Carl Zimmer and Randall Parker are both talking about love & chemistry (and evolution & monogamy) over at their blogs, check out their posts (follow the links). Also check out Imbler Volokh’s genius-on-the-street perspective on mating & dating issues here, here and here. So why do women focus on being sexy so much? Well, the fact that America is a serially monogamous society where there tends to be a “male shortage” as women push past 30 (there are more men than women in age cohorts past 28, the pairing of older men with younger women accentuates the imbalance as far as mating goes).
All this goes to show that there are important biological and individual considerations to take into account when it comes to mating and dating. Systems like “arranged marriage” are not romantic precisely because they are hyper-rational, taking into account data about potentional partners in a very empirical fashion, sometimes resembling command-style economics. When I was in Bangladesh, there was a young woman my mother wanted me to marry who seemed rather uninterested in her university coursework, and my uncle stated, “I know she is genetically intelligent, her father and her uncles are all rather intelligent and professional oriented.” This sort of gleaning of data of the extended family tree is common. Not that this sort of thing doesn’t go on in conventional (from the American perspective) mating & dating scenarios, but I tend to perceive the system as somewhat ass-backwards in that inter-personal compatibility is assumed to follow after inter-familial compatibility is ascertained. How’s that for kin selection? In some ways, assortive mating is extremely strong in arranged marriage systems, but sometimes I wonder if parents also make sure that their “wild” child pairs up with a more conformist and stable individual when possible, nudging atypical personalities toward a more conventional social channel. In contrast, we’ve all seen the assortment of like-with-like in American society, as deviants have formed their own subcultures of freaks, geaks and all those goths.
So here’s an analogy for you: arranged marriage is like socialism or corporatism, Western style marriage is more like the free market mediated by individual preferences. Which would you bet on? I guess that depends on what you think a “good end” is.
Posted by razib at 10:15 PM