and a wiggle in the walk, and a giggle in the talk …

Love songs may rhapsodise “something in the way she moves”, but a sexy walk is not a sign that a woman is ready to become pregnant.

So much for George Harrison’s theory of natural selection, eh? But perhaps his theory of negative mimetic desire, elaborated in songs such as “Don’t Bother Me” and “If I Needed Someone,” will stand the test of time. . . .

Seriously, this is a little leg-pullin’ hoax. Right? Just a bit of fun on a slow news day? The “Dr. Provost” is actually Jane Provost from Pale Fire, right? And the bit about how “Western icons of ‘hourglass-figure’ beauty from Playboy centrefolds to the Venus de Milo typically take a ratio nearing 0.7 in their stride, irrespective of their body weight, experts suggest” is one of those “wide stance” Internet jokes, right?

Whatever you do, don’t listen to “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”

Maybe “Walking Contradiction” is what we need here.

Does anybody know of an ev. psych. person who is *not* a total waste of oxygen?

“Desperately unconvincing” because it’s obvious that the opposite result was expected and would have been taken as clear support for EP.

I think it’s time to call Popper in on these guys.

But you haven’t given any reason for rejecting their explanation.

Because it’s blindingly ridiculous? If the men attracted by a sexy walk are undesirable enough that the sexy walk occurs in the unfertile part of the cycle, why not stabilize the walk on ‘unsexy’ rather than cycling it? There’s no reason to be sending out signals to undesirable men at all.

They call it an ‘unwitting signal’, but what evolutionary sense does it make for it to be a signal at all? They’re just making stuff up at this point.

“Because it’s blindingly ridiculous?”

It sounds ridiculous, but then so are peacocks’ tails, and could be wrong but I don’t find it in any way unscientific.

No, peacocks tails are straightforward sexual signalling. Female peacocks are attracted to flashy tails, males with flashier tails have more success mating and more offspring, the population generally evolves flashier tails in males due to that differential reproductive success.

How is this supposed to work — undesirable men but not desirable men are attracted to sexy walks (this is already sounding unlikely), so women responsively evolve sexy walks at times when they’re not fertile. How do the women get more or more successful offspring out of having the sexy walk? And if they don’t, how was it selected for?

This is the sort of thing theocratic loonies wank over as proof that evolutionary theory is just-so stories in smaller print with bigger words.

11: What about hormone fluctuations subtly changing joint flexibility? It at least makes as much sense as arguing that the women with the less sexy walks at the time they were the most fertile tended to be more reproductively successful than the ones advertising for sex. (Evolution doesn’t care if it’s consensual sex or not, just whether there’s a baby made.)

The research was funded by the Department of Silly Walks.

How this: women were walking with their knees “closer together” during ovulation (the most fertile part of the cycle), which must mean they had their knees more “open” during menstruation (the least fertile, um, period)… I’m thinking there’s a few bulky sanitary napkins somewhere in the story here.

Yeah, that last para is obvious crap. And it’s true Ev Psych is prone to just-so stories, especially in journalists’ and other popularisers’ hands.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, though – most of the stuff that makes the journals is much more Popperian than that. It’s the sort of thing referees are conscious of these days.

DD, I was rather surprised the authors (or maybe the referees/editors) felt the need for a just-so story. You might expect by this stage that EP would have reached the point where a significant (I *assume* was significant) wrong-signed result would be publishable in its own right.

Certainly if you combine Occkams Razor with Poppers Eraser you would have to count this result as a mark against Evo Psych.

But I note that close-up indicators of female availability are pro-fertile in cycle. So perhaps walking is just one of those frivolous things women always do, just to show-off. You know, like fashion.

Look but dont touch.

These boots are made for walking . . .

Are you saying there could not possibly be an explanation of these results in terms of evolutionary psychology?

quite the reverse; I’m saying that there couldn’t possibly not be an explanation of these results in terms of evolutionary psychology, which is kind of the problem.

I think the trouble for these guys is that it’s pretty well known from other studies that walking is a learned behaviour, not an innate one (left to themselves, human beings scamper like apes, apparently. Don’t ask me how I know this because I have misplaced the matchbox on the back of which I read it). Different cultures do actually walk in noticeably different ways. Thus, I would suspect that the link between fertility and walking is purely biomechanical rather than a sexual signalling device; it’s an epiphenomenon.

“walking is a learned behaviour, not an innate one (left to themselves, human beings scamper like apes, apparently”

So humans haven’t evolved to walk upright then? (you’re thinking of feral children who apparently have difficulty) That’s a rather bold statement. Do you know that great apes born in captivity need to be taught to breast feed, that not an evolved behaviour either?

I’m simply saying that stuff can require a degree of learning (like breastfeeding, language etc) whilst still having needed to evolve and being subject to selection pressures.

Heh, just looked at the study:

“Women who were not using hormonal contraception (n = 19) repeated the study during the late follicular stage and the luteal stage of their menstrual cycle…A female researcher met the participants, informed them that the study was investigating motion across the menstrual cycle, and obtained their informed consent. The women then answered a brief questionnaire, including questions regarding their use of birth control, the length of their menstrual cycle, the day of their last period, and the regularity of their cycle in order to estimate cycle stage…Late follicular walks had a similar attractiveness level (M = 3.66, SD = .5) as walks recorded in the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle (M = 3.56, SD = .5) when compared with a paired t-test, t(18)

As far as I can recall, it’s only humans, dolphins, and bonobo primates that don’t go into heat and so can have recreational sex.

I look forward to similar studies about the Dolphin Walk or the Bonobo Boogie.

Interestingly too, it appears that belief in evolutionary psychology may be hardwired into us.

nabakov: That link’s hilarious!

I was about to observe something along the lines that studies show that men who engage in evolutionary psychology do so in an attempt to compensate for lack of sexually desirable traits. Sort of like a disposition for clinical depression has been associated with appealing to women’s nursing instincts.

But that article is way brilliant!

The results are interesting. The interpretation is weak. A more simple explanation: off-cycle women sex up their walks to offset fertility advantage of on-cycle women.

“The tactic of picking a particularly risible article from the vast amount of literature generated by a particular discipline ….”

I’ve not encounterd a non-risible thing from ev. psych, except in the sense that g-d Bell Curve BS doesn’t inspire me to laugh.

I mean, it’s kind of unexpected that the walk would be correlated with ovulation at all.

Eh, one time in twenty you’ll get a “significant” correlation even if there’s no relationship at all. And there are a lot of these studies done. And that’s assuming there are no specification issues, which is a pretty heroic assumption here. Really, there’s no way of knowing what, if anything, this “finding” means.

More generally, a correlation between two things is meaningless unless you have a concrete understanding and specific evidence for the mechanism linking them. otherwise it’s just hand-waving.

And yeah, what Barry said: there’s nothing wrong with picking out a particular example of evolutionary psychology and mocking it because it’s all like this.

eudoxis@48: That’s not inconsistent with what Daniel wrote. Certainly humans have many anatomical adaptations for walking upright. But that doesn’t prove that walking upright is innate or instinctive behavior.

I don’t know if Daniel’s right in the case of walking, but spoken language is a clear example of this. We have a number of anatomical adaptations for spoken language, but speaking a language is not instinctive, it has to be learned.

“We have a number of anatomical adaptations for spoken language, but speaking a language is not instinctive, it has to be learned.”

I thought that was Chomsky’s point (and no, obviously I know nothing about this area of science at all), that humans learning a language was instinctive, which one being what was learned. Humans brought up not learning a pre-existing one will, in a group, invent one, won’t they?

“Sometimes I think that the problem here isn’t opposition to evolutionary psychology as much as to psychology itself. ”

Often I think that the problem here isn’t opposition to evolutionary psychology as much as to science itself. Whenever these types of posts are brought up, many commenters proudly display their scientific ignorance and gleefully put down those silly scientists and their methods.

JQ: “Desperately unconvincing” because it’s obvious that the opposite result was expected and would have been taken as clear support for EP.

It’s not at all obvious because being less “sexy” to males during the follicular phase supports the peculiar phenomenon of concealed ovulation in humans.

“being less “sexy” to males during the follicular phase supports the peculiar phenomenon of concealed ovulation in humans.”

If women are signalling their ovulatory status (whether that be by sexy or unsexy gaits” then males should evolve to pick up on those cues and then they would become sexy gaits.

Concealed ovulation implies just that, you conceal ovulation, you don’t go running around telling everyone “I’m not ovulating me, oh no” once a month!

I’m not sure you’d call it a lack of sexual signal – what is it about a ‘sexy’ gait that makes it a signal, whereas a non-sexy gait is not a signal? It seems to me that it has to be what it signals that makes it sexy.

dsquared wrote: in related news, “Summer Lovin’” from “Grease” contains the line:

which I’ve just realised is more and more distasteful the more you think about it.

I agree; i always found that line disgusting.

…it has to be what it signals that makes it sexy.

Signals could be deceptive. They could signal fertility when they aren’t fertile and conceal fertility when are. Like that fly imitating a bee, you know. Why women would act this way I don’t know, but hey, they certainly have many mysteries.

anyone who takes “evolutionary psychology” in its current state seriously is displaying scientific ignorance

I’m sure E O Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Dan Dennett have nothing on you when it comes to scientific understanding.

“But currently no one has proposed any explanation as to why men find the gaits they do attractive other than reasoning to do with ovulation and fertility.”

In fact there is a lot of research with many explanations about deceptive signaling and female power in mate selection wrt male investment in offspring.

So these people were paid to watch womens’ asses ?

I hope grant funding was involved.

I can feel the scientific rigour already.

Do infertile women glide, bob or skate? What about drag queens? What about those suffering from knee injuries? What about women like me, who walk with a long, assertive unwiggly stride (but who still get laid anyway despite the lack of sexy walk).

While we’re talking about creepy, skeezy song lyrics, the terrible “Into the Night” by Benny Mardones:

She’s just sixteen years old leave her alone, they saySeparated by fools who don’t know what love is yet But I want you to know

If I could fly, I’d pick you upI’d take you into the night and show you a loveLike you’ve never seen, ever seen

I’d love to see what Echidne will say to rip this one apart! The EP’ers are missing some very simple physiological factors, probably because none of them have ever gone through a menstrual cycle.

For example, in the latter half of my cycle, my joints hurt more than in the first half (Bio 101: ovulation is generally considered the middle of the cycle; optimal fertility takes place for the first several days after ovulation — the latter half of the cycle). See how I am already making more sense than those EP’ers?

Right before my period, I’m moody and showing it with body language. During my period, I’m usually in pain from cramps and bloating. I’m sure that pain shows in my gait when I am forced to leave my bed and walk somewhere. After my period, in the first half of my next cycle, I’m usually feeling better and likely showing that with body language and gait – swinging my hips more, swinging my arms more, throwing back my long, thick luxuriant hair…

If these researchers had examined any other possible causes of the gait changes, I’m sure they would have found more reasonable explanations for those changes. It sounds like the classic error in research called, “we have a theory, so let’s find a way to prove it”.

That is called bad science.

What I am wondering is why the song “Chantilly Lace” by the Big Bopper started running through my head as I was reading this.

Pigs, they tend to wiggle when they walk…

OK, pj, my comment is still in limbo, so I’ll try again: suggestion of an intercourse is indeed a honest signal, but when sent by the female who is not fertile it is in fact a false signal. Because the ultimate goal, of course, is procreation, not an intercourse.

I posted the above before seeing all the explanations posited by female readers. Thanks. As for the “statisical jiggery” used in finding the positive result, discriminant analysis is a valid way of finding variables that predict categorical membership; it’s the nature of the categorical membership itself that may be suspect. And the comment “Eh, one time in twenty you’ll get a “significant” correlation even if there’s no relationship at all.” betrays a smug non-understanding of correlations. A significant correlation means there IS a relationship, just by that is likely not just what is chance. How much of the variance the correlation explains is of interest. An r = 0.2 can be significant, but it only accounts for 4% of the variance, so as an explanation it is almost useless.

Wilson hasn’t really talked much about this stuff in the years since “sociobiology” morphed into evo psych, and I wouldn’t be all that sure he’s so enthusiastic about the current rash of just-so stories. Pinker has no expertise in evolutionary biology- he’s a linguist by trade. Dawkins is a fine author of popular science books (though they exhibit a tendentious degree of extreme adaptationism which is outside the mainstream of evolutionary biology) who hasn’t practiced science in many years. Dennett is a philosopher, not a scientist, who writes bad, ill-informed books about evolutionary biology (DDI is a particularly awful book).

Your point was?

Steve LaBonne wrote,

Pinker has no expertise in evolutionary biology- he’s a linguist by trade.

Perhaps, but he really pushed the idea that language was shaped by evolution, which Chomsky is leery of.

Has anyone here read the actual research, or are you commenting only on the journalists report of that research? If the latter, and you have access to the actual research, what stopped you from reading it?

If you have a Ph.D., how do you feel about how journalists commonly describe about research in your field? If you have a Ph.D., and haven’t read this study, and you are wont to categorically toss out evolutionary psychology, why would you argue that anyone should respect the Ph.D.s and research in your field and not just dismiss your field based on how journalists report it?

Me? I find EP interesting and often not convincing, to me. But I have almost never read any of their actual papers. I am willing to believe you that the field is bunk, but if so, I think there are a lot of fields that are equally as full of nonsense as EP. Perhaps yours.

Efficient markets? No speculation? Free Trade?

There’s a far more important issue here than the scientific validity of evolutionary psychology: I’ve always thought it was “a wiggle in her walk and a giggle in her talk.” Have I been wrong all these years?

Good catch! More evidence that we ain’t evoluted from no dang monkeys! Keep up the good work!

Jerry: I read one of the famous ev. psych. papers, as an experiment. It did not impress me as a particularly impressive piece of research. The level of nonsense is higher than in economics, for example.

Jerry at #88. A quick Google of CT for “efficient markets” produces a couple of hundred hits, most of them fairly sceptical. As with EP, fans of the efficient market hypothesis are prone to Just So stories, and to making big claims on the basis of modest empirical support.

“As for the “statisical jiggery” used in finding the positive result, discriminant analysis is a valid way of finding variables that predict categorical membership”

You should read the original paper or my summary. As I’ve tried to point out above the original paper actually doesn’t find that there is a difference in the perceived attractiveness of gaits by women in ‘fertile’ or ‘non-fertile’ phases of their cycle.

They modelled the relationship between the attractiveness scores and, rather than cycle stage, they used their discriminant function to generate a linear scale of gait (“menstrual cycle stage z-score”). These were compared with hierarchical linear modeling: “each SD of menstrual cycle score increase resulted in a 0.08 increase in the z-score of attractiveness rating, meaning lower perceived attractiveness.

That is there was no difference between the perceived attractiveness of women’s gaits in the ‘fertile’ and ‘non-fertile’ phases of their cycles, but, there was a relationship between attractiveness and the discriminant function score (which is a measure of gait, not of ‘fertility’).

I don’t want to be rude but the authors’ desperate effort to reconcile the unexpected result with their theory reminds me of economists (I am an economist). A theory which can explain either sign equally well, is a theory which is not ready for prime time. As you tacitly note, the first best of two possibilities would be for men to find women sexier when they are fertile. This would give said men an evolutionary advantage.

“The best you can say” is a bit too good to be said really. If the authors’ had swept the result under a rug, they wouldn’t have gotten a publication. Similarly, if they had said their result contradicts the natural prediction based on evolutionary psych they would have pissed off an editor and 2 referees.

Finally, I have a less feeble (although still feeble) reconciliation of the observation and the theory (which I just read in a semi old economist article on lap dancers). The article found that fertile lap dancers get larger tips than non fertile lap dancers including those on the pill.

Women have no trouble getting pregnant, they have trouble keeping the fathers of their children loyal to them. Therefore it is in their interest to be sexy all the time (promotes monogamy you should see what Chimpanzees do) while males who can tell which women are fertile gain. The result you mention says that women won the walk round. The result in the economist said that men won the lap dance round. The problem is that any set of results is equally consistent with the theory of natural selection, therefore the whole excercise is a waste of time.

EP is taken seriously i.e the broad picture which says that radical behaviourism is false and that human minds are not blank slates and that instead they come pre-structured is accepted by both EPers and most informed critics of EP.

No, the issue is how far we should go down the innatist road ? That is, how much and what is innate in the human mind ? Are the constraints deep and many or are they shallow and few ?

Also notice that we do not have to see this as all or nothing matter ( either nothing is innate or everything is ) : better view is that the extent to which mind is pre-structured may vary across different dimensuions : compare prefferences for food with political preferences ( one may be strongly innate while the other not etc ).

If EPers want evolutionary psychology to be taken seriously, then they need to be doing experiments which look at a number of different cultures and repeatedly find the same results, so that they have a good claim that their results aren’t simply a cultural artefact.

Haven’t there been at least a few such studies, though, e.g., certain body proportions (but not body weights) deemed attractive across a broad range of cultures? Yes, I am aware that one can criticise such studies by positing that, these days, even the denizens of Cimmeria and Shangri-La have seen pictures of Marilyn Monroe and so forth. But surely evpsych can produce some robust results. And just as surely, that’s not its greatest hurdle. Rather, the conclusions its practitioners draw from even robust data seem so often to be nothing more than, how shall I put this politely… intriguing speculation.

I would note that I don’t find the idea of evpsych offensive in principle, and don’t like the stance that evpsych is bad because it’s politically important to deny the existence of any sort of “hard-wired” human nature. (NB, I don’t think Daniel or the evpsych-critical commenters here are adopting that essentially Lysenkoist stance; but other fora in the contemporary world are alas not free of various sorts of neo-Lysenkoist.) If evpsych manages to produce fruitful, predictive results that tell us something about ourselves we couldn’t otherwise have known, well then hooray. I’ll keep an eye out.

That said, I liked it a lot better when it was still sociobiology. More emphasis on biology and less on psychology might not be a bad idea for current researchers in the field.

The good folks at PunkassBlog bring you: Evolutionary Psychology Bingo!

My card is almost full!

This is the last time I’ll pimp my blog, honest, but I can’t let soullite’s comments go unchallenged.

a) I’ve read the paper, have you?

b) The paper doesn’t find that men rate the walks of women in the ‘fertile’ late follicular phase as more attractive than the ‘infertile’ luteal phase. Everyone really needs to get this point – the fundamental basis of all these news articles is flawed because the study doesn’t make this finding, it finds that there is no difference

c) The press articles (all culled from New Scientist) are fairly accurate summaries of what the authors claim in the paper (despite their own evidence to the contrary such as the above).

d) The results in the paper suggest that women’s gaits may differ between the follicular and luteal phases, and that men may vary in the attractiveness they assign to different gaits. The relationship between these two findings is rather complicated and you should read the paper to understand it (I summarise it in post #101), but it is misrepresented by the authors themselves.

e) The New Scientist story also misrepresents the findings regarding hip movements and knees since the study itself finds no difference for these factors in the follicular and luteal phases.

I agree with eudoxis @ 108 in principle, the problem being that evo psych as currently practiced is rife with out-of-control adaptationism.

I’m a long time (and sympathetic) reader of Crooked Timber, and I can’t resist commenting on how disheartening this thread on EP is. EP is a multidisciplinary discipline that gets by not on strict factual deduction, but on a sort of hermeneutic that constantly swings back and forth from evidence to theory – sort of in the way that Elinor Ostrom writes about the relationship between theory and facts in Governing the Commons. The post above about inferences to the best explanation made a similar point. So to do EP one has to talk about and cross reference work on non-human primates, evolutionary theory, experimental studies, cross cultural case studies, historical anthropology and archeology, and cognitive science. And by no means is EP an alternative to “cultural” explanations of social phenomena — i.e. no more than the Chomskian linguistics program is intolerant of the fact that, despite the principles and parameters of our language acquisition “organ,” a seemingly infinite variety of actual languages emerge.

The charge that evolutionary psychologists are prone to just-so stories is a bit tired at this point. Such ‘stories’ produce hypotheses, and this is true of just about every science. They provide the theoretical entry way into their own exploration and potential refutation.

It’s important not to forget that all of us agree on the basic tenets of EP. Our minds are obviously the product of evolution; we know a good deal about the environments – and hence selective pressures – in which our minds evolved; and thus it is a good idea to think about this information when discussing how our minds execute the impressive array of cognitive tasks of which they are somehow – but obviously – capable. The issue of how we make reasoning tasks computationally tractable should be at the forefront of all studies of decision making (which includes the study of political psychology and political judgment). This is why scholars who take the evolution of the mind seriously (e.g. Richerson & Boyd, H. Simon, Douglas North) are inevitably drawn to cultural evolution and the crucial role that institutions play in reducing or shaping the cognitive tasks that actors choose to, and are capable of, taking on.

And don’t forget: most EP scholars are card carrying leftists.

And don’t forget: most EP scholars are card carrying leftists

Name them.