maybe maybe we could we could start our discussion of sexual differences in mating strategy with that so first of all what's the evidence that suggests that women are in fact choosier when it comes to sexual partners than men and how much choosier are they okay okay great question well so maybe first we could def just Define for listeners what sexual selection theory is uh because most people when they think about Evolution they think of survival of the fittest and that sort of nature reving tooth and clock and kind of Randomness too which you know that
that's kind of implicit in the natural selection Theory where sexual selection is anything but random yeah absolutely so so sexual selection so if if if natural selection this is oversimplified but is um the evolution of adaptations due to their survival advantage or the survival advantage that accred to the possessors uh so things like fear of snakes fear of heights uh spiders Darkness strangers and so forth food preferences things that led to better survival sexual selection deals with the evolution of qualities that lead to mating success and Darwin identified two causal processes by which mating success
could uh occur one is same-sex competition or intrasexual competition and the logic there is that whatever uh he he thought about it in terms of contest competition where there was a physical battle like two Stags locking horns in combat uh with the Victor gaining sexual access to the female loser are ambling off with a broken antler dejected with low self-esteem and probably needing some Psychotherapy uh but the logic was whatever qualities led to success in these same sex battles whether it be athleticism uh strength agility cunning or whatever those qualities get got passed on in
greater numbers due to the sexual access that the victors acred uh qualities associated with losing basically bit The evolutionary dust uh the second component so that's intersexual competition which actually the logic is more General than Darwin and vision so like in our species as we were alluding to we often compete for position and Status hierarchies uh and so we we can engage in in seexual competition without engaging in this physical battle or contest competition although I think that the contest competition was also part of human evolutionary history with with with males the other component process
is uh basically what Darwin called female choice and the logic there is that whatever qualities if there's some consensus about the qualities that are desired that men possessing the desired qualities have a mating Advantage they get preferentially chosen those lacking the desired qualities basically become incels or involuntarily celibate they get shunned banished or ignored uh now the The Twist on that and so I think sexual selection is is by far a a more interesting process and definitely has occurred with respect to humans but the twist there is that we have mutual mate choice at least
when it comes to long-term mating especially I should say especially when it comes to long-term mating uh and and that gets to the issue of uh trier's theory of Parental investment where he said he asked the question well which sex does the choosing which sex does the competing uh and he his answer was the sex that invests more uh in Offspring tends to be choser sex that invests less tends to be more competitive for access to those desirable uh members of the opposite sex but in long-term mating uh now we know from our reproductive biology
that women have that nine-month pregnancy which is obligatory so women can't say look I'm I'm really busy with my career I really only want to put in three months it's it's just part of our reproductive biology H to produce one child and men can that same child through one act of sex and so uh so women are at least in when it comes to sex the choosier sex the higher investing sex in part because the costs of making a bad mating decision are much more severe for women than for men men and woman hook up
have sex for one night in the morning they both realize oh this is a mistake I shouldn't have done that well if the woman gets pregnant then she might be pregnant with a guy who is not going to invest in her Offspring a guy perhaps is someone that uh has poor genetic material uh it does not have a robust immune system Etc so so anyway so that's that's a long-winded answer to your question about sexual selection
