A question brought more clearly into focus recently and one that has been bothering us recently deserves to be aired.
How should we measure “mating success” when we are doing studies about human sexual selection? The article discussed in the previous post defined this as the number of sexual partners a male had had in the past year, but this raised some issues for us. Firstly, the number of sexual partners no longer correlates to the number of children; does it make sense to measure it this way because it might have in human evolutionary history? Additionally, this measurement discounts the role of choice. As I brought up in class, Brad Pitt could have many more sexual partners and children than he has had. Easily.
Just look at him.
So, we’re unsure about number of sexual partners as a measure of mating success. But we’re also not sure what we should use as a measure. Thoughts, anyone (classmates, countrymen, accidental readers)?
