232 Catherine Wilson
the absence of this information, it is hard to tell what behavioural strategies were
selected for. The assumption that women derive a benefit from their social asso-
ciation with men is clearly inconsistent meanwhile with the assumption that men
rely on women to “take it from there” once they are impregnated. The same point
holds for women; we do not know how much of the variance in female reproduc-
tive success depended on individual behavioural variables, including promiscuity,
fidelity, maternal care, caretaking of males, or aggression towards other females or
their offspring. Nor do we know how much depended on behavioural vs. nonbe-
havioural strategies including the possession of good looks, intelligence, or a good
immune system.
Studies of revealed preference shed less light on the question of male and female
traits selected for than is generally supposed. In a large cross-cultural study of
more than 10,000 individuals, David Buss found that, while both sexes overwhelm-
ingly regarded intelligence and kindness as their main criteria in selecting mates,
men preferred young and physically attractive mates, whereas women attached
less importance to age and physical appearance and more to economic advantage
[Buss, 1989]. This finding might seem to license the conclusion that women who
allocate time and effort to establishing lucrative careers will place themselves at a
disadvantage relative to women who marry young and allocate time and effort to
beautification, and that the former ought to be dissuaded from career pathways
that are advantageous to men. A similar conclusion might be drawn from the
much-discussed male preference for particular female waist-to-hip (WHR) ratios,
which men are able to discriminate very accurately, and which are hypothesized
to be reliable signals of fecundity [Singh, 2002]. It might seem rational, in light of
this datum, for men and women to allocate their efforts differently if their main
goal in life is to attract a large pool of potential mates or to have as many children
as possible.
It is unlikely, however, that women evolved chiefly to give reliable signs of
fecundity and to devote the majority of their efforts to giving unreliable signs of
fecundity by way of time-consuming beautification to the exclusion of other forms
of achievement. Buss’s research has been criticized as unilluminating, since the
respondents were all university educated and the cultures studied were those in
which a woman’s status and well-being depended significantly on her husband’s
income [Boyd and Silk, 1997, 645–7]. In the early adaptative environment, female
status, whatever it depended upon, could not have depended upon this. Moreover,
the rigours of the early adaptative environment, the need for social intelligence,
vigilance, competence at provisioning, and teaching ability on the part of successful
mothers, make it unlikely, as Hrdy points out, that the Pleistocene woman who
relied on her beauty to pull her offspring through left many descendants [Hrdy,
1999, 24]. It also renders it unlikely that men who selected mates chiefly on the
basis of the WHR did so either.
Women’s alleged preference for older and more established mates, it should be
noted, does not translate either into a direct preference for such persons as sexual
partners, as opposed to protectors and nurturers, nor into a direct preference