title: The relationship between health and mating success in humans.
abstract: Health has been claimed to play an important role in human sexual selection, especially in terms of mate choice. Our preferences for attractive individuals are said to represent evolved adaptations for finding high-quality, healthy mates. If this is true, then we expect health to predict mating success in humans. We tested this hypothesis using several important physiological indicators of health, including immune function, oxidative stress and semen quality, and self-reported measures of sexual behaviour that contribute to mating success. In contrast to our hypothesis, we did not find a relationship between the physiological measures of health and sexual behaviour. Our results provide little support for claims that health, at least the health measures we used, increases mating success in relatively healthy humans.
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, 6009 Western Australia, Australia; Centre for Evolutionary Biology and School of Animal Biology, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, 6009 Western Australia, Australia.
authors.forename: Yong Zhi
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-7627-2991
authors.initials: YZ
authors.lastname: Foo
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, 6009 Western Australia, Australia; Centre for Evolutionary Biology and School of Animal Biology, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, 6009 Western Australia, Australia.
authors.forename: Leigh W
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-0562-1474
authors.initials: LW
authors.lastname: Simmons
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology , University of Western Australia , 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, 6009 Western Australia , Australia.
authors.forename: Gillian
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Rhodes
keywords: health; humans; mating success; sexual selection