A standard trope of evolutionary psychologists is that differential mate selection between the sexes is driven by competing sexual interests. Men will seek out younger women, who can bear them many children, and women will be attracted to the men who command more resources and power, who will be able to provide for them in adversity. The fact that this theory bears out a rather misogynist view of the sexes is probably just a coincidence. I mean, this is science, right? What's sexism got to do with it?

Like a lot of evolutionary psychology, I think this is trash. Drawing conclusions about why particular features evolved is extraordinarily difficult, especially since in this case you have to assume that there was a particular selective pressure at all. Not necessarily true; not everything is adaptive, and not everything that is adaptive need have emerged. Last I checked I can't shoot stinging foam into anyone's eyes.

Evolutionary psychologists proceed by taking their cues from the real world. Observe existing human behavior and draw conclusions about our evolutoinary past. These are usually ridiculous, overblown conclusions entirely unsupported by any actual evidence. E.g. this absurd Just So story about why men like blonde women better. Socialization is never admitted as a factor.

My favorite example is of a pair of ev psychologists who attempted to raise their child in a "gender-neutral" fashion, but found, to their dismay, that little Johnny liked playing with guns anyway, and concluded this was because of an evolutionary predisposition. Yes, that's right. Men evolved to love guns. You idiots.

This is not atypical. You can open any issue of most evolutionary psychology journals to find such flatulent conclusions. As a sample, here is an abstract I pulled up from the latest issue of Evolution and Human Behavior (the same one that contains the above "blonde cavegirls" study). It concludes, on the basis of a slight difference in answer to survey questions asking about people's preferences regarding their partners' senses of humor, that:

In summary, our results augment prior studies on the sexual selection of humor. We provided further evidence that sexual selection may have influenced humor production because it is specifically preferred by women in relationship partners. Furthermore, men’s reported preferences for humorous partners may be the result of sexual selection shaping male preference for partners who signal sexual interest through humor appreciation.

There is ZERO discussion of differential socialization and its possible influence. Egad, you say? Hold your surprise. This is nothing new.

So, getting to the punchline, the same journal is going to publish a study showing that the apparent evolutionarily-determined mating preferences outlined above (guys like young hot girls, girls like rich guys and don't really give a shit about appearance) are, well, not necessarily true. It seems that they may have been the result of, um, social circumstances, and as women gain more financial independence, their attitude towards what they want in a partner changes. "Quid?" an imaginary evolutionary psychologists cries, popping his head out of the underbrush. "The patterns we're observing might be contingent on the particular culture we're observing rather than on evolutionary dynamics? Alack-a-day!"

Unfortunately I doubt publication of stuff like this is enough to shut down an entire field due to embarassment, but a boy can dream.^*

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^* About guns, most likely.