What type of girl do you not want?

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the calories/vitamins always go to the fetus first, so the mother's caloric requirements wouldn't affect the child's development to that degree. the offspring might not survive if insufficient calories are available, but it is the same with a short woman's child.

a taller man wouldn't necessarily be a more stable provider, as it is the efforts of the entire group that lead to increased or decreased nutrition. in terms of resources, it makes more sense to have smaller men as taller men would have to use community resources to feed themselves, which would be detrimental to the unborn child. better if they were smaller and not diverting resources to their own bodies.

also, women were also significant providers, and if we accept the model that women did most of the gathering in prehistoric societies, then a taller woman would also be a member of a group with better gathering skills - hence she would be a better provider if she were tall.

there are many models of nutrition from many different ethnic groups in the past - some depended heavily on hunting, others scavenged, some were sedentary fishers, and still others gathered fresh grains and fruits. it's not so simple to decide that our prehistory led to certain sexual selections, because there isn't one single model of how nutrients were obtained by our ancestors. also, height changes can happen in a single generation so we can't fully extrapolate our ancestor's choices to our current mate selection.

the answers simply aren't fully logical (from either perspective) and i don't think we can come to any reasonable conclusions by speculating on the truthiness of our opposing theories without any proper evidence. it's an interesting exercise, but we simply don't have the answers. so i'm going to let the thread go back on-topic.

you participated in the derailment.

Is that the really bad one in Maryland in 1987?

I like tall girls. I like short girls. I like girls who are average height! I like girls, girls, girls, girls, girls all over the world!

OK now this thread has a Jay-Z reference and it really is sufficiently derailed.

I don't understand why height is not necessarily good for women because of the almost insignificant increase in nutritional needs.

Also I'm tall and I know lots of guys that are shorter than me have made fun of me for it, which seems really odd. Open hostility for my height, I'm fine with them finding my height unattractive but it's a big sign of insecurity when they mock my height as if there's something wrong with it.

Why are so many men insecure about women being taller than them? Is it because they're afraid we'll steal their girlfriends?

you know, i actually just did a stupid amount of research on this topic (i am really curious now), and it turns out that women have much more stringent height requirements than man. men are more willing to date a taller man than women are willing to date a shorter man. apparently we are more strongly reinforcing the height differences than men are. of course this was based on surveys and not actual dating selections so we can't look at it as absolute truth. nonetheless it is very interesting to consider.

Women....

Sorry, couldn't resist.


This reinforces the theory i mentioned above.

Yes, a lot of men like taller women but most of them fail to get their attention.

true. i think the ultimate evolutionary reasons are not known, but women are driving the height disparity bus for some reason. men are willing to be much more open to a wide variety of women in this way. i wonder if women are actually pickier in other ways in dating? i think it's a question worth asking.

I won't date this girl:

^ but she's styled as a NINJA TURTLE

That + her face.

Nephilim!

It's a question that has been answered about a million times in the last 30 years. Women are more selective in their partners because the only highly successful reproductive strategy they have had available to them throughout history has been to get a man to stick around to help them raise the kids.

A man on the other hand, has 2 valid strategies available;
1. Stick with the women and play out her reproductive strategy, thus going for a few higher quality offspring.
2. Sire as many children as possible with as many women as possible thus creating a large number of lower quality offspring.

So, women have to be more selective, not only because they in ancient times would have a much higher opportunity cost, 9 months of pregnancy, 3 - 4 years of lactating (thus being unlikely to be fertile) then an additional 5 - 6 years minimum of raising the child. Whereas the opportunity cost for the male is 100 million to 200 million of constantly replenishing sperm.

There was an experiment done, where an attractive female co-ed would walk up to men and ask one out of 3 questions:
1. Would you like to go out on a date with me.
2. Would you like to go back to my place.
3. Would you like to come back to my place and have sex with me.

75% of males answered yes to the 3rd question.
When the experiment was repeated with an attractive male student, asking the same question, 0% of women answered yes to the 3rd question.

For women, their strategy is to have their offspring produced with as high of a quality partner as possible. For a man, they can also go for having their offspring produced with as high a quality partner as possible, but they can also adopt the strategy of producing more offspring with more partners.

As I've recommended to you before, Matt Ridley's "The Red Queen: Sex and the evolution of human nature" is a good starting point for reading up on this, as it is a book which while drawing largely on scholarly sources is not overly technical, nor does it assume knowledge of the topic by the reader. After you've read that, Pinker wrote a book called "How the mind works" which deals with some of the same subject material among other things. Further reading includes the works of A.F Dixon (published by Oxford Biology), add Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" and you should start to get a clearer picture of human mating from both a evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology.

Once you've read the recommended literature, I'll be happy to recommend some books on the topic of seduction, body language and human communication in order to help you see how the concepts in the scholarly literature translate into human behavior.

For once, don't argue with me, just read the material. This is the one topic which has consumed more of my time than just about any other subject.

Last edited by TM on 06 Sep 2012, 4:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I won't date this thing either:

I don't think I could date a woman who is anti-abortion. Something about that really bothers me moreso than straight women or any men who are anti-abortion.

So you wouldn't date the pope?

Edit: Oh, nevermind, you were talking about lesbian women.

have you read Sex at Dawn or Delusions of Gender? those are the books i would recommend for any person who wants to understand the fallacies behind attributing innate gender differences to aspects of evolution or even aspects of current human behaviour. ev-psych is largely sexist unscientific drivel, and you can gain a better understanding of that from reading these books.

the study you quoted has been debunked for many reasons, one of them being the fact that it was only performed with college students, and safety was not assured for the individuals studied. when safety concerns are removed (i.e. friends are approaching and not strangers), humans tend to behave differently. since most sexual partners are individuals that a person is previously familiar with, the study only shows that college females are more careful when approached by strangers than college males. nothing more and nothing less. it demonstrates absolutely nothing about pickiness.

one study that used speed dating showed that when roles are reversed and women are hopping from table to table and men are sitting still and making selections, men become just as picky as women supposedly are. so it's not too accurate to attribute pickiness to anything other than our current social dating constructs.

but ultimately, if you actually support ev-psych and its silly conclusions and are approaching this discussion from that corner, there isn't any point in having this discussion. there is a chasm between the science and social science that i study and the pseudoscientific conclusions of ev-psych.