User:Dkap07/sandbox

We will be working on the Wikipedia article for mate choice. More specifically, I will be working on the section titled "Female Mate Choice". We will be updating reference and editing content. Additionally, we will be adding an evolutionary biology perspective to the idea of mate choice.

'All changes that I made to this section will be italicized and bolded. I will also use the strike through function to show where I will be removing text. - Daiana'

Mate choice in humans
In humans, males and females differ in their strategies to acquire mates and focus on certain qualities. There are two main categories of strategies that both sex's utilize: short-term and long-term. The strategies that each gender uses differs in regards to whether they are long-term or short-term. Human mate choice depends on a variety of factors, such as ecology, demography, access to resources, rank/social standing, genes, negative traits, and parasite stress.

'While there are a few common mating systems seen among humans, the amount of variation in mating strategies is relatively large. This is due to how humans evolved in diverse niches that were geographically and ecologically widespread. This diversity, as well as cultural practices and human consciousness, have all led to a large amount of variation in mating systems. Below are some of the overarching trends of female mate choice.'

Female mate choice
Although, in humans, both males and females are particular selective in terms of whom they decide to mate with, as is seen in nature, females exhibit even more mate choice selection than males.However, relative to most other animals, female and male mating strategies are found to be more similar to one another than they are different. According to Bateman's principle of Lifespan Reproductive Success (LRS), human females display the least variance of the two sexes in their LRS due to their high obligatory parental investment, that is a nine-month gestational period, as well as lactation following birth in order to feed offspring so that their brain can grow to the required size.

Human female sexual selection can be examined by looking at ways in which males and females are sexually dimorphic, especially in traits that serve little other evolutionary purpose. For example, male traits such as the presence of beards, overall lower voice pitch, and average greater height are thought to be sexually selected traits as they confer benefits to either the women selecting for them, or to their offspring. Experimentally, women have reported a preference for men with beards and lower voices.

Female mate choice hinges on many different coinciding male traits and the trade-off between many of these traits must be assessed. The ultimate traits most salient to female human mate choice, however, are parental investment, resource provision and the provision of good genes to offspring. Many phenotypic traits are thought to be selected for as they act as an indication of one of these three major traits. The relative importance of these traits when considering mate selection differ depending on the type of mating arrangement females engage in. Human women typically employ long-term mating strategies when choosing a mate, however they also engage in short-term mating arrangements, so their mate choice preferences change depending on the function of the type of arrangement. 'The type of mating strategy that females choose to engage in is also influenced by the type of environment or culture they are surrounded by. For example, in a patriarchal society where wealth and social status are inherited through the male lineage, monogamy is often practiced to assure certainty of paternal lineage. On the other hand, matriarchal societies often followed multiple mating and female cooperative breeding systems. Other environmental factors which influence mating strategies include access to available resources and risk/need for protection.'

Short-term mating strategies
Women do not always seek out and engage in long-term mating arrangements. This is evidenced by factors such as the evolved male tendency to seek out multiple sexual partners – a trait that could not have evolved if women were not also historically engaging in short-term arrangements – and by the tendency of some women to pursue affairs outside of their long-term couple pairings. (Added citation 1 to Scelza article which also speaks about this).

David Buss outlines several hypotheses as to the function of women's short-term mate choices:


 * Resource hypothesis: Women may engage in short-term mating in order to gain resources that they may not be able to gain from a long-term partner, or that a long-term partner may not be able to provide consistently. These resources may be food, protection for the woman and her children from aggressive men who may capture or sexually coerce them, or status, by providing the woman with a higher social standing. Women may also benefit from having several short-term mating arrangements through paternity confusion – if the paternity of her offspring is not certain, she may be able to accrue resources from several men as a result of this uncertainty.
 * Genetic benefit hypothesis: Women may choose to engage in short-term mating arrangements in order to aid conception if her long-term partner is infertile, to gain superior genes to those of her long-term partner, or to acquire different genes to those of her partner and increase the genetic diversity of her offspring. This relates to what is known as the sexy son hypothesis; if a woman acquires genes from a high quality male, her offspring will likely have higher mate value, resulting in their increased reproductive success.
 * Mate expulsion and mate switching: Women may engage in a short-term mating arrangement in order to cause her long-term partner to end their relationship; in other words, to facilitate a break-up. Women may also use short-term mating if their current partner has depreciated in value, and they wish to 'trade-up' and find a partner that they believe has higher value.
 * Short-term for long-term goals: Women may use short-term sexual relationships in order to assess a mate's value as a long-term partner, or in the hopes that the short-term arrangement will result in one that is long-term.

Long-term mating strategies
'While there has been evidence and research to support the existence of short term mating in women, it has nevertheless been shown that women prefer long term partners over short term mates''. This preference is due to women's tendency to invest and require more energy for parental care.''' In long-term mating arrangements, women typically look for males who will provide a high level of parental investment, and who can provide resources to the woman or to her offspring.[citation needed] The provision of economic resources, or the potential to acquire many economic resources is the most obvious cue towards the ability of a man to provide resources, and women in the United States have been shown experimentally to rate the importance of their partner's financial status more highly than men. However, many other traits exist that may act as cues towards a man's ability to provide resources that have been sexually selected for in women's evolutionary history. These include older age – older males have had more time to accrue resources – industriousness, dependability and stability. If a woman's long-term partner is not emotionally stable or is not dependable then their provision of resources to her and her offspring are likely to be inconsistent. Additionally, the costs associated with an emotionally unstable partner such as jealousy and manipulativeness manipulation may outweigh the benefits associated with the resources they are able to provide.

Women's mate choice is not as straightforward as selecting a mate that displays all of her desired qualities. Often, potential mates will possess some qualities that are desirable and some that are not, so women must assess the relative costs and benefits of their potential partners' traits and 'trade off'. Women's mate choices will also be constrained by the context in which they are making them, resulting in conditional mate choices.Some of the conditions that may influence female mate choice include the woman's own perceived attractiveness, the woman's personal resources, mate copying and parasite stress.

References (These are the references I will be adding)
'Wood Chapter 11 (Part I Marriage & Fertility) - Wood, J. W. Dynamics of human reproduction: biology, biometry, demography. (Aldine de Gruyter, 1994).'

Prum Chapter 1, Chapter 8 - Prum, R. O. The evolution of beauty: how Darwin’s forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world--and us.(Doubleday, 2017).

'Scelza 2013 - Scelza, BA. Choosy but not chaste: multiple mating in human females. Evol. Anthropol.22,259–69 (2013).'

Borgerhoff Mulder 1992 (Sections 11.3-11.4 In Chpt. 11)

Blake 2018, Borgerhoff Mulder 2018

--Dkap07 (talk) 21:20, 22 October 2018 (UTC)