It turns out you can deny evolution and still get published on the New York Times op-ed page. Dan Slater did just that, in a piece yesterday called "Darwin Was Wrong About Dating."

Slater--who has a new book out in which he claims that online dating, of all things, is revolutionizing the sexual marketplace--sets out to debunk a subspecialty known as evolutionary psychology, which seeks to explain differences between men and women in terms of Darwin's theory of sexual selection.

In brief, the theory of sexual selection posits that members of each sex will employ different evolutionary "strategies" in order to ensure that their genes survive into future generations. Since the male makes the lesser investment in reproduction, men are driven to favor quantity over quality. They are especially attracted to youth and beauty because these are signs of fertility. But one man can reproduce with many women, so that there is no evolutionary need to be selective. The most efficient way to pass on his genetic legacy is to have intercourse with as many women as possible.

Reproductively speaking, that's not an option for a woman, whose potential number of offspring is much smaller because she must endure the demands of carrying, bearing and nurturing every child she produces. Thus it is in her evolutionary "interest" to value quality over quantity--that is, to be selective, choosing men who enhance her offspring's chances of survival via some combination of their own genetic endowment and the resources they can contribute to the rearing of children.

It is crucial to understand that these are only metaphorical "strategies" and that evolutionary "interests"--the interests of one's genes--are not the same as individual interests. Evolutionary psychology posits not that men decide to be promiscuous and women hypergamous because they want to have as many or as robust children as possible, but that these sexual and emotional instincts developed because they were conducive to reproduction over many generations in the ancestral environment.