Mind the gap: Could evolutionary tendencies have driven Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas to make a pairing with a large age gap? Researchers found that in their study, couples with a smaller four to six year age difference are the most reproductively successful.
Credit: AFP
PARIS: A new study confirms that evolutionary pressure – the drive to have more children, in short – is what causes the typical age gap within male-female couples.
Austrian researchers explored the theory that men go for younger, sexually attractive women in order to boost their chances of reproductive success, while women prefer older, successful men to provide the resources and security that increase their offspring's chance of survival.
The study, which appears in the British journal Biology Letters, is authored by Martin Fieder, an anthropologist at the University of Vienna, and Susanne Huber, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna.
Four to six years
They trawled through a Swedish population database, covering 11,500 men and women born between 1945 and 1955, to see at what age these individuals became parents. Among couples who stayed together, the most children were born in households where there was an age difference of four to six years.
When couples split up and mated again, they each opted for partners who were younger than the first. That was especially so for older men, who went for women who were much younger. Women looking for a new mate generally chose a male who was slightly older than herself.
"The age preference for the partner increases [the] individual [reproductive] fitness of both men and women," write the authors, who speculate that this trait has been acquired through millennia of evolution.
