Heroism is apparently nonadaptive in Darwinian terms, so why does it exist at all? Risk-taking and heroic behavior are predominantly male tendencies, and literature and legend reflect this. This study explores the possibility that heroism persists in many human cultures owing to a female...

Despite extensive literature on female mate choice, empirical evidence on women's preferences in the search for a sperm donor is scarce, even though this search, by isolating a male's genetic impact on offspring from other factors like paternal investment, offers a naturally 'controlled'...

While many models have investigated the role of competitive mate selection processes in human marriage, few have addressed the potential for assortative processes to explain the observed demographics, as well as simultaneously investigating divorce. To explore the possibility that assortative...

In this paper, we study whether simple heuristics can arise as equilibrium strategies in mutual sequential mate search. To this aim, we extend the mate search model of Todd and Miller (1999), involving an adolescence (learning) phase followed by an actual mating phase, to a strategic game where...

Human mate choice is a boundedly rational process where individuals search for their mates without appealing to optimization techniques due to informational, computational and time constraints. A seminal work by Todd and Miller (1999) models this search process using simple heuristics, i.e....

Despite extensive literature on female mate choice, empirical evidence on women’s preferences in the search for a sperm donor is scarce, even though this search, by isolating a male’s genetic impact on offspring from other factors like paternal investment, offers a naturally 'controlled'...

Egg trading—the alternating exchange of egg parcels during mating by simultaneous hermaphrodites—is one of the best-documented examples of reciprocity between non-relatives. By offering eggs only to partners who reciprocate, traders increase their reproductive success in the male role, but...

Three paradigms for the study of the evolution of behavior are reviewed. The first is kin selection, originally seen as an explanation for the evolution of altruistic behavior among relatives. This leads to the concept of inclusive fitness as a measure of an individual's contribution to...

Researchers know very little about \textit{how} people choose mates. To remedy this, the present study examined the influence of number of potential mates and mate-standard strength on single women's choice satisfaction and strategy use. Single women chose one potential partner from a set of 4,...