now that you mentioned it.. I remember a psychology course I took in college just a while ago mentioned that, female's evaluation of attractiveness is greatly affected by knowing the person's financial state/personality/social status etc. While male's evaluation of attractiveness is less affected by other factors. Not sure how true this theory is..
It is true, and it's caused for evolutionary reasons.
When people have sex, the woman is in a much more dangerous place than a man.
Having a baby for a woman is very costly. She needs someone to protect her while it happens and to help raise the child.
The cost for a man is very low. He only needs a couple minutes to do his part in making a baby, then he can leave at any time.
So with that in mind, lets say the scenario is like this:
If a man impregnates a woman and he stays, the chance the baby survives to reproduction is 90%.
If a man impregnates a woman and he leaves, the chance the baby survives to reproduction is 10%.
So with those statistics, the man is actually in a very advantageous position.
As long as he impregnates 10 or more women in his lifetime, he is ahead than if he had stayed with the same woman for all his life.
Of course, the more healthy the woman, the more likely the baby is to survive even if he leaves. Beauty = healthy in evolutionary terms. If the woman is pretty, maybe she can even get another guy to raise his kids for him! So men seek beauty primarily.
So for a man it is genetically superior to impregnate multiple women (which generally means not staying too close to any of them).
A female on the other hand, can only have children a few times in her life. And she only gets a few shots at it.
If the man leaves, her shot is very likely to end up in failure.
So the woman needs to be very picky about who she has children with. She needs to judge his character, to see if he will stay with her and raise the child. And defend her, fight off aggression, etc..
So to a woman, character is more important than beauty, because that's what determines if her genes survive or not.
Erotic fiction is a billion dollar industry and the vast majority of buyers are women. Manly man stories = porn for women.
But multiple locally optimal strategies could be deduced from these assumptions. On the one hand, if a woman finds a man that stays, and has a child with him, the kid is likely to survive, and reproduce on his/her own, thus continuing the genetic line.
On the other hand, if she gets impregnated by a man who leaves, the chance of the baby reproducing are lower. However, if the father was very evolutionarily successful (great genes, exceptionally high mate value), even the low chance (5% for a male child that reproduces) can result in her genes being spread far and wide (assuming that the male child inherits his father's genes that make him very evolutionarily successful). Furthermore, the expected payoff of this strategy is further increased by the fact that (1) a woman can try this tactics multiple times in her life, and (2) she can cuckold a man that will stay with the child of the man that left.
The second strategy explains many this in our society, for example "why nice girls like bad boys", why "preselection" or "social proof" works for women, and why no sex before marriage was/is so strictly enforced in many societies.
I agree with both of you. A social safety net that is "too strong" seems to undermine social cohesion, since the state takes over what used to be communal responsibilities.
Of course, in the long term this will also affect romantic relationships.
I've heard some of those arguments to explain cheating; women marries a 'provider', and has sex on the side with a genetically superior men, so she has a win-win situation for her babies.
evo-psych needs studies? It seems more that the armchair evo-psych people have just decided on a set of axioms beforehand that sound sufficiently "common sense" and are making deductions based on that.
Evo-* people have always pretty much relied on "just-so" stories. Evolutionary biologists who claim that feathers evolved from scales by snakes jumping off trees for millions of years are falling into the same trap.
And thus evolutions is of course false by your perfect mathematical deduction?
I recommend you broaden your understanding of science. Scientific hypotheses are always one iteration in a series of increasingly accurate models of the known universe. Evolution, being a very young science, is understandably very far behind Physics in its life cycle. This does not mean that all evolutionary theory is "nonsense" because it cannot be instantly falsified with a perfectly designed experiment in real time.
The beauty of evolution, just like any other law of the universe, is that it does not care much for one's disbelief.
> It seems more that the armchair evo-psych people have just decided on a set of axioms beforehand that sound sufficiently "common sense" and are making deductions based on that.
You mean they're using their knowledge of humanity to make testable hypotheses to test and refine their implicit theories?
Say it ain't so!
Forgive the snark but armchair dismissal of evolutionary psychology from people who have never read an intro psychology textbook.
That'd be fair if what was being dismissed were the results of scientific studies. But what is instead being dismissed are the wildly extrapolated fancies of people who themselves who never read a peer reviewed study on evo-* but instead got it third or fourth hand, with exaggeration about what the data is suffiecient to show at every step. Then lo and behold all of sudden plain old traditional gender stereotypes are okay again because science (but please don't ask for citations).
There's plenty of blame to go around for this effect, but science popularizers are probably the lead villains of the piece.
