small, What's Love Got to Do With It?, 1998

Is it status and wealth that make Brad Pitt a box-office draw? Or something else entirely? Critics of evolutionary psychology point out that their work tends to emphasize female youth and beauty rather than the male equivalent.

In a call to the NPR program "Car Talk," one 40-something bachelor asked for advice on what new car would help him woo a 20-something mate.

Did evolution shape your taste in a mate?

Yes / No



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	Adaptation and Natural Selection

	Human Evolution