In many animals, sexual selection on male traits results from female mate choice decisions made during a sequence of courtship behaviors. We use a bower-building cichlid fish, Nyassachromis cf. microcephalus, to show how applying standard selection analysis to data on sequential female assessment provides new insights into sexual selection by mate choice. We first show that the cumulative selec...

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, ...

Learning in the context of mate choice can influence sexual selection and speciation. Relatively little work, however, has been conducted on the role of learning in the context of mate choice, and this topic has been mostly ignored in insects even though insects have served as a prime model system in research on sexual selection and incipient speciation. Extending recent work indicating apparen...

Costs of sperm production may lead to prudence in male sperm allocation and also to male mate choice. Here, we develop a life history-based mutual mate choice model that takes into account the lost-opportunity costs for males from time out in sperm recovery and lets mate competition be determined by the prevailing mate choice strategies. We assume that high mating rate may potentially lead to s...

Question: What mate choice strategies are evolutionarily stable when individuals vary in quality and there is competition over mates? Mathematical method: We analyse a life-history-based game theoretical model of a mating system. The evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) may be random mating, or any kind of assortative mating dependent on the numerical values of a set of probabilities. We solve ...

In house mice, genetic compatibility is influenced by the t haplotype, a driving selfish genetic element with a recessive lethal allele, imposing fundamental costs on mate choice decisions. Here, we evaluate the cost of genetic incompatibility and its implication for mate choice in a wild house mice population. In laboratory reared mice, we detected no fertility (number of embryos) or fecundity...

Those who are physically attractive reap many benefits—from higher average wages to a wider variety of mate choices. Recent studies have investigated what constitutes beauty and how beauty affects explicit social judgments, but little is known about the perceptual or cognitive processing that is affected by aesthetic judgments of faces and why beauty affects our behavior. In this study, the aut...