The Brutal Tactics of Female Sexual Competition - Dr Dani Sulikowski - #1064

How do you describe your area of research focus? So my research focus is the evolutionary psychology of human behavior. And in the last few years in particular, I've really narrowed that focus down a bit to look at female intersexual competition. which is just a a big fancy word for how women compete with each other to see who gets the largest share of the population's reproductive success. Okay.

What is it trying to achieve? Fundamentally, what does female intrasexual competition try to do? So the currency of evolution is reproductive success. The genes that promote reproductive success increase in frequency in the population and so whatever mechanisms and behaviors they produce will also increase in frequency.

So female intersexual competition is the suite of behaviors that have evolved to maximize an individual's relative reproductive success, not absolute reproductive success. And that's a pretty important point. So you don't need to have as many babies as it's humanly possible to have to win the evolutionary game. What you do need to do is reproduce at a greater rate than the average reproductive rate for your population. And if that continues to happen in your lineage generation after generation,

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (110 minutes, 20,026 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.