When we look at long-term evolution what is important in choosing wives and husbands?

Do women judge the status of men as more important than looks perhaps knowing that their children will have a better chance in life with a high status husband? This would happen a bit less now with more independent working women. And young women seem less class conscious and looks tend to be rated higher with them than status---but this changes as women get older. And high status people often choose beauty over status and low status people often choose status over beauty. When we look at long-term evolution what is important in choosing wives and husbands?

In the long term, group selection has been more successful than individual selection. As Raymond Cattell and Edward Wilson have said, evolution proceeds ultimately by natural selection among groups, which determines and is determined by natural selection among individuals, genetically and culturally. The only ultimate test of the fitness and progress of a group's culture-genetic make-up is whether it survives, historically.

As Wilson put it: "Within groups, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals." Cattell believed that the key to evaluating the individual and the group was for society to have a way to understand the difference between socially gifted work and anti-socially gifted work. Cattell sees survival to be as dependent on genetic as cultural bases, and one change of present values indicated is in a more enthusiastic pursuit of eugenics. This involves the acceptance of genetic individual differences, without envy or malicious obstruction, and of better education for the gifted.

Cattell sees two kinds of cultural developments : p-culture" which adapts as outlets for our frustrations, as in poetry, music, and drama, and "r-culture" which actually fits us to the environment, as in engineering, medicine, and science. P-culture may be training for r-culture, as well as for temporary emotional adjustment; but it is primarily by r-culture that we survive.

Ultimately our sexual choices will be or should be affected by these traits.