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By Root 934 0

of a lady are statistically among human beings. Monogamy demands assortative mating by pairs, mate attainable for them according to a variety of criteria. These criteria part of a human mating system that aims not at crushing competing members of the same sex but at attracting and seducing members of the sex. This second kind of sexual selection takes place in courtship, and it has affected the evolution of the human body and, more importantly for our purposes, done more to create the human personality as know it today than any other single evolutionary factor. Just as sexual in animals is concentrated in males, and has tended to perfect offensive and defensive combat weapons such as teeth, claws, and antlers, mate choice in courtship is dominated by females, and especially Homo sapiens by female feeling and discrimination. It is directed toward more subtle and charming qualities of body but also of mind; in fact, sexual selection is the driving force that has defined the very meaning charm” in how human beings tend to regard each other.

The reason females tend to dominate sexual selection is built into the logic of evolution. The burdens of conception are much heavier for than for males. A girl arrives at puberty already possessing four hundred eggs; she will issue one or occasionally two month until menopause, never producing any others. When conception occurs, it is followed by a nine-month gestation, with sickness weakened mobility. Then on to months of lactation, with the mother nurturing a hungry, mewling infant that in the end will require more years to achieve maturity than the young of any other species of animal. Men, on the other hand, may produce around twelve million sperm hour and, in principle, may inseminate large numbers of women— then abandon them at will. Thus the biggest recorded number of children born of one woman, an eigh teenth-century Rus sian peasant, is to be sixty-nine, but that included many multiple births twenty-seven pregnancies. The largest number of children fathered man, Mulai Ismail Ibn Sharif, a contemporary of Louis XIV, is be 1,042, naturally involving hundreds of mothers in a harem. (This number is on the low side: it is merely when they stopped counting.) A man who inseminates a low-quality, irresponsible mate still enjoys chance of his genes being passed on at very little cost—indeed, at whatsoever, if he abandons the woman and baby. For the woman, deep, innate propensity for women to be far more cautious and discriminating than men in choosing a mate for procreation: women not need a mate who is healthy, they need one who will stick around, and protect. (That the higher degree of female discrimination product of the lopsided costs of child-bearing is demonstrated by that in each of those few species where the costs of gestation borne by males—pipefish sea horses, for instance—it is males who the more discriminating sex. This role reversal, however, is occurs in no species of mammal.)

Again, the very idea that one man might, elephant-seal style, control hundreds of women in a harem is a reminder of how far some religious politi cal structures of the last ten thousand years have drawn us away from the prehistoric scene in which hunter-gatherer sexual preferences evolved. The small, mobile bands of human beings that came to flourish the Pleistocene developed mate preferences based on their conditions, ours. These tastes persist in our preferences in flirtation, courtship, mating. They reveal themselves in experiences of plea sure and revulsion, including the physical features and qualities of personality we regard attractive and charming—or, indeed, as beautiful—in human beings.

II

What, to begin with, are some of the outer, physical features that may make a member of the opposite sex eye-catching? One of the most famous studies of sexual attraction involves the waist-to-hip ratio. Healthy premenopausal women will have a ratio of .67 to .80—hardly hourglass, but possibly a Coke bottle; this body shape is regarded as feminine” and attractive by men. Women know this, and the history