[pilliwinks]

Looks like there are plenty of folk interested in why women mate [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

I readily confess to being no anthropologist or sociologist, so I will gladly bow to whatever is the received wisdom on who it is that women prefer. My point is that our theories should be prioritised if they contain current data about current habits, and treated with some suspicion if they are based on hypotheses about what did or did not occur in the Pleistocene.

It would be unfortunate if our best theories for human behaviour were of the form: we see now that A does X to B, we speculate that in the Pleistocene it was adaptive for As to do X to B, we now have an explanation for why A does X to B.

The reason this is unsatisfactory is that I find I can make an adaptive Pleistocene 'explanations' for just about any behaviour, including contradictory ones.

Of course if you actually have convincing data about sexual habits in the Pleistocene, I'll be the first to applaud.

Please note that I have no problem with people being driven by unconscious urges or goals. I just have problems with attempts to make sociological hypotheses sound genetic by attributing an imagined selective history to them.