ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Unpacking mating success and testing Bateman's principles in a human population.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- The "I" in egalitarianism: Hadza hunter-gatherers averse to inequality primarily when personally unfavorable.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Diagnosing confounded Bateman gradients.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2025Article
- The Multiple Perspectives Approach to Understanding Sexual-Economic Exchange.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Review
- Little evidence that nonmonogamous family structures are detrimental to children's well-being in Mpimbwe, Tanzania.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Cross-cousin marriage among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists during demographic transition and market integration.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- The interdependence of relational and material wealth inequality in Pemba, Zanzibar.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Gender disparities in material and educational resources differ by kinship system.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- A matter of time: Bateman's principles and mating success as count and duration across social strata in contemporary Finland.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Reproductive inequality in humans and other mammals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Market integration, income inequality, and kinship system among the Mosuo of China.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- A Double-Track Pathway to Fast Strategy in Humans and Its Personality Correlates.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Phenotypic Signals of Sexual Selection and Fast Life History Dynamics for the Long-Term but Not Short-Term Mating.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior · 2021Article
- The multinomial index: a robust measure of reproductive skew.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Mother's social status is associated with child health in a horticulturalist population.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human marriage systems, characterized by long-term partnerships and extended windows of parental care, differ from the mating systems of pulsed or seasonally breeding non-human animals in which Bateman's principles were originally tested. These features, paradigmatic of but not unique to humans, complicate the accurate measurement of mating success in evaluating Bateman's three principles. Here, we unpack the concept of mating success into distinct components: number of partners, number of years partnered, the timing of partnerships, and the quality of partners. Drawing on longitudinal records of marriage and reproduction collected in a natural-fertility East African population over a 20-year period, we test and compare various models of the relationship between mating success and reproductive success (RS), and show that an accurate assessment of male and female reproductive behaviour requires consideration of all major components of mating success. Furthermore, we demonstrate that while Bateman's third principle holds when mating success is defined in terms of years married, women's fitness increases whereas men's fitness decreases from an increase in the number of marriage partners, holding constant the total effective duration of marriages. We discuss these findings in terms of the distinct, sex-specific pathways through which RS can be optimized, and comment on the contribution of this approach to the broader study of sexual selection.
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