A man, by contrast, is seeking a mate who will use his sperm and his money to produce babies. Consequently, he has always had an enormous incentive to seek youth and health in his mates. Those men who preferred to marry forty-year-old women rather than twenty-year-olds stood a small chance of begetting any children at all, let alone more than one or two. They also stood a large chance of inheriting a bunch of stepchildren from a previous marriage. They left fewer descendants than the men who always sought out the youngest, postpubertal females on offer. We would expect, therefore, that while
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