The Mate Selection Process

Someone can underestimate the woman’s risk of choosing the wrong man. One can say: “well, she doesn’t have to marry him, just a short relationship or a one-night stand”. We can argue that at the moment of her choosing for the potential partner she is not guided by her rationale mind. Other parts of her brain and body come into play during this process.

The mate selection process is quite important. We cannot understand how and why a person is attracted by another person and how this leads ultimately to the evolution of the human species, if we don’t understand how this process works.

A species, being it humans, horses or fishes, to evolve needs not only to procreate but also to be sure that the offsprings are strong enough to survive. They must have all the characteristics that will allow them not to succumb and to project in the future the genes of their parents or no evolution of the species will take place.

To do this there has to be a way to select the proper mate so to optimize the reproductive success. The traits that guarantees this success are unequally distributed in the population, thus selection is very important. This, in turn, generates intra-sexual competition for mates in both sexes.

As in marketing, the only way to let people know about your product and beat competitors is advertising what you have to sell. This is exactly what happens with intra-sexual competition. Males and, to a lesser degree, females, try to advertise the genotypic and phenotypic traits that signal their mate quality.

The advertisement has to be strong enough to beat the competition but not so strong as to run the risk of being detected by competitors.