and so the way what the females seem to be doing is using some marker or some set of markers as a proxy indicator for for for health and I think I think you could say with with reasonable you could say reasonable that reasonably that female human beings do the same thing to male human beings and there's some of that vice-versa too like we evaluate other for example for symmetry which is one of the elements of beauty because healthier people tend to be more symmetrical and lots of animals use symmetry butterflies if butterflies won't mate with
another butterfly if it deviates from symmetry by the tiniest amounts you can imagine so symmetry is a marker and there's other markers like shoulder width to waist width is one and waist width to hip width is another that's usually what males use that to evaluate females in part so there's lots of markers of health but it also looks to me like that the data worldwide seems to indicate that women so imagine that women made across dominance hierarchies and up socioeconomically speaking and on average across cultures women go for men who are about four to five
years older you know it varies in the Scandinavian countries that's shrunk a little bit but not that much and in other cultures it's bigger I would say that depends to some degree on difficulty of establishing economic independence right because in richer countries it's easier to have enough economic independence if you're a male to be to be a useful participant in the process of having children but it doesn't matter cross culturally it's still across and up where a man made to cross and down they don't care much about socioeconomic status it doesn't seem to be part
of their selection method generally speaking so so I think that part of that is also that the ability of women to select for for male health it's something like that because it isn't that only that because if you're healthy and energetic you're much more likely to be successful because it's very hard to be successful if you're ill obviously I mean so because the competition is just too high and both both genders both sexes select each other for attractiveness both select for intelligence both to select for personality although the difference there are differences there in terms
of what's what's stressed but so so so I think you can derive a couple of things out of out of this and this is where I think people are different than than other animals importantly different is that so you imagine that there's tremendous selection pressure to towards the production let's say of men who are good at climbing male dominance hierarchies or climbing the male dominance hierarchy but the thing that's so interesting about people is that we've multiplied our dominance hierarchies you know if you take an animal that's got a rather static behavioral pattern then there's
there's a single hierarchy elephant seals are a good example of that so elephant seals the males are absolutely massive they're way way bigger than the females and they basically have harems roughly speaking and they use physical prowess as their marker of status essentially and obviously size is a huge part of that because otherwise the male elephant seals wouldn't be as they're massive these things are absolutely enormous and so it's just power slash health you know maybe aggression something like that it's whatever makes them more suitable for the kind of physical combat that elephant seals engage
in so and the degree to which power is associated with dominance status in those sorts of situations seems to be associated with the size differential between males and females so the more power is an issue with regards to male competence the larger the males are compared to the females and the more likely the males are going to have a harem relationship with the females and you see that a little bit in human beings because men are bigger than women they're not overwhelmingly bigger that's sexual dimorphism and you know there's some men that are smaller than
some women but on average men are taller and they're they have more upper body strength and so forth so there is a power element to male competition but it's not as extended as it would be among animals say like like elephant seals so in the elephant seal you see maybe there's one stable set of traits that's being selected for that makes the males more likely to reproduce but human beings were very weird creatures because we're so conceptually flexible and so what seems to have happened maybe we started mail started selecting each other for dominance competitions
for something like cognitive flexibility and and conscientiousness it's something like that so that would be the ability to abstractly represent the world and then the ability operate effectively within it to represent yourself socially in a way and then to carry through with that because that enables people to trust you so it's something like that and so that produced cortical expansion and then women were selecting men who were good at that and that produced cortical expansion and then there's an arms race between women and men with regards to intelligence so the women kept up or they
certainly kept up with with with intelligence as the evolutionary cycle continued you
