What's your mating IQ?

PHILADELPHIA - What's it take to get laid?

Speakers at an annual evolutionary psychology conference here Thursday took a long, deep view at one of life's age-old questions during morning paper presentations. And a new player in the intelligence game reared its head, too.

Morning presentations at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting focused on creativity as a key element in getting mate seekers into the good graces of their intended, as well as tackling larger questions about how the intelligence needed to do so works.

Presenters discussed mating intelligence, a publicity-poor cousin of such popular concepts as emotional and Machiavellian intelligence, in a symposium aimed at building a case for the idea from an evolutionary perspective.

Whether mating intelligence - roughly defined as adapatations that will get you a mate, help you keep that mate and deal with rivals - should take its place as part of a pantheon of intelligences or as a subsidiary of general intelligence was a subject of debate. For that matter, the idea of "general intelligence" got its fair share of inspection.

Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, put forward his view that mating intelligence is a separate portion of a whole that has no name - a sort of unnamed pie that includes a slice called "general intelligence" as well as numerous other slices.

Kanazawa cast his view in opposition to popularly held - and in the world of evolutionary psychology this is a supremely subjective term - views of general intelligence.

Other speakers at the morning session took a more pragmatic approach to their arguments.

Ilanit Tal of the University of New Mexico discussed an attempt to validate mating intelligence.

Her study called on college students to undertake a variety of creativity tasks - including representational and abstract drawings and short essays - as well as a battery of tests to ascertain their intelligence, attitudes, personality type and tendency toward mental illness.

Findings of her study included a bright spot for the verbally creative, which is that the skill is a positive for men looking to capitalize on a short-term mating strategy.

Other findings discussed in the symposium posed more questions than they answered. A talk on mating intelligence as seen through the lens of speed dating concluded that more needs to be learned. Peter Todd's research attempted to find more about the high-speed assessments, but perhaps his most amusing discovery was that men typically offered second encounters to about 40 percent of women,. Meanwhile, women acquiesced to only about 20 percent of second encounters with men.

Never a truer word spoken?

Indeed.

Researchers in the session repeatedly highlighted findings that suggest long-term bonds are forged primarily at the hands of women, who are typically seen by evolutionary psychologists as having a greater interest in the long haul.

A final and fascinating note in the symposium was offered by Maureen O'Sullivan, whose research suggests that while everybody lies in relationships, women have a particularly distinguished record in that they successfully lie not only to men but to themselves.

Alas, for the romantic little remained after the mid-morning session.

Except, perhaps, findings of Scott Barry Kaufman, who found that creativity - that attractor of mates - to be linked with mental illness.