The Evolution of Desire - Revised Edition 4 by David M. Buss

Author:David M. Buss
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780465008025
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2003-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Evolutionary Arms Race

Conflicts between men and women pervade their interactions and relationships. These range from conflicts over sexual access in dating couples, to fighting over commitment and investment among married couples to sexual harassment in the workplace, date-rape, and rape on the streets. The vast majority of these conflicts can be traced directly to men’s and women’s evolved mating strategies. The strategies pursued by members of one sex often interfere with those of the other sex.

Both sexes have evolved psychological mechanisms, such as anger, sadness, and jealousy, that function to alert them to interference with their mating strategies. A woman’s anger is evoked most intensely in the specific contexts in which a man interferes with her mating strategies, for example, if he acts condescending, abusive, or sexually aggressive toward her. A man’s anger is most intensely evoked when a woman interferes with his mating strategies, for example, by spurning his advances, refusing to have sex with him, or cuckolding him.

Unfortunately, these battles create a spiraling arms race over evolutionary time. For every increment in men’s ability to deceive women, women evolve comparable increments in their ability to detect deception. Better abilities to detect deception, in turn, create the evolutionary conditions for the opposite sex to develop increasingly subtle forms of deception. For every escalating test that women impose on men to gauge the depth of their commitment, men develop increasingly more elaborate strategies to mimic commitment. This development in turn favors more refined and subtle tests by women to weed out the fakers. And for every form of abuse heaped on one sex, the other evolves methods for escaping the abuse. As women evolve better and more sophisticated strategies to achieve their mating goals, men evolve increasingly sophisticated strategies to achieve theirs. Because the mating goals of the sexes interfere with each other, there is no evolutionary end to the spiral.

The adaptive emotions such as anger and psychological pain, however, help women and men to reduce the costs they experience when someone attempts to interfere with their mating strategies. In the context of dating or marriage, these emotions sometimes lead to a termination of the relationship.

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