Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

And now my conversation with Dr. David Buss.

Well, David, delighted to be here.

I'm excited to ask you a number of questions about these super interesting topics about how people select mates. Just to start off, perhaps you could just orient us a little bit about mate choice.

You know, some of the primary criteria that studies show men and women use

in order to select mates, transient mates, as well as lifetime mates. Right. Well, that's a critical

distinction because what people look for in a long-term committed mateship, like a marriage partner or a long-term romantic relationship, is different from what people look for in a long-term committed mateship like a marriage partner or a long-term romantic

relationship is different from what people look for in a hookup or casual sex. So that's actually

critical. I wonder if we could maybe just back up a second and just talk a little bit about

the theoretical framework for understanding mate choice. Sure. It basically stems from Darwin's theory of sexual selection.

Darwin noticed that there were phenomena that couldn't be explained by this so-called survival

selection. So he came up with the theory of sexual selection, which deals not with the evolution

of characteristics due to their survival advantage, but rather due to their mating advantage. And he identified two

causal processes by which mating advantage could occur. One is intracultural competition. And the logic was

whatever qualities led to success in these same-sex battles, those qualities get passed on in

greater numbers. And so you see evolution,

which is change over time and increase in frequency of the characteristics associated with

winning these, what Darwin called contest competition. And we know that the logic of that is more

general now and involves things like in our species competing for position and status hierarchies.

But the second, most relevant to your question about mate choice is preferential mate choice.

That was the second causal pathway.

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