This is a link-bait title, and a surprisingly poor guide to the professional literature on the subject of evolutionary influences on human mating behavior. First of all, "Darwinians" is the wrong category to use to name the scientists who think about evolutionary influences on human behavior. All competent psychologists, biologists (whether zoologists or botanists or specialists of some other kind), medical doctors, and other scholars of human behavior are "Darwinians" in the sense of knowing that species Homo sapiens originated by a process of macroevolution from earlier living things.
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/history/modsynth.shtml
combining Darwinian evolution from common descent including a mechanism of natural selection and Mendelian inheritance of discrete units of heredity is the standard point of view among all people who have a current scientific understanding of biology.
It is rather what is properly called "evolutionary psychology" (which at its core
is much more recent than Darwin's thought) that is actually controversial at the moment, with some very Darwinian biologists not liking evolutionary psychology well at all
Charles Darwin made few assertions about "dating" in the current sense and hardly any settled assertions about human behavior, even in his book-length treatments of the subject, but raised a lot of questions. Some of the answers are still tentative and debated, and the overall approach of what fans call "evolutionary psychology" is controversial, but that evolution happened and had something to do with the current human condition is not controversial at all among scientists.
Looks like you just read the title, thought it must be crypto-creationist and decided to dump in your link collection. The article is not anti-Darwinian, it's a survey of criticisms of the "ultra-Darwinian" position on gender differences. The criticisms come from evolutionary psychologists and such respected biologists as Stephen Jay Gould. The title is not link-baity since it pointedly refers to Darwin's position that men are more about "inventive genius" and women about "greater tenderness".
It turns out you can deny evolution and still get published on the New York Times op-ed page. Dan Slater did just that, in a piece yesterday called “Darwin Was Wrong About Dating.”
Slater–who has a new book out in which he claims that online dating, of all things, is revolutionizing the sexual marketplace–sets out to debunk a subspecialty known as evolutionary psychology, which seeks to explain differences between men and women in terms of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection.
In brief, the theory of sexual selection posits that members of each sex will employ different evolutionary “strategies” in order to ensure that their genes survive into future generations. Since the male makes the lesser investment in reproduction, men are driven to favor quantity over quality. They are especially attracted to youth and beauty because these are signs of fertility. But one man can reproduce with many women, so that there is no evolutionary need to be selective. The most efficient way to pass on his genetic legacy is to have intercourse with as many women as possible.
Reproductively speaking, that’s not an option for a woman, whose potential number of offspring is much smaller because she must endure the demands of carrying, bearing and nurturing every child she produces. Thus it is in her evolutionary “interest” to value quality over quantity–that is, to be selective, choosing men who enhance her offspring’s chances of survival via some combination of their own genetic endowment and the resources they can contribute to the rearing of children.
It is crucial to understand that these are only metaphorical “strategies” and that evolutionary “interests”–the interests of one’s genes–are not the same as individual interests. Evolutionary psychology posits not that men decide to be promiscuous and women hypergamous because they want to have as many or as robust children as possible, but that these sexual and emotional instincts developed because they were conducive to reproduction over many generations in the ancestral environment.
Yet Slater claims “a new cohort of scientists have been challenging the very existence” of such sex differences:
Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed–and early research had shown–that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline”–a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).
Which proves . . . absolutely nothing. The average number of sex partners by sex is a meaningless statistic. To illustrate why, we shall establish an uncontroversial empirical fact and then proceed to prove, by means of pure logic, that the average female human has more lifetime heterosexual partners than the average male human.
The empirical fact is that more boys are born than girls. “In mammals, male live births exceed female ones,” according to a 2002 study published in the British Medical Journal. “In humans, the ratio of male births to total births is expected to be 0.515.” That translates into a male-to-female ratio of just above 1.06. Data on sex ratios at birth from the CIA World Factbook confirm this expectation. Of 228 countries (including dependent territories like Greenland and Puerto Rico), 226 had sex ratios at birth greater than 1. The only exceptions were little Liechtenstein, with a ratio of exactly 1, and negligible Nauru, a genuine outlier at 0.837. The practice of female abortion and in...
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As Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,"
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/10/2/l_102_01.html and the "modern synthesis"
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/history/modsynth.shtml combining Darwinian evolution from common descent including a mechanism of natural selection and Mendelian inheritance of discrete units of heredity is the standard point of view among all people who have a current scientific understanding of biology.
It is rather what is properly called "evolutionary psychology" (which at its core
http://www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer.html
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/busslab/pdffil...
is much more recent than Darwin's thought) that is actually controversial at the moment, with some very Darwinian biologists not liking evolutionary psychology well at all
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/12/10/ep-the-fundame...
while other biologists who are friends of those biologists like evolutionary psychology as an attempt to explain human behavior.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/is-evolut...
Charles Darwin made few assertions about "dating" in the current sense and hardly any settled assertions about human behavior, even in his book-length treatments of the subject, but raised a lot of questions. Some of the answers are still tentative and debated, and the overall approach of what fans call "evolutionary psychology" is controversial, but that evolution happened and had something to do with the current human condition is not controversial at all among scientists.
Slater–who has a new book out in which he claims that online dating, of all things, is revolutionizing the sexual marketplace–sets out to debunk a subspecialty known as evolutionary psychology, which seeks to explain differences between men and women in terms of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection.
In brief, the theory of sexual selection posits that members of each sex will employ different evolutionary “strategies” in order to ensure that their genes survive into future generations. Since the male makes the lesser investment in reproduction, men are driven to favor quantity over quality. They are especially attracted to youth and beauty because these are signs of fertility. But one man can reproduce with many women, so that there is no evolutionary need to be selective. The most efficient way to pass on his genetic legacy is to have intercourse with as many women as possible.
Reproductively speaking, that’s not an option for a woman, whose potential number of offspring is much smaller because she must endure the demands of carrying, bearing and nurturing every child she produces. Thus it is in her evolutionary “interest” to value quality over quantity–that is, to be selective, choosing men who enhance her offspring’s chances of survival via some combination of their own genetic endowment and the resources they can contribute to the rearing of children.
It is crucial to understand that these are only metaphorical “strategies” and that evolutionary “interests”–the interests of one’s genes–are not the same as individual interests. Evolutionary psychology posits not that men decide to be promiscuous and women hypergamous because they want to have as many or as robust children as possible, but that these sexual and emotional instincts developed because they were conducive to reproduction over many generations in the ancestral environment.
Yet Slater claims “a new cohort of scientists have been challenging the very existence” of such sex differences:
Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed–and early research had shown–that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline”–a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).
Which proves . . . absolutely nothing. The average number of sex partners by sex is a meaningless statistic. To illustrate why, we shall establish an uncontroversial empirical fact and then proceed to prove, by means of pure logic, that the average female human has more lifetime heterosexual partners than the average male human.
The empirical fact is that more boys are born than girls. “In mammals, male live births exceed female ones,” according to a 2002 study published in the British Medical Journal. “In humans, the ratio of male births to total births is expected to be 0.515.” That translates into a male-to-female ratio of just above 1.06. Data on sex ratios at birth from the CIA World Factbook confirm this expectation. Of 228 countries (including dependent territories like Greenland and Puerto Rico), 226 had sex ratios at birth greater than 1. The only exceptions were little Liechtenstein, with a ratio of exactly 1, and negligible Nauru, a genuine outlier at 0.837. The practice of female abortion and in...