Looking for love online may impact how humans evolve

Rice University
Office of Public Affairs / News & Media Relations
EXPERT ALERT

Amy McCaig
713-348-6777
amym@rice.edu

Looking for love online may impact how humans evolve
Ahead of Valentine’s Day (Feb. 14) and International Darwin Day (Feb. 12), expert available to discuss how online dating could affect evolution 

HOUSTON – (Feb. 11, 2019) – Anybody looking for a Valentine’s Day date in cyberspace might want to consider this prediction from an evolutionary biologist: Online dating could affect how humans evolve in the future.

“The way in which humans are choosing their sexual partners is changing rapidly,” said Scott Solomon, an associate teaching professor in the Department of BioSciences at Rice, author of “Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution” and the author and instructor of “What Darwin Didn’t Know: The Modern Science of Evolution.” “In most species that reproduce sexually, the way in which they choose their sexual partners has a major impact on their evolution.”

Solomon said the proliferation of web- and app-based dating options over the past 20 years may be affecting men and women differently.

“We already know that evolution influences traits that have to do with how attractive we are to the opposite sex and how people perceive attraction in the opposite sex,” Solomon said. “Men rely more on vision cues in determining attractiveness, but women rely on a wider range of cues, including vision and smell.”

For example, women use smells to determine how genetically similar they are to a man, he said.

“Studies show that women tend to prefer men who are not too genetically similar, which likely evolved to prevent incest and/or to increase genetic variability in offspring,” Solomon said.

But that evolved cue doesn’t help much when a woman is looking for a partner online. As a result, Solomon said, online dating offers more of an evolutionary advantage to men.

For more information on Solomon, visit https://solomon.rice.edu. To schedule an interview, contact Amy McCaig, senior media relations specialist at Rice, at 713-348-6777 or amym@rice.edu.

Rice University has a VideoLink ReadyCam TV interview studio. ReadyCam is capable of transmitting broadcast-quality standard-definition and high-definition video directly to all news media organizations around the world 24/7. Rice also has a professional Skype setup with lighting.

-30-

This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Related materials:

Scott Solomon bio: http://solomon.rice.edu/

Scott Solomon photo: https://bit.ly/2SstMki

Photo credit: Rice University

Follow Scott Solomon on Twitter @ScottESolomon.

International Darwin Day hashtag: #DarwinDay

Charles Darwin photo (public domain): https://bit.ly/2MQCAv3

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,962 undergraduates and 3,027 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.