Contemporary mate preferences can provide important clues to human reproductive history. Little is known about which characteristics people value in potential mates. Five predictions were made about sex differences in human mate preferences based on evolutionary conceptions of parental investment, sexual selection, human reproductive capacity, and sexual asymmetries regarding certainty of paternity versus maternity. The predictions centered on how each sex valued earning capacity, ambition— industriousness, youth, physical attractiveness, and chastity. Predictions were tested in data from 37 samples drawn from (...) 33 countries located on six continents and five islands. For 27 countries, demographic data on actual age at marriage provided a validity check on questionnaire data. Females were found to value cues toresource acquisitionin potential mates more highly than males. Characteristics signalingreproductive capacitywere valued more by males than by females. These sex differences may reflect different evolutionary selection pressures on human males and females; they provide powerful cross-cultural evidence of current sex differences in reproductive strategies. Discussion focuses on proximate mechanisms underlying mate preferences, consequences for human intrasexual competition, and the limitations of this study. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se analizan conceptos clave de la obra de Jakob von Uexküll, a partir de la confrontación con el darwinismo mecanicista de principios del siglo XX, al cual, Uexküll contrapone la idea de un mundo viviente de interrelaciones, conformado de acuerdo con un Plan u Orden subyacentes. Pero la cuestión no del todo resuelta para Uexküll, y que aquí será estudiada, es el papel que ha de atribuirse al azar y a la tendencia natural de traspasar los (...) límites. Cuestión que adquiere su mayor significación en el plano humano, siendo el hombre, como es, antiguo actor de la transgresión. The intention of this paper is to analyze the principal concepts in Jakob von Uexkiiltt's work, considering the confrontation with the darwinian mechanism of the beginnings of the XXth Century. In response to it, Uexkülll supports the idea of a living world of interrelations, which is conformed in accordance to a subjacent Plan or Order. But the question analyzed here, and which is not at all solved by Uexkülll, is the roll that should be attributed to chance, or the natural tendency to surpass the limits. A problem that acquires its deepest meaning in the human context, because man is, as we know, an old actor of transgression. (shrink)

The controversy between Biometricians and Mendelians has been called an inexplicable embarrassment since it revolved around the mistaken identification of Mendelian genetics with non-Darwinian saltationism, a mistake traced back to the non-Darwinian William Bateson, who introduced Mendelian analysis to British science. The following paper beings to unravel this standard account of the controversy by raising a simple question: Given that Bateson embraced evolution by natural selection and that he studied the causes of variation within a broadly Darwinian framework of problems (...) and questions, how are we to understand the claim that he was a non-Darwinian? A brief survey of possible responses to this question is followed by an alternative proposal: the controversy will be considered as a struggle among Darwinians about the future course of Darwinism. On this account, Darwin's own work led to the juncture at which Mendelians and Biometricians parted company, indeed, the Origin itself prepared the divergent methodological stances subsequently adopted by Bateson and his antagonists. The inexplicable embarrassment is dissolved through the parsimonious reconstruction of the profound substantive conflict between Biometricians and Mendelians as a chapter in the articulation and differentiation of the Darwinian research programme. (shrink)

Julian Huxley’s eclipse of Darwinism narrative has cast a long shadow over the historiography of evolutionary theory around the turn of the nineteenth century. It has done so by limiting who could be thought of as Darwinian. Peter Bowler used the eclipse to draw attention to previously understudied alternatives to Darwinism, but maintained the same flaw. In his research on the Non-Darwinian Revolution, he extended this problematic element even further back in time. This paper explores how late nineteenth-century neo-Darwinian conceptualizations (...) of Darwinism were later utilized by several advocates and detractors of the Modern Synthesis. John Beatty has shown how this continuity hinges at least partly on the perceived importance of the creativity of natural selection. The paper provides a more thorough look at Darwin’s two conflicting accounts of variation, ascribed to struggles in explaining quantitative versus qualitative characters. In doing so, it suggests that other forms of Darwinism persisted, in both the non-Darwinian revolution and eclipse periods, because of tension between contingency and creativity in Darwin’s own work. This tension is traced out from Darwin’s conceptions of variation into the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, Hugo de Vries, and Thomas Henry Huxley. Based on this, the eclipse narrative is criticized for not considering the meaning of Darwinism in different geographical locations. Britain and the United States showed few signs of an eclipse. Rather, the rise of German debates about Haeckel’s vision of Darwinism have been mistaken for a universal decline in support. (shrink)

Contemporary mate preferences can provide important clues to human reproductive history. Little is known about which characteristics people value in potential mates. Five predictions were made about sex differences in human mate preferences based on evolutionary conceptions of parental investment, sexual selection, human reproductive capacity, and sexual asymmetries regarding certainty of paternity versus maternity. The predictions centered on how each sex valued earning capacity, ambition— industriousness, youth, physical attractiveness, and chastity. Predictions were tested in data from 37 samples drawn from (...) 33 countries located on six continents and five islands. For 27 countries, demographic data on actual age at marriage provided a validity check on questionnaire data. Females were found to value cues toresource acquisitionin potential mates more highly than males. Characteristics signalingreproductive capacitywere valued more by males than by females. These sex differences may reflect different evolutionary selection pressures on human males and females; they provide powerful cross-cultural evidence of current sex differences in reproductive strategies. Discussion focuses on proximate mechanisms underlying mate preferences, consequences for human intrasexual competition, and the limitations of this study. (shrink)