The author of the paper, Physical attractiveness and reproductive success in humans: evidence from the late 20th century United States, speaks:
Having your study publicized by the media is nice. Having your study misrepresented and misinterpreted in the process is not. The media coverage of my paper on physical attractiveness and having children had a bad start and even worse follow-up. The origin of the problem: Times Online news article sexing up the finding a bit too much (I wasn't interviewed for this article at all and heard about it only after it had been published). Then things got worse with other journalists copying & slightly modifying the Times Online piece. Naturally, things were further muddled by the If-I-were-a-movie-critic-I-would-rate-movies-without-seeing-them-and-just-by-relying-on-discussions-overheard-in-a-pub columnists, the I-haven't-read-the-paper-but-here's-my-take-on-it-anyway bloggers and the ever so alert This-research-is-nonsense-I-want-my-tax-money-back-even-if-the-research-was-not-funded-by-my-tax-money readers.
...
On the more amusing side, the media flurry did have one funny unintended consequence. The Fox News covered the story by telling the viewers that evolution is driving women to become even more beautiful. A note to future historians: when tracing back the turning point at which conservatives begun to believe in the theory of evolution, please cite my article.
Oh well, my article had its 15 minutes of fame. Not the fame it would have deserved, but anyway. My guess is that nobody remembers the article anymore; it has already been 7 days since the Times Online report. I don't believe this commentary will be read even by 1% of those who have read the news articles of Times Online and others. It is merely damage control targeted to people who come across my study in blog & newspaper archives sometime in the future. At the moment, there seems to be more pressing news in the horizon, reported with the accuracy and moderation so characteristic to professional journalism:
The original paper is here. Jokela says that the Forbes piece was accurate. The rest of it, not so much, and he points out that the Times Online story spread virally and was the original source of the misinformation.
Since I got carried away and didn't read the paper before commenting, I apologize. I have a general rule, "beware of tales told in British newspapers" (most because of all the made up stuff they printed after 9/11), but I forgot that here. Live & learn. Jokela's response is thorough, so please check it out. Or, read his paper, which he has placed on his website.
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Ah, I did the "rate the movie without seeing it" as well :)
I read the paper now, and I'm still somewhat skeptical. I mean sure the results are what they are, but I'd like to see some explanation for why it is so. The discussion does address this, but I'd be much more comfortable with a replication study with a different dataset.
I'd also love to see a follow up study where the attractiveness of the offspring are compared to the parents to see how strong the genetics of "attractiveness" is. A strong correlation there wouldn't surprise me much, so the evidence wouldn't have to be particularly strong to convince me of an effect there, though.
I read the 'media' version and was not quite sure what to make of all that.
Duh who would be surprised that evolutionary processes favor heritable attractiveness?
The gender pressures are different, but exist in both genders (peacocks, cardinals?), but even as one who feels much of our sexual behavior is predisposed by selection, this seems to be a lot about a little.
I notice that the Times piece is by Jonathan Leake, who also wrote what is quite possibly the worst article ever about neuroimaging.
love to see a follow up study where the attractiveness of the offspring are compared to the parents to see how strong the genetics of "attractiveness" is
Jokela says: "assuming a heritability of 0.60 for
physical attractiveness (McGovern, Neale, & Kendler, 1996)"
Right, missed that one Eric. Do you have a link for the paper or something? A google search only found another Razib post (http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/08/hot-smart-brown-girls_1155707460677258…) for me :-S
I'd better go for the original literature this time, after all :)
that post was written by assman. though i'd get that into the record....
oh don't lie -- you know it was you who wrote a post titled "hot, smart Brown girls"!
Thomas, you mean McGovern, right? I don't have it. But judging from the abstract and the GNXP post you found, it would seem that the h^2 of 0.60 was calculated using the method of MZ twins raised together compared against DZ twins (formula in wikipedia[heritability]).
Jay, "duh" is probably a defensible reaction - but I think this is a duh result mainly for the malthusian past. For times after 1800, I think this result is non-trivial. For example, you would expect no beauty-offspring relationship at all if you made the following roughly-plausible assumptions:
- variance in lifetime number of children is solely determined by number of children desired
- there is no relationship between beauty and number of children desired.
Obviously these assumptions are false if Jokela's finding is replicable. For me personally the numbers on the present are much less interesting, though - I'd far rather know what they were before 1800. But, you take what you can get.
Via Jokela's paper, I found this info on the Ache, who are semi-disturbed hunter-gatherers. I am not sure if they faced malthusian conditions over the time studied:
http://books.google.com/books?id=_2ZQUncZuosC&dq=Hill+Hurtado+ache+life…
Unfortunately I don't speak the sweet language of regression, so I can't understand the data presented in table 10.4. I do understand from the text that the most beautiful women seemed to have 1.16 times more conceptions per unit time than the median woman. I suspect/speculate that under either hunter-gatherer or agricultural malthusian conditions the beauty-fitness relationship would be very marked, and would not be completely captured by rate of conception, since I'd bet there would be further beauty-linked variation in live births per conception, in infant and child mortality, and in social rank of adult offspring.
The Hill and Hurtado data addresses the infant/child mortality by aiming to control for last child's death...
I've read somewhere that there's a sort of Fynn effect for boobs. Cup sizes increasing, or larger cup sizes being more popular. Maybe it should be called Larry Flint effect. Here the debate will not be "nature vs nurture", but "real or fake".
Dann: Do you happen to have a citation for that claim? I tried a few Google scholar and PsycINFO searches and got nothing. I am skeptical that there would be an increase when you remove the likely increase that will result from the secular increase in weight, but would be very interested to hear otherwise.