If gender conflicts continue at their current rate, my partner gloomily observed, men may fade into extinction and women will manage fine without them. What with test-tube babies, cloning, a falling birth-rate, and have-it-all career women prevailing like never before, it seems as if old-fashioned, instinct-driven sexual selection was totally out of fashion. But a study from four British universities suggests it is alive and well, and busy shaping the next generation.In spite of emancipation, the feminist movement, gender equality, and consistent efforts to avoid gender-stereotyping, men still prefer to marry women who are not too brainy. In the study a high IQ hampered a woman"s chance of getting married, with a 40 percent drop in marital prospects for every 16-point rise. The opposite was true for their male class-mates. Top-earning men were 8 per cent more likely to be married than their low-earning peers.How interesting that we automatically assume that men are put off by cleverness in women. Perhaps the brainy women did not wan to get married. Possibly they could not find men clever enough to satisfy them. But these interpretations hardly merit more than a passing thought because this study simply reinforces what we know to be broadly true: that most women do want a committed partner and that most stable marriages occur in a power relation, with the man being the center.We usually think of competitiveness as a male activity, and so it is mainly, which is all the more reason for it causing stress in a marriage. Our ancestry certainly included a long phase when the males competed for the alpha role, in which the top male took all the advantages and most of the group matings. Most men nurse secret dreams of being "benign" dictators. No man likes his wife to earn more than he does. We see how fragile are the marriages of those in which the female has thewhip handin the shape of fame, success, and wealth. In contrast, marriages where the female status is obviously inferior, including arranged marriages, there is a greater stability.Women have to accept that coming into our own and achieving the full potential of our (seemingly superior) capacity to use education will undoubtedly make us more inaccessible as partners. More choosy, and therefore less successful. Conventional sexual selection______

A. gets out-of-date
B. seems prevalent
C. becomes extinct
D. remains active