Women's preferences for men's androgen dependent secondary sexual traits are proposed to be phenotypically plastic in response to exposure to pathogens and pathogen disgust. While previous studies report that masculinity in facial shape is more attractive to women who have recently been exposed to pathogenic cues and who are high in self-reported pathogen disgust, facial hair may reduce male at...

The past two decades have seen extensive growth of sexual selection research. Theoretical and empirical work has clarified many components of pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection, such as aggressive competition, mate choice, sperm utilization and sexual conflict. Genetic mechanisms of mate choice evolution have been less amenable to empirical testing, but molecular genetic analyses can now ...

The impact of learning ability and sexual selection on the climate biodiversity crisis is currently unclear. Using African butterfly Bicyclus anynana, which shows strong phenotypic plasticity (i.e., polyphenism) in response to temperature, we tested whether affects mate preferences under warming. We first modelled warming scenarios then showed experimentally that temperature becomes an unreliab...

Background: Divergent natural selection between ecologically different environments often drives speciation. An unanswered question concerns the importance of sexual selection in generating sexual isolation during this process. We illustrate that four distinct mechanisms can drive sexual isolation: (I) divergent sexual selection, (II) uniform sexual selection, (III) intrapopulation assortative ...

Evidence from 61 follow-up studies was examined to identify the factors most strongly related to recidivism among sexual offenders. On average, the sexual offense recidivism rate was low (13.4%; n = 23,393). There were, however, subgroups of offenders who recidivated at high rates. Sexual offense recidivism was best predicted by measures of sexual deviancy (e.g., deviant sexual preferences, pri...

This study examines sexual communication by describing the content of sexual disclosures within marital relationships and assessing the association between sexual disclosures and relational outcomes, specifically relational satisfaction and closeness. A survey administered to 293 married individuals (58% female) who had an average age of 40 years (range = 20-73), 13.7 years of marriage (range =...

Sexual selection by female choice can shape the evolution of male traits within populations, since the most attractive males experience an increase in fitness through elevated mating success. Speciation by sexual selection occurs when evolution in traits and preferences within populations causes differentiation among populations, such that females in alternative populations prefer sexual signal...