More Than Just a Pretty Face

Is this even a real and significant phenomena? I ask because my intuition (that is, based on what I notice, not what I count or think I could count) is that it’s more common for average to slightly above average guys, and even sometimes good looking guys, to be with less attractive women. My guess on this is that its because even the less attractive women are able to use sex in a way the guys are not to build a relationship. Nothing wrong with that at all as far as I’m concerned, and I don’t mean anything like what an ev. psych person would by this. Just that I rather doubt that there is an interesting phenomena here to be explained in the first place. (This is a pretty common problem with ev. psych stuff, in fact.)

The whole thing sounds too much like “mating is a marketplace” or similar vulgar economic “models” of everything under the sun to me.

Maybe, just maybe, a select few men and women choose spouses and SO’s because they are smart, funny, and kind. It may be hard for Kanazawa and Co. to believe, but these qualities sometimes, every so often, once in a while, DO trump looks.

After all, we’re all going to become less pretty as we age. But, barring Alzheimers or some such tragedy, smart, funny and kind are yours for life. These qualities have a lot more to contribute to the success of a marriage in the long run.

I get the feeling that a lot of this theoretical bloviating on the “marriage market” (blech) has precious little to do with how actual people choose their partners.

man, I agree that it’s a shame that hott guy with the great personality didn’t leave his email. Because he would totally work out with Jaqueline Mackie Paisley Passey. They’re like, made for each other.

On the original issue: these people seem deeply confused. Is there any evidence that sex selection is other than more or less random at large enough samples? (I mean–look at my siblings, and you could tell all sorts of stories about why 4/5 were male, why 2/3 of those have had even numbers of boys and girls, etc. etc. But that’s because you’ve got a sample size of 5).

There’s a similar debate that used to run through demography and population studies in the 80s and 90s. It looks like in populations that are at war or have recently been through a war, there is a shift towards male births. Cool! Women stepping forward to do their patriotic duty! But the numbers are pathetically weak, like 50.003 to 49.997 or something like that.

Ideology gone fishing.

Nobody wants to face the real issue. As we all know, caring handsome men are attracted to female ducks. It is pretty much a scientific fact, proved in a study done by Brutus Bonkerovich, “Journal of Hot, Nice Males and Why we Don’t Get Hot, Stuck up Babes Quarterly.” A group of 15 hot hot but nice and caring schoolboys were shown Donald Duck comic books and their eye movements were monitored for the “desireable squinting” effect – which went off the graph when gazing at Daisy Duck.

Why a duck? The answer is obviously on the savannah. While a hot, snobby female does offer a reproductive choice, the male hunter really grows to love the soothing quack of the duck after bringing in the mammoth meat for ms. Ungrateful. Who is, by the way, just looking for some ugly duck to wash her feet, and of course is she in the cave when she should be? And where is she then? Why is she lying about that, eh?

That we are all wired like this is a scientific fact only rejected by “postmodern” feminists, most of whom can’t understand science anyway, since their concentration on formulas is continually interrupted by dreaming of ugly guys that can break their spirits and make them real, begging women. Facing science takes the bravery of the male hunter type.

Bonkerovich is reportedly working on a more popular version of his paper for Slate.

Kanazawa has done previous research suggesting that nurses, social workers and kindergarten teachers—those with “empathic” traits—also had more daughters than sons.

You should read what Andrew Gelman has to say about that paper. (Gelman is a well-known Bayesian stats guy at Columbia.)

Um, how exactly? You probably think I’m just being snarky about evolutionary psychology, but I’m genuinely curious to know what the proposed mechanism is for this effect.

Is it necessary that evolutionary psychology should propose a mechanism here? Isn’t that a job for biologists? I mean, seriously, step 1 — demonstrate an effect, step 2 — look for the underlying biology.

Certainly, biased sex ratios based on expected success of male or female offspring is documented among other species–even primates. For example, the following is from Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mother Nature (I’m not sure if the underlying mechanism is understood in these cases either):

When the “Rules” Themselves Are Contingent . .

The perennial question “which sex to produce” can be mind-boggling, especially in such flexible primates as baboons and macaques, “weedy” species like humans are, readily adapting to diverse habitats. As in all the well-studied Old World cercopithecine monkeys, baboon and macaque daughters inherit rank from their mothers. Because daughters remain nearby, it behooves a high-ranking mother to produce the sex that will benefit most from her own status, as well as bolster matrilineal interests by supporting kin (another form of local resource enhancement). In habitats like Amboseli, where food is scarce, high-ranking mothers do just this—they overproduce daughters. The same pattern can also be documented for some populations of macaques.
Year after year, mothers in the highest-ranking matrilines consistently produce significantly more daughters than sons, while low-ranking females produce few daughters and more sons. Low-ranking females not only produce few daughters, but such daughters as they do produce are more likely to die than are sons born to mothers of equivalently low rank. Based on captive studies of bonnet macaques, Joan Silk showed that whereas sons who depart their natal group can leave the disadvantages of their mother’s low rank behind, daughters cannot. In her study, no daughter born to a low-ranking mother managed to produce a single surviving offspring. When competition for local resources is intense, a daughter born to a high-status mother is the right sex in the right place at that time.

jim makes a very good point, up there.

Clearly all of us who had a daughter first are devastatingly good-looking. This study proves it!

(And who you gonna believe: a scientific study or your lying eyes?)

Roger, all you need to do is invoke Margaret Mead as a straw-woman and you pretty much have the sociobiological party line down.

Another thing I want to know is? What exactly does “beautiful” or “handsome” or “good-looking” mean? And how exactly does this sex-selection occur? Yes, I’m sure that most of us agree that Angelina Jolie is prettier than Camilla Parker-Bowles, and Johnny Depp is more handsome than George W. Bush, but beyond that, what about cultural and individual tastes? Some women are hot for blond men, others like ’em dark. Some men like wide hips and ample behinds, others like ’em thin as a rail. These cultural and individual tastes are bound to influence opinion of who is beautiful and who is not. And these factors can be remarkably idiosyncratic – if “Steve” was the class bully in third grade, it might make a bad association with Steves from there on in, and a “Steve” might seem uglier than someone equally good-looking named “Brian.”

Then there’s the little question of how this sex-selection occurs. Do good-looking men produce more X-chromosome-bearing sperm? Do good-looking women’s wombs reject male embryos? Can people select the sex of their unborn children using some kind of Spidey Sense? Maybe my scientific illiteracy is showing, but I’d really like to know the “how” of this in plain language.

Nobody wants to face the real issue. As we all know, caring handsome men are attracted to female ducks.

No, no, no, it’s the other way around: beautiful women with gigantic breasts are attracted to male ducks. I saw it in a Frank Cho cartoon.

Roger and Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey should hook up.

Ginger Y, well, although it is true that, as a male, I am biologically destined to treat my sperm like Johnny Appleseed spreading those apples, I am momentarily defying my hard wiring by remaining true to my own ‘Mother Goose’ – from her cute little bill to her webbed feet, she’s the bird for me. And she appreciates passages from Manliness, which I read to her so she knows her place in this complicated world — a savannah in which the clash of civilizations is played out between men who know they are men and womanized men with the E brain types — oh brother, don’t we all know that type!

Supposedly Mansfield is part of a study Kanazawa is making at the moment on “Genius, the warrior spirit, and birth order among the Straussians.” This will help us pick our natural leaders, of course, in this terrible War on Terrorism.

Christ, Mansfield. What is it with neocons and being spectacularly wrong? Is it a secret competition?

“But dominant or subordinate status is cultural.”

Not in most ape societies. Or at least not entirely. It’s based ultimately on innnate strength. It would be interesting to see if the same result can be found in bonobos, given their, ah, alternative means of dispute resolution and status affirmation.

Ugly must be adaptive, because it sure hasn’t died out.

As I have no money, there is only one remaining explanation for why my gorgeous fiance decided to hook up with me. There goes my healthy self-image.

It’s amazing the lengths to which an “evolutionary biologist at the London School of Economics” will go to avoid rather obvious cultural and political explanations for inequality.

Not only does Clinton have “a lot of Nice Guy traits,” he grew up with the classic ingredients: absent dad, harsh and controlling mom and dominant wife.”

Anti-“nice-guy”ism is a little out of control. A lot of bullshit evolutionary psychology speculation tends to ignore the results of actual evolutionary psychology studies:

In study 1, 216 single students demonstrated a prevailing desire for a kind, considerate, and honest partner who displayed a keen sense of humor. Consistent with the hypothesis, there were no clear sex differences evident in these results.

Kind, considerate, and honest with a keen sense of humor sounds like a nice guy to me.

So the claim that attractive couples have girls more often is not the only thing wrong with this study. There is also a problem w/ the research not supporting the thesis. So say attractive genes are more likely to be passed on to women. Whatever. That doesn’t mean there are going to be more attractive women than men because women are not compared directly to men- they’re compared to their peers (other women). There is no absolute standard here- its all just comparative. So when people claim that attractive women hook up w/ unattractive men, what they mean is that women who are relatively attractive to other women hook up with men who are relatively unattractive to other men.

Now obviously this will happen occassionally, but frankly, I don’t think its that strong of a trend. Sure some hot women will be w/ unattractive men who are rich or famous or even just nice, but those things make a man more attractive to a woman. So this guy who is totally hott is just wrong, from my experience. On the other hand, he may very well be attractive and just not know how to get women. Since men can easily identify attractive women, as an attractive woman its easier to pick-up the partner you want (at least on the surface). But as a good-looking guy (or even a guy w/ a lot of other positive qualities, too) b/c women are worried about more than just your looks, you may not be able to get the women you want b/c you don’t know how to show off your other desirable qualities (b/c honestly, its not easy).

If my theory is true than attractive women should occassionally be settling for someone slightly less awesome than is theoretically at their level, but they will probably be happy b/c they chose him. On the other hand, there will be some desirable men who get left out in the cold and may be bitter about it. Plus there are all the guys who think they’re great, but aren’t. This seems true in my experience. But I’ll grant my experience is limited.

I agree that this all sounds completely bogus. But I will point out that there is a mechanism for sex selection: male sperm are shorter lived. In fact, it’s been shown that the more often a male ejaculates, the higher percentage of his sperm are male, as female sperm build up over time. Likewise if the journey the sperm must take to the egg is longer, that would favor female sperm.

Now how, specifically, this can come into play in what they’re describing is still a bit sketchy, but I believe that it’s possible.

As far as the ‘good-looking mating with ugly’ phenomenon, I think the mechanism at work here is something like this:

All other things being equal, every person (above level 0) always has a wide choice of less good-looking potential partners offering their affection.

Those in the middle of the scale are not satisfied with the quality (quality of looks, that is) of easily available potential mates and they prefer to work harder to attract a higher quality partner, while those on top of the scale will naturally perfer an easy pick-up of a still reasonably good-looking partner from one or two levels under.

IOW, they get too much attention to be willing to work on a relationship, so in the end they have to trade their partners’ looks for their endurance.

Adaptive sex-ratio adjustment in evolution is an empirical finding. We can’t just dismiss it because there is no plausible mechanism.

In anything involving statistics in any but the most trivial way, it’s never safe to just say it’s an empirical finding. Statistical analysis is a weak tool to come by the truth, one fraught with difficulties. Until you find the causal mechanism, the result can be an artifact of the estimation procedure.

Walt of course correlation and causality are different. But proper statistics has lots of ingenious ways of testing causality, and the term “empiric finding” normally assumes that these have been used.

If there’s any impressionistic validity in the conclusions of Kanazawa’s ridiculous research, mightn’t that be down to momentary external perceptions rather than evolutionary biology etc? We perceive beautiful women to choose ugly mates in the same way that we perceive basketball players’ girlfriends as short – at least, until they step away from their boyfriends. It’s the Carlo Ponti phenomenon: Ponti was actually pretty average-looking, but because he was hooked up with Sophia Loren, everybody said, “Ugly ugly ugly.”

Ginger/Belle, there’s a reasonable reason for only looking at first children: the sex of your first child can affect your decision to have other children. So for example some studies of the relationship between child gender and divorce have focused just on the first child.

That said, all the Kanazawa papers I can find on the web look at # of sons, and # of daughters. Which seems exactly the wrong way to do it.

My reading of the “kids sired by engineers/scientists” data is that women who are married to engineers/scientists are more likely to fool around outside the marriage with men who are more likely to father sons, which confers a protective benefit on the mother since the engineer/scientist husband sees, on average, the male-dominated litters of his wife and believes that they must be his, since after all, he is an engineer/scientist and is more likely to sire sons.

Lesson is that if you’re a man who is more likely to sire daughters than sons, it’s a waste of your time to hit on women who are married to engineers/scientists (except for protected recreational sex, so be explicit about what you’re offering her!). Note, as a side benefit (pun intended — “on the side,” get it?) if you’re a man who is more likely to sire daughters than sons, it’s less likely that your own father was an engineer/scientist, so it’s less likely that your social circle overlaps with the husband of the woman you are hitting on, so your dalliance with her, if successfully initiated, can be much more relaxed!

Ginger/Belle, there’s a reasonable reason for only looking at first children: the sex of your first child can affect your decision to have other children. So for example some studies of the relationship between child gender and divorce have focused just on the first child.

I can understand that, but selection acts on the genes that are passed to each of the children, not just the first. And as I said originally, it’s only very recently that people have stopped having children after one or two. And more importantly, how can you say something like “Selection pressure means when parents have traits they can pass on that are better for boys than for girls, they are more likely to have boys” when you’ve only looked at the first child? What if most of these people have a boy first and then three girls? Wouldn’t that completely disprove her argument? What if the mechanism for this hypothetical process were to work in precisely that way, making the first child the opposite gender of all future children? Put simply, how can you measure how many children of each sex certain people have without looking at all the children?

We’re talking about political animals, here—even male dominance hierarchies, even among chimps, aren’t ‘based ultimately on innate strength’. Read some of Frans de Waal’s work

I’ve read Chimpanzee Politics and The Ape and the Sushi Master. All I was saying was that dominance hierarchies aren’t entirely cultural, as they effectively are in modern human societies. Certainly for the most part it’s culture that maintains the status quo in, for exampe, chimpanzee societies (which are far more politically complex than any other non-human primate society). But when there is a power-struggle, it’s strength or perceived strength that settles the matter, even to a much smaller degree for females. See the trajectory of Frodo, for instance. Obviously culturally driven politics plays a part because you get alliances of low-status chimps taking on the alpha, or if the alpha has been a successful ruler he will be supported by lesser status chimps. But the strength of the individual male is an extremely good indicator of status.

I’m astonished people are still discussing this work seriously, given comment 12 above: Andrew Gelman thoroughly demolished Kanazawa’s work purporting to show that “empathetic” parents have more girl children. He was looking at the number of (e.g.) boy children, controlling for the number of girl children, which cannot show what he wants to show, although it may be a sign of something else (e.g., that engineering parents are more likely to keep trying to have children if they have only girls so far).

Yeah, everyone should read comment 12 and then limit their comments on Kanazawa to mockery.

As Montaigne said, people too often ask “why is it so?” without first asking, “is it really so?”

For example, Lyle Lovett, the singer, is often described as less than lovely and horselike in appearance, but is also rumored to be hung like a horse.

Actually, as far as I’m concerned, being able to sing well is a bonus all by itself (I’m assuming Lovett does in fact sing well – I haven’t really listened to him).

On the other hand, attractive people of either sex being matched with less attractive people of either sex doesn’t really require any explanation beyond regression to the mean.

I’m astonished people are still discussing this work seriously

You mean this is a serious discussion? I was assuming most of the proposed explanations were mockery of one kind or another. Or at least a chance to have fun skewering one or another of the groups that supposedly have more boys or girls.

while discussing with a friend about the absurdity of the paper, one itneresting question has arised – how do they account for abortion and miscarriages?

otherwise, i totally agree with the comment that said “ugly is adaptive” – true. Also, Why separate the smart and the beautiful? What about people who are both ugly and stupid?

Yeah, Mia is Teh Hot. Evidence that there is indeed a genetic basis for beauty.

My new favorite misquote about science is that science began to make progress when people learned that the fact that something seems to be true is independent of whether it is actually true.

This is the problem with psychology, evolutionary and otherwise. It is hard to tell the difference between ridiculous truths and ridiculous falsehoods.

That the current state of our evolutionary psychology sucks and that Freud was dishonest, does not make it true that we are not Things subject to Unconscious forces.

wait a second–

while Bonnie Raitt is in fact a first-rate bottle-neck guitar player, she is in no way lacking in the more traditional charms that lead to the production of offspring.

I mean, Lyle Lovett has to **make up** for his looks. The kid’s a dog face. Bonnie Raitt is and always has been a **looker**.

(And yes, you can calculate my age from this comment, with fair reliability. If you don’t agree about the present tense version, just check out the version that corresponds more closely to your own current age).

What amazes me is that your criticism is even lamer than the comments you criticize.

Slight misuse of the slanted Flannery O’Connor cite there, Belle. “She would of been a good woman if there had been somebody there to shoot her every day of her life” because the prospect of death inspired in her a generous and self-sacrificing, morally focused character. There’s no indication here that the prospect of being popped on the schnozz would inspire this gentleman to anything but more resentful, bigoted, boastful self-pity.