Human Sex Differences in Behavioral Ecological Perspective

Abstract

Behavioral ecology, based in the theory of natural selection, predicts that certain behaviors are likely to differ consistently between the sexes in humans as well as other species: aggression, resource striving, information content of sexual signalling. These differences, though of course open to modification by cultural practice, arise because male and female humans, like males and females of other mammal species, typically optimize their reproductive lifetimes through different behaviors: males specializing in mating effort (which has a high fixed cost, and is not offspring-specific), and females in parental effort (which has more linear reproductive returns, and is offspring-specific). The resulting patterns are reviewed.