How Mate Choice Shaped Human Nature: A Review of Sexual Selection and Human Evolution

The application of sexual-selection theory to human behavior has been the greatest success story in evolutionary psychology, and one of the most fruitful and fascinating developments in the human sciences over the last two decades. Ironically, this development would have seemed absurd only 20 years ago. At that time, many biologists considered sexual selection through mate choice to be Darwin’s least successful idea: If not outright wrong, it was at most a minor, uninteresting, even pathological evolutionary process. At that time, any “Darwinization” of the human sciences would have had to rely on natural selection theory, which bears much less directly on human social, sexual, and cultural behavior.