Embryo Selection and Mate Choice: Can ‘Honest Signals’ Be Trusted?

Abstract

When a measure becomes a target, it often ceases to be a good measure – an effect familiar from the declining usefulness of standardized testing in schools. This economic principle also applies to mate choice and, perhaps surprisingly, pregnancy. Just as females screen potential mates under many metrics, human mothers unconsciously screen embryos for quality. ‘Examinees’ are under intense selection to improve test performance by exaggerating formerly ‘honest’ signals of quality. Examiners must change their screening criteria to maintain useful information (but cannot abandon old criteria unilaterally). By the resulting ‘proxy treadmill’, new honest indicators arise while old degraded indicators linger, resulting in trait elaboration and exaggeration. Hormone signals during pregnancy show extreme evolutionary escalation (akin to elaborate mating displays).