Genes, Culture and Behavior: Mate-choice Copying in Humans and Nonhumans.

How humans and nonhumans choose mates is central to the study of evolution and behavior.  It is also a subject of great interest in psychology. For more than seven decades, much of the work on the evolution of female mate choice assumed that a female's preference for a particular male trait is under some sort of genetic control. Mounting evidence from nonhumans, as well as humans, however, suggests that cultural transmission of information¾via imitation¾also plays an important role in mate choice.  Today, researchers are actively investigating the degree to which a female's preference is affected by the preference of other females, i.e. do females copy the mate choice of others, and if so, under what conditions?

Whether females copy each other's choice of mates is not only important in the context of mating behavior, but more generally, because it addresses the role that cultural transmission of information plays in structuring behavioral interactions in both nonhumans and humans. 

In this talk, I will discuss work that I have been doing for the last twenty years on the interaction of cultural and genetic transmission in shaping mate choice in two species: 1) guppies (Poecilia reticulata) and 2) humans (Homo sapiens).  

Professor Lee Alan Dugatkin, leedugatkin.com