Geoffrey Miller, “The Mating Mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature”

Sport rues

Adults playing sports care intensely about rule violations. If sports were just arbitrary cultural pastimes, why should competitors care so much about developing good rules? Fundamentally, I think they care about rules because they have a shared interest in presenting the sport as a good fitness-indicator to observers of the opposite sex. Obviously, competitors have conflicting interests in terms of who wins. But they all want their sport to be perceived as «cool», so that winning yields social status and sexual rewards.