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Tuesday, Aug 03, 2010 - 23:48 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Facts About Life

"For a man to walk into a bar and have his choice of any woman he wants, he would have to be the ruler of the world. For a woman to have the same power over man, she'd have to do her hair."
- Bill Maher, comedian, wise man


Spent the weekend mostly tinkering with Google Chart (yes, what service doesn't Google provide? - see some results) and reading; Specifically, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, among other books.


(Source: amazon.com)



Questioning Generals (Not In The Army)

Before I continue, I'd like to straighten out an issue about my writing. From my own observation, I have been using words like "probably", "likely" and "perhaps" somewhat more than is common. If taken to the strictest possible standard, nothing is certain, but it's probably (ah, see?) unnecessary to qualify a statement like "the Sun will rise tomorrow", seeing as the event is about as close to a practical certainty as we can get.

Stuff like "men are taller than women" though would deserve "in general", since it is true that many individual women are taller than many individual men, even if men are indeed taller as a group. For the remainder of this post at least, I shall follow the convention of leaving out such qualifiers whenever plausible, as occurs in the book. It certainly makes for a cleaner, if mildly less accurate, read.

The authors are evolutionary psychologists (EP), and the main thesis is that a lot of our behavior is actually deeply ingrained within us; Learning and the environment can only do so much to adjust that, contrary to what the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) says. Culture is not destiny, and humans are basically still animals deep within.

Unfortunately, where SSSM was extremely politically correct - we all have the same infinite potential! - EP is more gloomy, and says that while humans are indeed basically alike, it's not always for the best, and worse, the "bad" parts are unlikely to change in the near future.

The unifying theme is about something all our honoured ancestors did, stretching in an unbroken chain through the mists of time. Back through the modern era, the industrial ages mere centuries past, various renaissances major and minor, the discovery of agriculture many millenia ago; But even those tens of thousands of years are but the merest blink in the story of life, a fraction of the latest paragraph of the newest chapter, where some creatures who were not quite human, became so.

And in that span of time, there were generations - thousands, tens of thousands, millions of them. Every single human today stands at, or very near the end, of that unimaginably enormous tree, and looking up he can see, beyond his two parents and four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and in general, 2n+3 great-to-the-power-of-n-grandparents.

That's a lot of ancestors for even moderate values of n, by the way.

And each of those; They may have been male, or female, tall or short or fat or thin. Black, white, or any shade in between. Smart or slow, pretty or plain. Kings or paupers, humble or vain. Good or evil, violent or tame, devout or disbelievers, happy or discontent. Of such a huge mass of people (and proto-people), there are very few similarities that all share. Probably not all had an arm, or both legs, or even a single head. But there is at least one non-trivial act that they all engaged in.

They all f**ked. Every single last bloody one of them.


Ah, Yes, So They Did

As might be expected, it is hard to contemplate this fact without reevaluating the sheer significance of sex, or procreation, for the squeamish. In particular, if traits might be passed down to children (as most believe), then how people chose their mates would answer a lot of questions.

The short answer is: Men want young and beautiful (a.k.a cute) women, and women want rich, powerful and respectable men. There, it doesn't make for especially pleasant reading, but that's the status quo everywhere throughout known history. Note the absence of qualities like intelligence (except where it translates into money/power for males), sense of humour and personality.

Further, men want young, beautiful and many women, since they can potentially have thousands of kids (and at least a few did), while no woman could have more than a handful. But women do have their own consolation, in that they could almost always have a few children if they wanted to, while historically the majority of men died without progeny (hint: one wife per guy is a relatively recent invention)

This is also why males are more violent and bigger risk-takers - they have a lot more to gain if they win in life, and everything to lose by default if they don't try (indeed, the authors argue that even the death penalty is scant deterrance, as that only threatens a personal demise, while failure to reproduce represents eternal annihilation). Whereas for females, it's "meh, I can have about the same number of offspring anyway", which also explains male ambition and dedication to career, as compared to females.

Thus the guys explore new continents, fight dangerous beasts and each other, try horrible pick-up lines etc, and when the dust settles there are somewhat fewer of them. And the survivors will claim the young ladies, because they have most of their reproductive years in front of them, and the pretty ones, as beauty is a sign of good health, and easy on the eyes after a hard day out.

In fact, gentlemen prefer blondes (well, usually...) as blonde hair was an accurate indicator of youth (it usually turns brown later in life), and long hair as the hair's appearance reveals the woman's health status for the period it had been growing (years for shoulder-length hair) [Interestingly, this may also be why blondes are regarded as dumb - it turns out they're just younger and less experienced]. A thin waist (waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.7) is universally liked as it shows high fertility, and large boobs because it helps in determining age. There's a reason for everything, eh?


Money Finds Looks, So...?

Well, there are many other fascinating explanations for observed phenomena. A selection:

  • Beauty (symmetry, averageness) is mostly objective, as it is a useful and accurate indicator of health.


    Seventeen dots to symmetry at anaface.com
    (N.B. Accuracy disputed)


  • Young chicks dig older men for their wealth and status (and all men dig young chicks for their youth).
  • Men overreact to female signals of interest because it would be too costly not to (slap in the face for misread vs. children if it works out), while it is the other way round for women (absent father for misread vs. valuable helpful father if it works out)
  • Humans are naturally polygamous, according to relative body sizes between the genders, and in fact are even now serially polygamous through divorce and starting new families.
  • Sons reduce the likelihood of divorce as the father has an incentive to increase his chances of reproductive success by passing on an inheritance (whereas daughters can get by on looks alone. Also, failure to produce a heir was often grounds for separation, or at least another wife, in some societies)
  • Intrinsically useless gifts like diamonds, roses and chocolates are liked as they signal a willingness to sincerely invest in the female (and helps to deter golddiggers, from the male perspective - well, perhaps not the diamonds...)
  • Handsome guys do sleep around more (and make worse long-term mates) than uglier guys, but mostly because they can, and not due to any exceptional morality on the uglier guys' part.
  • Beautiful people have more daughters because beauty is rather more valuable to daughters than handsomeness is for sons (answering the question posed by the book's title, and despite the point above)
  • Rich parents have more sons, and poor parents more daughters (the Trivers-Willard hypothesis). Now, this was unexpected, but the authors did supply many sources. The explanation is again that sons need money to get laid (but with sufficient resources they can get laid a lot), while daughters don't.
  • Babies resemble the father more - or at least the mother and her family tend to say so happily. This is because the mother is certain that the baby is hers, while the father is never sure - and in reality, about 3% of dads are cuckolded, which is lower than the over 10% that the authors state, but still quite high, on average about one per class of students!


    And he thought he had his great-granddad's hair...
    (Source: washingtoncitypaper.com)


  • Fathers abandon their families more often, not only as they can't be sure of paternity, but also as they (usually rightly) believe that the mother will take care of the kids, since they represent a much greater proportion of her reproductive potential.
  • Genius and crime manifest most in young men, who resort to both to get mates, and mellow after marriage.
  • When domestic violence occurs, young wives get the worst of it (even considering the husband's age) as they are considered more valuable, and thus provoke more jealousy. If children are mistreated or killed, they are statistically far more likely to be stepchildren.
  • Single young women travel more than young men, as young and pretty girls are young and pretty everywhere, while male status and power does not necessarily translate across cultures.
  • (Hypothetical) Gays exist because whatever genes cause their condition also cause their sisters to have more children, thus propagating such seemingly self-defeating genes on. The authors also wonder if acceptance for gays would actually reduce their numbers, since societal homophobia actually forces them to stay in the closet and raise (more probably gay) children.
  • And ending on a bright note: We're all overwhelmingly descended from winners! Kings, lords, chiefs, heroes, successful tradesmen... simply because they had much more kids, generation after generation. Hooray! [N.B. One in 200 men today - and 8% of men in Asia - can claim direct lineage from Genghis Khan or his immediate family, going to show that killing one person makes you low-life murderer scum, but killing countless thousands might make you the father of nations, if you play your cards right after that]

Wow. Is All That True?

I would say... perhaps. One thing to note is that the authors seem to concentrate on and favour evidence that conforms to their theories (e.g. the 10%-30% cuckoldry rate assertion, which appears a gross overestimate, and their refutation of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, heavily based on Derek Freeman's arguments, themselves in question)

Another possible criticism is that the authors move too easily from evidence to hypothesis (refer to one of Kanazawa's original academic papers, which is recommended reading if only as a more approachable introduction to academic writing). The confirmation that beautiful people do have more daughters was based on:

  1. Some 3000 subjects
  2. Each of whose physical attractiveness was (hopefully secretly) rated by an interviewer (and which was noted to be weakly correlated with the subjects' [generally inflated] assessment of themselves)
  3. And results for the first-born are... 50% boys for the very unattractive, 56% for the unattractive, 50% for the average ones, 53% for attractive people, and 44% for very attractive people

Without delving too deeply into the statistics, exactly why there is such a difference between attractive and very attractive people seems to bear further thought, if the hypothesis is to be supported. Kanazawa does try to correct for variables like income by considering them in doing regression analysis, but like much of social science, it's hard to be certain.

There are simply too many possibilities to consider; Did the same interviewer rate all subjects? Even if so, how objective can a single human be, especially given that the results necessarily depend heavily on the initial segmentation? Are there important undiscovered variables? Unlike the hard sciences, there's a distinct lack of near-certain relations and dependable numbers, though not through any fault of the social scientists.

Also, things are changing. This might be the most fascinating time to be a human, thus far. While the basics may still hold true, advances like hair dye (not that recent actually) and plastic surgery, not to mention increased earning power by females and other social upheavals. And despite all these subconscious drives, people do still - gasp - think, at least once in a while.

But it sure doesn't hurt to be young and pretty, or rich and powerful.



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