Quotes About Mate choice

In many instances, mate choice is a compensatory process. In other words, both men and women choose prospective mates by combining their scores on several key attributes.

A woman's difficulty is that she has a much wider choice of men to provide her with genes than she has of long-term partners. She could probably persuade many men of her choice to give her their genes — it takes only a few minutes of sex, after all. Her options for a long-term partner, though, are much more limited.

Sexual selection tends to amplify individual differences in traits so that they can be easily judged during mate choice. It also makes some courtship behaviors so costly and difficult that less capable individuals may not bother to produce them at all.

Female adolescents are significantly less fertile than 20-year-olds. Female fertility declines gradually during the thirties, and declines steeply after age 40. Women after menopause are infertile. This female fertility profile is a basic fact of life to which male mate choice systems have adapted. Youth is an important cue of fertility.

He theorized that these sex differences (dimorphisms) were due to females being choosier about their mates and males competing more intensely for mates. We now know that Darwin was correct. When mate choice occurs, females typically do the choosing.

Female orgasm seems poorly designed as a pair-bonding mechanism, but it is perfectly designed as a discriminatory system that separates the men from the boys.

The large male penis is a product of female choice in evolution. If it were not, males would never have bothered to evolve such a large, floppy, blood-hungry organ. Ancestral females made males evolve such penises because they liked them.

in the matter of choosing mates, males are usually after quantity and females after quality.

Or she may accept, as appearances would sometimes lead us to believe, not the male which is the most attractive to her, but the one which is the least distasteful.

The independent role of morphology in mate choice is revealed by the rare instances where the usual association between song and morphology is disrupted.