That stuff was a hot topic in Britain in the early 1980s -- possibly because of a television documentary based on Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (1976) -- but you hardly hear about it nowadays. One problem (mentioned in the blog) is the difficulty of extrapolating general statistics from the data available, which tends to draw on out-of-the-ordinary folks.muzza wrote:Click on http://coverdoll.com/drupal/node/1961 for the full blog or, if you prefer, it is now published in full at Tumblr
https://www.tumblr.com/blog/roimay
Another problem is that the 'establishment' seems to resist publishing anything that challenges popular belief. On BBC Radio 4, for example, whenever a UK university reproduces findings about human mating based on academic publications in the USA 20 years previously, they refer to it as 'controversial new research'!
The cooperative breeding behaviour of birds is great for generating possibilities of how people make their sexual choices. Birds reproduce much more rapidly than humans and nobody worries about researchers examining their mating behaviour.