Behavioral Ecology Blog

I’d like to point readers to an interesting post, The Evolution of Modern Human Mating Systems and Sexuality, over at Greg’s Blog. It’s worth a read… Anyway, I believe he is proposing that the estrous is adaptive in species where female choice is important. His argument goes like this:

1. There are species in which females have estrous, and some that don’t.
2. Estrous allows males to determine when fertilization is possible.
3. Estrous enhances females ability to choose appropriate males.
4. Female choice is adaptive.
• Females choose on the basis of direct and (more controversially) indirect benefits. This choice is especially important in species with altricial young, or in other situations where costs are high. Parental investment is typically very costly.

Greg goes on to describe how estrous is distributed across primates. Basically that chimps have estrous, and humans don’t. Lastly, he claims that parental investment in humans is more costly than in chimps

• Greg is an Anthropologist (so he probably knows this literature) but is this true? Have there been studies that demonstrate this??? Anyone??

But wait a second- if estrous enhances the ability for female choice, and female choice is especially beneficial in species with costly parental investment, then shouldn’t expect to see the opposite pattern??? Humans with estrous and chimps without?

Greg?