No abstract

In 1948, Angus J. Bateman reported a stronger relationship between mating and reproductive success in male fruit flies compared with females, and concluded that selection should universally favour ‘an undiscriminating eagerness in the males and a discriminating passivity in the females’ to obtain mates. The conventional view of promiscuous, undiscriminating males and coy, choosy females has also been applied to our own species. Here, we challenge the view that evolutionary theory prescribes stereotyped sex roles in human beings, firstly by reviewing Bateman's principles and recent sexual selection theory and, secondly, by examining data on mating behaviour and reproductive success in current and historic human populations. We argue that human mating strategies are unlikely to conform to a single universal pattern.

Niche construction is the process whereby organisms modify selective environments, thereby affecting evolution. The niche‐construction perspective is particularly relevant to researchers using evolutionary methods to interpret human behavior and society. On the basis of niche‐construction theory, we argue against the hypothesis that modern humans experience an atypically large adaptive lag. We stress that humans construct their world largely to suit themselves and frequently buffer adaptive lag through cultural niche construction. Where they are unable to do that, natural selection of genes rapidly ensues. Our argument has implications for evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology, and suggests that the methods of the latter are potentially applicable to all human societies, even postindustrial ones.

Human infants rely on social interactions to acquire food‐related information.1, 2 Adults actively teach children about food through culturally diverse feeding practices. Characteristics we share with the other primates, such as complex diets, highly social lives, and extended juvenile periods, suggest that social learning may be important during ontogeny throughout the order. Although all young primates typically pay attention to feeding adults, great apes and callitrichids, in particular, acquire new foraging techniques through abilities unknown in other nonhuman primates; that is, they learn by imitation. However, ape social learning is almost exclusively infant‐initiated, while adult callitrichids actively teach their young. It is unlikely that the same selective forces have acted to favor sophisticated social‐learning mechanisms in both taxa.3, 4 Equipped with an ape brain, complex foraging methods, and a cooperative infant‐care system, early hominins were uniquely poised to take social learning about food and foraging techniques to a new level.

No abstract

Men score higher than women on measures of sensation-seeking, defined as a willingness to engage in novel or intense activities. This sex difference has been explained in terms of evolved psychological mechanisms or culturally transmitted social norms. We investigated whether sex differences in sensation-seeking have changed over recent years by conducting a meta-analysis of studies using Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale, version V (SSS-V). We found that sex differences in total SSS-V scores have remained stable across years, as have sex differences in Disinhibition and Boredom Susceptibility. In contrast, the sex difference in Thrill and Adventure Seeking has declined, possibly due to changes in social norms or out-dated questions on this sub-scale. Our results support the view that men and women differ in their propensity to report sensation-seeking characteristics, while behavioural manifestations of sensation-seeking vary over time. Sex differences in sensation-seeking could reflect genetically influenced predispositions interacting with socially transmitted information.

Evolutionary Psychology (EP) views the human mind as organized into many modules, each underpinned by psychological adaptations designed to solve problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. We argue that the key tenets of the established EP paradigm require modification in the light of recent findings from a number of disciplines, including human genetics, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and paleoecology. For instance, many human genes have been subject to recent selective sweeps; humans play an active, constructive role in co-directing their own development and evolution; and experimental evidence often favours a general process, rather than a modular account, of cognition. A redefined EP could use the theoretical insights of modern evolutionary biology as a rich source of hypotheses concerning the human mind, and could exploit novel methods from a variety of adjacent research fields.

. This hypothesis has produced considerable debate within evolutionary biology. Here we use meta-analysis techniques to evaluate claims that nonhuman primate females facultatively adjust the sex ratio of their progeny in relation to their own dominance rank in a uniform way. The magnitude of the difference in birth sex ratios of high-and low-ranking females declines as sample sizes increase, and the mean difference in birth sex ratios of high-and lowranking females is zero. These results suggest that the observed effects could be the product of stochastic variation in small samples. These findings indicate that presently we cannot reject the null hypothesis that maternal dominance rank is unrelated to birth sex ratios.