I recently read the "Sex similiarities and differences in preferences for short-term mates: What, whether, and why" JPSP article for my DIS. The most interesting part of the paper was a footnote in the introduction explaining why many women who are considered somewhat physically unattractive by today's standards are still likely able to reproduce. One might wonder why selection would design a mechanism where judgements of female physical attractiveness did not correspond with actual fertility and reproductive health. It's not a flawed mechanism, just a mismatch between the current environment and the one in which we evolved.
"In harsh ancestral environments, fertility and reproductive health among females may have varied greatly, thereby creating the adaptive problem for males of identifying physically attractive partners (Buss & Schmitt, 1993). The resulting adaptive mechanisms for evaluating physical attractiveness have been hypothesized to operate in a relative, rather than absolute, manner. That is, what constitutes acceptable physical attractiveness may depend on comparisons within one’s local pool (Symons, 1979). Although the variance in reproductive health among modern day college-aged women may be much smaller and differences in physical attractiveness less meaningful than in the ancestral past, the standard-setting mechanisms for physical attractiveness are still expected to operate within this
pool."
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3 comments:
Good point! A vestigial mechanism I hadn't previously thought of as such. And BTW, the importance of relativitity to basically everything is a note I made today during a talk. It's all relative, from your own desirability in the mate market, how you interpret your successes/failures, to the vigorousness of the sexual display a male lizard makes relative to the visual background "noise" (if leaves are blowing and there's a lot of action in the visual field around him, he needs his signal to stand out and be visible to females!), to genes passed on to offspring (relative reproductive success). True dat!
Fo sho. This discussion of relativity vs. absolute-ness reminds me of Robert Frank's plenary at HBES (the only plenary I went to). He presented data where participants were asked if they would rather live in a) a 10,000 square foot house in a neighboorhood of 13,000 square foot houses, or b)a 6,000 square foot house in a neighborhood of 5,000 square foot houses. Participants, of course, chose the latter.
p.s. I like the lizard example.
Oh yeah, I'm full of 'em now after the conference. I thought that study was way cool.
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