Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty

As a guy, I think the author focus a lot on the "we, the poor women" theme sometimes, but as a whole the book is a "must read". Every single HR manager, boss, teacher and potential employer should read it as a tool to avoid the awful discrimination we use (and are not aware of) when hiring, assessing, judging and promoting people. It was an eye opening experience for me.The book is extremely well researched (50 pages on citations only) and very convincing. The language is easy and friendly.

One of the most interesting books I've ever read.

Of the many books that have been written about the evolutionary psychology of sexual attraction, a common complaint is that they are full of untested, or even untestable, speculation (what Stephen Jay Gould called ‘just so stories’).This is not a criticism that could be levelled at Nancy Ettcoff’s ‘Survival of the Prettiest’. From start to finish, it is full of data from published studies, demonstrating, among other things, the correlates of physical attractiveness, as well as the real-world payoffs associated with physical attractiveness (what is sometimes referred to as ‘lookism’).My main criticism is that, while rich in data, it is somewhat deficient on theory.YouthfulnessFor example, one recurrent theme of the book is that female beauty is associated with indicators of youth.“Physical beauty is like athletic skill: it peaks young. Extreme beauty is rare and almost always found, if at all, in people before they reach the age of thirty-five” (p63).Yet Etcoff addresses only briefly the question of why it is that males are attracted to females of youthful appearance.This, she argues, is because female fertility declines rapidly with age, before ceasing altogether with menopause.As for the menopause itself, this, she speculates, citing Jared Diamond, evolved because human offspring enjoy a long period of helpless dependence on their mother, without whom they cannot survive. Therefore, after a certain age, it pays women to focus on caring for existing offspring, or even grandchildren, rather than producing new offspring whom they will not be around to care for (p73).However, the decline in female fertility with age is perhaps not sufficient to explain the male preference for youth.After all, women’s fertility peaks in their early- to mid-twenties. But men’s sexual interest, if anything, seems to peak in respect of females somewhat younger, namely in their late-teens (Kenrick & Keefe 1992).Douglas Kenrick and Richard Keefe propose, following a suggestion of Donald Symons, that this is because girls at this age, while less fertile, have higher ‘reproductive value’, a concept drawn from ecology which refers to an individual’s expected future reproductive output given their current age (Kenrick & Keefe 1992).Reproductive value in humans peaks just after puberty, when a girl first becomes capable of bearing offspring. Before then, there is always the risk she will die before reaching sexual maturity; after, her reproductive value declines with each passing year as she approaches menopause.They argue that, since most human reproduction occurs within long-term pair-bonds, it is to the advantage of males to form long-term pair-bonds with females of maximal reproductive value (i.e. mid to late teens), so that, by so doing, they can monopolize the entirety of that woman’s reproductive output over the coming years.Yet the closest Etcoff gets to discussing this is a single sentence where she writes:“Men often prefer the physical signs of a woman below peak fertility (under age twenty). Its like signing a contract a year before you want to start the job” (p72).Yet the theme of indicators of youth being a correlate of female attractiveness is a major theme of her book.Thus, Etcoff reports that, in a survey of traditional cultures:“The highest frequency of brides was in the twelve to fifteen years of age category… Girls at this age are preternaturally beautiful” (p57).But this seems rather younger than most men’s, and even most boys, ideal mate, at least in western societies. Thus, Kenrick and Keefe inferred from their data that around eighteen was the preferred age of sexual partner for most males, even those themselves somewhat younger than this themselves.Of course, in primitive, non-western cultures, women may lose their looks quicker, due to worse health and nutrition, the relative unavailability of beauty treatments and because they usually undergo repeated childbirth from puberty onward, which takes a toll on their bodies.On the other hand, however, obesity is more prevalent in the West, decreases sexual attractiveness and increases with age.Moreover, girls in the west now reach puberty somewhat earlier than in traditional cultures, probably due to improved nutrition and health. This suggests that females develop secondary sexual characteristics and hence come to be attractive to males somewhat earlier than in premodern societies.Perhaps Etcoff is right that girls “in the twelve to fifteen years of age category… are preternaturally beautiful”.However, if ‘beauty’ peaks very early, I suspect ‘sexiness’ peaks rather later, perhaps late teens into early or even mid-twenties.Thus, the latter is dependent on secondary sexual characteristics that develop only in late-puberty, namely larger breasts, buttocks and hips.Thus, just as Etcoff argues that the attractiveness of exaggerated indicators of facial youthfulness represent an example of “supernormal stimuli” (p151), so the same could be said of the unrealistically large, surgically-enhanced breasts favored among, for example, glamor models (Doyle & Pazhoohi).Perhaps this distinction between what we can term ‘beauty’ and ‘sexiness’ can be made sense of in terms of a distinction between what David Buss calls short-term and long-term mating strategies.Thus, if fertility peaks in the mid-twenties, then, in respect of short-term mating (i.e. causal sex, one-off sexual encounters) men should presumably prefer partners of this age, slightly older than their preferences in respect of long-term partners – i.e. of maximal fertility rather than maximum reproductive value.As far as I am aware, however, no study has confirmed this. This is perhaps because, since commitment-free short-term sex is a win-win situation for men, and most men’s opportunities in this arena likely to be few and far between, there has been little selection acting on men to discriminate at all in respect of short-term partners.Sex Differences in Sexiness?Another major theme of ‘Survival of the Prettiest’ is that the payoffs for good-looks are greater for women than for men.Beauty is most obviously advantageous in a mating context. But women convert this advantage into an economic one through marriage. Thus, Etcoff reports:“The best-looking girls in high school are more than ten times as likely to get married as the least good-looking. Better looking girls tend to ‘marry up,’ that is, marry men with more education and income then they have” (p65).However, there is no such advantage accruing to better-looking male students.The only disadvantage to being pretty, Etcoff reports, is in respect of same-sex friendships:“Good looking women in particular encounter trouble with other women. They are less liked by other women, even other good-looking women” (p50).She does not speculate as to why this is so. An obvious explanation is envy and dislike of the sexual competition that beautiful women represent.However, perhaps an alternative explanation is simply that beautiful women come to have less likeable personalities. Perhaps, having grown used to receiving preferential treatment from and being fawned over by men, beautiful women become entitled and spoilt.Men might overlook these flaws on account of their looks, but, other women, immune to their charms, may be a different story.But why are the payoffs for good looks greater for women than for men?Etcoff does not address this, but, from a Darwinian perspective, it is actually something of a paradox.After all, among other species, it is males for whom beauty affords a greater payoff in terms of the ultimate currency of natural selection – i.e. reproductive success.It is therefore males who usually evolve more beautiful plumages, while females of the same species are often quite drab, the classic example being the peacock.The ultimate evolutionary explanation is derives from ‘Bateman’s principle’.Females must make a greater minimal investment in offspring in order to reproduce. For example, among humans, females must commit themselves to nine months pregnancy, plus breastfeeding, whereas a male must contribute, at minimum, only a single ejaculate.Females therefore represent the limiting factor in mammalian reproduction for access to whom males compete.One way in which they compete is by display. Hence the elaborate tail of the peacock.Yet, among humans, it is females who seem more concerned with using their beauty to attract mates.Of course, women use makeup and clothing to attract men rather than growing or evolving long tails.However, behavior is no less subject to selection than morphology, so the paradox remains.Indeed, the most promising example of a morphological trait in humans that may have evolved primarily for attracting members of the opposite sex is, again, a female trait – breasts.As Etcoff writes:“Female breasts are like no others in the mammalian world. Humans are the only mammals who develop rounded breasts at puberty and keep them whether or not they are producing milk… In humans, breast size is not related to the amount or quality of milk that the breast produces” (p187).Instead, human breasts are, save during pregnancy and lactation, composed predominantly of, not milk, but fat.This is in stark contrast to the situation among other mammals, who develop breasts only during pregnancy.“Breasts are not sex symbols to other mammals, anything but, since they indicate a pregnant or lactating and infertile female. To chimps, gorillas and orangutans, breasts are sexual turn-offs” (p187).(An alternative possibility is that breasts evolved as a storehouse of nutrients, analogous to the camel’s humps, on which women can draw during pregnancy. Thus, Etcoff mentions the possibility that breasts are attractive because they “honestly advertise the presence of fat reserves needed to sustain a pregnancy”: p178.)Why then does sexual selection seem, at least on this evidence, to have acted more strongly on women than men?Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, first alluded to this anomaly, lamenting:“What has happened in modern western man? Has the male really become the sought-after sex, the one that is in demand, the sex that can afford to be choosy? If so, why?” (The Selfish Gene: p165).Yet this is surely not the case with regard to casual sex (i.e. hook-ups and one-night stands). Here, it is very much men who ardently pursue and women who are sought after.For example, in one study at a University campus, 72% of male students agreed to go to bed with a female stranger who propositioned them to this effect, yet not a single one of the 96 females approached agreed to the same request from a male stranger (Clark and Hatfield 1989).(What percentage of the students sued the university for sexual harassment was not revealed.)Indeed, patterns of everything from prostitution to pornography consumption confirm this – see The Evolution of Human Sexuality.Yet humans are unusual among mammals in also forming long-term pair-bonds where male parental investment is the norm. Here, men have every incentive to be as selective as females in their choice of partner.In particular, in Western societies practising what Richard Alexander called ‘socially-imposed monogamy’ (i.e. where there exist large differentials in male resource holdings, but polygynous marriage is unlawful) competition among women for exclusive rights to resource-abundant alpha males may be intense (Gaulin and Boser 1990).In short, the advantage to a woman in becoming the sole wife of a multi-millionaire is substantial.This, then, may explain the unusual intensity of sexual selection among human females.Why, though, is there not evidence of similar sexual selection operating among males?Perhaps the answer is that, since, in most cultures, arranged marriages are the norm, female choice actually played little role in human evolution.Instead, male mating success may have depended less upon what Darwin called ‘intersexual selection’ and more upon ‘intrasexual selection’ – i.e. less upon female choice and more upon male-male fighting.Male Attractiveness and Fighting AbilityParadoxically, this is reflected even in the very traits that women find attractive in men.Thus, although Etcoff’s book is titled ‘The Evolution of Prettiness’, and ‘prettiness’ is usually an adjective applied to women, and, when applied to men, is (perhaps tellingly) rarely a complement, Etcoff does discuss male attractiveness too.Yet what is notable about the factors that Etcoff describes as attractive among men is that they all seem related to fighting ability.This is most obviously true of height (p172-176) and muscularity (p176-80).Indeed, in a section titled “No Pecs, No Sex”, though she focuses on their role in attraction, Etcoff nevertheless acknowledges:“Pectoral muscles are the human male’s antlers. Their weapons of war” (p177).Thus, height and muscularity have obvious functional utility.This in stark contrast to traits such as the peacock’s tail, which are often a positive handicap to their owner. Indeed, one influential theory of sexual selection contends that it is precisely because they represent a handicap that they have evolved as a sexually-selected fitness indicator, because only a genetically superior male is capable of bearing the handicap of such an unwieldy ornament.Yet, if men’s bodies have evolved more for fighting than attracting mates, the same is perhaps less obviously true of their faces.Thus, anthropologist David Puts proposes:“Even [male] facial structure may be designed for fighting: heavy brow ridges protect eyes from blows, and robust mandibles lessen the risk of catastrophic jaw fractures” (Puts 2010: p168).Indeed, looking at the facial features of a highly dominant, masculine male face, like that of Mike Tyson, for example, one gets the distinct impression that, if you were foolish enough to try punching it, it would likely do more damage to your hand than to his face. Thus, if some faces are, as cliché contends, highly punchable, then others are at the opposite end of this spectrum.This also explains some male secondary sexual characteristics that otherwise seem anomalous, for example, beards. These have actually been found “to decrease attractiveness to women, yet have strong positive effects on men’s appearance of dominance” (Puts 2010: p166).“Men’s traits look designed to make men appear threatening, or enable them to inflict real harm. Men’s beards and deep voices seem designed specifically to increase apparent size and dominance” (Puts 2010: p168).These same traits are indeed often attractive to women.After all, if a tall muscular man has higher reproductive success because he is better at fighting, then it pays women to preferentially mate with tall, muscular men so that their male offspring will inherit these traits and hence themselves have high reproductive success. In addition, males with fighting prowess are better able to protect and provision their mates.However, this is secondary to their primary role in male-male fighting.Moreover, Etcoff admits, highly masculine faces are not always attractive.Thus, unlike the “supernormal” or “hyperfeminine” female faces that men find most attractive in women, women rated “hypermasculine” faces as less attractive (p158). This, she speculates, is because they are perceived as overaggressive and unlikely to invest in offspring.Also, facial-width is though to be associated with testosterone, but, anecdotally, this does not seem to be perceived as handsome.Likewise, large eyes are perceived as attractive, but these are a neotenous, indeed feminine, trait (p158). This, she proposes, is because they evoke women’s nurturance, a trait that evolved in a parental rather than a mating context.Indeed, one study even found that women preferred males with more feminine faces (Perrett et al 1998), while another study suggested cyclical changes in female preferences (Penton-Voak & Perrett 2000).ReferencesDoyle & Pazhoohi 2012 Natural and Augmented Breasts: Is What is Not Natural Most Attractive?' Human Ethology Bulletin 27(4):4-14Gaulin & Boser 1990 Dowry as Female Competition, American Anthropologist 92(4):994-1005Kenrick & Keefe 1992 Age preferences in mates reflect sex differences in mating strategies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(1):75-133Penton-Voak & Perrett DI 2000 Female preference for male faces changes cyclically: Further evidence. Evolution and Human Behavoir 21(1):39–48Perrett et al 1998 Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness Nature 394(6696):884-7Puts 2013 Beauty and the Beast: Mechanisms of Sexual Selection in Humans. Evolution and Human Behavior 31(3):157-175

Thank you

Etcoff's book describes the way "prettiness" is seen from (mostly) the western viewpoint, but it also backs up the statements with how people developed their views of prettiness from a historical and evolutionary background. It is free of political correctness and is very refreshing to read. The prose was a bit hard going in the first chapter, but it soon flowed. Read it and you will find interesting insights about why men prefer women of a certain type and why women prefer a certain type of men (the book also gives you the similar info on various animal preferences too).

AAA