MALADAPTIVE

Opposites Attract? Not in Real Life (NATALIE ANGIER, July 8, 2003, NY Times)

As a new report demonstrates with the no-nonsense zing of the phrase "I do," humans often seek in a spouse the sort of person they know best: themselves. Beautiful people want beautiful partners. The well-heeled covet Prada-clad companions. Those who are devoted to kith, kids and unabridged Passover seders expect no less from the person who adorably snores beside them each night.

And while the notion that like-seeks-like may not surprise anybody who has scanned the newspaper wedding announcements and wondered if a few of the couples weren't inadvertently committing incest, the new results contradict some important claims about male-female differences in mating strategies that lately have emanated from the niche of neo-Darwinism called evolutionary psychology. [...]

Instead, in analyzing the results of a questionnaire about who wants what in a long-term relationship, the researchers found that the men who were most likely to seek beauty in a woman were not the trust-fund sons, but those men who considered themselves quite handsome; while men who rated themselves as wealthy and ambitious were much likelier to focus on the wealth and status of a prospective mate than on her physical charms.

Similarly, women who viewed themselves as attractive ranked the toothsomeness of a potential husband above the particulars of his stock portfolio; while women from privileged backgrounds wanted a groom who knew the purpose and position of all four forks in a formal table setting.

The same "Why not make more of me?" principle held for each of the 10 traits that were listed on the survey, including devotedness, faithfulness, strength of family bonds, health, desire for children and qualities for raising children. The biggest predictor of whether a person rated the characteristic low or high on a partner-picking scale depended above all on where the respondent placed himself or herself on the same gradient from one to nine.

This creates all sorts of problems for evolutionists, not least that individuals with truly significant mutations are de facto undesirable mates and that the species can't even recognize its fittest, never mind make sure they have many offspring. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 10, 2003 9:54 PM