Humans are extremely choosy when it comes to mating, only settling down and having kids after a long screening process involving nervous flirtations, set-ups by friends, online matchmaking sites, awkward dates, humiliating rejections, hasty retreats and the occasional lucky strike. In the end, we “fall in love” and “live happily ever after.” But evolution is an unforgiving force — isn’t this choosiness rather a costly waste of time and energy when we should just be “going forth and multiplying?” What, if anything, is the evolutionary point of it all? A new study may have the answer.
Doing a cost/benefit analysis of love is a challenging business, with many potential confounds, and — in the case of humans — some ethical limitations on doing experiments. A new study publishing on September 14th in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology by Malika Ihle, Bart Kempenaers, and Wolfgang Forstmeier from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Seewiesen, Germany, describes an elegant experiment designed to tease apart the consequences of mate choice.
The authors took advantage of the fact that the zebra finch shares many […]
