Mate preference for well-adapted individuals may strengthen divergent selection and thereby facilitate adaptive divergence. We performed mate choice experiments in which we manipulated male red crossbill (Loxia curvirostra complex) feeding rates. Using association time as a proxy for preference, we found that females preferred faster foragers, which reinforces natural selection because poorly a...

In the pantheon of evolutionary forces, the optimizing Apollonian powers of natural selection are generally assumed to dominate the dark Dionysian dynamics of sexual selection. But this need not be the case, particularly with a class of selective mating mechanisms called ‘directional mate preferences’ (Kirkpatrick, 1987). In previous simulation research, we showed that nondirectional assortativ...

Aggression. Offensive action, particularly in regard to defending resources. Aggression in defending females and other resources should be favored by selection when there are fewer resources than competitors and when an individual can boost fitness by forcibly removing another individual. Intersexual Selection. Sexual selection due to interactions between the sexes. Mate choice by males or fema...

Contemporary mate preferences can provide important clues to human reproductive history. Little is known about which characteristics people value in potential mates. Five predictions were made about sex differences in human mate preferences based on evolutionary conceptions of parental investment, sexual selection, human reproductive capacity, and sexual asymmetries regarding certainty of pater...

The main objective of the IBM Grand Central Station (GCS) is to gather information of virtually any type of formats (text, data, image, graphics, audio, video) from the cyberspace, to process/index/summarize the information, and to push the right information to the right people. Because of the very large scale of the cyberspace, parallel processing in both crawling/gathering and information pro...

Throughout history, humans have faced critical challenges that included finding a mate, keeping that mate, caring for kin, forming coalitions, and gaining some status. Solving each of these ancestral challenges involved forming a different type of social relationship. An evolutionary perspective suggests that there is a set of fundamentally different types of close relationships associated with...

Natural selection and sexual selection are usually seen as either two different and separate processes or with sexual selection being a subset of natural selection but distinct from other processes such as kin selection. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of a connection between discriminatory altruistic behaviors consistent with kin selection and the sex-specific criteria that men a...