The Mating Game Isn't Over: A Reply to Buller's Critique of the Evolutionary Psychology of Mating

Abstract

Eager undergraduates who are just learning about critical thinking will often raise their hand in class and say something like: Wait, it cant be true that men prefer young women! The frat guys I know all date 20-year-old sorority sisters, but my widower grandfather dates a 45- year-old kindergarten teacher! They fail to understand the ceteris paribus qualification that goes with all researchthat is, that all else is held equal. In Adapting Minds, philosopher David Buller makes just such a logical error the cornerstone of his attack on research in evolutionary psychology. Buller sets out to show not only that the theoretical and methodological doctrines of Evolutionary Psychology are problematic, but that Evolutionary Psychology has not, in fact, produced any solid empirical results (Buller, 2005, p. 15, emphasis added). However, his critique, though admirably zealous, is riddled with flaws. As Holcomb (2005) has recently said, this is an important book that has the potential to be very damaging to public reception of the present science of evolutionary psychology unless researchers can defend their work by engaging the content of the critiqueThe leaders of the field, and those researchers who know their work well, should beat the press to the punch and defend their work (pp. 392 and 398). In that spirit, we present a reply to the most egregious errors and missteps that Buller makes in his criticisms of evolutionary psychologists hypotheses and empirical evidence on mating. After what might seem like a reasonable review of the mate preferences literature, Buller concludes that evolutionary psychologists are mistaken in their claims of a universal male preference for relatively young women as mates and a universal female preference for high status men as mates. Male mating preferences, Buller argues, although sometimes containing a preference for young women, are far more complicated. We agree with this conclusion, but not because he demolishes the empirical evidence, or because his theoretical acumen is sharper than the many evolutionary psychologists who have written on this issue. Instead, we agree because the alternative he proposes is essentially the reigning consensus among evolutionary psychologists. He fails to understand that evolutionary psychologists also believe that people in different situations will behave differently. For instance, college aged fraternity boys and elderly widowers face different circumstances and are at different life-history stages; no one would expect them to have identical mates. Regarding the female preference for high status males,