From Preference to Selection: Causal Architecture and Evidence in Human Sexual-Selection Explanations

Human sexual-selection explanations often appear as compact sentences: a trait evolved because it attracted mates; a preference evolved because it tracked fertility; male status striving was favored because status increased reproductive success. Such statements can be scientifically useful, but they often compress several different propositions into one narrative unit. A cue can be attractive without reliably indicating the quality attributed to it. A stated preference can be experimentally robust without strongly determining realized mating. Mating advantages can fail to translate into reproductive advantages in some ecologies. Contemporary associations can make a historical pathway plausible without uniquely identifying the historical process that produced a phenotype or psychology. This essay develops a conceptual way of reading such explanations as claim-specific causal architectures rather than as indivisible hypotheses. The central distinction is between two inferential layers. The first concerns contemporary relations among traits, cues, receiver responses, behavior, mating, reproduction, and other proximal variables. The second concerns historical evolutionary origin: whether, when, and through which selective process a phenotype or psychology arose. The two layers are connected, but they are not interchangeable. For contemporary relations, construct alignment comes first: the measured variables must correspond to the theoretical objects named in the claim. Three further questions are then especially useful: direct evidence coverage—has the exact relation actually been studied? result direction—what do the direct findings say relative to the proposition? and causal leverage—what does the design allow us to infer about the named direction rather than association, confounding, or reverse causality? Historical origin then requires a separate synthesis of developmental, genetic, comparative, ecological, mating, reproductive, and alternative-hypothesis evidence. Current function and historical origin must remain distinguishable, as long emphasized by evolutionary theory and adaptationist methodology. The practical implication is simple: expand first, compress second. Evidence should first be attached to the proposition, set of propositions, or pathway that it genuinely bears on. Broader explanatory language is licensed only when the required bridges are themselves evidentially characterized, the constructs and scopes remain compatible across those bridges, and unresolved uncertainty is not erased during composition. This is not proposed as a new general theory of causal inference or adaptation. It is a conceptual synthesis for keeping the internal structure of human sexual-selection explanations visible. Four cases—male status seeking, female waist-to-hip ratio, sex differences in competitiveness, and male strength/muscularity—illustrate how the same approach can weaken overcompressed claims, preserve genuine uncertainty, or strengthen explanations whose evidential architecture is well connected.