Monday, October 26, 2009

Girls have to right to be picky, even science agrees




Female investment exceeds male investment when it comes to sexual reproduction. Females have to bare the off spring and have limited number of eggs they produce throughout their life span while males have no limit. With such a high risk investment, females become very choosy. while on the other hand, the males' focus is to maximize their number of matings in order for them to spread them genes to increase its own individual fitness.

Males from different species of birds have evolved bright, strange colors on their feathers just to impress females. A female's choice in their mate is based on several factor(here are two that I found interesting): the handicap principle states that females are attracted to genetically expensive trait, for example a really long tail on a bird. The bird having a really long tail does not help them fly better or anything, it is just there for the purpose that females like it, an example of a handicap trait in humans would be an expensive car, the car does the same thing as any other car that would cost less, but some girls like it because they can afford it. Another factor is pre-existing bias, saying that females are attracted to males with unusual traits, just as when girls are attracted to foreign guys, because it's different and it's exotic to them. Those are the two out of the six that I find the most interesting.

Males on the other hand, don't really have choosiness in sexual selection. In fact, they expense a lot of their energy to impress females. Males compete against each other to woo females, for example male bower birds dance in their bowers while a female watches to see who she would choose to mate with. There's also sperm competition between males as well. In some species of bees after a male mates with a female, he will plug her opening to prevent other sperm from entering, at some worst scenarios some penises are designed to cause physical damage to the female reproductive system to prevent them from mating after their sperm has been deposited.

See girls, look how hard guys have to fight to get to us...we have the right to be picky

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