Parental investment, mate choice, and mate quality.

Local mate competition and parental investment in social insects.

Efforts to develop formulas for contrasting genetic interests of workers and queens in social Hymenoptera are complicated by many factors, including multiple matings by queens, oviposition by unmated females, and mating rivalry among genetic relatives (Hamilton's "local mate competition"). Because of haplodiploid sex determination in Hymenoptera, when such influences are absent, queens benefit ...

Mate choice

If you are interested in the diversity of life, you can not ignore the plethora of striking behaviors and morphologies that have been the handiwork of sexual selection. The peacock’s tail is one emblematic result, but a compendium would also include: the songs of birds, frogs, and crickets, the brilliant colors of fishes and corals, the complex odors of moths and mustelids, and the differences ...

Mate Choice and Learning

Do as we wish: Parental tactics of mate choice manipulation.

The mate choices of children do not always meet with the approval of their parents. As a consequence, the latter employ a battery of tactics that they use to manipulate the mating behavior of the former. This paper offers the first taxonomy of parental tactics of mate choice manipulation. In particular, in Study 1, 57 semi-structured interviews revealed 72 acts that parents employ to influence ...

Mate choice turns cognitive.

Evolutionary psychology has revolutionized research on human mate choice and sexual attraction in recent years, combining a rigorous Darwinian framework based on sexual selection theory with a loosely cognitivist orientation to task analysis and mechanism modelling. This hard Darwinian, soft computational approach has been most successful at revealing the adaptive logic behind physical beauty, ...