SIO269: Evolutionary Psychology and Sex Differences

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 269. It's part two with Lindsey Osterman on Evo Psych. How you doing, Lindsay?

0:00:39 Lindsey: I'm really great. How are you?

0:00:40 Thomas: I'm good. I will note for the patrons, you are hearing this slightly early, but not as early as we would have liked. There was some scheduling stuff. I had to deal with the opening arguments fundraiser, which, by the way, raised $85,000 for Asaf and Warnock. So thank you all to who came and donated. And even if you couldn't donate, it was nice of you all to come and participate and do everything you can to take back the Senate because it's so important. But anyway, that kind of threw a wrench in the works. So this episode, not as early for patrons as I'd like it to be, but still a day early, hopefully. And just letting you know that I'm trying to make that be a perk for my fine patrons.

And I'm still getting people who I guess didn't know that the website, I stopped using the website. Site. So if you hear this and you're still thinking that you're using the website to pledge to the show, that's no longer active. I've turned it off. So there's no, you don't have to disable anything. I just turned the whole thing off. Anyway. All right. Finally, we get to part two of Evo Psych. I'm so excited to hear about, I think we were talking about a lot of the objections and then maybe in this episode,

0:00:56 Lindsey: Yeah, that was amazing.

0:01:45 Thomas: We were going to get to some of the more proactive examples of good Evo psych, right?

0:01:51 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, we're gonna do a deep dive into some of the mating literature. So I think that'll be fun.

0:01:56 Thomas: Oh, I always love doing a deep dive into some of them, mating literature, as I they call it. No, mom. I'm just doing a dance, never mind, just doing a deep dive into the mating literature. Yeah.

0:02:01 Lindsey: Yeah, not. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's research.

0:02:08 Thomas: Yeah, well, thought, yeah.

0:02:08 Lindsey: Yeah? Oh, yeah. But gonna say, I've been thinking a lot about your cats, though, before we get to mating. Um, and I, I remember it, so we have, we have indoor outdoor cats now. Um, so they, you know, they get to run around and and eat voles and things, uh, but they

0:02:21 Thomas: Is that because you just are trying to have fewer cats. That's a good trick, too. That's that strikes me as like, you know, the opening up the marriage before, you know, it's doomed to divorce or something. Why don't we try being indoor and outdoor cats and then they wander out, maybe it's because, because I'm from the country, but back in the day, when the, the cats that we had, because we had a lot of them that became indoor outdoor cats, became cats that were probably eaten by a coyote or something, like that, yeah, yeah.

0:02:26 Lindsey: Yeah no our cats have a lot of privilege because they, they happen to live in an area where, you know, we're not super rural, but we're also not real urban, or kind of on the outskirts. It's yeah and one of my cats is white, so, um, yeah, I know, uh, but yeah, so they, they're, there's not like a lot of traffic, so they're not likely to get hit by cars, and there's also, like, you know, so they, their, pretty, they're pretty safe, we've had them for like three or four years and they've been perfectly fine, but, um, but yeah, anyway, so, so they're indoor-outdoor, and I was just thinking about the fact that they don't eat our plants, cats, um, and they typically don't vomit everywhere either, um, but when I did have exclusively indoor cats, uh, they did do that shit and

0:02:53 Thomas: Yeah cat privilege why is nobody talking about it? Oh my god, yeah.

0:03:16 Thomas: Cool. Hmm

0:03:30 Lindsey: I had to get some cat grass, which you can you can get, like, you know, pet store or whatever. It's

0:03:30 Thomas: Wow this sounds made up like it's an elaborate print or like a product. I'm gonna go to the website and it's like www.catgrass and it is like Lindsey Osterman profiting off of gullible podcast hosts.

0:03:41 Lindsey: Just grass. God. I should have thought to do that before I I made this damn it.

0:03:48 Thomas: Yeah. Now, it's a little expensive. It's $5,000 or $6,000 for the first sheet of catgrass and you got to feed them the catgrass every week, so it's going to add up, but I'm willing to pay it to get rid of this barf, so you've caught me in a bind.

0:03:51 Lindsey: Yeah yeah but it'll it's worth it. Uh-huh. Yeah, yes.

0:04:02 Thomas: Okay. So, do they actually eat it or is it a thing that teaches them not to eat it?

0:04:03 Lindsey: No no, they, they eat it, and I, and they don't eat the other plants, uh, I, I'm not, I, so I am convinced that this is some sort of adaptation thingy, I'm not sure exactly what the function is, I'm an expert of

0:04:08 Thomas: Oh. Oh, oh my gosh. Yeah. Well, I actually, I saw, um, I watched a cat documentary the other year and, uh, I did, It was part of it that was like, because their diet relies on, you know, it's how, what was it? I'm going to misremember it, but it was essentially like they have an instinct to try different food all the time because they need like a balance in their diet or something like that. And so that's why, uh no, I think it's just a, uh I'm not, I don't remember.

I thought it was just all cats, you know, that, that might, but anyway, that's why like when you're pouring them food, like for example, I have four now we, uh, we, we had to adopt one out. I announced it. I can't remember if I said that on Facebook, but one was just, we were not giving him enough attention and we felt bad and we found a really good home for him. It was nice. But anyway, so we're down to four and, uh. But, but when I feed them, we have, we like three feeders that try to make them like, you now, work for the food a little bit

0:04:22 Lindsey: Course, is this house cats specifically, huh?

0:05:08 Lindsey: Interesting.

0:05:08 Thomas: Because we've noticed Notice that that helps a little. But when you pour one, you notice the cat goes to the one, you pour the other one, and then that cat goes to the other ones too. Like, they always have the instinct for like, oh, whatever food I'm not eating, I need to try. And I believe it's something to do with the fact that they need a variety in their diet or something like that. And they also have that instinct to just barf stuff up right away, like if it's not good, so that they're able to kind of try different stuff and it doesn't kill them.

0:05:20 Lindsey: Yeah rats rats do that, um, that's, that's their strategy, or no, no, excuse me, they don't, sorry, rats don't barf stuff up, rats, like, have a different strategy, they're also omnivorous. I thought that cats were like largely carnivorous, that's interesting.

0:05:37 Thomas: Hmm. That's my memory of it. Oh, well, I, what was it? I think they are, but there was some problem with that or some reason they needed to try different things. I don't know. It was, again, I watched this like two years ago and I can't remember, but it was that when I watched it, I was like, oh, is that why our cat is already always eating whatever and then barfing it up and seemed to make sense to me. We can bring on a cat scientist, but you, you, uh, I think you were making a further point with that. So go, go ahead.

0:06:06 Lindsey: Yeah helps, we should, I just thought, maybe if you got out your cat some cat grass, they'd eat that and maybe not barf all over your house, but it's an empirical question, I don't know. Lindsey

0:06:19 Thomas: Okay. OK, so it's like cat grass designed to be food, basically. Where do I www.lindsayostromanripoffproducts.com?

0:06:25 Lindsey: Osterman slash cat grass. Yeah, uh, yeah, you could, you could get anywhere, like, you know, Amazon probably has it.

0:06:32 Thomas: OK, OK, I will. I am going to try that. Why don't I? I probably, I imagine, maybe it takes a minute, like, I'll get them used to the cat grass for a little bit, and then I will buy a plant and you will be liable for the barf cleanup, that, but I have to do because you're giving me your guarantee.

0:06:35 Lindsey: Yeah uh-huh see if they still eat the flowers, yeah. Yeah correct yeah yeah, I think it actually might just be wheat grass, if I might be remembering, written that wrong, but it's some specific type of grass. That's supposed to be.

0:06:50 Thomas: Okay. Is it going to be like, what if they also just barf this up everywhere? Then I just have a cat that's ill, I guess. All right. Well, enough of the cat talk. Let's get to the Evo psych, shall we?

0:07:01 Lindsey: Then I take it back. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah, so we were right in the middle of my second claim about evolutionary psychology, which is that it's not a thinly veiled pseudoscientific attempt to justify bigotry. And we left off talking about the garbage study by Satoshi Kanazawa, which which is not legitimate, totally condemned by evolutionary psychologists. But putting all that aside, I mentioned that what I see more commonly that's used to support this idea that it's a pseudoscience is actually good research that's just been communicated kind of poorly. And so I've got a couple of examples from the mating literature that I want to talk about that I think will tweak some of the negative intuitions that are behind this objection action and that might cause some discomfort. And then we're going to do a deep dive on like the evolutionary claim that, or the evolutionary theory that this claim is based on and sort of a nuanced examination of what the evidence actually shows.

0:08:06 Lindsey: So yeah, is some legitimate research on gender differences and mating behavior and mate preferences. And it tends to get some resistance because of the clickbaity way that sometimes it tends to be represented. So the click baby summary of some of these claims sounds like this. So men think about sex more than women, right? Or maybe the more pernicious way to frame that is that women are less interested in sex than men. And that, by the way, that is, it's

0:08:06 Thomas: All right?

0:08:33 Thomas: Sounds like a different claim though, doesn't it? Slightly. Yeah.

0:08:36 Lindsey: Connected, Right? It's connected to the same underlying literature, essentially. But yeah, I mean, I've heard claims like that come up in sort of a dangerous way in the context of trying to justify norms about feminine sexual purity or something. And I've also heard them come up like the justification of successively worse claims like women should accept cheating behavior on the part of their partners because men just have higher sex drives. So like really they're doing their wives a favor by meeting those needs elsewhere. So that's cool. Um, and I mean the, that argument clearly doesn't follow, I don't, I don't know how much I need to really support that, right? Um, or another one, right, this is another sort of clickbaity type thing is that, uh, men and women prioritize different things in mates, and in particular that men care about physical attractiveness in their mates and women care about money, it's like status and resources. So the worst possible framing of this is that men are shallow pigs and women are gold diggers. So that's evolutionary psych, right?

0:09:48 Lindsey: It sounds pretty gross, right, to frame it that way. So both of these claims really are connected to legitimate research in evolutionary psychology, and it's stuff that I spend several weeks talking about in my undergraduate course. And I want to demonstrate two things about claims like these. So one is that the research on human mating is insanely complicated, and it goes way beyond these sort of like very narrow individual claims about preferences or attitudes, um, and that too, like even if it really were that simple, even if all human mating came down to those two claims, you still wouldn't be able to get from that descriptive claim to claims about how, uh, like people should behave, right?

0:10:34 Thomas: Yeah.

0:10:34 Lindsey: Um, so those are, those are the two things that I'm hoping we can work through, through these examples. So we obviously don't have time to talk about the entire mating literature, but I want to use a couple of straightforward predictions from parental investment theory, which I alluded to a little bit in the last episode. Parental investment theory is this very powerful, well-supported theory from evolutionary biology, and it's been used to generate a number of predictions about mate preferences and mating behavior as a function of how many metabolic resources males and females of various species must invest in offspring in order for those offspring to reach reproductive maturity. So another way to say that is that reproduction often has different costs for the males and females of sexually reproducing species. So parental investment theory is based on this very simple premise that in sexually reproducing spaces, the two sexes are often not equal in how much they have to invest in offspring.

0:11:28 Lindsey: In order for the offspring to survive and reproduce themselves. And that that initial imbalance creates different selection pressures for the two sexes in the realm of mating adaptations. So let's go back to cats. This is just going to be the cat show, I think.

0:11:43 Thomas: It all comes back to cats. Cats

0:11:45 Lindsey: It does, right? Right. So. So, yeah. So if you're if youre a male cat. Right. I don't. Are you. You probably. Yeah. Hey, there you go. Yes. If you're a male, cat. What's the absolute least that you have to do in order to potentially have a viable kitten?

0:11:45 Thomas: A tom cat just

0:12:03 Lindsey: I mean, yeah, yeah just just a few moments of your time. Right? Small donation of genetic material and then you can go about your day. Yeah.

0:12:02 Thomas: To just the sex part. Wow. A few moments that's a that's a generous cat sex partner. I think. Yeah. The least They can do is make, make biscuits, you know, or whatever. I don't know if that's part of the process for them, but yeah.

0:12:13 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. It's It's a tender and loving, maybe. They can, they can get some cat grass, share that. That'd

0:12:26 Thomas: What's Anyway. No. The jokes are gone for an hour. I'll just stop. Cut. Cut it off there. Yeah.

0:12:27 Lindsey: Nice. Um. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, so I mean, very, very small amount of investment is, is just a baseline absolutely necessary if you're a male cat. But if you're female cat, right, what's the absolute least that you have to do in order to have a kitten that survives to reproduce.

0:12:44 Thomas: It's Quite a bit, right?

0:12:46 Lindsey: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. So for cats, you know, two months of gestation, and that imposes massive metabolic costs. Plus, you've got the metabolic costs of nursing and all the time and energy protecting the kittens until they're old enough to be independent. Any less investment than that, as a female cat parent, and your kittens do not survive, meaning that your genes don't reproduce. Produce.

0:12:55 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:13:09 Lindsey: So that imbalance in male versus female obligate investment, as it turns out, has massive implications for the mating psychologies of male and female cats and other species, of course, which are articulated in parental investment theory. So in particular, parental investment theory predicts that the more investing sex, which is females in a lot of species, has more to lose from a bad mating decision because they bear more of that reproductive reproductive burden. And so the more investing sex is predicted to be the choosier sex. It's like the gatekeepers of reproduction in many species. So they select among mates, right, rather than the other way around. And on the other side, yeah, yeah.

0:13:46 Thomas: Like You got those birds where the, the male birds have to do a whole, like song and dance, literally, actually, they gotta do a whole shtick. They have to have like their, their tight five minutes of bird material. It's amazing the things those birds haveと do. Oh.

0:14:02 Lindsey: It is. Oh, I know. I've actually, I got a bird example that's really cool. It'S not the song and dance one, but those are, are amazing, like if people haven't seen those videos, they should watch them. Um.

0:14:06 Thomas: Cool. Yeah. It Really? May, I wonder if there's any of birds are like, is it worth it? I'll do whatever. I'm just going to, I'll just be a celibate bird. I just, I'm not a performer. I don't want to come up with whole tap dance and stuff. They have to build like a shrine.

0:14:17 Lindsey: Nope. There's got to be a few. Yeah.

0:14:25 Thomas: It's crazy. It'S so funny.

0:14:26 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. Um, yeah, yeah, so, so exactly right on. So on the other side of this coin, the less investing sex, mostly males in most species, are less choosy about who they mate with. Um, and they have to be more competitive, right, which is what you're talking about with other males, in order to secure mating opportunities. So, um, in many species, cats included, you see traits in males that have been specifically shaped to make them more successful at competing for mates. And so I've got, yeah, I've got a couple of quick, cool examples of this. So in, in some species, like elephant seals are a particularly dramatic example of this, the competition is literally an aggressive, violent competition. So males are like essentially trying to kill each other to win access to female mates.

0:15:13 Lindsey: And so in a species like this, if it's the largest and most aggressive males that are the most reproductively successful over generations, that success creates a selection pressure for larger size in males. And so, in species like that, you see that males are much larger physically and much more aggressive than females.

0:15:32 Thomas: Oh, that's interesting. So that's, I mean, I'm sure obviously it's going to vary depending on what species you're talking about. But so I wouldn't have thought as a lay person that like bigger male size would be anything other than And like, oh, well, there's, you know, hunting, getting food, something like that. But it's like, no, just to literally kick each other's asses.

0:15:33 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:15:52 Thomas: Wow.

0:15:50 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. In some species, that's exactly right. Yeah.

0:15:53 Thomas: I didn't think about that.

0:15:55 Lindsey: Yeah. But you're exactly right, like, it depends on the species. Species, right? There can be different pressures that create that kind of thing. But often, yeah, it actually is about this sort of intersexual competition for mates. Yeah, which is nuts. So, but in other species, the competitive tactics aren't about these sort of like violent clashes. And one of my favorite examples is the competitive tactics that have evolved in male bowerbirds. Have you seen these? Ring a bell?

0:15:58 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Huh. Hmm. I can't remember by name, but maybe.

0:16:26 Lindsey: Okay. All right. So So male bowerbirds, they create these, like, incredibly intricate, colorful structures. And they kind of look like nests, but they're not nests. They're called bowers. And I really want people to Google image this real quick because they're just these – they're just the most beautifully designed.

0:16:33 Thomas: Right. I think this is the one I was joking about with the shrines. You got to make like a shrine to the mate. Yeah, I think that's what I'm talking about. Yeah. So Jack Bauer Bird. How do you spell Bauer Bird? Just like It would, okay, I'm gonna pull it up now while you're talking, see that, yeah Yeah, okay, I see one that's kind of lazy, that bowerbird needs to work on it, see some other good ones yeah, he's like, hold on, I'm still working, I'm still working, how long do these take to make man

0:16:44 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so they're jack bower birds. B-O-W-E-R bird. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, they probably didn't get selected Um, Yeah, but like So long So long, and that's the cool thing about them to me, right, so, um, for people who are not seeing this right now, right, so these very sort of intricately designed, uh, they tend to decorate them with brightly colored objects, uh, so sometimes it's like berries and flowers, sometimes they get like, yeah Yeah Um, sometimes they use like plastic debris, so there's one that should be high in the, the results that's like blue bottle caps and plastic straws Do you see that one

0:17:23 Thomas: It's their bachelor pad or something, yeah Oh Yeah, that's everywhere in the results That's funny. That bird got a lot of tail.

0:17:34 Lindsey: Yeah Yeah It's a good one, um, uh, yeah So Yeah You know it, um, yeah, so I mean, but they're really quite beautiful, right, um It's, it's pretty cool, so, so yeah, so during mating season the males make these bowers, the female bowerbirds come around, inspect all the bowers, um, and then they choose the one that they find the prettiest, and thus they choose the bird that they're going to to mate with, and the, the thing that I find particularly interesting about this is that these bowers are not nests, so they don't all This, and no, yeah It's No, it's, well, it kind of is, it's a sex basket So like they just, so they just, they just have sex in the bower and then they abandon it, they never use the bower again

0:17:47 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:18:07 Thomas: They don't live there? It's even a vacation home? They don'T? Yeah. That's expensive. And then what if they're like, well, let's move into my place and it's like a piece of shit. And they're Like, what?

0:18:22 Lindsey: Yeah Yeah You know, that had to have caused some, some bird arguments there, um, but yeah, so they don't have any inherent survival value, the female choose the favorite bower, they mate, then they leave, and they never use the power again, and so this behavioral trait to invest this like huge amount of time and energy into building and showing off a bower is like solely flavor, or favored by selection because it helped males compete for mates, that's all that shaped it.

0:18:25 Thomas: Ah.

0:18:51 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I got an evolutionary question. I can't quite remember the answer to. Do these things usually or need to, like this sex pad making process, do they need to or usually correspond to some other skill or fitness measurement that would be important in some other thing, you know, that would then make it so it makes sense to choose a mate based on this? Or is it purely just art?

0:19:20 Lindsey: So they sometimes do correspond to other things, right?

0:19:21 Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I suppose if you're able to make one of these things, you're at least fit enough to move around and gather bottles and crap.

0:19:31 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. So I think my understanding is that there have been a couple of sort of theoretical positions articulated on this. So one is essentially that for some traits, they can be completely arbitrary. And the only thing that creates a pressure for them is female preference, literally nothing else. It's called like the runaway hypothesis or something, um, but in a lot of cases, I mean, think of like a peacock's tail, right? That was Darwin's literally

0:19:49 Thomas: Wow. Oh, yeah. If anything, that's a pain in the ass. Literally. Yeah.

0:20:02 Lindsey: Yeah. Uh, yeah, so it, so it is, right? Um, and the, the driving selection pressure there is like female preference for those big tails, but also it is metabolically costly to maintain that tail, and so like being able to to sort of, uh, to grow and maintain a tail like that is an indicator that's like relevant to health and things, um, so I think that there's, I think that some people take a harder line on whether a trait can be selected when it doesn't indicate anything else other than, uh, female choice, but yeah it's pretty

0:20:25 Thomas: Right.

0:20:37 Thomas: Yeah, and not to get too into the just the purely biology part of this and not the, you know, Evo psych part of it. But I've always been confused as to how the female bird, for example, even develops like the judgment criteria for this. You know, like how does that part evolve to where a certain thingy or display or whatever attracts them more? Like, I don't know. It's so weird. Where does that come from? Like, how does it build up?

0:20:39 Lindsey: Cool, yeah So So, so it's all about like statistical associations, right? So, assuming that the trait that we're talking about really is something that's, that's linked to fitness, all that has to be true is that that behavior or that physical trait or whatever it is happens to be associated with something that that enhances reproductive success, and then the, the birds that have that preference to reproduce more, and then, you know, their babies inherit that preference and then it takes off. Um, yeah

0:21:09 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it could be, I mean, just such a conjunction of things that's hard to make sense of, right? Mean, if you see one of these Bowers that's like, okay, that's got a bunch of blue bottles. This one's got an orange bottle. This one You know, like how does the female like, well, I like this one better for no discernible reason or something like, you know what I mean? Like, yeah,

0:21:52 Lindsey: So, like, what are the specific features of the bowers that are like drawing their attention, I, I don't know know the answer to that, um, yeah

0:21:54 Thomas: I don't know. Yeah, I wasn't expecting you to have the answer. I just meant like it's interesting. I always kind of whenever I see these things, I think about that. Like, wow, how does that develop? And like you say, it must be just loose statistical or some sort of statistical, you know, probabilities of like some characteristics that work in the bird brain to like suggest that, OK, I can form a preference for this one over this one.

0:22:07 Lindsey: Yeah yeah right Yeah, no, and, uh, probably also, I don't know if this speaks to your question, but, um, it also develops like piecemeal, right? Like the first, the, the proto origin of the building in the bower was something that looked a lot simpler, probably um and then it's, you know, you can get sort of a accumulation of pressures over time, right? Like the males becoming larger and larger, the bowers become sort of more and more complex as the tray it gets selected for I

0:22:28 Thomas: Right. Yeah. OK. Yeah, by the way, I see one of the One of the thumbnail photos is a bird got a hold of like what looks like a ten dollar bill. I think it just cut straight to the chase, like, I'm just kidding, yeah.

0:22:51 Lindsey: Got money.

0:22:52 Thomas: I'm I'm a rich bird. I'm not even gonna build the rest of it, like, hmm.

0:22:52 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah. That's Awesome. I have not seen that. Oh, man. Um, all right, so I got one more example to illustrate parental investment theory in another species, um, and this is an interesting one, uh, of how it can make sort of like uniquely accurate, uh, predictions about mating, um, so as I said, like in most species, the, the bulk of reproductive investment, the bulk of that cost falls to females. But there are species in which this is reversed.

0:23:24 Thomas: Wow.

0:23:25 Lindsey: So in seahorses, for instance, males actually have to invest more into reproduction than female seahorse. So females deposit their eggs into males' brood pouches, and the males actually do the gestating of the offspring, and they bear That cost. And so the prediction you'd make from parental investment theory is that you'd see a number of mating-related traits that are often seen in females characterizing the male seahorses, and vice versa. And that is, in fact, exactly what you see. So male seahorses are choosier than females. Females are actually physically larger, and male seahorses exhibit a preference for larger female mates. And females are actually more aggressive, and they have to compete for the choosy male mates.

0:23:36 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:05 Thomas: Well. And this sounds obvious, like, if you put it the other way, like, if you didn't find that, then what the hell would be the source of a thing known as maleness or femaleness in any way, you know what I mean? Like, there'd be some other thing about it that would lead to these characteristics? I'm not even sure what that could be.

0:24:22 Lindsey: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure that there are maybe some competing ideas about pressures that can shape things like that, that could be true in a particular species but

0:24:29 Thomas: You know, I do want to ask, and mind you, you know, of course, we're talking biologically speaking about animals and stuff. But like when you're characterizing, I guess, sex among animals, what is the base definition of like what is a male and what is female? Because if you see some of these like slightly switcherood species, why do you even still call one male, one female? Is it because of like an egg versus a, whatever, fertilizing it or something?

0:24:50 Lindsey: Yeah yeah Yeah, that's, that's exactly right. Um, yeah, so I mean, and you know, the, the chromosomes, right, that determine sex, right, there's there's still, yeah

0:24:59 Thomas: Okay. I am not a scientist, everybody. But there's something, so there's something consistent in chromosomes throughout all species that you can be like, this is a male one and this is female one.

0:25:08 Lindsey: Um, yeah. Yeah I, I'm pretty sure, I, if they're a biologist in your audience, they, they can confirm whether or not yeah Um, but yeah. Yeah. That's, that is my memory. Uh, yeah.

0:25:21 Thomas: Okay. Oh, I know. I'm sorry. I am asking you biology questions. Apologies. I wonder if, I imagine it gets like sketchy in some cases or something. I don't know.

0:25:35 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, and actually, I know that there are species that, um, that, like, the genetic basis of sex looks a little bit different, so it's not, like XXXY. There's actually some different...

0:25:35 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Aren't there ones that can change their

0:25:44 Lindsey: That's true, yeah, I knew about that.

0:25:44 Thomas: Sex too? Yeah. All kinds of things

0:25:48 Lindsey: Like, as... Uh-huh.

0:25:48 Thomas: In the animal kingdom, I'm sure.

0:25:50 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah yeah. So, like uh, some of them switch on the basis of, like sex ratio and stuff, which is cool.

0:25:51 Thomas: Anyway, so seahorse. Right, we all saw Jurassic Park. So the male seahorses, so the kind of the characteristics are flipped a little bit because they have to carry the egg. Okay. Wow.

0:25:54 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, they become pregnant, which is pretty interesting. Yeah, so the point is that these physical and behavioral differences between the sexes are straightforwardly predicted by parental investment theory. And at this point, there's overwhelming evidence across the animal kingdom that supports parental investment as a theory. So sexual imbalances in the cost of reproduction do, in fact, sort of predict these inherited mating-related traits that differ between the sexes. Yeah. So then we move into the realm of humans and, you know, use parental investment theory to try to predict some things about human mating behavior and talk about the fact that, for example, men and women on average would be predicted to have different attitudes about casual sex, with women being more cautious about casual six than men and more selective about who they choose to have sex with, or, you know, suggesting that women and men have different strategies or priorities when they're selecting long-term mates, especially.

0:27:05 Lindsey: So meaning like marriage partners, people who you're intending to raise children with. You start making those kinds of claims on the basis of parental investment theory, people start to experience some psychological reactance and worry about what your motives are in making that claim. So like, are we trying to slut shame women who have casual sex, right? Or, you know, another objection here is that, you know, how can we be sure that parental investment theory explains any observed gender differences in these attitudes rather than it just being the product of sort of gendered socialization, right? And as we discussed before in the last episode, I want to be careful not to be dismissive of this reaction because one, culture does matter and it's surely a part of what's going on here with our mating psychologies, but not in a way I would argue that is necessarily competing with our evolved architecture, and we'll talk about that a little bit more in a few minutes. Yes.

0:27:17 Thomas: Right? Right.

0:27:56 Thomas: Well, we've already emphasized it, but just in case, One, I want to mention, of course, that when we're talking about biological sex in a scientific way among animals, it's a totally different thing than gender and gender expression. So I would never use that to make any claims about someone's gender or what they should or shouldn't do. I just want to emphasize that. Totally different thing. And then also, I don't know. I guess people react to these things different ways. But for me, like I never just as a listener or a reader or whatever, I never see this stuff and think, well, therefore, I ought to or have to act a certain way. Like I I feel like I can just take this information, be like, yeah, OK, on average, makes sense that, you know, these these characteristics might show up in different probabilities based on, you know, based on this

0:28:08 Lindsey: No. Right.

0:28:30 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah.

0:28:40 Thomas: Science and who care? Like, OK. That's information, you know, but like it's weird that people react or and again, maybe they're reacting to Ben Shapiro's. Yeah.

0:28:44 Lindsey: Yeah. Exactly. They're reacting to actual Yes, that's

0:28:49 Thomas: Using it badly. But And I don't want to, yeah, but, but still, like, just the information itself, to me, I don't see why anyone needs to take information about some sort of average that tends to be true and say therefore what I'm doing is right or wrong or something like there's no value judgment, uh, that should be made based on mere observance of like a scientific average. Yeah.

0:28:50 Lindsey: Exactly what they're acting to. Yes.

0:29:06 Lindsey: Yes.

0:29:16 Lindsey: No, that's, that's perfectly articulated. Yeah. Um, but, but yeah, I mean, the thing that people are reacting to is that, like, like, primarily, I think, if you're not in this area or adjacent to it, the primary people that you hear talking about this stuff are people like Ben Shapiro. And they're taking these things and saying, like, you know, see, women should stop being sluts because evolution. Like, definitely not because I'm obsessed with judging other people's sex lives. Definitely because science and evolution. Yeah, it's dumb.

0:29:31 Thomas: Jordan Peterson and it's it makes no sense on any level because you can just be like, well, we have, but we have birth control now, so it doesn't really, so the whole thing doesn't matter, like, there's no

0:29:46 Lindsey: No. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And also, so I'm glad you made the point about sex versus gender, because if people notice, right, I may make mistakes on this occasionally, but generally, I try to be pretty careful about using sex, like using male and female, when I'm talking about the evolution of these traits, because when we're talking about mating adaptations specifically, right? Right. Like those adaptations happened in the context of heterosexual couplings. Right.

0:30:26 Lindsey: So I try to be careful about using like the language of genetic sex when I'm talking about how these traits evolved, because that, that is how they evolved. But like if I'm taking about like the attitudes of of men and women, right, current men and woman. Right, I think that those preferences are actually tracking with gender identity. And as you mentioned, that's not identical to sex. So I, it's, I think it's worth sort of highlighting that explicitly

0:30:25 Thomas: Right. And Of course Yeah, also worth noting there are many more, uh, gender identities than merely male and female

0:30:51 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, man, so we probably don't have time to get into this, but like, I, I have thoughts about this. Um, yeah, we should probably talk about that at another date

0:31:01 Thomas: Yeah. A separate separate show but I think it's important to note, you know, for for everybody listening, that's kind of our background assumptions going into this.

0:31:05 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, right. Okay, so, so anyway, so, uh, yeah, so culture matters, people really are sort of making this this inappropriate jump, but again, I want to underline that the people who are doing this tend not to be evolutionary psychologists that are sort of going from the descriptive claim to the prescriptive one. Because first of all, like evolutionary psychologists understand about the naturalistic fallacy and the distinction between describing the history of a trait, the evolutionary history of a trade, and claiming that thus those features are good, as you just talked about. And second of all, evolutionary psychologists wouldn't say something like this because they know how complicated our mating psychologies are. And that, you know, this one piece about attitudes toward casual sex or this one mate preference, right, is one small piece of a much richer and more complicated picture.

0:31:24 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Hmm.

0:31:57 Lindsey: So, yeah. So I want to talk a little bit more now about, like, what we do know about men and women when it comes to these kinds of attitudes and behaviors related to mating. So we know that in terms of averages, men do, in fact, tend to report less hesitance about casual, uncommitted sexual encounters than women do on average. And, you know, could this strictly be the result of sociocultural conditioning? Like, sure. But it's also precisely what we would predict from parental investment theory, given the features of our species. And it appears to be a consistent gender difference across cultures, even those that have much more progressive views of sexuality than we do in the United States, typically. And, furthermore, so like, does this imply that women are never interested in casual sex? Like, absolutely not.

0:32:11 Thomas: Mm-huh.

0:32:33 Thomas: Hmm. Obviously not.

0:32:42 Lindsey: Like, we actually spent a big chunk of time in my course on this talking about the circumstances under which the benefits of casual sex for our female ancestors would have been high enough relative to the cost to make that behavior beneficial, and the evidence that those resultant preferences, right, from those fitness benefits, are still observable in modern human women, right? Right? So, like, for instance, like, one of the biggest benefits of a casual sexual encounter for our female ancestors would have been just the quality of the offspring produced. So, female ancestors who desired casual sex with males that possess certain heritable traits related to things like health, right? We're back to symmetry. I know, your favorite trait. As well as certain, like, sex-typical traits like testosterone, link trinks, and things like that.

0:33:31 Lindsey: So females who, who preferred casual sex with males who possessed those traits would have been more successful than female ancestors who did not, if they were having casual sex, because offspring produced from those kinds of encounters would have likely inherited those traits and, thus, you know, had those traits themselves. And this hypothesis, just a fun factoid, is sometimes referred to as the sexy sun's hypothesis, which is gross, uh, but there it is. So, anyway, so, so, current women today, right, are predicted to retain that preference, and that prediction has been consistently supported. So women.

0:34:06 Thomas: And therefore, yeah, that is the birth of the, what is it, the celebrity freebie list. No, what do you call it? What they call it ? Oh, I can't remember now. Yeah, like the, oh, yeah.

0:34:10 Lindsey: Yeah. No, that's Right, yeah. Elizabeth Warren's mine, so that's Fun. Yeah.

0:34:17 Thomas: There you go. I mean, I'm not sure what kind of offspring you're going to produce from that. But yeah, yeah for sure. Maybe, yeah, maybe you adopt and I'm sure the characteristics of your offspring would be delightful because you're both wonderful.

0:34:18 Lindsey: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, I'm thinking Kate McKinnon's also on the list, but only if Elizabeth Warren's there too, too. So wouldn't that be nuts?

0:34:38 Thomas: Do you want them both dressed as one of them or the other? Or maybe they're dressed as each other. Like you'd get it like everything

0:34:44 Lindsey: That's a hard choice to make. I don't know. We should come back to that. Okay. Anyway. All right. So yeah. So that is all true, right? Yeah, it is. Yeah. So when women have casual sex, they tend to prioritize physical attractiveness much more so than they do when they're choosing long-term mates, right, So that tends to be, yeah, yeah. One other example, right, relevant to casual sex with women. So one important cost of casual sex for female ancestors was the lack of paternal investment, right, because sort of by definition here, an uncommitted sexual encounter is one in which the male is not likely to invest in any resulting offspring. So it's hypothesized, this is one of many hypotheses related to this, that casual sex might have had a better cost-benefit ratio for our female ancestors under certain circumstances, such as when they've already secured an investing mate. So we're talking here specifically about pressures that would have favored cuckoldry. So for our male ancestors to have sex with someone other than their partner under circumstances where it would have paid off on average genetically.

0:34:56 Thomas: You just said is true.

0:35:10 Thomas: That's interesting.

0:35:59 Lindsey: And so there is evidence, for instance, that women today who are in committed relationships relationships exhibit a tendency under certain circumstances to feel more desire for men other than their current partner, but like, again, only when certain other things are true. So like if their partner doesn't possess those heritable sexy sons traits, and when the probability of conception is particularly high, and and so on, right? So there's a lot more here in this literature, but to her. So anyway, so that's a harmful, hurtful, you know, behavior that there's good reason to believe.

And this is, you know, there's findings across other species that are consistent with this that, like, yeah, cheating was beneficial for both male and female ancestors under certain some circumstances, but doesn't make them more fun for us, does it? So yeah, anyway. Okay, so another related example from the mating literature of a claim that seems sort of overly reductive and stereotypy on its surface because of how it's often overly reduced. We also know that men and women tend to differentially value certain traits in potential mates, and especially like potential long-term mates. So for instance, we've got strong cross-cultural evidence that women more so than men seem to value money, right?

So, like, status and resources, things that predict them, like, ambition and so on in long-term mates, and men more so than women seem to value physical attractiveness in long term mates. And here are the theoretical reasons that those preferences are predicted to have evolved in humans.

0:36:14 Thomas: Right. Huh.

0:37:35 Lindsey: So our male ancestors' mate choices needed to be sensitive to cues of female fertility, which varies widely across the lifespan. And female fertility is accompanied by a number of really easily observable cues that are not present until puberty and that are no longer present after menopause. So one particularly reliable and noticeable one is waist to hip ratio. So the circumference of the narrowest part of the waist relative to the widest part of the hips. Before puberty, waist to hip ratio in females is close to 0.1. And it goes back to approximately that ratio after menopause, but its lowest Yeah.

0:38:13 Thomas: Whoa, I didn't know that. Huh. Huh.

0:38:15 Lindsey: Yeah, it drops precipitously during the years when women are most fertile, right, which that peaks in like early 20s. So that means, yeah, so waist to hip ratio drops, meaning that the waist is smaller than the hips. So, uh, yeah, think, I think, hourglass figure if I'm not during

0:38:33 Thomas: What would be the I maybe I'm coming at this the wrong way, but like what would have been the evolutionary pressure for that to go back? You know, like I or or is it that it already did that and then the preference developed based on that?

0:38:43 Lindsey: Oh, it's not Yes, that one. Yeah.

0:38:50 Thomas: OK, still seems weird that it like goes back like that. Like I get like it's like, OK, you know, in sexual maturity or whatever. Yeah, it makes sense. OK. And then like it undoes itself. Self? That's kind of weird.

0:38:50 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:39:00 Lindsey: So it's mediated by hormones. So like the various ratios of like estrogens to androgens creates differences in fat distribution. And that's what's mediating it. And so when those hormonal triggers sort of reverse again in menopause, like that fat distribution changes again, yeah.

0:39:19 Thomas: Well, that's weird. I didn't know that. Cool. And thus, every mom in every Pixar movie was born. I don't know. Yeah.

0:39:21 Lindsey: Yeah, um. Yeah. No, that's that's true. I mean, yeah, once you once you know about this, this mechanism, you can't unsee it everywhere.

0:39:29 Thomas: Oh, my God. Once. Yeah, yeah.

0:39:34 Lindsey: Right, or like fucking corsets, um, anyway, yeah, so you can, you can see this a lot of places in ways that are sort of manufactured by culture but are definitely reflecting this sort of underlying architecture. But anyway, so one theoretically driven prediction here is that male ancestors who preferred that observable cue, right, of low waist to hip ratio, as well as some other things that are associated with fertility, were going to be more reproductively successful than males who didn't exhibit that preference, because being sexually attracted to fertility linked traits leads to more kids than not a preference for that, right?

0:40:11 Thomas: Right.

0:40:11 Lindsey: And so you get more more gene propagation.

0:40:12 Thomas: So like genetically, you know, if you're into gilfs, then it's like your traits aren't going to move on much.

0:40:21 Lindsey: We need a whole other episode for the psychology of gilfs, I think.

0:40:25 Thomas: That's interesting. It's sort of like they always say like people with red hair are dying out because they don't, it's recessive thing or whatever. Is it like that? Like gilf lovers are going to be a vanishing breed? I don't know. That is probably more than mere evolution going on here.

0:40:27 Lindsey: Yeah. Yes, probably so. I'd like to spend some time thinking about that. We could revisit it a later date.

0:40:46 Thomas: Review the mating literature.

0:40:47 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Go to the Pornhub EBSCO. Anyway, yeah. So that's the theoretical rationale of the preference. And then we predict that men today would retain those preferences and there's... there's this is one of the more robust areas of evidence um that's a low waist up ratio yes

0:41:03 Thomas: Yeah, again, see every Pixar movie. Enter into the the record The Incredibles, the Incrediles 2, yeah, those

0:41:06 Lindsey: Exactly right uh-huh And yeah, and so we have this preference, like, using a variety of methods from a variety of sources, we've got it cross-culturally, like it's very robust preference um and then so on the on the flip side, right, for our female female ancestors' mate decisions were more sensitive rather than to fertility to cues related to investment, right? So cues that potential mates were going to be able and willing to invest in offspring, which not all potential mates are willing to do, right. So some potential mates at any given moment might have been more interested in just having casual sex, right, because that's generally a thing that our male ancestors were more interested in for reasons we've talked about.

0:41:48 Lindsey: And again, for males, right, because investment isn't required to produce viable offspring, like some males will use that strategy of just having casual sex as like their dominant strategy, just all their lives, not all of them, but yeah. So anyway, so because there's variability in investment across mates, and because offspring do in fact benefit a lot from paternal investment, female ancestors who had a preference for male mates who had traits related to their ability and their willingness to invest voluntarily in offspring would have had more reproductive success through the greater success of their children than those who did not prefer investing mates. And so traits that predict investment, which include things like current access to resources, ability to accrue resources,

0:41:47 Thomas: Pigs sorry I

0:42:34 Lindsey: As well as traits like generosity, generosity, right? Because you can have all the resources in the world, but if you're not willing to invest, it doesn't really matter.

0:42:41 Thomas: Was just gonna say, like, why? Where does it necessarily follow that resources mean you would invest them in offspring? Is that just okay

0:42:48 Lindsey: It doesn't. Those are two actual separate traits that you can distinguish between, and women show preferences for both of them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So women today are predicted to retain those preferences for mates with these investment-related traits. And again, this is another area where there's a lot of robust evidence, including cross-cultural evidence that women do in fact exhibit this preference when they're selecting long-term mates, to a much greater degree than men do. They don't prioritize that, um, so a little bit of nuance, right, to add on top of this, this claim about this gender difference. So one thing that's often not emphasized in the surface level treatment of these two mate preferences, um, is that men and women also share a lot of important preferences for mates, so both

0:42:49 Thomas: Hmm oh okay interesting oh

0:43:34 Lindsey: Men and woman, yeah, they both highly value traits related to kindness.

0:43:38 Thomas: I thought you were gonna say that women just love that waist to hip ratio just to, just want the men to have that, just that The dump truck absolute. Absolute. No, not that one so much.

0:43:45 Lindsey: Are we I said, are we talking about Seidel but again, it sounds like it. I

0:43:53 Thomas: Yes. Well, actually, I mean, we joke, but I've always found it kind of interesting that like, you know, when, you know, in in my life history, anecdotally, when women talk about like, oh, nice male, but whatever, Seidel, for example, I'm always like, well, what are you doing with that? Like, what is how does that? I don't know. It must be a signal for something, but I've always wondered, especially as a kid, when I would hear a comment like that, I was like, what, what? Why is that a preference that, you know, heterosexual women would have?

0:44:06 Lindsey: Don't even know if it is like anecdotally, I'm familiar with these comments. But don't, I don't know.

0:44:24 Thomas: Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Hmm.

0:44:28 Lindsey: I'll do some research, but preferences, um, yeah, we get this, man, this whiteboard's gonna get filled up fast, I do, yeah.

0:44:31 Thomas: Back to the mating literature. You've got a lot of homework. It's pretty really fun homework too.

0:44:38 Lindsey: Yeah, So, so yeah, so men and women, yeah, both highly value kindness, they prioritize that. They also value traits that predict compatibility, um, so similarity along a number of dimensions is preferred by both men and woman, um, cues to genetic compatibility, right, so we don't have time to get, get into this, but, like, odor is apparently, uh, it may be a cue that we use to determine, like, one aspect of, uh, genetic compatibility, which is super interesting, yeah.

0:45:02 Thomas: Oh, well, I will say I, I, this is absolutely not not in a sexual or reproductive context, but if you don't think humans are, uh, you know, susceptible to odor, like if you, you don't have kids, cause like something about your own kids. I just want to, I, I seriously, I just go up to Arlo's head and I just got like, I'm snorting cocaine. It just, it's delightful. Something about your own kids, uh. The chemicals involved. I don't know what it is, but it's, I could just sniff them all day. They're little heads.

0:45:24 Lindsey: Mm-hmm.

0:45:38 Thomas: Oh, they're the best.

0:45:38 Lindsey: That's that's a thing too we could do, we could be another episode on just odor cues in in both like parenting and mating context, it's super interesting.

0:45:42 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I want to where my kids want to give their heads a good sniff right now. That's so good. I'm worried about what I'm going to do with when I don't have all these nice chemicals going on. I'm I'm dreading that when my kids get older, you know, and then it's like, eh, they just smell like a smelly kid.

0:45:46 Lindsey: Yeah. Yep.

0:45:58 Thomas: But right now it's it's perfect.

0:46:00 Lindsey: Okay, so, so bottom line there, right, um, what was the bottom line, is overlap

0:46:06 Thomas: Well, you talked about women, men having some of these similar preferences. I was actually just going to ask, is there a is there any expected preference that men Men would want to mate with women. And again, loosely speaking, just talking about averages here. I know there's so much more going on to humans than mere men and women heterosexual mating. We granted that.

0:46:09 Lindsey: Yeah absolutely Yes.

0:46:28 Thomas: But talking about that, would there be any drive for like men wanting to pick a female mate that seems as though they would raise their kid offspring well? Or is that not, is it more just like we're going to mate as much as possible and who cares? Like it'll sort itself out.

0:46:40 Lindsey: Yes, no, no, well, it, it depends on the context. Right, if you're talking about, if you're talking about short-term mating, which, that's casual sex, that's uncommitted sex. Then those kinds of traits don't seem to matter much in terms of the preference. The physical attractiveness tends to be almost everything that's prioritized in short-term mating. But in long-term mating, and the decision for ancestral males in that case was like, who am I going to invest my time and my resources into, to, um, in that context, yes, uh, cues that somebody is going to be a good parent, um, are something that both men and women prioritize.

0:46:47 Thomas: Oh, okay. Right. Interesting.

0:47:12 Thomas: Right?

0:47:22 Thomas: But that's also a really good reminder that this is not just one thing that's always a certain thing. It's all about like context. And, you know, so it's not as though you can think of all of human behavior as this one thing when it comes to reproduction, like there's lots of different contexts and scenarios.

0:47:22 Lindsey: Yeah, Absolutely, Right. And, and I mean, that that is the point that I'm trying to make through talking about all this stuff. I know we're kind of in the weeds with this, but I just, I want to show the mating literature is much bigger than these, these, like, narrow claims that get trotted out in order to claim that the entire area is, you know, sort of reducing people, people to stereotypes. It's, it's not doing that, it's very complicated. Um, so lots of overlap in terms of long-term mate preferences, that's important, and I also think it's worth pointing out that when we say that men and women differentially prioritize or value these two traits, so women differentiallly value money, right, status, resources, that kind of thing, and that men more so prioritize or value physical attractiveness, the implication of that is not that people are, are trying to maximize those traits in their mate choice, or that they only care about those traits, right?

0:47:39 Thomas: Okay. Right, huh?

0:48:28 Lindsey: And in fact, when you look it in the right way, you almost find the opposite. Yeah, right.

0:48:36 Thomas: What do you mean?

0:48:36 Lindsey: So this is worth talking about. Yeah. So Norman Lee and Douglas Kenrick are evolutionary psychologists. They've done a bunch of research in human mating. And they came up with this research design that I think is really cool. It's called the mate dollars paradigm. Dime, in order to investigate mate preferences. And so in this design, they tell participants that they're going to have them design their ideal mate, like marriage partner in some cases, which is what we're focus on. They've done the casual sex thing too. But anyway, so they're designing their ideal long-term mate. And they provide participants with a certain budget of mate dollars, which they can use to purchase different levels of various traits for ideal mates. And imagine that I have 20 mate dollars and I can spend them to purchase which is different levels, right? There's essentially different percentile ranks of physical attractiveness, status, kindness, creativity, and intelligence. And so each of my $20 buys me 10 percentile points. So if I spend, wait, what?

0:49:30 Thomas: I think this is what Andrew Yang ran on, right? It's Andrew Yang had the, well, you know, UBI, but also I think he had like a democracy dollars.

0:49:37 Lindsey: Oh, that's right. Like freedom dollars or something. No, I remember what you're talking about. Like it. Yeah. So if I spend five democracy dollars, no.

0:49:44 Thomas: Pretend you get it. Yeah. But I

0:49:46 Lindsey: So if I spent five of that $20 that I have in my budget on physical attractiveness, that means that I'm purchasing a mate who is at the 50th percentile on physical attractiveness. So essentially average attractiveness, and then I have $15, 15 mate dollars left in my $20 budget to spend on other things, like social status and kindness and whatever. So using the study design, they've been able to look at how men and women allocate their dollars differently and how gender differences change when somebody has a very small budget of mate dollars, so like you only have $10 to spend on traits, versus when you have a lot of mate to spend, like say like $30, right?

0:50:23 Thomas: Wow.

0:50:23 Lindsey: Where you have to make fewer trade-offs. And it's a really cool technique because like to make an analogy here, say you're asking people about like like a survival situation. So you say like, okay, you're about to be stranded on a desert island for an indefinite amount of time. What do you take if you only have two items, right? Fire starter and a tarp, obviously. What about if you have five items that you can take? And what about 10?

0:50:34 Thomas: Yeah. I just took two Elliot Smith albums, and I don't have anything to play them with. I'm an idiot. I've got the wrong Desert Island thing going.

0:50:49 Lindsey: Ah, shit. Yeah. So, you can do that when you have five items. It'd be okay. Yeah, and so by sort of using those different budgets, you could look at people's priorities, right, right? Where do they put their sort of necessity dollars? That's the first 10 bucks. And then what do they do if they have an additional $10 and so on, right? So I think it's a very clever way of looking at these trade-offs, essentially, and priorities.

0:50:54 Thomas: Okay. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

0:51:14 Lindsey: So what they found using this mate dollars paradigm is that when people only have a small budget of mate dollars to spend, men allocate the largest portion of their budgets to physical attractiveness. So essentially, one of their two necessity items is a certain level of physical attractiness. But as they are given more money to purchase higher levels of different traits, they don't continue to spend the most on physical attractiveness. Their spending on that actually goes way down once they've met like a certain minimal threshold. And then they actually start to allocate more of their additional dollars to purchasing higher and higher levels of other things like creativity.

0:51:48 Thomas: Strength and vitality Points. Points, oh no, I may be making a Diablo character, never mind, yeah.

0:51:49 Lindsey: Yeah. It's similar though, yeah.

0:51:55 Thomas: Black magic, is that what, no, you could

0:51:58 Lindsey: We could do that, we could, we could do our own mate dollars where we add in black magic, that'd good, yeah.

0:52:03 Thomas: Probably You know, gamify or whatever this experiment by making the character creation like create your mate in a certain way. That would be interesting, it would be like a new, different version of the same experiment, I think. Hmm.

0:52:13 Lindsey: Yeah, I like that. Um, yeah, so and then by contrast, like when, when women are doing this task, they allocate the largest portion of their smallest budget to purchasing a certain level of social status, but then they, again, they don't continue to spend lots of mate dollars on that, they, they instead divert their extra dollars into other things like, again, you know, creativity, the ability to craft artisanal pop filters and things like that. So, um, so the bottom I

0:52:28 Thomas: Did we talk does that, do the listeners know about your brilliant artisanal pop filter? I don't remember, did we talked about that, I can't remember, did we, no I don't know, it was a great joke

0:52:42 Lindsey: Don't know, I I have no idea, but I have one and it's beautiful yeah Thank you, I thought so, is which my, my adoring spouse made for me, yeah. It's a very nice pop filter.

0:52:48 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I see where you put all those democracy dollars or whatever, mate dollars

0:52:56 Lindsey: Yeah Yeah, he saw right through me too. Um, yeah, so, so yeah, so the bottom line, right, is that evolutionary psychologists are not claiming that women only care about resources, men only care about looks. It's a much more nuanced point, which is that sort of like the bare necessities of mating are different on average. And this is derived from biological theories that are not specific to humans, right? And then beyond that, you see, you know, all the complexity that probably resonates with our intuitions about selecting mates, right. And so I just, I thought it was worth going into that because this is not normally the kind of nuanced picture that's painted of these surface level explanations that you see of human mating. And once you get up close and start looking at the details, I think that it starts to resonate with people's intuitions a lot more. And it sounds a lot less like we're reducing people to stereotypes, essentially. And I think it's important.

0:53:50 Lindsey: Okay, so I had some stuff about culture that I don't think we have time for, but

0:53:50 Thomas: Yeah yeah we're kind of running out I know, I extend everything out by derailing you and joking

0:53:57 Lindsey: It's my fault. I extended my notes. But I hope actually that the discussion about culture has sort of suffused the rest of the conversation enough for people to hear how much context, learning, and culture are sort of centered in these explanations, right? Because we talk about there being cross-cultural consistency in things like like gender differences, but then there's also all of this literature that's actually looking specifically at cultural modulation of these things.

And we talked about Annie Wertz research, which is, you know, specifically focused on sort of the social transmission of information, right? There's an entire area of investigation within evolutionary psych that is examining culture in a couple of different ways as kind of an extension of our evolved architecture, architecture, right. And so I think what I'd want to say about the culture piece in general is that one, uh, culture tends not to compete with evolved architecture, I think, as much as people think it does. Um, and that, you know, maybe this is something that eventually we can do another episode on, right, um, but that also, like, there is value in looking at, um, the evolved architecture and sort, sort of cultural contributions in order to fully understand, you know, how a psychological mechanism is working. And just one more time, I want to refer people to the last two episodes, we talked about incest avoidance mechanisms.

And a big part of that was sort of looking at what I'd say is the exception more than the rule, when like a cultural norm conflicts with an evolved mechanism. And so that can sort of give people another piece in terms of how culture, uh, shows up in an evolutionary psych, but anyway, so yeah, maybe, maybe at another date we can do a longer thing about culture.

0:55:48 Thomas: Yeah Well, there's a lot going on there because there's going to be so many examples of where I imagine culture is going to be kind of determined in some way or directed by these pressures, you know, and that's why, you know, religion, you tends to have certain beliefs about things, but then there will be other ways in which it's kind of going to butt heads and, you know, it's probably like the most complicated subject in the world would be human culture. Like it's got to be so complicated to try to study, but there's, yeah, I'm sure you find examples either way.

0:55:48 Lindsey: Yeah exactly yeah yeah Yeah, yeah, I do think that knowing something about the evolved mechanisms can sort of like help you parse things out in that chaos in a really interesting and useful way. Um, like, I mean, traditional gender norms, I think might be a good example, because parents have a huge stake in sort of like influencing the mating decisions of their kids, but they tend to prioritize different things. So Yeah, um, so parents are more likely, especially with their daughters I

0:56:37 Thomas: That's interesting. What can you do the democracy dollars experiment, but with like, okay, who's your, who's her kid gonna marry or mate with, that's an interesting one, how would they spend it

0:56:50 Lindsey: Mean there's plenty of cultures that do that, right, with arranged marriages, and yeah oh

0:56:53 Thomas: Yeah no I know but it'd be interesting to just do that actual experiment and compare the results, yeah. Like versus like I'm spending my, did I just give you a good research idea, I'm spending my mating dollars on a mate versus, okay, I, you're spending your mating dollars on choosing a mate for your offspring, and like how that would compare, yeah.

0:56:59 Lindsey: Okay, okay, let's do it, oh yes No, I love that, I thought, thought you literally meant democracy dollars, and I was like, we should do a cultural experiment where we have parents dictate the mates of their children, let's not do that again, uh no that's a great idea, I would love to do that, yes.

0:57:22 Thomas: Yeah no not that okay Well, I expect to be cited in the, uh, in the paper, yeah. Oh, this let's do it, I'll have, here we go, and actually we can also use my idea of using a character creation, uh, like thing, if Cyberpunk hadn't gone off this PlayStation store or whatever, you know, we could still use that, because you can make anything in that, apparently, I didn't buy it, but anyway, uh, this was so much fun, Lindsey, I, we're We're out of time yet again. I imagine from having this interview of this podcast, we have, you know, 10 other subjects that we need to branch out on. But this was an absolute pleasure. Thanks as always. And I

0:57:30 Lindsey: Absolutely would you like to be an author, yeah.

0:57:45 Lindsey: Yeah yeah easily yeah, yeah. Same here

0:58:02 Thomas: Can't wait till next time.

0:58:02 Lindsey: Yeah yeah thank you. Thank you.

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