#select

David Buss has amassed a lot of evidence that human females across many cultures tend to prefer males who have high social status, good income, ambition, intelligence, and energy--contrary to the views of some cultural anthropologists, who assume that people vary capriciously in their sexual preferences across different cultures. He interpreted this as evidence that women evolved to prefer good providers who could support their families by acquiring and defending resources I respect his data enormously, but disagree with his interpretation. The traits women prefer are certainly correlated with male abilities to provide material benefits, but they are also correlated with heritable fitness. If the same traits can work both as fitness indicators and as wealth indicators, so much the better. The problem comes when we try to project wealth indicators back into a Pleistocene past when money did not exist, when status did not imply wealth, and when bands did not stay in one place long enough to defend piles of resources. Ancestral women may have preferred intelligent, energetic men for their ability to hunt more effectively and provide their children with more meat. But I would suggest it was much more important that intelligent men tended to produce intelligent, energetic children more likely to survive and reproduce, whether or not their father stayed around. In other words, I think evolutionary psychology has put too much emphasis on male resources instead of male fitness in explaining women's sexual preferences. ↗

— Geoffrey Miller

#sexual-selection #family

Once you have selected a sport or a creative activity, the rules are pretty much the same. ↗

— Bill Toomey

#creative #much #once #pretty #rules

Once he had selected the path he was going down he really had to stick with it in a 16 game match. He had to try and hit in the one direction but unfortunately for him - though fortunately for me! - he hit in the wrong direction. ↗

— Vladimir Kramnik

#down #fortunately #game #going #had

You were told how much space so it was a matter of whether you could send in two paintings or three paintings, you know, pending where the show was being held. You did submit work to be accepted. Once you were accepted that was it. You did your own selection of what went in. ↗

— Lee Krasner

#being #could #did #held #how

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#course #evolution #human #human mind #mind

I'm honoured to have been selected to be the Labour candidate for Manchester Central. ↗

— Lucy Powell

#candidate #central #honoured #i #labour

I think people forget that to be on the A list you first had to go through the original graded Parliamentary Selection Board. I did that and then like everyone else had the further interviews to get onto the A list. ↗

— Adam Rickitt

#did #else #everyone #first #forget

The duty of responsibility placed on any MP is one of the greatest honours that can be bestowed and I for one don't believe the Conservative Party would abuse that trust by selecting someone who did not have the goods to do the job, just for the sake of media coverage. ↗

— Adam Rickitt

#any #believe #bestowed #conservative #conservative party

Selective literalism' is another attempt in a very long line of techniques designed and intended to shape God into our own image". ~R. Alan Woods [2012] ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#literalism #r-alan-woods #selective-literalism #design

Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life! ↗

— Charles Darwin

#natural-selection #species #life