23/02/2019 Cads and dads - Human mating strategies

Human mating strategies

Cads and dads

Promiscuity and delity seem to be speci c biological adaptations. Their manifestations in men
and women are not as di erent as you might expect

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Print edition | Science and technology

Feb 4th 2015

RECEIVED wisdom and biological theory both have it that males are (or, at least, would like
to be) more promiscuous than females. That does not stop a lot of men settling down
happily as faithful husbands. Conversely, wisdom and theory also suggest that once a
woman has kissed the frog who turns into a prince, she will stick with him till death do
them part. But that is belied by the number of females who wander from man to man, or
simply do without a helpmeet altogether.

As with many biological phenomena—height, for example—propensity for promiscuity in

either sex might be expected to be normally distributed; that is, to follow what are known
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colloquially as “bell curves”. The peaks of these curves would have di erent values between
the sexes, just as they do in the case of height. But the curves’ shapes would be similar.

Rafael Wlodarski of Oxford University wondered whether things are a little more
complicated than that. Perhaps, he and his colleagues posit in a study just published in
Biology Letters, rather than cads, dads and their female equivalents simply being at the
extremes of a continuous distribution, individual people are specialised for these roles. If
so, the curve for each sex would look less like the cross-section of a bell, and more like that
of a Bactrian camel, with two humps instead of one.

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The mating game

To test this idea the team looked at two sets of data which had been collected for other
purposes. One was from almost 600 people who had completed the “sociosexual
orientation inventory”, a questionnaire intended to elucidate the di erent tendencies of
people to engage in sexual relationships without a deep emotional commitment. The other
was of 1,300 people who had had the lengths of their index and ring ngers measured. The
ratio of these lengths indicates the e ect on an individual of exposure to testosterone in
the womb. (A long ring nger compared to the index nger means a big e ect.) This ratio
corresponds, throughout the primates as a group, to the amount of promiscuity found in a
species’s mating system.

Both of these tests con rmed the idea that men are more predisposed to promiscuity than
women. But Dr Wlodarski knew that already. What he wanted to determine was whether
distinct sexual strategies exist in either or both sexes. Doing that from the relatively small
samples available meant putting them through two statistical tests that asked how likely it
was they really did come from a bimodal, camel-shaped distribution rather than bell-
shaped one.

For both sexes, in the case of the sociosexual results, they clearly were bimodal. That
pattern remained when the sample’s American and British participants were analysed

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separately. In the case of the nger data, all of which came from British participants, the
men, but not the women, were bimodal.

These results suggest that—probably for men and possibly for women—caddishness,
daddishness and so on are indeed discrete behavioural strategies, perhaps underpinned by
genetic di erences, rather than being extremes of a continuum in the way that tall and
short people are. Although there is some overlap between the two strategies, they are, if Dr
Wlodarski and his colleagues are correct, what biologists call phenotypes. These are
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outward manifestations of underlying genes thatnow
give natural selection something to get
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Each week, over one million

Intriguingly, the di erence in phenotypic
subscribers mix between
trust the sexes
us to help themis not huge. Dr Wlodarski
and his colleagues calculate that cads sense
make outnumber dads
of the by a ratio of 57:43. Loose women, by
world.
contrast, are outnumbered by their more constant sisters, but by only 53:47. Each of these
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ratios tends in the direction of received wisdom. Both, though, are close enough to 50:50
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for that fact to need an explanation.

In the case of men, there is a likely explanation. The reproductive output of a male of any
species (measured as the number of his o spring that survive to adulthood) is limited
mainly by the number of mates he can inseminate. He therefore has an incentive to be
promiscuous (which will promote caddishness). But humans are unusual in that a father
often helps care for his o spring. Those o spring are (at least, in a state of nature) less
likely to survive and thrive without him. That will promote daddishness.

A woman’s evolutionary reasons to play fast and loose are less obvious, for having many
lovers will not bring her more children. It will, however, bring her children who are more
genetically diverse—and that might be an advantage in itself. Such children would, for
instance, be less susceptible to catching the same diseases as each other, since openness to
any given infection is partly determined by genetics.

If their analysis is correct, Dr Wlodarski and his colleagues have probably stumbled on a
type of equilibrium known to biologists as an evolutionarily stable strategy, in which a way
of behaving becomes more advantageous as it gets rarer, and less so as it gets commoner.
Cads succeed when dads are frequent, and vice versa. Neither can conquer and neither can
vanish. Such equilibria are part of a branch of maths called game theory—a name both men
and women might think eminently appropriate.

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