Babyface Wed 10th May

This morning I heard a fragment in which the author of the book I am trying to complete working on, Dario Maestripieri, spoke of research showing that women could distinguish photographs of men who liked babies, and preferred such men for long-term relationships. For short-term relationships they preferred men whose faces were more ruggedly masculine. He acknowledged that they had no idea what it was that the women recognised in the faces. This piece of research, which I assume was on mate selection, illustrates the point I was making in my update on the chapter on attachment in his book, Primate Psychology. One factor is selected and investigated in isolation in relation to a psyche where a multitude of factors interact. I suppose if one believes that there is an evolved module for mate selection that might be considered acceptable, but considering all the things that have been investigated, e.g. pheromones through the sniffing of sweaty sweatshirts, it's an amazing multiplicity of things that have to be taken into account by this one module. In today's crowded cities where it might be assumed that a woman has a wide choice of mate, perhaps this would make sense. But that module, if it exists, which I of course do not believe, evolved in the Pleistocene when there would have been an extremely limited choice.