Short Cuts: Episode I 
Human Mate Selection Is a Many-Splendored Thing
David Buss has a grand unified theory about the evolution of desire. His research has identified 115 love acts, 147 things you can do to upset or annoy the opposite sex, and 237 reasons to copulate. But can that help me find romance?
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It’s a counterintuitive picture—at least to women like myself, for whom the search for a mate is no saunter through the produce department—and it didn’t exactly catch on with Darwin’s Victorian contemporaries. The idea of sexual selection gathered dust for a century, until biologists began thinking again about an evolved basis for social behavior. In 1972 a biologist named Robert Trivers published a crucial paper, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection,” which went a long way to resurrect the theory. Trivers explained differences in sex roles as the consequence of biologically mandated differences in “parental investment,” defined as any investment of time or energy a parent devotes to one offspring at the expense of that parent’s ability to invest in other offspring.
Usually it’s the female whose minimum investment is larger. In humans and other mammals, males need merely ejaculate, while females must gestate, give birth, and nurse to produce a child. So males compete for a shot, as it were, at that lucrative female investment. Females, on the other hand, discriminate in order to obtain resources and quality genetic material from males. In the case of the peacock, the offspring of males with more-ornamented tails have been shown to enjoy higher survival rates: A better tail seems to signal a peacock with a better genetic endowment. So the peahens are not mere avian aesthetes, enamored of tails for tails’ sake; they are savvy gene shoppers. (Perhaps the problem was that I was not so savvy myself. If I were a peahen, I’d probably be cawing after the smart-ass peacock with no interest in breeding, or the nearsighted peacock that used to get beaten up by the other peacocks and so quit spreading his tail entirely and instead took up a musical instrument.)
Buss was a new assistant professor at Harvard when he came across “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection.” “I just went, ‘Whoa, this is amazing,’” he told me. “It just blew me away.” At the time—this was the early eighties—evolutionary psychology did not yet exist as a field. Buss had pushed his Darwinian enthusiasms to one side while he pursued his doctorate in personality psychology, yet he’d long been eager to incorporate evolutionary thought into his own work and was inspired by Trivers and by a book called The Evolution of Human Sexuality, by Donald Symons, an anthropologist. Where Trivers’s paper was technical, with analyses of mating patterns in birds and lizards, Symons had written a wide-ranging and engaging treatise, replete with flashes of wit and allusions to Proust and Byron and starring that popular sixties-era hero Man the Hunter, along with his faithful companion, Woman the Gatherer. Because humans had lived in small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers for most of our several million years of existence, Symons argued, many of our behaviors must be adaptations to the Stone Age environment. And because men and women faced different problems, they would have developed separate mating-related adaptations. Men would have competed for younger, more fertile women and desired sexual variety; women would have selected men with greater hunting prowess or other cues to resources and status.
To test Symons’s conjectures—along with the hypotheses of several other scientists—Buss added questions about “mate preferences” to a study of married couples already in the works. The responses were consistent with his predicted sex differences. “I went around to different people and asked them how they would interpret these sex differences,” Buss recalled. “Almost everyone I talked to said that these sex differences were the result of culture. I asked them if they thought they were universal, and virtually everyone said no. My biggest regret is that I didn’t ask these people to write down their predictions and sign off on them.”
With his imposing stature, Buss must have cut a striking figure as he strode around the Harvard campus. (There, he would later write, he first felt “the bliss of total freedom of intellectual pursuit.”) As he well knew, definitive conclusions about human nature couldn’t be generated from a pool of respondents restricted to married couples in Cambridge (unless those were conclusions about the appeal of watching Fassbinder films, perhaps, or eating lentils). So bit by bit, he started gathering a wider sampling of data, in what he would eventually call the International Mate Selection Project. Over the next four years he extended the study to 37 countries, wherever he could find a willing data collector—in Brazil, in China, in a Zulu area in South Africa, in Iran. Participants, 10,047 of them in all, were asked to rate on a scale from 0 to 3 the importance of various qualities in a partner (“good cook and housekeeper,” “chastity,” and “emotional stability and maturity,” to name a few) and to rank a separate list of characteristics from most to least important. Data arrived back in Buss’s office by the boxload. Although analysis revealed that the qualities that people claim to desire most in a mate—dependability, kindness, good hygiene, and so on—are shared by both sexes, and more or less attainable, it also exposed those same sex differences. Men desired younger women with a specific set of attractive features, while women wanted men with earnings potential and ambition. (Homosexuality was not a target of the survey, nor has evolutionary psychology arrived at any consensus interpretation of it.)
It was a study unprecedented in magnitude, and it turned the conventional wisdom of the time on its head. Censure came even before Buss had gone public with his findings: One day, following a presentation he made at the University of Michigan, a woman approached and asked him not to publish the results, for fear that they would upset other women. When the study did appear, in 1989, it was criticized, as his work would be for years to come, by those who believed that cultural factors play a greater role in determining human attitudes. (“Everything I’ve ever done has been attacked,” Buss says.) He was accused of being parochial: Though the surveys had been distributed in 37 countries, his critics argued that the populations surveyed were still mostly Western or Westernized. He was accused of ignoring the simple economic reasons that a woman might prefer resources in a mate, i.e., that in many societies marriage is her only route to better circumstances. And he was accused—as all of evolutionary psychology has been—of telling “just-so stories,” inventing evolutionary fables and bolstering them with flimsy evidence. (Buss would counter that he had made every effort to include non-Western cultures and that women’s desires for men with resources do not abate when women themselves are better off.)
Controversy aside, the principles of mating put forth by Symons, Buss, et al. have taken root in the popular imagination over the past twenty years (at least in part because members of the press, Lord forgive us, can never resist reporting on them). It is now a relatively common idea that, for example, men like younger women because youth was a sign of fertility way back whenever.
Common, and yet terribly unfortunate for me. I was an old maid by Pleistocene standards, and evolutionary psychologists’ further investigations of men’s yens—revealing, for instance, that men prefer women with a low ratio of waist size to hip size—only underscored my unsuitability. Here is how Buss describes the standards of female attractiveness in a paper called “The Evolution of Love”: “Clear skin, smooth skin, lustrous hair, long hair, symmetrical features, absence of open sores, pustules, or lesions, relatively small waist, relatively large breasts, and a low waist-to-hip ratio.” Of those, I can lay claim to clear skin. Shapely hips and weapons-grade knockers had all been handed out when I reached the front of the girl line, and my hair is neither long nor lustrous. (I should maybe play up my lack of pustules?) My type is tall and thin, and though that may have some cultural cachet nowadays, it apparently wouldn’t have turned the head of a troglodyte.
That I might have been better off with a different set of attributes wasn’t exactly news so much as a stirring up of old worries—worries that Dr. Norwaald assured me were nothing more than manifestations of neurosis and cultural brainwashing. (“You just need to meet more people,” she keeps telling me.) Still, I wasn’t ready to give up on extracting a practical take-home from Buss’s theories. He was about to head to Rochester, New York, to start an East Coast lecture tour, but I thought if I could just talk to him about his recent research, I might hit on something useful. Almost twenty years had passed since the publication of the original study on mate preferences; one could only assume that in the interim, under the journalistic radar, its conclusions had been refined and expanded upon. There had to be more to mating than child-bearing hips, tonsorial luster, and symmetrical ears.
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