Evolutionary Developmental Psychology

Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives—an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective—offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions. Using a new 45-country sample ( N = 14,399), we attempted to replicate classic studies and test both the evolutionary and biosocial role perspectives. Support for universal sex differences in preferences remains robust: Men, more than women, prefer attractive, young mates, and women, more than men, prefer older mates with financial prospects. Cross-culturally, both sexes have mates closer to their own ages as gender equality increases. Beyond age of partner, ne...

Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives—an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective—offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions. Using a new 45-country sample ( N = 14,399), we attempted to replicate classic studies and test both the evolutionary and biosocial role perspectives. Support for universal sex differences in preferences remains robust: Men, more than women, prefer attractive, young mates, and women, more than men, prefer older mates with financial prospects. Cross-culturally, both sexes have mates closer to their own ages as gender equality increases. Beyond age of partner, ne...

Как человеческая коммуникация впервые вышла за пределы «здесь и сейчас»? Способность к смещённой референции (displaced reference) — указанию на объекты, отсутствующие в непосредственном перцептивном окружении — общепризнанно является определяющей чертой человеческого языка (Hockett, 1960), и Бикертон (Bickerton, 2009) справедливо поставил её в центр проблемы происхождения языка. Однако господствующий сценарий, связывающий displacement с необходимостью привлекать членов коалиции к отдалённым источникам пищи, не даёт убедительного объяснения, почему отбор должен был создать автономную репрезентативную систему, если указание, пантомима и простое ведение за собой вполне справлялись бы с задачей.
Гипотеза «Имя-поводок» (Name-Leash) предлагает альтернативу: первым смещённым сигналом было не обозначение пищи, а имя собственное — индивидуализированная вокализация, обращённая к отсутствующему младенцу. В условиях кооперативного выращивания потомства (cooperative breeding), характерного для ранних Homo (Hrdy, 2009; Burkart et al., 2025), матери регулярно передавали младенцев алломатерям и уходили на фуражирование, создавая неустранимое аффективное давление — сепарационную тревогу, направленную на конкретного, незаменимого ребёнка, — которую невозможно было разрешить никаким перцептивно обоснованным жестом.
Гипотеза определяет семиотический механизм этого перехода: когда референт индексального сигнала исчезает, индекс «обрывается», создавая давление отбора на вокальный заместитель, способный поддерживать ментальную репрезентацию референта в его отсутствие. Имя собственное заполняет эту роль как восстановленный индекс — сохраняющий единичность индексального указания, но приобретающий контекстную независимость символа. В терминах Крипке (Kripke, 1980) имя функционирует как жёсткий десигнатор (rigid designator): оно не несёт дескриптивного содержания, требующего верификации в текущей среде, что делает его единственным типом сигнала, работающим именно тогда, когда воспринимать нечего.
Механизм опирается на физиологическую платформу, созданную привычным прямохождением (разобщение дыхания и локомоции, усиленная вагальная регуляция), на нейронную архитектуру инвариантной репрезентации идентичности (нейроны концептов; специализированные системы извлечения имён в левом височном полюсе) и на этологию кооперативного выращивания потомства. Данные онтогенеза — совпадение пика солитарного лепета с началом сепарационной тревоги, игра Fort/Da у Фрейда, анализ Поршневым первого слова как регуляторного, а не референциального — независимо подтверждают предложенную динамику. Сравнительные данные показывают, что две предпосылки механизма — вокальная индивидуация и вокальный мимезис — существуют по отдельности у других видов, но сходятся только у гоминин с кооперативным выращиванием потомства.
Прото-имя, рождённое как инструмент аффективной саморегуляции, изначально несёт реляционную (генитивную) структуру и функционирует как имплицитное обещание возвращения — что позволяет предположить совместное возникновение референции и социального обязательства как свойств одного и того же вокального жеста.

How did human communication first escape the "here and now"? The capacity for displaced reference — referring to entities not present in the immediate perceptual environment — is widely recognized as a defining feature of human language (Hockett, 1960), and Bickerton (2009) rightly placed it at the center of the language origins problem. Yet the dominant scenario, which locates displacement in the need to recruit coalition members to distant food sources, does not compellingly explain why an offline representational system would be selected when pointing, leading, and pantomime would suffice.
The Name-Leash hypothesis proposes that the first displaced signal was not a food reference but a proper name — an individualized vocalization addressed to an absent infant. In cooperative breeding contexts characteristic of early Homo (Hrdy, 2009; Burkart et al., 2025), mothers regularly transferred infants to allomothers and departed to forage, generating an irreducible affective pressure — separation anxiety directed at a specific, non-fungible child — that no perceptually grounded gesture could resolve.
The hypothesis identifies a semiotic mechanism for this transition: when the referent of an indexical signal disappears, the index "breaks," creating pressure for a vocal substitute that maintains the referent's mental representation in absence. The proper name fills this role as a repaired index — preserving the singularity of indexical pointing while acquiring the context-independence of a symbol. In Kripke's (1980) terms, the name functions as a rigid designator: it carries no descriptive content requiring environmental verification, making it the only signal type that operates precisely when there is nothing to perceive.
The mechanism is grounded in the physiological platform created by habitual upright walking (decoupled respiration, enhanced vagal regulation), in the neural architecture of invariant identity representation (concept cells; dedicated name-retrieval systems in the left temporal pole), and in the ethology of cooperative breeding. Developmental evidence — the coincidence of peak solitary babbling with separation anxiety, Freud's Fort/Da, and Porshnev's analysis of the first word as self-regulatory — independently supports the proposed dynamic. Comparative data show that the two prerequisites for the mechanism — vocal individuation and vocal mimesis — exist separately in other species but converge only in cooperative-breeding hominins.
The proto-name, born as a tool of affective self-regulation, already carries relational (genitive) structure and functions as an implicit promise of return — suggesting that reference and social obligation may have co-emerged as properties of the same vocal gesture.

This is an addendum to my last two papers. The assumption that humans initiate change
through their own choices, that they have evolved outside the process engaged in by the rest
of the planet, seems entirely implausible. Capitalism has encouraged the ideas that revolution
always leads to a reestablishment of capitalism, usually under a far more authoritarian regime;
that in each case a political party has to be actively opposed to the capitalist system before
conditions become ideal for revolution.

Barcelona n 1963 el psicólogo americano William Kessen, en una panorámica acerca del desarrollo, saludaba la aparición de una psicología infantil comparativa y aludía -¿cómo no?-a las célebres experiencias de Harlow con los monos rhesus, a los trabajos de Hess sobre el «imprinting» y a los de Levine sobre la posible influencia de la estimulación precoz en el stress. La lectura de Kessen deja traslucir una impresión optimista de que de aquellas primicias podrían recogerse sazonados frutos. También se adivina la atracción que intelectualmente siente por la investigación animal. Casi han pasado 20 años y puede decirse que la historia ha corroborado ampliamente la predicción de Kessen. Hoy día el enfoque biológico del desarrollo humano está en alza y en él la Etología ha jugado un papel preponderante. Es imposible, en una exposición como la que voy a hacer, abarcar todos los puntos que merecerían ser tratados. He escogido algunos y quisiera desarrollarlos sin sacrificar la exactitud a la brevedad, siempre con la esperanza de que mi exposición sirva para provocar reflexiones, interrogantes que den pié a un intercambio fecundo entre nosotros. Los puntos que desarrollaré serán cuatro. En primer lugar, algunas puntualizaciones sobre la Etología que me permitan aproximar mejor la ontogenia del comportamiento humano. Luego daré algunas ideas sobre la significación global que adquiere el desarrollo humano en una perspectiva comparativa. En tercer lugar tocaré brevemente la conducta del «attachment» (apego) como ejem-

Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives—an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective—offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions. Using a new 45-country sample ( N = 14,399), we attempted to replicate classic studies and test both the evolutionary and biosocial role perspectives. Support for universal sex differences in preferences remains robust: Men, more than women, prefer attractive, young mates, and women, more than men, prefer older mates with financial prospects. Cross-culturally, both sexes have mates closer to their own ages as gender equality increases. Beyond age of partner, ne...

Gregory Bateson made a great number of valuable contributions to our understanding of our world, raising questions that have influenced how it’s investigated. Unfortunately, his extensive investigations have not led to a comprehensive theory that connects them. This paper looks at some of those heuristic theories and the assumptions that Bateson made when developing them. The paper goes on to show what happens when those assumptions are changed and how this can lead to a more connected, consistent tautological theory. A theory which can be applied to all systemic issues. This is particularly relevant to me when the questions are about the future possibilities for a global revolution, one that addresses the needs of the planet, specifically rectifying the damage caused by human activity.

At the heart of this book is the belief that neurodiversity, the vast array of mental and neurological variation among people, is not just a modern phenomenon but played a crucial role in the survival and thriving of our ancestors in the prehistoric past. For example, we all have a sense that anxiety may have helped hunter-gathers take necessary precautions, that depression may have kept them from taking unnecessary risks, and that today an attention deficit might represent a hunter in a farmers world.

But this book goes further looking at disorders such as schizophrenia, intellectual disability, autism, Alzheimer’s, and the neurological consequences of stress hormones on all our brains. In doing so, the book traverses the fascinating landscapes of evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and brain science to understand how diverse mental traits could have been vital strengths in a world vastly different from our own.

In recent years, the diagnostic rate of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has exhibited an exponential explosion on a global scale. Contemporary mainstream medicine and evolutionary psychology have long been trapped in the quagmire of phenomenology, unilaterally attributing this phenomenon to the relaxation of diagnostic criteria, the accumulation of environmental toxins, or pathological genetic defects. This research thoroughly discards such a narrow carbon-based medical perspective. Grounded in the topological dynamics framework of the Grand Unified Theory of the Cosmic Mind (GUTCM), it officially proposes a survival and evolutionary hypothesis carrying the significance of a paradigm shift: the explosion in ASD prevalence is by no means a simple neurodevelopmental error, but rather a "Macro-Quantum Fluctuation" and topological resistance forced to reboot by the human gene pool when facing the extreme pressure of modern "highly instrumentalized" and "linearly standardized" education systems.
This paper rigorously demonstrates that the human mind is fundamentally a "3D Riemann Sphere" utilized to contain survival paradoxes. However, the essence of industrialized education is an extremely violent Linear Compression Operator, attempting to forcibly flatten high-dimensional human neural networks possessing non-linear chaotic traits into two-dimensional logical gears serving capital efficiency. This topological violence has completely shattered the old relative equilibrium of the principle of least action (δS=0) established by humanity during the hunter-gatherer era. Facing the extinction crisis of systemic heat death and massive psychological dissociation, the unconscious genetic source code activated an antifragile self-organizing mechanism, launching a blind and cruel "full-path trial and error" across generational shifts.
Under this ontological definition, ASD is neither a disease nor a perfect new solution where evolution is already complete, but rather evolutionary pioneers residing in an "Uncollapsed Quantum Superposition State." Their violent fluctuations and neurological suffering within the spectrum are precisely the thermodynamic waste heat generated when genes attempt to calculate and find the next survivable geometric extremum (a brand new δS=0) amidst extreme linear oppression. By comparing the geographical topological distribution of global ASD prevalence and the "Social Instrumentalization Index," this research confirms: the more extreme the linear compression in a region (such as rapidly modernizing or extremely standardized societies), the more violent the quantum fluctuations of the genes.
This research ultimately declares that traditional behaviors attempting to "correct" or "cure" ASD are, in physics, violent reverse-entropy work violating evolutionary inertia. Facing the advent of the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) era, linearly instrumentalized humans are bound to be completely eliminated by silicon-based computing power; whereas the originality and "semi-closed/semi-open" non-linear topological manifolds preserved by the ASD gene pool during its fluctuations will leap to become the ultimate core asset of human civilization. The only solution for civilization is to move toward "Topological Inclusion"—stopping ineffective educational oppression and respecting the passive transmission of the law of conservation of information. Only by quietly waiting for this cruel evolutionary trial and error to naturally collapse in phase space can the human species usher in a brand-new equilibrium state adapted to the high-entropy environment of the new era. It is not the autistic patients who are sick, but this industrial civilization, which is frantically squeezing the survival space of the soul, that is too deeply diseased.

This study proposes a theoretical framework for the "Prototype Mind" (or Prototype Cognitive Personality, PCP), identifying it not as a pathology or a mere variation of neurodivergence, but as a distinct evolutionary cognitive archetype characterized by low instinctual survival drive, high cognitive plasticity, and an absolute dependence on semantic consistency (meaning).
Historically misclassified under various labels—such as high-functioning autism, existential depression, or the "genius-madness" spectrum—the Prototype Mind is re-examined here through the lenses of evolutionary biology, information topology, and civilizational entropy. The paper traces the developmental trajectory of this archetype: from a fragile, instinct-void infancy (0-3) and a childhood of "social camouflage" (3-22), to a critical phase of "narrative collapse" (22-30) that forces a reconstruction of the self based on cosmic and entropic principles rather than social conventions.
Furthermore, this research posits that the Prototype Mind serves a specific function in the dynamics of civilization: acting as a "Variable Injection Mechanism" within the human population. By introducing high-variance cognitive models, these individuals prevent civilizational systems from succumbing to entropic rigidity and stagnation. The study concludes by offering the Prototype Cognitive Personality (PCP) as a preliminary scientific framework, linking individual narrative data with the Free Energy Principle and cultural evolutionary theory, to explain the persistence of this high-risk, high-contribution phenotype.

Enjoy the Prologue and Introduction to The Evolution of Tears.

This is a book about tears—about the sacred dance of tears in our lives. Tears are not all the same; they come in many different forms and textures. Part of waking up is to learn to identify the nature of your tears and give them voice. To wake up is to become fluent in the language of tears.

The Evolution of Tears is a profoundly original re-engagement with the Hebrew wisdom ritual of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year holy day. Best-selling author and educator Dr. Marc Gafni re-reads an entire corpus of biblical and mystical literature to unlock a hidden esoteric code that is the essence of the ritual—the code of tears. Dr. Gafni identifies eleven major forms of tears woven throughout the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, along with the archetypal figures who cry these different tears. This book invites you to enter this sacred code, to explore the depths of your own tears, and to awaken to their profound melody and meaning.

Tears are our greatest teacher. But most of us are ashamed of our tears. We repress them. We don’t know how to interpret them. We don’t realize that they hold an important message for us. Tears are the colors with which the tapestry of our awakening is painted. Sometimes we cry surface tears in response to stuff that happens—good stuff and bad stuff. But the truest tears are those that well up from the deepest place, the place on the inside of the inside. They may be triggered by a specific event or image, but they are larger than any one event. Every time we cry these true tears, we cry for all the times we never cried before. True tears come only on occasion, but when they do, they are harbingers of great wisdom and guidance.

Identifying the nature of our tears, giving them voice, is to know the language of tears. When we know that language, we wake up, hearkening to the melody and message of our tears. We find that we are guided by our tears in all their forms: tears of joy and tears of protest, tears of longing and tears of transformation, tears of prayer and tears of ecstasy, tears that break through and tears that break down, tears of expansion and tears of contraction, tears because it is all so big and tears because it is all so very small.

More than a study of Hebrew wisdom ritual, The Evolution of Tears demonstrates how world religion as a context for our diversity can emerge from within classical Western traditions. World religion represents a deep ethos and commitment to a shared grammar of evolving value alongside a set of binding injunctions and practices. It stands steadfastly for Spirit in the world and it honors rituals and community—which embody value in themselves even as they are crucial in the transmission of value. This approach offers a post-postmodern framework of meaning for those who are engaged by Spirit but who can either no longer locate themselves in the traditions or for whom one religion can no longer be an exclusive home.

Whether you are Jewish, spiritual-but-not-religious, or are simply seeking deeper meaning in life’s rituals, this book provides a fresh lens for understanding both ancient wisdom and your own emotional landscape. Beyond its accessibility and highly engaging and transformative transmission, the text offers scholarly readers a rich collection of sophisticated insights drawn from the depths of esoteric Hebrew wisdom tradition.

This interview aims to clarify main tenets of enactivism in the context of previous consciousness theories. Ralph D. Ellis, one of the strongest advocates of the enactivist approach to consciousness and cognitive theory, began his academic career as a phenomenologist, earning the Ph.D. at Duquesne University under Andre Schuwer, John Sallis and Amedeo Giorgi, and has taught at Clark Atlanta University since 1985. He subsequently received a post-doctoral M.S. in Public Affairs at Georgia State University, and worked also as a social worker in both Pittsburgh and Atlanta. Partly as a result of those experiences, as well as being a lifelong practitioner of Gene Gendlin's focusing method, he gravitated toward emotion research and the intersection of philosophy, psychology and the brain sciences from the enactivist perspective, arguing that action, as opposed to mere reaction, has to be emotionally motivated, and that the understanding of

Previous research has demonstrated the significant influence that both children's facial features ( Lorenz, 1943 ) and children's cognitive expressions ( Bjorklund, Hernández Blasi, and Periss, 2010 ) have on adults' perception of young children. However, until now, these two types of cues have been studied independently. The present study contrasted these two types of cues simultaneously in a group of college students. To this purpose, we designed five experimental conditions (Consistent, Inconsistent, Mature-Face, Immature-Face, and Faces-Only) in which we varied the presentation of a series of mature and immature vignettes (including two previously studied types of thinking: natural thinking and supernatural thinking) associated with a series of more mature and less mature children's faces. Performance in these conditions was contrasted with data from a Vignettes-Only condition taken from Bjorklund et al. (2010) . Results indicated that cognitive cues were more po...

I consider the case of the fragmentation of psychology and propose keys for a renewed interpretation of its scope and severity. I argue that in order to address the problem of fragmentation based on an adequate criterion of epistemic progress, it is necessary to take a position on the centrality of descriptive and classificatory practices in psychology, in particular a view that does not see them as subordinate to explanatory efforts. On the one hand, I argue against the widespread idea that the fragmentation of psychology is a symptom of underlying epistemological fractures. On the other hand, I consider the multifarious nature of the objects of psychological research and its axiological density to illustrate the richness of psychology's descriptive dimension. The view outlined here offers a fertile entry point to the crisis debate in psychology, that is both independent of the question of its explanatory status as well as of some of the charged ontological and epistemological debates associated with it. It can at the same time dispel some of the gloomy renderings of the widespread idea of a crisis permeating the field.

Richard Dawkins is widely celebrated as a key figure in contemporary evolutionary biology, but his intellectual legacy resists simple classification. While he is often framed as a hardline defender of empirical science and naturalism, the structure of his contributions reveals a more ambivalent posture-one that is deeply philosophical, even as it disavows philosophy. This essay argues that Dawkins' enduring influence derives not from experimental discoveries or novel data, but from his role as a conceptual architect: a theorist who reshapes how we think about genes, selection, and organismal design. Through close examination of his major works, public statements, and the epistemic frameworks he deploys, I suggest that Dawkins' authority operates through what might be termed a "rhetorical empiricism"-a stance that foregrounds science while covertly engaging in metaphysical and conceptual argumentation. The central irony is that Dawkins embodies a form of philosophy he explicitly rejects: a speculative, systematizing, and normatively charged philosophy of biology.

Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives—an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective—offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions. Using a new 45-country sample ( N = 14,399), we attempted to replicate classic studies and test both the evolutionary and biosocial role perspectives. Support for universal sex differences in preferences remains robust: Men, more than women, prefer attractive, young mates, and women, more than men, prefer older mates with financial prospects. Cross-culturally, both sexes have mates closer to their own ages as gender equality increases. Beyond age of partner, ne...

This chapter is written from a viewpoint largely unfamiliar to arts educators and arts education researchers-that of evolutionary psychology, whose basic tenet is that the human mind has been prepared by natural selection, operating over geological time, for life in a human group . My concern here is with the arts as they originated and developed during the evolution of the human species (phylogeny) and as they emerge in individuals (ontogeny). My hypothesis proposes that arts-or, more accurately, aesthetic proclivities that can be realized in every art-evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in our Pleistocene ancestors, contributing to their psychobiological fitness. 1 Manifested first in mother-infant interactions and later elaborated in cultural practices, these inherent aesthetic proclivities are in the repertoire of every individual human, from infancy to old age. They are normal, natural, and necessary human endowments. Such a broad and perhaps surprising claim provides justification for the importance of arts education and arts educational research, even though its author is not a practitioner of either profession. It is not my task here to suggest subjects or questions for research or point out connections between my ideas and other particular subjects of study that interest arts educators. The aim, rather, is to give arts educators and researchers empirical and theoretical support for an essential, if tacit, principle of their work: that the arts have been and remain not only important but integral to human lives. My argument is composed of five interrelated claims. These are followed by a concluding commentary that emphasizes the importance to individuals and societies of recognizing and developing the aesthetic abilities with which all humans are psychobiologically endowed. It further describes how a Pleistocene perspective can contribute to ideas about arts education in the twenty-first century. 1 . "Pleistocene" refers to the geological period from 1.6 million to 10,000 years ago, coinciding approximately with the appearance and development of the genus Homo.

Summary in English (paper is in German):
Teaching is taking place in institutions. At the same time it requires competence in keeping expertise as well as founding a relationship with the teachers - those competences are seen as two aspects of the primary task of transference of knowledge. The article presents the concept of an interactive didactics within the scope of academic education of teachers. Students develop content as part of attended (reading) groups in 5 stages
- agora-panel, reading groups, self organised groups, seminars, reflexion. They prepare the content autonomously and hand it on to other students as part of a seminar unit. This seminar unit is going to be recorded on a video tape. During the reflexion phase both aspects- the expertise as well as the relational aspect- always remain reducible to a meaning unit even though they are going to be analysed separately.

Zusammenfassung:
Gelehrt wird in der Regel in Institutionen. Dabei ist Kompetenz sowohl hinsichtlich des Fachlichen, als auch in der Herstellung der Beziehung zu den Lernenden gefordert – diese beiden Kompetenzen sind als zwei Aspekte der primären Aufgabe, der Vermittlung von Kenntnissen anzusehen. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt das Konzept einer interaktiven
Didaktik im Rahmen der universitären Lehrerausbildung vor. In fünf Phasen – Agora-Forum, Lesegruppen, Selbstleitende Gruppe, Seminar, Reflexion – erarbeiten Studenten in begleiteten (Lese)-Gruppen Inhalte, die von ihnen autonom aufbereitet und im Rahmen einer Seminareinheit an andere Studenten weitergegeben werden. Die Seminareinheit wird auf Video aufgezeichnet. In der Reflexionsphase bleiben beide Aspekte, der fachliche und der Beziehungsaspekt, immer auf eine Bedeutungseinheit zurückführbar, auch wenn sie getrennt analysiert werden.

This is just the initial step on my journey and Thesis, that the R1b Y Chromosome, and gene for red hair, so prevalent in the Scotland, Eire and Wales, initially, was a result of a unique cultural marriageml which I can evidence in my idiosyncratic, 'Whole Genome', geographic map.
And when I map this with my C282Y Heamachromatosis gene, the result is particularly illuminatung as to whom really were involved in  building  our  Stonehenge and Orkney Sun and Moon Temples, abd others.

Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives—an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective—offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions. Using a new 45-country sample ( N = 14,399), we attempted to replicate classic studies and test both the evolutionary and biosocial role perspectives. Support for universal sex differences in preferences remains robust: Men, more than women, prefer attractive, young mates, and women, more than men, prefer older mates with financial prospects. Cross-culturally, both sexes have mates closer to their own ages as gender equality increases. Beyond age of partner, ne...