A few weeks ago, the question came up about choosing mates for physical attractiveness or mental ability. The comment was made that women choose differently depending on where they are in their fertility cycle. During the nonfertile period, women gravitate toward the nerdy, stable, brainy guy, but during ovulation they crave the handsome rogue with the protruding buttocks.
An idea occurred to me: assuming the above theory is correct (ladies, please comment if you wish to reopen this discussion) and further theorizing no societal intervention or controls of any kind, then the stable nerds would end up with most of the sex (since the females would be infertile most of the time) and yet most of the offspring would, oddly enough, resemble the handsome rogue. Correct? Since our society has invented marriage, which makes it less convenient (at least) for the women to visit Mr. Buns during the fertile few days, it seems that societal restraints would serve to tilt the scales back in favor of Mr. Brains. Right? Does this explain why humans are getting more intelligent over the past few millenia? spike