Chapter 9: Mating and Mate Choice
Chapter Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
- Identify the influence of sexual selection as an adaptive pressure.
- Distinguish between honest, dishonest, and costly signaling in mate selection.
- Compare human mating systems with those of other primates.
- Contextualize sex differences in mating strategies.
- Analyze human mating systems as responsive to resource availability.
Chapter Introduction
Beginning with this chapter, we will start to move from individual variation of evolved traits, and begin to see how evolution shapes human mating practices. This includes defining important terms like sex and gender, as well as exploring human sexuality.
We will also discuss sex differences in the way humans select partners, and how they signal their interests (and value) to those potential mates. In order to contextualize these sex differences, we also explore the mating systems of some of our closest, living evolutionary relatives.
Before we dive in, I want to prime you with one incredibly important truth – mating systems, especially in humans, are the result and response to current resource availability. As such, wealth and status can certainly play a role.
