Mate Choice Strategies argue against special creation

In language studies, we define between "online" and "offline" behavior. "Online" behavior is where somebody doesn't take the time to think and re-think a decision, they just "do"; "offline" is the opposite.I think the term "mate choice" is folded over two things that can be, and usefully "should" be, separated. One is a "online" choice of a sexual partner, the kind of judgement that "which one of these is more attractive" would work off of. The other is an "offline" choice, the kind of judgement about what kind of person we would marry. This judgement changes (in my unscientific thinking on the subject) due to culture, experience, and .. "offline thinking."So, I'd like to make two points:1. I'm not sure that your study is addressing this; I think you might be focused purely on what I call the "online" type of mate selection. If so, then I think some of the posts in this thread are wandering away from it. If not, then I think it's an important distinction to bring up.2. Do you have any findings that span across culture? I didn't really catch how your study teased apart culturally "defined" values vs. "evolutionary" values. Since "cultural values" seemingly would be an evolutionarily selective pressure (thinking that those who typify cultural values will be "desirable," and thus reproduce more than those who do not typify cultural values, and then are pushed to the outside), I'm not even sure there's a big difference between the two.

P_R, That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure. I think the sub-thread started by DarkStar was leaning quite a bit to the conscious direction, so I wanted to check. No doubt about it. In this speech titled "The Biology of Our Uniqueness", Robert Sapolsky goes to great lengths to talk about where the uniqueness of humans lies. He argues that, in some important sense, it is not in the biology; it's in how we uniquely use it. As a prospective graduate student in cognitive science, I'm really interested in how comparative neurology can constrain the problem of "solving" "the human condition."Actually yes. There are lots of studies in this area, and this particular kind of study was also performed in Dominca, West Indies and found the exact same results. I'm sorry if it's a bother... if you can find it without too much trouble, I'd love to have it. I'm not very knowledgeable on these subjects, and it's an area I want to increase my knowledge on. A good quesiton, and similar to one that I'm ...kind of... grappling with in the domain of language and culture. Once again, as an unknowledgeable pedestrian, I would motivate the thought like this:Culture is built off of our unconscious biases. I would model culture as a feedback system between our unconscious biases and the selection pressure that the culture exerts. Because culture DOES have a conscious component to it, then I think it's reasonable to see conscious shift in culture propogated down to the biological level. Of course, with population sizes and thing s changing as they do these days, that's unreasonable. But with smaller population sizes and more stable cultures, it's a possibility that I'm interested to at least entertain ... until I educate myself more on the subject.Thanks for the response!Ben

P_R,I thought I responded to this message, but apparently not.I did find David Buss' homepage, where he has numerous free publications. As you mentioned, the '89 article is not available.At this point, there's lots to read; if I ever find a need for the '89 article, I'll let you know. But for now, I've got more than I can handle already Thanks again for all of the info.Ben