 |  |  | It isn't clear to me whether the original poster is claiming, in the section "Preference by Aging Males for Younger and Younger Females," that men prefer women of decreasing absolute age (which would be news to me) or that they prefer women who are younger and younger than they are (i.e., the age of the preferred women stays the same even as the man ages). I find it curious that anyone would find it remarkable that a man would continue to prefer young women, in their most fertile years, even as he grows older.
Turn the matter around: men obviously have circuitry in the brain for evaluating the genetic quality (beauty) of a potential mate; if you believe that a 20-year-old man should be attracted to 20-year-old women and 60-year-old men should be attracted to 60-year-old women, then you are hypothesizing the existence of a mechanism that alters those preferences over time. That is, creating a brain with a constant attraction to the physical features of young women is almost surely a lot *simpler* than creating a brain which is attracted to different physical features over time.
Said another way, many people seem to think that if men are always attracted to young women, then we must look for a genetic explanation. Isn't that backwards? Isn't it really the case that if men were preferentially attracted to older women as they grew older, then *that* would demand some explaining? And what would be the point of such an age-dependent preference? The man's happiness?
The genes care not a whit for the man's happiness; the man is just something the genes create in order to get themselves copied into the future. Given the unlikelihood of a 60-year-old woman being fertile, a gene creating a preference for women your own age sounds like a loser in the Natural Selection game. In fact, happiness and sexual desire are just hormonal hooks the genes create to allow the more primitive brain, which evaluates the quality (beauty) of potential mates and controls ejaculation, to control the conscious mind.
Human genes create space, in the form of neurons, for a person to learn about the specific environment into which s/he is born, and to acquire the skills and reputation necessary to survive and attract high-quality mates. What develops in that space is a personality. But the genes don't do this for fun -- they do it to get copied into the future. So they encoded their wishes into the more primitive parts of the brain and gave that part of the brain the ability to cause the personality discomfort (loneliness, horniness) to spur us into finding a mate and having sex, as well as the ability to give us pleasure (love, orgasms) to encourage us to repeat the desired behavior. The carrot and the stick -- to our genes we are oxen, slaves. We tend to think that life is all about us, our personalities, our dreams and our potential, when in fact this is all about our genes. Personalities are just "organs" that genes create to increase adaptability, and they must be controlled to ensure that they stay on task.
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