Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Woman X is much more attractive to men than Woman Y, though both are the same age and equally healthy. That is hard to explain evolutionarily except as sexual selection (as opposed to fitness selection). I suppose all sexual selection is surprising in this way, but this example bothers me. One thing is that in a monogamous species adultery is a threat. If I choose woman X for sexual selection, it is because her children will also be beautiful and will have more children than average. But she will especially tempting to other men, so her children may not be mine, whereas an ugly woman’s would have been.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 2:01 pm and is filed under InDesign, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.