Until recently, the main things I thought of as indicators of reproductive potential were things like hip-to-waist ratio, income, secondary sex characteristics, and so on — things we normally recognize as related to childbearing or supporting a family, and generally to good genes.

However, I was leaving something out.:

Someone (don’t ask who) showed me a few pages from an on-line book he was reading about how to attract women.

This book stated emphatically that one needn’t be rich or successful, tall or muscular to score with women. In fact, the book actually dissuaded men from focusing on success for attraction’s sake or putting too much energy into augmenting secondary sex characteristics like arms and abs. Instead, the book said, men should focus on what matters most for getting women: the semblance of social status.

Note that it didn’t say ‘actual’ social status. According to the book, it doesn’t matter so much how many friends you have or how many people invite you to their parties — what matters is seeming like you’re the sort of person with 500 facebook friends, who’s also president of their fraternity. That’s right — the emphasis is on ‘seeming’ like such a person.

And how can a man seem high-value, especially to high-value women? By treating them as though he thinks he’s higher status than they are. He can level partially disguised insults, *not* buy them drinks, or pretend to be uninterested in the women he’s pursuing. While he’s treating them as though he’s far superior to them, he can seduce them by pretending to think they’re below him.

This reminded me of The Rules for Women, which gives the second sex tips on how to seem uninterested in men. The authors suggest never making the first move, never returning calls until you’ve hooked the guy, and limiting phone conversations to four minutes by saying “I’m busy, gotta go!”

The best strategy for both men and women, these books suggest, is to feign high status by treating the object of desire as though they are lower status.

But then again, isn’t feigned status almost indistinguishable from real status? Or rather, status is not an inherent property of people but rather a phenomenon built from what other people think about them.

Assuming the status one projects becomes one’s actual status, can we make the next step to fit status into the genetic paradigm?

Yes, it does indeed seem that high-status people can have more offspring or at least offspring who themselves have high social status. Keith Henson writes in the Human Nature Review, “Of all the factors that have been measured in such representative ancestral environments as we have (including chimps), social standing is the most predictive of reproductive success.”

Henson writes that “the potential rewards for obtaining high social status were — and still are — higher for males. High status males had multiple wives or additional mating opportunities in the ancestral environment (and for that matter, still do).” For evidence of high-status males having many children, he cites Gordon P. Getty’s ‘extra’ family with three children and Brigham Young’s 47 children. For women, he writes, “High status females, from what we can see in chimpanzees and humans, have no more offspring than low status ones, but their children are more likely to survive.” Moreover, those children of high-status fathers are likely to be high-status themselves.

Finally, it makes more sense. Social status is actually an extremely good predictor of reproductive success, so no wonder the book said to attract women by projecting high status.

And the premise of the book was that social status isn’t fixed at all.