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...or why I lost my job writing summaries of academic papers...
THE face of dating may have changed down the years, but the laws of attraction have not changed since the days of the Neanderthals, a new study says.
It seems that men still seek out the most attractive women and women are drawn to the men that make the best providers - leveraging their looks to snag the best mate they can.
Or at least that's what a group of researchers found when they observed some modern singles at work - in a speed-dating session in Munich, Germany.
In questionnaires filled out before they went into the session, the participants said they were looking for mirror-images of themselves - someone who matched them in terms of status, commitment and looks.
But when the 21 women and 25 men sat down for "mini-dates'' with members of the opposite sex and later chose which ones they would like to go on a proper date with, the investigators saw a completely different dynamic at work.
"There's this disparity between what people say they want in a mate and what they end up choosing,'' said Peter Todd, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington who worked on the paper.
The men homed in on the most attractive women, while the women were drawn to material wealth and security. The females were also much more calculating and picky in their choices of prospective mates than their male counterparts.
While the men opted on average to see every second woman, the women expressed an interest in seeing only a third of the men again, and they appeared to calibrate their choices based on how attractive they thought they were and who they could realistically expect to bag.
"The women were self-censoring. The men weren't,'' said Mr Todd.
The results suggest that modern-day singles, like generations of their ancestors, are driven by biology with men seeking the best specimens to procreate with, and women seeking the best long-term partners.
"Evolutionary theories in psychology suggest that men and women should trade off different traits in each other, and when we look at the actual mate choices people make, this is what we find evidence for,'' said Mr Todd.
"Ancestral individuals who made their mate choices in this way - women trading off their attractiveness for higher quality men and men looking for any attractive women who will accept them - would have had an evolutionary advantage in greater numbers of successful offspring.''
The study is published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
THE face of dating may have changed down the years, but the laws of attraction have not changed since the days of the Neanderthals, a new study says.
It seems that men still seek out the most attractive women and women are drawn to the men that make the best providers - leveraging their looks to snag the best mate they can.
Or at least that's what a group of researchers found when they observed some modern singles at work - in a speed-dating session in Munich, Germany.
In questionnaires filled out before they went into the session, the participants said they were looking for mirror-images of themselves - someone who matched them in terms of status, commitment and looks.
But when the 21 women and 25 men sat down for "mini-dates'' with members of the opposite sex and later chose which ones they would like to go on a proper date with, the investigators saw a completely different dynamic at work.
"There's this disparity between what people say they want in a mate and what they end up choosing,'' said Peter Todd, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington who worked on the paper.
The men homed in on the most attractive women, while the women were drawn to material wealth and security. The females were also much more calculating and picky in their choices of prospective mates than their male counterparts.
While the men opted on average to see every second woman, the women expressed an interest in seeing only a third of the men again, and they appeared to calibrate their choices based on how attractive they thought they were and who they could realistically expect to bag.
"The women were self-censoring. The men weren't,'' said Mr Todd.
The results suggest that modern-day singles, like generations of their ancestors, are driven by biology with men seeking the best specimens to procreate with, and women seeking the best long-term partners.
"Evolutionary theories in psychology suggest that men and women should trade off different traits in each other, and when we look at the actual mate choices people make, this is what we find evidence for,'' said Mr Todd.
"Ancestral individuals who made their mate choices in this way - women trading off their attractiveness for higher quality men and men looking for any attractive women who will accept them - would have had an evolutionary advantage in greater numbers of successful offspring.''
The study is published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
