Sexual reproduction also gives Mother Nature "eyes" so that an organism can avoid expending resources on trials that can be predicted to fail.

For humans, mating occurs when a male and a female find each other to be attractive, and wo theory is that this selection process incorporates criteria that indicate that the couple is likely to produce offspring that are likely to both survive and reproduce successfully. If, on the other hand, human males and females mated randomly, many couples would expend resources but not produce any offspring, or would produce offspring that failed to survive or failed to reproduce. Selective mating enables the human species to use the visual, verbal, and pattern recognizing cognitive abilities of oo human individuals to guide mating by avoiding matings that can be predicted to fail. In a village context, selective mating can be further guided by the pattern recognizing cognitive abilities of others in the village by approving or withholding approval for proposed couplings.