Atomic Nerds

Title of article, and just from it you just know the caliber of science journalism you’re in for:

Why Women Now Prefer Johnny Depp To Sean Connery

Actually, I could take or leave either one of them, preferably leave unless we’re talking desert island scenario. But they didn’t ask me.

Historically women chose manly men because features such as a square jaw, low brow and thin lips were linked to superior genes which would produce stronger and healthier offspring.

Oh, brother. Where to start with this one? I’d really love to know if this is the author’s assertion or something he got from the researchers the article’s about, or some mutant combination of both.

Okay, this is selection 101, we’re talking the sorts of evolutionary equations that can be represented with basic algebra. If genes that are linked to a square jaw, low brow, and thin lips are that soundly linked to “superior” genes that provide a clear fitness advantage, even one as small as .5%, those genes will become fixed in the population over time- to the exclusion of all other, less-fit variations. Within the generational time span represented in, say, the Bible, all men would become square-jawed, thin-lipped, and low-browed, and Johnny Depp would not exist.

But the choice came at a cost – as the more masculine the man, the less likely he was to help out nurturing his child.

Any backup to offer here? No? Well, maybe that’s the researchers’ fault, maybe just the reporter’s fault. But it’s a really “interesting” assumption to make in a species with extreme child-care requirements, in which fitness depends far more on successfully raised children that go on to become good parents themselves than it does on Robust Manliness genes. Even if Junior is a pencil-necked asthmatic who faints at the sight of spiders and gets hives when he eats peanuts, if his parents can manage to rear him to adulthood to find a nice neurotic girlfriend they, and he, have a massive fitness advantage over poor parents with “superior” genes.

One of the huge problems with this kind of research, that draws conclusions about superior genes based on mate choice, is that in any species with high child-care requirements, of which humans are the most extreme example, behavioral development quickly outstrips genetics in terms of which has the most effect on an individual organism’s fitness. Ted Bundy was by all accounts a handsome, healthy man. His tendency to murder his girlfriends rather than parent with them leads to his overall fitness being zero.

Now researchers believe that improvements in health care in wealthy western countries mean women do not have to worry about so much about the quality of their offspring – and so are picking more feminine looking men.

The researchers at the University of Aberdeen came to the conclusion after studying the preferences of 4500 women from 30 different countries.

They found a direct correlation between the quality of health care and the choice of male.

What does every good statistics professor say? Correlation does not equal causation. If you’re waiting for any point at which somebody is going to support the assertion that thin lips, a low brow, and square jaw equate to healthy offspring and a lack of interest in parenting, it’s not coming. Again, I don’t know if this is the researchers’ fault or the reporter’s. I’d really like to know how genes for resistance to tuberculosis, for example, are reflected in one’s jaw structure.

The most likely explanation is that they’re considering it a stand-in for testosterone levels and exposure in the womb, as digit ratio is used for. The problem is that testosterone levels don’t actually have much of an affect on nurturing behavior, levels of aggression, or overall healthiness. We like to use the poor hormone as a proxy indicator for pretty much every conception we have of “man”, but it just isn’t so; too little testosterone will affect your health adversely, but so will too much, and it supports some areas of health while being subtly detrimental to others. Estrogen is the same way. As for aggression, it makes a difference with very little, as in a woman or castrated man, or way too much, as with a bodybuilder that’s taken about ten times too many androgenic steroids, but within normal ranges of testosterone- which Johnny Depp and Sean Connery presumably both fall under- a man’s thoughts and actions influence his testosterone level far more than the reverse.

When it comes to testosterone and the immune system… well… currently the argument is whether lots of testosterone is or is not immunosuppressive, not whether it HELPS.

The result was that in Sweden, which had the best health care, most women (68 per cent) preferred feminine looking men.

In contrast in Brazil, which had the worst health care, the majority of women (55 per cent) preferred masculine men.

So, our two most extreme results, which we’re supposed to believe represent the innate genetic preferences of all women, and the results are “slightly more than half of one extreme preferred more masculine” and “two thirds preferred more feminine”. They’re definitely statistically significant results, but pardon if I’m not blown away by them. Judging by the photos in any women’s magazine, there’s still a major variety of tastes being catered to and assumed as “mainstream”.

“The results suggests that as health care improves, more masculine men fall out of favour,” said the lead author and psychologist Dr Lisa DeBruine.

Only if you assume at the outset that national health care results, measured by standards undisclosed, are a tight proxy for the sex drives of all human women.

Dr DeBruine said: “We found that women from countries with poorer health, which have higher mortality and increased incidence of communicable disease, were more attracted to masculine faces than women living in countries with better health.

“People used to think beauty was arbitrary and that different cultures have different preferences.

“However our research shows that preferences may instead be explained by responses to different environmental factors like a low level of health in the population.”

“Low level of health” is a catchall way to describe the fallout from everything from communicable diseases to cancer rates to smoking to rates of alcoholism to rates of social violence, and I’m not Dr. DeBruine but I’d be very fucking hestitant to conclude that square jaws correlated usefully to “more health” at the societal level. Or that there’s no cultural effects in play here.

Dr DeBruine said: “We found that women in countries like Brazil, Argentina and Mexico where the health is poorer were more attracted to masculine looking faces than women in countries like Belgium and Sweden, which have lower mortality rates and higher longevity.”

Interestingly, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico are all part of Latin America, in which cultural anthropologists have widely observed that the concept of machismo is an overwhelming cultural influence that makes the obsession with manliness in the USA look pretty weaksauce. I would not be remotely surprised that women in this culture would prefer men that look more like what everything in their culture reinforces a man is supposed to BE- though I actually am kind of surprised the majority is as low as 55%. Perhaps the innate human female variety in preferences is overcoming cultural influence.

Dr Ben Jones, who was also involved in the research said: “These new findings really do seem to show that preferences for different types of men in different parts of the world are linked to cross-cultural differences in health.

The effect remained even when we controlled for lots of other factors, such as cross-cultural differences in wealth.”

History, of course, was invented yesterday and will be dictated by standards of good research from that point on, so you can safely ignore that both male and female beauty standards have changed all the time historically within the same cultures, and in ways that cannot possibly be correlated to health care. I’m pretty goddamn certain that population health levels in Britain in the late nineteenth century were worse than they were in, say, 1955, but that didn’t make Oscar Wilde’s idealized-in-body male in Picture of Dorian Gray a square-jawed he-man rather than described as supernaturally beautiful. The idea of that example being the most attractive man imaginable didn’t strike a wrong note with the culture, either- or else the story would never have succeeded. If you want to go back even further, Michelangelo’s David has a soft jawline, full lips, and only somewhat qualifies on the “low brow” scale- and I’m fairly sure that Renaissance Italy’s health care was yet worse than modern Brazil’s.

If you want to tie an evolutionary incentive to a wildly variable and culturally and historically shifting beauty standard, it might be best to forget about an arcane process by which females identify .001% better fitness potential for herself in a male by any quickly recognizable superficial feature- which it’s highly questionable even female animals are capable of doing- and turn to one feature that isn’t necessarily genetically determined but IS very important to fitness: status. The popular narrative of “evolutionary” male-female just-so’s is that females are attracted to status while males are attracted to “beauty as an indicator of genetic quality”. In strict terms of the evolution of social primates and basic selection math, both bonuses should be of equal appeal to both sexes; if anything female status should be disproportionately attractive, given the big fitness bonus high-status female relatives give to both female primates in most social primate groups and mothers in hunter-gatherer societies. In practice, in “primitive” groups known, nurturing investment by female relatives is much more significant than that given by fathers. When you add in that female status in primates is usually hereditary, it suddenly becomes a very evolutionary attractive feature- even if it has no indicative value whatsoever for genetics.

As beauty standards for both sexes change over time, what DOES remain constant is that the highest status members are most able to meet its ideals. In a hungry society where food shortage is an issue, bountiful Titian style women are “high status” signallers because only the wealthy can afford to eat to the degree required to maintain. In a society where calorie-dense food is always bountiful and it’s having the time to exercise and money to buy very fresh and calculated ingredients is the issue, very thin becomes the status for women. Purple is the expensive dye? I hear purple is hot this season. And designer clothing and expensive vehicles are always a sound choice, even if they look different from season to season and decade to decade.

And so, for that matter, does the fashionability of basic physical features; some decades it seems to go to more stereotypically “masculine” or “feminine” in men and women respective, sometimes it’s for a little bit more gender-bent- and even if one “style” predominates, there’s always a healthy population of the other being a sex symbol to whoever’s got the “minority” tastes of the times. Interestingly, we’re not even unique in this respect; now that it’s starting to occur to some researchers to question some basic assumptions of mate choice in their favorite model, birds, they’re finding that lots of things they thought were timeless and unvarying appeals actually don’t seem to affect the fitness of their bearers- and that what’s actually most attractive will change over the course of breeding seasons*. Even peacocks are out as poster children of the classic sexual selection narrative- after a seven-year intensive study, turns out the females don’t actually care much about the males’ plumage relative to each other at all- and the selective pressure is most likely far more on her to be drab than on him to be showy, as she faces a much bigger risk of predation due to ground-nesting. So why the bright plumage and the tail? That’s now in “don’t know” territory, it’s just that the traditional explanation seems to be thoroughly wrong.

Before publishing an assertion that evolution now favors unthreatening wimps thanks to antibiotics and public hospitals, it might be a good idea first to check your own set of biological assumptions, and then walk into an art museum for an afternoon and check the historical ones.

*I WILL cite my source. Cornwallis and Burkhead, “Plasticity in Phenotypes Reveals Status-Specific Correlations Between Behavioral, Morphological, and Physiological Sexual Traits”, Evolution 62, 2008.

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