Quotes from David M. Buss

Evidence for the mate-switching function of casual sex in humans comes from several sources. Women tend to have affairs when they are unhappy with their primary relationship, whereas men who have affairs are no less happy with their marriages than men who refrain.63 Heidi Greiling and I conducted the second study, which revealed that women sometimes have affairs when they are trying to replace their current mate or in order to make it easier to break off with a current mate.64

Among all the tactics[to elevate their position in status hierarchies], industriousness proved to be the best predictor of past and anticipated income and promotions. Those who worked harder achieved higher levels of education and higher annual salaries, and they anticipated greater salaries and promotions than those who failed to work hard.

Perviven en nosotros los mismos mecanismos evaluativos que evolucionaron en épocas antiguas.

One man who estimated that he had hooked up with thirty or forty women over the past year through dating apps admitted, "I sort of play that I could be a boyfriend kind of guy," in order to win them over, "but then they start wanting me to care more . . . and I just don't.

While women's desirability as mates declines predictably with age, the same does not apply to men's. The reason is that many of the key qualities that contribute to a man's value are not as closely or as predictably linked with age. These components include a man's intelligence, cooperativeness, parenting proclivities, political alliances, kin networks, coalitions, and, importantly, ability and willingness to provide resources to a woman and her children.

According to the sex role and structural powerlessness hypothesis, women who have a lot of personal access to resources are predicted not to value resources in a mate as much as women lacking resources. This hypothesis receives no support from the existing empirical data, however. Indeed, women with high incomes value a potential mate's income and education more, not less, than women with lower incomes.

Excessive jealousy can be extraordinarily destructive. But moderate jealousy, not an excess or an absence, signals commitment.

Of the more than 10 million animal species that exist, including roughly 5,000 mammals, only two species have been documented to show male-initiated coordinated coalitions that raid neighboring territories and lethally attack members of their own species: chimpanzees and humans.

A man at the apprenticeship stage of a promising career may pursue only brief affairs, figuring that he will be able to attract a more desirable long-term mate later on, when his career is closer to its peak.

All of us descend from a long and unbroken line of ancestors who competed successfully for desirable mates, attracted mates who were reproductively valuable, retained mates long enough to reproduce, fended off interested rivals, and solved the problems that could have impeded reproductive success.

In brief encounters, it seems, women demand sexy partners who are highly desirable to other women, perhaps because their sons stand a greater chance of being sexy themselves. Women, of course, do not think these thoughts; there is no conscious calculus of genetic effects. They just find some men sexy and that's all they need to produce sons who will be sexually successful.

Humans over evolutionary time have fallen much more while descending than while ascending. Jackson and Cormack (2007) predicted from this that people would overestimate heights much more while standing above than below. They found that the distance that people perceive while standing on top of a five-story building is equivalent to the actual height of a nine-story building.

los hombres son más proclives a dar por terminada una amistad cuando resulta evidente que las relaciones sexuales no forman parte de ésta.

Because a woman's appearance provides such a bounty of cues to her fertility, men have evolved mate preferences that, perhaps unfortunately, give tremendous importance to a woman's physical appearance. In some ways, it is a psychological fact of life that women are sometimes treated as sex objects, just as men are sometimes treated as status objects.

La evolución a través de la selección ha creado mecanismos de emparejamiento posiblemente mas complejos, elaborados y misteriosos que cualquier otro mecanismo orgánico conocido.

The characteristics that men and women value are keys to understanding the means of attracting a mate.

La búsqueda de una buena pareja subyace a casi todo lo que realizan los seres humanos, desde entablar amistades hasta despreciar a los competidores, desde la búsqueda de prestigio hasta la motivación para el asesinato.

El emparejamiento se halla presente en buena parte de lo que hacemos como individuos. Como especie, define quienes somos.

It might seem that women rarely inflict violent aggression against men. In reports of spousal abuse, such as slapping, spitting, hitting, and calling nasty names, however, the percentages of male and female victims often are roughly the same (e.g., Buss, 1989b; Dobash, Dobash, Wilson, & Daly, 1992).

In part because of the evolutionary roots of women's sexual attractiveness, self-esteem is greatly influenced by how women feel about their bodies.

En la historia de los 3.5 mil millones de años de vida en la Tierra, somos la primera especie con la facultad de controlar nuestro destino. La perspectiva de hacerlo será excelente en la medida en que conozcamos nuestro pasado evolutivo.

Seeking love and sincerity are two solutions to the commitment problem. Sincerity signals that the man is capable of commitment. Acts of love signal that

Analogously, men value physical attractiveness, and I found that women were most likely to cite enhancing their appearance as one of their primary mate retention tactics—a finding that is replicable across cultures, including Brazil, Croatia, and the United States.40 Out of the nineteen clusters evaluated, enhancing their appearance was the second most effective tactic used by women, after love and kindness.

Sólo examinando el complejo repertorio de estrategias sexuales humanas sabremos de dónde procedemos; sólo comprendiendo por qué han evolucionado controlaremos hacia dónde vamos.