Did you know there are Six SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN ways women can be more attractive to men? Would you be surprised that they’re all about looking slender and youthful and smiling a lot? I kind of gagged at the suggestion that they’re supposed to use less makeup, because the natural look is in, and they should wear bright red clothes.
The foundation of all this bullshit is the premise that when men look at women, they are always performing a “reproductive fitness assessment” — we’re simply on the lookout for women to bear our babies. Society is so simple! Instead of a complex culture with complex individuals filling multiple roles, men are just incredibly stupid sperm carriers who see women as perambulating wombs. If you accept that, then you can do simple-minded single-parameter experiments on human interactions and interpret everything in the light of the hip-to-waist ratio, and presto! By ignoring the majority of the data, you can elevate culturally dictated preferences to the level of ultimate biological truths!
I don’t know about you, but I interact with a lot of women in my classes — and I don’t think at all about having babies with any of them, nor do any of them consider me as a sperm donor. Same with my colleagues. Same with the people I meet on the street. And it’s the same with you. Sex is not the primary determinant of how we live our lives.
I should also mention that it was a real masterstroke to have a guy in the video deliver the instructions to women on how they could be more attractive.
Gah. Evolutionary psychology makes me so pissed off.
Hang on…
I don’t… huh? But… no. I mean, if we’re just performing “reproductive fitness assessments” then… what the fuck does it matter what’s “in”? Why would such assessments be influenced by transitory fashions? My even! Augh! I don’t!
Yes ladies, wear red and less makeup, just like in The Handmaid’s Tale!
QFT
Maybe they think makeup can get passed down to one’s progeny; thus the man would be at risk of being father to a bundle of fashion faux pas.
I think that ‘womb’ here is probably an organ or two higher in the body than this kind of man would be imagining. Many hetero men of my acquaintance would rather there were no such things as uteri getting in the way of the eternal verity: ‘getting me some’.
PUAs want to reproduce?
OK while the subject of evopsych is up, I have a question and maybe someone here could point me to some reading on it?
I’m wondering if there is any actual scientific literature out there that deals with the whole “men are driven to have sex with as many partners as possible while women seek monogamous emotional connection and support for their offspring” thing I always see in pop culture. I find the entire premise to be bunk, but I’m wondering if that did come from research at some point or is it just a garbage story used by the mass media that has no basis in science?
On Halloween I saw Neil Gaiman at the main branch of the New York Public Library doing a reading of his version of “Hansel and Gretel”. During the ensuing discussion he posited that hunger, not sex, is the primal, simplistic drive. My anecdata confirms this because I’m always wondering how the people I meet can help me acquire delicious snacks.
*meerkat*
Did somebody say snacks?
*unmeerkat*
Can we get a new open thread going?
To all the MRAs, if you were looking for misandry, this is it, it’s right here, just not from the mouths of feminists, but from the mouths of people like yourselves. I’m so fucking sick of being insulted like this…
drst @7:
It would essentially be impossible to have any significant legitimate scientific support for that conclusion as controlling for the effects of culture is well-nigh impossible. And, of course, like all evo-psych bullshit, the opposite claim is equally plausible, i.e. women are driven to seek out as many “protectors” as possible for themselves and their children, while men are driven to promote monogamous pairing in an effort to control women’s rampant sexuality and make sure that the women who bear their children don’t have other children distracting them. 150 years ago that might have been the popular evo-psych had evo-psych been a thing at the time.
@R Johnston @ 12 – yeah I never really bought that there was solid science behind the premise, I just wondered if there was research that got twisted by the media/culture or if it’s “one of those things everyone knows” that nobody ever bothered to actually test, like drinking 8 glasses of water a day. Research on female sexuality is already a stunted and tiny field to begin with, when you add in the cultural pressures involved, quantifying anything becomes hopeless.
As a cultural studies person, I’m pretty much of the opinion that monogamy is a male invention for precisely that reason, but male dominated culture has indoctrinated women from birth that it’s a woman’s “natural” state to want emotional connection, not sex. That way the patriarchal culture preserves monogamy by making the oppressed population do the work of preserving it, and makes it possible for men to be more successful at reproduction (if women are seeking “providers” those are characteristics any man can successfully display or at least mimic, where if women are driven by physical attraction, more men will be out of the pool based on something out of their control).
This is actually useful information. I’d like to learn how to recognize people who read “Business Insider” for dating advice, so that I can avoid them. (I mean, I’m married and out of the dating pool, but I still want to be able to avoid them in general.)
I clicked through to the link and see that it’s a followup to a “Scientific dating tips for men” video. I don’t have time to watch the video but I did like the blurb:
drivenb4u
There are two “open threads”.
The Lounge and The Thunderdome.
Links are on the sidebar.
If you are against evo psych you are a science denier http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psychology-biased-republicans
Would a man looking for a fertile women not rather be uninterested in someone “slender”? Evolutionary speaking a big, well fed woman would be a much better “breeder”, I think.
Not that the whole concept needs another point to show what an absurd idea it is, but I think this shows nicely how the author just seeks a justification for his own (culturally influenced) preferences.
I’m imagining taking my horse into the vet and having the vet tell me, “This horse is not reproductively sound, it does not smile a lot, look youthful, is not slim and wears *way* too much makeup. Also, you need to get rid of this blue halter and get a red one.”
Someone told me this before, that it’s all about reproductive soundness, all the while worrying about things that have nothing to do with reproductive soundness – like, for example, facial features. Well, I’ve lived on a farm long enough to recognize what’s on my boots when I step in it… and that’s what this is.
Wow. I know some of the people that actually do this research.
I can’t speak for all of the research and I haven’t read it all of it, but I can speak to the tiny corner of it do know about. Short version: It’s business insider that this is sexist, not the “evolutionary psychologists” that are doing the research.
The original people that researched whether red makes us more attractive to potential sexual partners are social psychologists, who, at the time, didn’t make any particular claims about the biological/cultural origins of the effect. Notably, the effect goes both ways, red enhances the attractiveness of women http://www.psych.rochester.edu/research/apav/publications/documents/ElliotNiesta_RomanticRed.2008.pdf, but also the attractiveness of men http://www.psych.rochester.edu/research/apav/publications/documents/ElliotNiestaGreitemeyerLichtenfeldGramzowMaierLiu_RRR.pdf. So to focus on how red makes women more attractive to men is business insider’s fault, not these scientists.
Interesting, similar results were found in rhesus macaques, a species in which it is know that both males check out females and females check out males. They are perhaps an interesting model for humans because they aren’t one sided – both males and females do a significant amount of checking each other out and choosing. http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(14)00102-0/abstract If you look at the abstract you’ll see that the way business insider briefly mentions this article is particularly disingenuous. In macaques, researchers were capable of finding an effect of red increasing attractiveness for female viewing males, but not for males viewing females. So again, this is Business Insider’s fault as interpreting this as evidence of how women should be for men, not the researchers.
Other recent research from this lab and another lab can put this all in context. Red also increases competition and aggression in some contexts so what gives? One possible solution is that red is an innate attention grabbing color that accentuates social information, for both positive and negative contexts, maybe for sexual and non-sexual contexts. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0108111
One can easily imagine how in rhesus macaques with color sexual signals, how an attentional system like this could be hijacked by evolution to produce a sexual signalling system, and how, regardless of whether humans have sexual signals or cues or nothing, similar behavior would be evident in humans because sex = social information & red = enhanced social information gathering.
I know Pharyngula loves to hate on evolutionary psychology, but giving the honest description of the psychology here, some of which is evolutionary, I don’t see how any of these publications can painted as sexist. Its Business Insider that is sexist.
Yeah, I’ve heard before that researchers shouldn’t even do this type of research because it just reinforces patriarchal cultural stereotypes. I think that’s the same argument as, we shouldn’t research x because it could be weaponized, etc. E.g., maybe we shouldn’t have researched cloning because what if unethical people start cloning other humans and harvesting the clones bodies for organs. etc. I disagree. We should be able to investigate the world and insist on the ethical use of information, we shouldn’t tell people not to investigate things because the information could be used in an unethical way. That goes for science that can be turned into unethical actions and products, and science that can be twisted into unethical moral positions.
But thanks, PZ for hating on evolutionary psychologists without doing your homework. Again.
“nor do any of them consider me as a sperm donor”
How on earth do you know?!?!
Before I ever buy a drink for a girl at a bar, I insist on a cheek swab, which I then send for complete genetic testing. I consider only the most desirable genomes to be genuinely attractive.
enhances the attractiveness of women
Don’t you mean something like “subjectively assessed attractiveness of women as self-reported by a self-selected sample of US college undergrads”?
Here’s something you evo psych types can explain: if red makes women ‘more attractive’ why are there any other clothes available? A second question is: is this measured universally in all human societies at all times and all places? (Hint: there is probably not enough time for humans to have evolved a preference for red clothing, but I’ll let you make that case)
Even if I were only interested in their physical characteristics and specifically what I’m supposed to assume about their baby-making capacities, I know that I’m attracted to a wide variety of women who have very different features. They couldn’t all follow the same “advice” about how they’re “supposed” to look in order to attract me. That wouldn’t work, not for me, and not (from what I can gather) for a lot of other people.
I just don’t get how this kind of thinking even gets off the ground. What would make anyone think there’s a specific set of features that everyone is looking for, or that even one person is looking for in every one of their potential partners? It’s just bizarre. Are these people living on a different planet? Even if that’s how they actually think (probably this is just bullshit which is really about something completely different), how could they explain away all of the evidence that not everyone else does?
From the Rochester paper you cited:
Twenty-seven male undergraduates in the United States partic- ipated voluntarily or for extra course credit. Participation in this and all subsequent experiments was restricted to individuals who did not have a red–green color deficiency.
Oh, boy, right again.
Also, the beginning of the paper correctly waffles about how red preference is almost certainly cultural but may have other factors. Then, an experiment on a single culture self-selected sample of size 27.
Please continue explaining why we are meanies who make fun of evo psych. C’mon, this shit practically mocks itself.
My question for people who study evo psych, what is the purpose of studying of what female characteristics attract men (and vice versa)? It is not like we have dearth of babies being born, so obviously men and women are getting together. The question itself is culturally biased. What I find more interested is the question of why humans can have depression. Is there any evolutionary advantage for some humans to have depression or is it unrelated? Those questions could lead to more ideas about the cause of depression and how we can treat it. There is no need to make sure men and women are attracted to each other and get together and have babies.
consciousness razor @ 23
The media? Our understanding of love, sex and relationships mostly comes from the media these days, and the media only depicts an extremely narrow subset of people being successful at this, while being careful to depict anyone who doesn’t fit the “right” image as unsuccessful and fundamentally unattractive. When that’s all that you see, it can become very easy to fall into the same thinking that you must be thin, white, cis and hetero in order to ever be attractive or happy (and any disabilities have to be invisible or only evidenced by “cute quirks”).
Frankly, people are generally way too kind to evo-psych even when they mock it. Any sufficiently advanced evo-psych argument is indistinguishable from abject idiocy, and the insufficiently advanced evo-psych arguments are pretty much indistinguishable from santorum.
Complex human behavior simply is not dictated by evolved genetic traits. One thing humans have certainly evolved is the ability to learn, to be influenced by people and by culture, and to engage in behaviors that are matters of choice and acculturation rather than dictated by evolutionary pressures. Evo-psych only works on the assumption that humans aren’t intelligent beings, and even proponents of evo-psych are too intelligent for evo-psych to meaningfully apply to them.
OK, we’re up to 25 comments and (unless I missed it) nobody has swung at the softball pitch: guys like that have no Business Insider.
Tip your waiters, I’m here all week.
OK, I fully admit that I’m a novice to the evo-psych conversation, so please forgive me if this has all been hashed and rehashed. It seems to me that all of psychology is just brain chemistry and brain structure. My desires, my impulses, my revulsions, my phobias – these should all be possible to derive by investigating the structural and chemical physicality of my brain.
So it seems to follow from that that the physical traits of my brain, just like the physical traits of the rest of my body, were shaped by the evolutionary forces of selection and survival. So what is the “evo-psych” that people here object to, and what is simply evolutionarily shaped psychology?
Seriously, I’m new to this conversation, and I don’t have a side or an agenda. Just trying to learn. Thanks!
Red is such a tacky colour…if you want someone to look sexy, black is the way to go, every time.
Also, husky voices for the fucking win!
The brain is constantly being rewired and reconnected during childhood and adolescence, due to the learning and socialization that is occurring. Any genetic tendencies get lost during this process. Plus there are bigger differences within a sex than between sexes. It is called plasticity, and the human brain is very plastic.
The call on women to smile more is interesting given how common other expresses, like pouting, a slightly open mouth, or no expression at all, are in fashion photography and fashion shows. You know, the images all women are supposed to aspire to look like. There’s a Guess Jeans store in a local mall, and for a while in every photo of a woman they had in their store windows the model had the same slightly open mouth, vapid express on her face. I guess they hadn’t got the “Smile more!” message from Trend Central, or wherever such things come from.
timgueguen, the pouting and open mouth bits are really more about advertising her sexual availability, since as a poster she can’t affirm a man’s manliness in an active way by smiling at him on demand. So instead, we depict her as already aroused, so he doesn’t have to worry about whether or not she’s interested.
Nominally, these are made for women, but they are largely shot by men, the agencies choosing them are staffed by men, and thus the appeal the photographer has to go for is that which appeals to the people paying him, not the end-users (women for whom fashion is important). Male gaze is a crucial aspect of the fashion world; I suspect the men console themselves on this by imagining that women only consume fashion for its ability to appeal to men.
Evo psych argues that your brain has been programmed by evolution to behave in certain ways.
Like seeing bugs as disgusting “not food” … except, of course, in the hundreds of cultures where bugs are seen as “delicious”.
The problem with evo psych is that — in the main — the premises are “not even wrong”.
Preference for the color red?
Well that makes sense, both the notion of reconfiguration during development and the limited differences between the sexes. We can still accept that there are some elements driven by inherited genetics, though, right? Mankind’s tendencies toward pareidolia, for instance, or inherited mental illnesses? My skeleton and musculature have boundaries imposed by genetics (thanks Dad!), but my body could wind up in any of a number of shapes within those boundaries. Is it that psychology works similarly, but with greater variance (plasticity) within the boundaries?
Thanks for walking me through this.
Well, there’s the rub. What behavioral elements are genetically derive, and which are due to socialization? For evo-psych, it is all genetics when they claim “adaptation”. For everybody else, it is a cultural “adaptation” until a true genetic link can be found.
Which is why evo-psych gets laughed at. The inane and fallacious presupposition it is based on.
Bleah, apparently I can’t spell expression today.
#30, azhael:
Two words for you: Maasai Warriors.
Mmm.
“nor do any of them consider me as a sperm donor.”
PZ, you are so adorable sometimes. I am sure that at least a few of your students over the years have considered you – seriously and earnestly – as a potential sperm donor.
drst #7
Pretty much this.
Marcus Ranum22
Ah yes, the old WEIRD people problem.
@38 anym
My post was meant as an entirely subjective comment, nothing more xD
Trivially true. The real question is, which ones, and to what extent. That’s where the disagreement lies.
I wonder how they reconcile “the natural look is in [at the moment]” with this stuff being genetically programmed into us. If it was all genetic, wouldn’t it not be subject to changes in fashion?
Sometimes, it seems like people want to put evolution (or genetics) on the same footing as fundamental physics. Those are laws that apply to everything, always and everywhere, constantly, no exceptions — and most relevant here is that it is a complete system which is closed to any additional stuff, causes, influences, etc. You describe exactly what the fundamental physical properties are, and you’ve got it all. There’s no “magic” which comes in from “outside” physics somehow, basically no leftovers of any kind. We don’t actually know physics that well yet, but that’s idea of a fundamental law of nature. Evolution and genetics (and culture and many things) shape a whole lot of things in the world, but they don’t do it all.
Even if you don’t take the extreme route of saying genetics (or natural selection or whatever) determines everything in biology, it’s very easy to come up with ways of explaining how evolution (or whatever it is) might have done this or that or the other thing, without realizing what you’re doing. Unlike the case in physics, there are other confounding factors (lots and lots of them) that you really have to take seriously, instead of just speculating (perhaps based loosely on a little bit of evidence which may not even be relevant) about what your go-to explanation supposedly did. You just don’t have that luxury, in the way that physicists do, of there being no alternatives. The other options still aren’t “magic” but things like epigenetics and culture and various other natural causes; but the point is that your form of explanation still isn’t going to be sufficient in a lot of situations. Maybe most situations, or for all know, maybe all situations. Some people just don’t get that. It really is that bad.
But there’s nothing wrong with finding evolutionary causes of psychological or social (or other) phenomena. That’s okay, in general, but in practice people fuck it up a lot. Sometimes, the reasons they fuck up aren’t so nice as the kinds of confusions you or I might have about biology, but because they’re bigots of some flavor who want to support their ignorant assholery with their bogus “science.”
I’m no biologist, but I’d say it’s better to think of things besides “genetics” as another kind of boundary condition, not some other thing (no idea what you’d call that) which only does some minor tweaking within the main framework that’s “imposed” by genetics. (Maybe it’s just the wording here, but it seems to put a lot of emphasis in one spot, for no apparent reason.) All sorts of other causes are “imposing” on your body too. But, well, it’s not even clear where you (given what you know, which I’m not privy to) would draw the line between “genetics” and something else — your mother’s genetics (some of which you inherit) has at least something to do with your development during her pregnancy (I’ll leave elaboration on that to the biologists), but what kind of category is that supposed to fit into, if you even have that sort of thing in mind?
Here’s one way that may help you understand the relationship between evolution, mankind as a product of evolution, and human behavior: humans evolved to be able to learn behaviors; our genes express the construction of evolved brains that do whatever the fuck based on the environment they grow in and their interpretation of their experiences.
To Marcus Ranum and others:
Whether the papers underlying the Business Insider video are good or bad science is irrelevant to the question as to whether they are sexist, which is a main argument against much of evo psycho. In both cases, whether in looking at humans or in rhesus macaques, the researchers looked at both sexes to find the effect. In the case of humans, it went both ways, and in the case of rhesus macaques in went in the direction of females looking at males. That sexism was entirely invented by Business Insider, and had nothing to do with what the researchers are trying to understand.
The fact that Rochester team “waffles” about whether it is a product of biology or culture or both is a sign of good science. The researchers aren’t willing to commit to paper something they aren’t sure about yet. In the original papers, the researchers are studying the effects of color on human psychology, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are looking for human universals, even if they discuss that possibility. Its perfectly ok to say, and relevant to marketing and design and a whole host of other domains, that red has a specific effect on American people or WEIRD American people, or whatever. There is no reason that isn’t a perfectly reasonable scientific question to ask and answer. I think its interesting that color can affect my judgments and I’m more aware of how it is used in advertising!
In neither case do the researchers argue that an attraction to red clothes evolved since people started wearing clothes. Which is just irrational.
Working with a WEIRD population doesn’t necessary mean the data are completely and utterly invalid. It all depends on what questions you ask, and how your suite of studies all end up working together. If you worked in science – which I doubt you do – you would know how difficult it is to tackle more than one questions at one time. So the question of whether similar effects can be found in non-WEIRD people – which is a more expensive research question – is to be tackled in another paper. Well, here is one example: http://ubc-emotionlab.ca/wp-content/files_mf/elliotetaljesp2013.pdf
Look guys, its not my job to keep running around and find all the answers for you. Its a little like trying to convince a creationist that evolution really happened. The creationist can always find another example that I don’t know the immediate answer to, e.g. “Oh yeah? Well, what are the transitional fossils between A. africanus and H. erectus?” The creationist hasn’t done the work for themselves to answer that question, and because I don’t have an immediate answer to it, it must be a “gap” so that can be filled by magic god.
But you and I both know that isn’t how it works.
Likewise, just because I showed you some papers based on WEIRD populations doesn’t mean there aren’t other papers on non-WEIRD populations. You just didn’t do the work yourself to educate yourself on that, and you threw your ignorance back in my face as “fact” to discredit what I had to say.
That a lab has a majority of papers on WEIRD populations – the first papers to establish the effect and justify a reason to look for it in other areas to really understand it – especially in a lab that has produced about 100 papers doesn’t discredit a whole program of science, or even a particular lab or a particular effect or finding. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you have to look at all of these studies together. That’s how you build a research program.
Example of the plasticity of a developing/rewiring brain: Musician’s brains, where there are physical differences that develop when musical training occurs when young.
Scientific studies are perfectly capable of being sexist, especially if they’re doing bad science – so this is a relevant point. I don’t see why this is an issue, though – the fact that Business Insider is also acting sexist in its interpretation of badly-designed studies is irrelevant to the fact that scientists can be sexist, too, by bringing their biases into their research and by collecting crappy and/or insufficient data, thus leaving their research wide open to openly sexist interpretation. You’d think they’d pay attention to that part of publishing their research, too. Or is that too many things for a scientist to think about at once?
And if you were interested in showing a spectrum of non-sexist scientific research, grouperfish, maybe you should have included a larger-sample-sized, non-WEIRD study (that is, better science!) in your list of examples. Because science, you know?
Likewise, just because I showed you some papers based on WEIRD populations doesn’t mean there aren’t other papers on non-WEIRD populations.
So, you led with an argument you knew was worse? Why did you do that? Don’t call me “ignorant” for poking holes in what you put forward – it’s not my job to make a good case for evopsych and it’s hardly the case that the papers you cited are the first bad evopsych papers I’ve read. In fact I’d be thrilled to find a good one, which is why I went to the trouble to follow the links you provided. That I was able to reject it after a cursory glance is not a testament to my being a partial reader. The paper is unconvincing because it has trivially recognizable methodological flaws.
Yes, evopsych would be an important field with a lot to say, if only it had a lot to say. That’s not my fault any more than I’m being narrow-minded and ignorant when I say creationists haven’t convinced me either because I haven’t yet stumbled on a conclusively convincing creationist argument…
Apparently this writer has failed to notice that women past reproduction still manage to date and have sex lives. IME men of all ages find a no baby guarantee to be a wonderfully attractive trait in a sex partner.
Johnny Cash. Isaac Hays. Kathleen Turner Lauren Bacall? Attraction is far more complex than visual stimulus and reproduction. I don’t have the studies bookmarked, but it seems that what all genders find attractive as far as physical traits, are mostly markers of sound genetics and good health. Humans do look for basic conformation to a very narrow range of facial symmetry parameters automatically. We especially like big eyes, and show a marked preference for faces with slightly exaggerated, slightly imperfect features. Shiny hair, nice teeth and smile, and good skin are all high on the list of what everyone cites when trying to define what they find attractive. This article ignores the fact that finding someone sexy is not the same thing as being sexually attracted to them. Dancers in general have amazing gorgeous bodies, as do many athletes. I find them all very sexy and beautiful, but it has nothing to do with mating or reproduction.
I wonder what percentage of the students used in the study have not seen The Matrix and been programmed by the media representation of The Red Dress.
And, as pointed out upstream, how many participants in the study were Maasai? I believe a red dress in Maasai-land means something a bit different than “sexy” though it may be a cue for sexual selection.
I read a book not long ago that included a scientist detailing the way in which the caged environments of rhesus monkeys altered the sexual behavior. In caged environments, scientists assumed that males were initiating sexual contact due to female pheromones, and ergo were the dominant and aggressive sex in the species. But observing them in larger spaces that mimicked their natural habitat, female stalking behavior of males was far more dominant and aggressive than anything that had been seen in cages. Much of the literature had to be rewritten, because the scientists (mostly men) had assumed the monkeys’ behavior was “natural” because of their existing prejudices. The book was “What Do Women Want” by Daniel Bergner – it was more anecdotal and less rigorous than I would have liked. I wanted him to share some more data from the researchers he interviewed but he went for a more conversational, anecdotal approach.
Ever since then, when I see anyone go “well it happens in animals!” I just roll my eyes.
@grouperfish, 19
I can’t speak for anyone else here, but, personally, I don’t see any problems with doing this research, though it should be done properly if it’s going to be done – preferably no studies with sample sizes of 27 being used as strong evidence.
The problem comes when ignorant people, such as the author of the business insider article or your average MRA decide to use that research to “prove” that women are doing it wrong, and should cater to men’s wishes; that social evolution ended in the neolithic era, when human behaviour was somehow monolithic, and that we ought to emulate their ideas of how humans behaved in that period; and that society has no influence on our behaviour.
The problem comes when ignorant people, such as the author of the business insider article[…]
Not publishing shabby studies wouldn’t exactly hurt, either. If someone is publishing a shabby study in a field where it’s known that people are standing by, eager and ready to distort and reinterpret it, they could hold themselves to a standard higher than publish or perish.
grouperfish
This is true, but in this instance it’s both sexist and bad science.
No, the main argument against much of evo psych is that it’s crap science, and that the crap science keeps reinforcing existing bigotries (and not just sex and gender based bigotries either).
That doesn’t make 27 American undergrads any better of a sample, in size or composition.
Or at least a sign that they know what science is supposed to look like.
Well, what are they looking for, then? What significance do they think that the color preferences of 27 American undergrads have? Why did the other paper you linked to claim that it was universal?
But it won’t tell you anything whatsoever about anyone’s genetics or about human evolution, it’ll only tell you what American culture thinks of the color red (and the sample size is still way the fuck too small to tell anyone anything of any use, frankly). Which is a valid question, but not a terribly significant one in the grand scheme of things, nor something that can be used to draw any broad conclusions.
Good for you, I guess? What’s that got to do with evo-psych?
So then this isn’t a defence of evo-psych you’re writing here? What the hell point are you trying to get at? You’ve admitted that evolution has shit-all to do with these results and it would be absurd to think it did, so what are you actually defending?
No, but it means you can’t fucking generalize about the entire fucking species based on said data, as evo-psych types (among others) are extremely prone to doing.
Only if your suite of studies also includes non-WEIRD people.
Hahahahah. Oh Wow. (Fair disclosure, I don’t actually, but several of the people castigating you here do)
Um, no. See, there’s this little thing called ‘evidence’. There’s a whole enormous shit-ton of it for evolution, vs. squat-all for evo-psych. You see the difference?
Once again, your analogy is shitty, because, among other things, questions like that actually have known answers, even if you don’t personally know them. The problems people are pointing to here do not have that quality.
That last paragraph this this line seems rather unneeded. I have not heard anyone say that here, why should anyone else care about what some random person may, or may not have said about studying this type of thing? Maybe you should stick with commenting on what was said here, or comments PZ has made in the past, if you want to talk about the attitude on this blog.
We especially like big eyes, and show a marked preference for faces with slightly exaggerated, slightly imperfect features. Shiny hair, nice teeth and smile, and good skin are all high on the list of what everyone cites when trying to define what they find attractive.
It’s still hard to sort out what’s culturally conditioned; I suspect all of it. The very words “nice teeth” presuppose a lot of cultural baggage.
Shiny hair like this?
http://www.naturalhairjourney.com/.a/6a010534ca6f00970b0147e2441ab4970b-pi (Maasai ochre-block hair)
Or nice teeth and smile like this?
http://candacescharsu.com/new%20scharsu%20pics/Other%20Countries/FileTeeth.a.jpg (Cameroon Baka pygmy filed teeth)
Or maybe nice teeth like these?
http://www.cvltnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Ann-woman-black-teeth.jpg (Yaeba black dyed teeth)
Good skin maybe like this?
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/4a/b0/6c/4ab06cb37a399c0e6265fe91dc4ce7e2.jpg (Manyeba skin cicatrice)
Regular features like these?
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/dc/a4/24/dca424a87db896dbc6689be7c16a5e9c.jpg (Ubangi lip plate)
@grouperfish, 46
Yeah, no. Creationists are arguing against well established and practically irrefutable science by picking at points of disagreement over small details and claiming that it disproves the whole thing. When you’re questioning weak science supported by weak studies, it’s called “skepticism.” Come back in 150 years with a century’s worth of research – then, maybe, you can call us creationists for not jumping on board uncritically.
No, it wasn’t, and if Romulus and Remus tried giving tours of Rome on day two of construction, people wouldn’t have been very impressed, would they?
@Marcus Ranum, 54
Yeah, true, but I was taking it for granted, for the sake of argument, that any studies coming out would be of a decent quality. Obviously shoddy studies start you off in a weak position from the beginning, but a skeptical audience should be able to pick out the flaws and treat it with the lack of respect it deserves.
#utopiandaydreamer
Thanks to all who helped in my understanding of the issues here. I wish I could go through and hit a “like” button on the illuminating responses, especially consciousness razor @44. Much appreciated.
Someone did actually hit on my partner once by telling her that she had a perfect hip-to-waist ratio.
I’m pretty sure nobody made that claim, and the people who are dissing the evo-psyche as specious bullshit happen to teach science for a living so I am certain they know what they are talking about when it comes to genetics and evolution. IANAS, but a quick read of the paper at your link shows a very flawed experiment that had no controls. It’s completely worthless to draw a conclusion about any preference based on two colors and some odd questions, much less speculate about its role in evolution. Marketing departments, lipstick manufacturers, and restaurants are well aware that humans have color vision, and find bright colors like red very eye-catching and stimulating. It seems both sexist, and a huge waste of science funding to spend time trying to establish a link between a color, male human sexual preference and evolution, Hummingbirds are also attracted to red things. Red things in nature are often prized food for both humans and birds, there is no need to demonstrate this with scientific studies. Sticking a red or blue border on a photo doesn’t tell you a damn thing about sexual preference or evolution.
Observe as I yet again deftly avoid being sucked into another discussion of evolutionary psychology here.
But this is a fundamental misrepresentation of the studies cited. Participants were not asked to score or rate the successful-gestation-potential of women they know and meet or even “look at” in real life. They were asked to score the “attractiveness” of strangers viewed as photographs. Correlation of subjective preference with measured aspects of the photographs led to the conclusions. That’s a totally different question than the “foundation” and “premise” you made up about it.
The idea that explicitly rating the physical-only “attractiveness” of women in photographs is equivalent to “performing a ‘reproductive fitness assessment’” is, if I am not mistaken, the very hypothesis being tested most of these studies. There are theoretical and behavioral-ecological rationales for explicit predictive hypotheses about at least some of these variables, it’s really not just cultural constructs lined up for confirmation. As important, of course, as they are.
And, if you want to talk about the studies you really want to talk about the data, not the last and most speculative paragraph of the Discussion, or the press release, or Somebody’s Comment on Pharyngula.
but whatever.
Nailed the dismount, I’d say.
Without getting too embroiled, evo-psych suffers from the following:
1. Psychology as phenotype is poorly understood. Further, the relationship between phenotype and genotype are completely obscure for most of the traits that evo-psych researchers are interested in. This relationship is really difficult to determine without selective breeding experiments in controlled environments, something clearly out of the question for human subjects.
2. Complex behaviors often exhibit high environmental variance, meaning that selection has only a weak ability to act on them.
3. Complex behaviors probably also have high interaction variance; genes and environment jointly determining phenotype. This also decreases heritabilty and the ability of selection to change a trait.
4. A trait that appears to be adaptive (increases fitness) may not have been under selection when it arose, or in different environments, meaning that selection is not the only explanation available.
5. In most cases, if selection played a strong role in shaping a trait, variance would trend to zero. If there is a lot of variation in a trait within a population, selection is not likely a great explanation for the distribution of that trait.
6. Traits that vary strongly from population to population or in historical time are not likely shaped by selection, unless that selection pressure is very strong in some segment of the environment.
Oh…and
7. Failing to take much of 1-6 into account when estimating the confidence one should have in a particular conclusion.
It appeals to people’s desire for easy answers that give them control over the outcomes of their interactions with others, and to marketers’ need to have people feel like they aren’t good enough the way they are.
… and it appeals to those who think it’s some kind of cheat-sheet, I suppose, that will magically enable them to unlock hoards of coins. Or something.
Hey, does that mean that it’s all about ethics in evo-psyching journalism?!?!?!
“I don’t know about you, but I interact with a lot of women in my classes — and I don’t think at all about having babies with any of them, nor do any of them consider me as a sperm donor. Same with my colleagues. Same with the people I meet on the street. And it’s the same with you.”
Broad generalization about your female students and colleagues and women in general and probably not true. Check with some women on whether or not some might look at you as a potential sperm donor. (Always good feminist practice before asserting what women do or do not think about)
Your modesty and the necessity of keeping classroom relations clear of any “monkey business” may influence your view.
I think “which animals – chimps, bonobos, anglerfishes, hyenas or penguins?”
I know nothing about evopsych except that its controversial, at least on this list.
But there is this huge pile of data staring us in the face that must have implications. Literally staring us in the face, the required female appearance.
Females begin decorating themselves early on, rather caregivers begin decorating female infants and soon girls do it themselves, then it accelerates big time near puberty. It continues, albeit with much variation, throughout life. Perhaps one of the largest industries is the production and distribution of women’s clothing and accouterments. Women’s specialty apparel shops are everywhere. My Krogers has more square footage of cosmetics than canned goods. Women spend a very large share of their disposable income on decorative material.
What does this mean? Is this trip necessary? Is it mostly the marketers doing?
Male privilege? This is a big one and I don’t have to do it. Just the expense, let alone the time, effort, concern, seems to me overwhelming.
Does Evopsych have anything interesting to say about this?
Is it cultural, or genetic? That is the question nobody is answering, and the evo-psych idjits claim it is genetic without any evidence.
See above.
It has nothing interesting to say about anything. There is no match to genes for the claimed “adaptations”. Test run on a small number of college students as subjects. Bullshit all the way down. Why don’t you see that truth?
@ludicrous, 70
I believe they prefer the term ‘differently male,’ but ‘women’ is often accepted, too.
Females begin decorating themselves early on, rather caregivers begin decorating female infants
Good, you caught yourself there…
and soon girls do it themselves, then it accelerates big time near puberty. It continues, albeit with …
Males decorate themselves, too. In some cultures they do so more than females – consider the Guérewol:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%A9rewol
ludicrous @ 70
I’m sure evo-psych has plenty to say about it. Whether any of it is interesting depends on whether your definition of “interesting” includes just-so stories full of motivated reasoning.
ludicrous,
There will need to be some study where an entire community or society doesn’t push (or even suggest) gender roles on their children. This would include things like parents buying dolls with pretty pink dresses and makeup sets for their daughters who are very young and haven’t even expressed an interest in those things yet. Companies would either need to stop manufacturing makeup or create a line for boys too and advertise it just as much. Beauty pageants for little girls would need to stop (or beauty pageants for boys will need to start), etc.
I’m sure that our psychology has been shaped by our evolutionary history. And I’m sure that, one day, people will do good science based on that hypothesis. But so far all of evo psych is no more than telling just-so stories to justify 1950’s American prejudices. Girls are obviously attracted to pink toys and clothes because, I dunno, they were picking berries, even though 200 years ago, pink was seen as a masculine colour. Men obviously want lots of sex partners because, maybe they’re maximising their offspring, even though a high libido used to be seen as a female problem.
When people start doing actual science rather than pandering to the culture they live in, I’m sure PZ will take the field more seriously.
Wasn’t that the rule in certain European societies just a few centuries ago? In fact, how much of this “women be pretty and men be not” is confirmation bias and not recognizing typically male ways of showing off?
The problem people have with evo-psych is not the premise that human psychology is, to some degree, shaped by evolution. Nobody denies that. But human psychology is also shaped by environment, culture, personal experience, etc. and there’s no way to control for those things. Nobody exists in a vacuum and isolating someone deliberately would be unethical. The problem with evo-psych is that it largely ignores this fact. It’s just bad science.
Well, what they actually mean by this is not “wear less make-up”. Because that would totally go against that beauty standard evolution allegedly favours and that about no healthy and fit woman in the western world actually achieves by getting out of bed, brushing her hair and cleaning her teeth.
What they mean is “spend a lot of time and money on make-up that hides all that ugly humanness but still doesn’t remember me that you don’t look like this without spending 30 minutes and 2 bucks each morning on this look”.
ludicrous
1. Women. Or girls. Or girls and women. The term “females” is not your friend unless you want to sound like a Ferengi douchebag exactly because of its dehumanizing connotations.
2. Boys begin “decorating” themselves early, too. Because by the age of 3 you will hardly find a boy who doesn’t care about what he’s wearing. And you will hardly find a caregiver who doesn’t care about whether the boy is wearing a blue jeans or a pink skirt. It’s the pervasiveness of “male as default” that makes you overlook this fact.
3. When I was a kid it was unthinkable that anybody would put nail polish on a 3 yo. Today my kids are outliers. Together they are 12, an age at which I would consider nail polish appropriate, but I’ve been having ail polish conversations with them for years. Why do they want nail polish at that age when I probably didn’t even know what that meant back then? Because they see it in other girl-identified people and want to fit in.
Does this tell you something about the nature of little girl, passed down by evolution in our genome because of reproductive fitness or does this tell you something about our fucked-up culture?
As I recall it, during WWII, when American young men met English young women, there was some cultural confusion. In America, men were hormone-driven beasts, and women were ladies protecting their own virtue. In England, men were rational gentlemen, protecting the hormone-addled women from female incompetence.
And seriously, how does your brain sort out what you inherit from each of your parents? If you get berry-picking as well as mammoth-hunting, where do the hormones work?
I have been working with children the last few years, and I will say that at least 90 percent of the difference is cultural. Maybe more, but it is hard to sort out.
Antiochus Epiphanes @64-65
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Another one (a _big_ one) for your list:
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#8: Failing to be aware of, let alone account for their unconscious biases and assumptions when reporting data (e.g., observations) and analyzing it. These unconscious biases, etc., cause them to see what they expect to see, rather than what is actually in front of them, and cause them to reach conclusions that don’t actually follow from even their skewed perceptions of what is happening, at least not without taking these unconscious biases, etc., as objective, already proven truth.
.
This is an issue even in the “hard” sciences, such as physics, which aren’t dealing with things that have so much cultural baggage. It’s even more so in the social sciences, where the researchers are subject to the very forces and distortions that they are studying.
@ ludicrous #70
In ancient Egypt, men wore kohl around their eyes, and upper class men wore lots of jewelry. “Old world’ 16th-17th-18th century men were as fancy as they could afford, and it was not unheard of for them to use cosmetics (including fake beauty marks).
One of my favourite examples of “gender differences” is football, i.e. soccer.
In Europe it is a manly man sport. Girls and women are actively discouraged from it, those who do are supposed to be butch lesbians (not that there was anything wrong with butch lesbians, but the implication is “not really women”)
Yet in the USA soccer is a girly girl sport that is threatening masculinity, just ask Anne Coulter.
I’m waitng for evolutionary psychology to come up with two opposing explenations that are both totally true, of course.
Seems to me like a bit of a strawman. I have never met anyone who really thinks that.
No, it really isn’t (for me). I interact with other humans all the time, and while the vast majority of those interactions are unaffected by evaluations of sexual fitness, in none of them are those evaluations completely absent. In fact, if we never evaluated, at some level, everybody, we would never be able to evaluate anybody. There has to be some evaluation filter.
Note, I didn’t bother reading the linked article, as it is likely to be filled with the same nonsense I have seen in other such articles (e.g. aboriginal Australian man should be attracted to blonde women; which is just bad science).
There are some interesting ways to study human psychology as a product of evolutionary forces, but I haven’t seen too man evo psych people explore them.
For instance, once of the distinguishing features of humans (Homo sapiens, specifically and probably Homo neanderthalensis also) is the lack of sexual dimorphism when compared even to chimp species and say, gorillas and other primates. The other is lack of an estrus cycle.
This could have all kinds of interesting implications all by itself. Maybe that’s why human sexuality is relatively fluid and subject to cultural influence to the degree it is. Sexuality is certainly more flexible in humans than it seems to be in other primates. And certainly more than in other mammals, though it’s interesting to ask whether the concept of sexuality has any meaning at all in animals that haven’t got language or anything like it.
Humans also do devote a lot of brain-space to sex generally. That makes a lot of evolutionary sense, but another interesting question might be whether that is why we are as smart as we are. Monkeys having to come up with ever more elaborate mating strategies, like the arms race of horned beetles and peacocks, except as a side effect it pushed other areas of our brains to greater complexity rather than making us grow antlers or something.
But I don’t see a lot of evo psych looking at this. Instead they try to come up with studies that, lo and behold, all seem to confirm gender stereotypes that are themselves pretty recent (ca. the last 100 years or so, usually).
(If you want to see an interesting fictional treatment of evo psych, I recommend Ursula LeGuin’s The Left hand of Darkness, which gets into the cultural implications of physical sex in a way that holds up really well even after nearly 50 years, and a hell of a lot better than most pseudo-feminist fiction since).
I, like PZ, am a college instructor, and I prefer to believe that the idea that my female students would consider me a potential sperm donor is ludicrous. I am sufficiently comfortable in that belief that I have no intention of questioning it, as no good at all would come of learning that the opposite might be true.
And yes, I am equally disinterested in any unprofessional affection my male students may hold for me.
@85 Jesse
Hmmmm…bonobos. And i’m pretty sure homosexual contact is pretty frequent in other primate species, particularly in inmature individuals. Granted homosexual behaviour is not necessarily indicative of sexual orientation.
As for other mammals….lions, giraffes….rampant homosexual behaviour all around…
vaiyt @ 77
Indeed. A mature cis man who didn’t do any grooming at all of his facial hair would be seen as aberrant in many cultures. The vast majority of adult physically male people have to engage in “prettying” of their faces on a regular, if not daily, basis with trimming, shaping, styling, or removing hair.
Whether beards or bare faces are currently fashionable, most men aren’t going to to hit our cultural ideals without careful, frequent grooming.
@azhael–that’s why I asked if sexuality per se has any meaning when applied to animals that don’t have language. I know canids do “homosexual” behavior in the context of dominance displays, for instance — any dog owner will tell you that allowing a dog to mount you is a bad idea viz. obedience training. So when people talk about “homosexual” behavior in any mammal that hasn’t got language and isn’t all that smart to begin with, I get skeptical of that, you know? Just seems to be applying the wrong tools.
To take an extreme example, you wouldn’t describe an amoeba enveloping another single-celled animal a murder, and nobody talks about same-gender attractions having any meaning for insects or frog species. As we get more complex these things start to take on more meaning, but often times I wonder if there are things unique to humans that we try to impose on other species.
And IMO a whole lot of human behavior can be put down to mating strategies, though not in the way evo psych people usually frame it. Every culture has dance, for instance, and it almost always comes up as a kind of display / bonding behavior, and that I would argue we share with primates, no question.
And think of how so much of what we do all day is about impressing other people, consciously or unconsciously, all the dumb things we do, why sex sells. I grant my bias; I have a rather jaundiced view of human nature, broadly defined.
(I have a cousin who studied primates in the wild. She now teaches school. She noted that there are loads of behaviors in the average American teen that could be classed in the very same way she classed her east African primate troop — threat display (among males and females both), reconciliation, social exchange, alpha and betas of the group, exchanging food and grooming and social bonds — it’s all there in the 15 minutes before the bell rings. We joked that she could have done her dissertation studying the kids and never leaving New Jersey –nobody would have noticed).
Of course every culture (and sub-cultures within the broader culture) will have unique ideas about how to adorn and enhance their mouths and teeth and hair. My point is that all humans focus specifically on those features when describing what they find attractive in a potential mate. Human anatomy, as far as bone structure is concerned, conforms to very precise and measurable spatial ratios. Human faces appear perfectly symmetrical, but if you were to look at each half on its own, each side has very slight differences. Humans have highly developed facial recognition, and would see a face with true perfect symmetry as very mask like and unnatural. You would notice any deviations from the standard spatial arrangement of eyes – nose – mouth. Bone abnormalities of the teeth and jaws are a marker of multiple genetic diseases. I don’t think anyone is consciously measuring symmetry, but just as in art, or architecture, what looks pleasing to the human eye is a very well developed golden ratio.
Link to PDF. Symmetry and Human Facial Attractiveness A much longer, scientifically well supported study on what physical characteristics humans find attractive in a mate. Spoiler alert, there isn’t a single mention of color preferences or waist to hip ratio.