Dr. David Buss

Right.

Well, that's a critical distinction because what people look for in a long-term committed mateship, like a marriage partner or a long-term romantic relationship, is different from what people look for in a hookup or casual sex.

So that's actually critical.

I wonder if we could maybe just back up a second and just talk a little bit about the theoretical framework.

for understanding mate choice.

It basically stems from Darwin's theory of sexual selection.

Darwin noticed that there were phenomena that couldn't be explained by this so-called survival selection.

So he came up with the theory of sexual selection, which deals not with the evolution of characteristics due to their survival advantage, but rather due to their mating advantage.

And he identified two causal processes by which mating advantage could occur.

One is intrasexual competition.

And the logic was whatever qualities led to success in these same-sex battles, those qualities get passed on in greater numbers.

And so you see evolution, which is change over time and increase in frequency of the characteristics associated with winning these battles.

what Darwin called contest competition.

And we know that the logic of that is more general now and involves things like in our species competing for position and status hierarchies.

But the second most relevant to your question about mate choice is preferential mate choice.

That was the second causal pathway

And the logic there is that if members of one sex agree with one another about the qualities that are desired, then those of the opposite sex who possess the desired qualities or embody those desired qualities, they have a mating advantage.

Those lacking desired qualities get banished, shunned, ignored, or in the modern environment become incels.

The logic there is very simple but also very powerful, and that is that

whatever qualities are desired, consensually desired, if there's some heritable basis to those, then those increase in frequency over time.