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Natural Selection and Mating Preferences

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The principle of natural selection posits that organisms better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce. This principle is closely intertwined with mating preferences, a key aspect of sexual selection, which evolutionary psychologists believe is driven by instincts to propagate one's genes. Such instincts significantly influence mating behaviors and preferences between genders.
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Natural selection influences the frequencies of particular alleles and phenotypes within populations in several different ways. Primarily, natural selection can be directional, stabilizing, or disruptive. Directional selection favors one extreme trait and shifts the population towards that phenotype while selecting against individuals displaying alternate traits. Stabilizing selection favors an intermediate trait with a narrow range of variation. Deviation from the optimal phenotype towards an...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 10, 2026

Measurement of Lifespan in Drosophila melanogaster

Measurement of Lifespan in Drosophila melanogaster

Published on: January 7, 2013

Measuring selection in contemporary human populations.

Stephen C Stearns¹, Sean G Byars, Diddahally R Govindaraju

¹Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8102, USA. stephen.stearns@yale.edu

Nature Reviews. Genetics

|August 4, 2010

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Humans are actively evolving, contrary to static views. Analysis of reproductive success and genetic data from long-term studies reveals ongoing evolutionary changes in human populations.

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Area of Science:

Evolutionary biology
Human genetics
Population studies

Background:

The question of ongoing human evolution remains a key area of scientific inquiry.
Existing long-term multigeneration studies contain valuable data for assessing contemporary human evolution.
These datasets, often from clinical and epidemiological research, have been underutilized for evolutionary analysis.

Purpose of the Study:

To review methodologies for predicting evolutionary change in humans.
To examine methods for measuring natural selection and genetic inheritance in human populations.
To identify and present long-term studies suitable for further evolutionary research.

Main Methods:

Review of established methods for predicting evolutionary trajectories.
Analysis of techniques for quantifying selection and heritability in human populations.
Compilation of examples from existing longitudinal studies.

Main Results:

Evidence strongly indicates that humans are currently undergoing evolution.
Human nature is demonstrated to be dynamic, not static.
Long-term studies provide a robust framework for observing evolutionary processes.

Conclusions:

Human evolution is an ongoing and observable phenomenon.
Contemporary data confirm the dynamic nature of human evolution.
Further research using existing longitudinal data can enhance our understanding of human evolution.