Special interest groups often unfairly accuse the Media, Beauty pageants and associated organisations of promoting an unhealthy body image among women.

We have already shown that amongst Miss America winners, the numbers of low-weight individuals, both in total and across time is generally very small. On the other hand, female Porn stars are frequently much below average weight, when compared to the average woman, as we will show:

A list of the names of the most frequently downloaded female adult entertainers (n=50) was obtained from a site purporting to supply ‘Porn star desktop wallpapers‘. To this data set, the height and weight of the respective actresses was added, using information obtained from Wikipedia, and corrected where possible, using information from the performers own webpage.

Using the information collated, the following summary data was obtained:

For those who are interested in trivia, the following information was extracted from the compiled data set.

• Shortest Porn stars – 1.52m
  Julia Bond, Nicole Graves

• Tallest Porn stars – 1.78m
  Briana Banks, Carmella Bing, Jelena Jensen, Gianna Michaels, Nicole Sheridan

• Lightest Porn star – 40.82Kg
  Lacey Duvalle

• Heaviest Porn star – 65.77Kg
  Gianna Michaels

• Highest BMI Porn star – 22.9Kg/m²
  Katja Kassin

• Lowest BMI Porn star – 16.3Kg/m²
  Jenna Haze

The following graph shows the BMI frequency distribution of the Adult entertainers sampled.

From the compiled data set, fully 32% of the sample are below 18.5Kg/m², which is classed as Underweight, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and considered unhealthy.

To put this into context, using the compiled data set, the mean Pornographic actress is 1.64m tall, weighs 50.89Kg and has a BMI of 18.82. This contrasts sharply with the mean 25-34 year old UK woman, at 1.63m tall, 69.7Kg in weight, with a BMI of 26.1. Even compared to the weight of the mean Miss America winner, the average female Porn star weighs more than 4Kg less.

Now, since the Porn actresses in the sample were determined by the popularity of their desktop wallpaper downloads, we can eliminate the possibility that only low-weight women become Porn stars, and thus consumers of pornography have a restricted choice. Further, since market forces determined the ranking of the porn stars in the sample, we can also eliminate a media plot to miseducate people about body image or promote skinny models.

Now, it’s axiomatic that men would choose to download images of women that they desire to have sex with (assuming the opportunity arose), but this begs the question – if Sociobiologists are correct in telling us that males are attracted to women displaying signs of health and fertility, then why are unhealthy-weight adult performers so popular?

It seems that either the WHO is wrong in classifying low-weight women as unhealthy or Sociobiological ideas about males choosing healthy, fertile women for sex are incorrect.

Does anyone here have a more complete answer to this paradox?

Posted by Jonathan as Analysis, Sociobiology at 11:00 PM BST

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New research shows men are better at detecting infidelities than women; although they’re also more likely to suspect cheating that doesn’t exist.

A US study of heterosexual couples has found that men are the more suspicious of the sexes when it comes to straying, but the flip side is that to counter this constant vigilance, women may be better than men at concealing illicit liaisons.

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond gave confidential questionnaires to 203 young couples, asking them whether they had ever strayed, and whether they suspected or knew their partner had strayed.

The results, published in New Scientist magazine, showed 29 percent of men admitted they had cheated, compared with 18.5 percent of women.

Lead researcher Dr Paul Andrews said the men were better at judging fidelity than women:

Eighty percent of women’s inferences about fidelity or infidelity were correct, but men were even better, accurate 94 percent of the time.

Men were also more likely to catch out a cheating partner, detecting 75 percent of the reported infidelities compared with 41 percent discovered by women. However, men were also more likely to suspect infidelity when there was none.

Dr Andrews said this made evolutionary sense, because unlike women, men can never be certain that a baby is theirs:

Men have far more at stake. When a female partner is unfaithful, a man may himself lose the opportunity to reproduce, and find himself investing his resources in raising the offspring of another man.

David Buss, at the University of Texas, Austin, commented:

This adds to the evidence that men have evolved defences to detect their partner’s infidelity

Adding that it demonstrates a:

…fascinating cognitive bias that leads men to err on the side of caution by overestimating a partner’s infidelity.

However, Australian Sex therapist Dr Rosie King said that she believed men had heightened suspicions simply because they were the bigger cheaters and were more aware of the temptations.

They’re getting very busy seeking outside sexual activity so they’re more likely to suspect their partner is doing the same.

She pointed out that Australian research had found men were not naturally intuitive, making it “doubtful” that they could detect infidelity in women. Dr King went on to state:

Men are not good at reading body language or picking up non-verbal cues in the way that women are.

Posted by Jonathan as Anthropology, Sociobiology at 12:19 AM BST

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Women looking for both a quick fling and a long-term relationship pick brains over brawn, according to a new study.

Instead of asking women to rate qualities they seek in men, as other studies had done, Mark Prokosch at Elon University in North Carolina, and his team, filmed fifteen college men performing a series of tasks on camera.

The volunteers performed a series of tasks, such as reading news reports, saying why they would be a good date, and explaining what would be the consequences of discovering life on Mars, as well as throwing and catching a Frisbee. Each potential suitor also took a quantitative test of verbal intelligence.

More than 200 women watched a series of these videos before rating each man’s intelligence, attractiveness, creativity and appeal for a short-term or long-term relationship. The team found the smarter the man, the higher his appeal.

Whilst the difference between one-night stands and a long-term relationship may amount to a boozy decision people make each weekend, it does have some evolutionary significance.

Mark Prokosch, who led the study, said:

Women want the best of both worlds. Not only a physically attractive man, but somebody in the long term who can provide for them.

To many women, a smart man will appeal because he is likely to be clever enough to keep his family afloat. But he may also pass on “good” genes to his children.

In potential husbands, women look for signs that a man might be a good provider and father. In one-night stands, women are on the prowl for little more than “good” genes, not to mention a good time.

Interestingly, women proved to be decent judges of intelligence, with their scores generally matching each man’s intelligence test results.

As for choosing a sex-partner, the men’s actual intelligence rating proved a reliable indicator of their appeal for both brief hook-ups and serious relationships, which was something of a surprise, since previous studies had suggested that, for women anticipating short-term relationships, a man’s intellect isn’t foremost in their minds.

This disparity in results could be due to women’s lack of awareness that intelligence also affects the attractiveness of candidates for quick flings – how intelligent women perceived a man to be, influenced his desirability as a long-term mate much more than his appeal for a one-night stand.

Although women are good judges of intelligence, they aren’t perfect. In many cases, women have rated good hook-ups as dunces, even though their intelligence scores indicated otherwise; noted Martie Haselton, an Evolutionary Psychologist at the University of California in Los Angeles.

However, looks were still a more powerful predictor of sex appeal than brains, and Prokosch says:

If you had an option to pick from five different people, you would pick the most attractive one.

Creativity also proved to be another sought-after trait, and Prokosch’s team is currently working on an objective measure of creativity, similar to the intelligence test they used.

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociobiology at 1:09 AM BST

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A study by researchers at the University of California shows that women tend to speak with a higher tone of voice, when most fertile, making them more attractive to the opposite sex.

The researchers recorded the voice of 69 female undergraduates during two phases of their menstrual cycle. Once while their fertility was low, the other recording when they were near ovulation. When these women were closer to the period of egg release it was found that their voice tones were higher pitched. A finding which suggests sex hormones act on vocal chords to give off hidden signals about their fertility, that men might unconsciously identify.

But the difference was found only when women spoke a simple introductory sentence such as ‘Hi, I’m a student at UCLA’ and not for simple vowel sounds.

Although the changes are too subtle to identify in ordinary situations, experts believe that unlike other mammals there are no obvious signs to show that a woman is at her most fertile. However the biology of men lets them detect even subtle changes in the sex hormones of women; and previous studies have shown men had a greater affinity towards higher-pitched female voices, finding them far more attractive.

Lead author, Dr Greg Bryant, of the University of California, Los Angeles said:

Our study shows women change their voice in relation to fertility – and possibly only in social communication contexts. When speaking a simple introductory sentence women’s pitch increased during high – as compared with low – fertility and this difference was the greatest for women whose voices were recorded on the two highest fertility days within the fertile window – the two days just before ovulation.

The high versus low-fertility difference in pitch was associated with the approach of ovulation and not menstrual onset – thus representing the first research to show a specific cyclic fertility cue in the human voice. We interpret this finding as evidence of a fertility-related enhancement of femininity consistent with other research documenting attractiveness-related changes associated with ovulation.

These findings support previous studies that documented changes to body scents, flirtatious behaviour and style of dress that they believe are also used as clues to a woman’s fertility status.

It is feasible these changes in vocal femininity occur primarily or exclusively during social communicative tasks – raising the intriguing possibility cues of ovulation appear more during social interactions and could serve a communicative function. These results are consistent with other findings revealing women’s tendency during high fertility to accentuate sexually differentiated traits such as wearing fashionable clothing and preferring male masculinity.

Dr Bryant, whose findings are published in Biology Letters, said future research should explore contextual effects on vocal production in association with the ovulatory cycle.

He said: “Manipulations involving the presence of attractive others, speech content, and other stimuli before and during recording sessions might reveal systematic communicative signals – which in turn should be detectable and found attractive by judges.”

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociobiology at 1:41 AM BST

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New research suggests that men from polygamous cultures outlive those from monogamous ones.

Virpi Lummaa, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield, suggested that after accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60, from 140 countries that practice polygamy, to varying degrees, lived on average 12 percent longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations.

The latest research might solve a long-standing puzzle of life expectancy in human biology: Why do men live for so long? This question only makes sense after asking the same for women, who (unlike nearly all other animals) live many years past the menopause.

One answer seems to be a phenomenon called the ‘grandmother effect’. For every ten years a woman survives past the menopause, she gains two additional grandchildren, and Lummaa says. It seems that doting on and spoiling grandchildren aids their survival, as well as furthering some of their grandmother’s genes.

Men, by contrast, can reproduce well into their 60s and even 70s and 80s, and most researchers assumed this explained their longevity. But Lummaa and colleague Andy Russell wondered whether other factors explained the long lifespan of men, such as a ‘grandfather effect’.

The team tested this possibility by analyzing church-gathered records for 25,000 Finns from the 18th and 19th centuries, when people tended to move little, nobody practiced contraception, and the Lutheran Church enforced monogamy.

During this era, only widowed men were allowed to remarry, and if they had children with their new wife, they fathered more kids, on average, than men who only married once.

Dr Lummaa said:

Ultimately, remarried men don’t end up with any more grandchildren. If anything the presence of a grandfather was associated with decreased survival of grandchildren.

Adding:

Perhaps, the children of the first mother lose out on food and resources that go to the second mother’s kids. It’s kind of the Cinderella effect.

This was a finding that was supported by previous research, which showed even fathers with only one wife provided no benefit to their grandchildren.

With the grandfather effect ruled out, Lummaa and Russell next wondered whether the constraints of human physiology explain male longevity – In the same way that men have nipples that evolved for women to nourish their young – male longevity might be a consequence of biological selection for long-lived women.

To answer this question, the researchers compared the lifespan of men from polygamous countries with those from monogamous nations.

Using data from the World Health Organization, Lummaa and Russell scored 189 countries on a monogamy scale of one to four – totally monogamous to mostly polygamous. They also took into account a country’s gross domestic product and average income to minimise the effect of better nutrition and healthcare in monogamous Western nations.

Lummaa stressed that their monogamy score is a crude first stab, and that they are working to find multiple ways to assess marriage patterns. So, the conclusions could evaporate under further analysis.

The study suggests that if female survival is the main explanation for male longevity, then monogamous and polygamous men would live for about the same length of time. However, it seems that fathering more children with more wives leads to increased male longevity. Men, therefore, live long because they’re fertile well into their grey years.

But, the explanation could be both social and genetic. Men who continue fathering kids into their 60s and 70s could take better care for their bodies because they have mouths to feed. Although evolutionary forces acting over thousands of years could also select for longer-lived men in polygamous cultures.

Lummaa presented her findings at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology’s annual meeting in Ithaca, New York.

It doesn’t surprise me that men in those societies live longer than men in monogamous societies, where they become widowed and have nobody to care for them.

Posted by Jonathan as Anthropology, Sociobiology at 10:43 PM BST

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One of the big mysteries of relationships that women sometimes ponder is how they can best find and keep a man.

Thus, in the same way that men sometimes have the crazy idea that if they quiz a woman, she will tell them some big secret about how to shag loads of hot babes; women get the daft notion that any man can reveal some confidential information about how they can keep a man faithful.

In this latter case, typically, the man will skirt the issue, and say “why would you want to do that? Isn’t variety the spice of life?” Or worse, he’ll give her an answer based on some fantasy situation he’d like to encounter, i.e. he’ll say “Put on a short skirt, a tight top, walk into a bar and get completely drunk”. Then the girl protests that she’s not a slut, and gets rather upset about the whole episode.

Obviously, the girl knows that this option is available to her, but she doesn’t want to choose it. Rather like the old diet joke that suggests you can lose 10 lbs of weight by chopping off your leg, there’s been a communication breakdown; the girl really meant she wanted a relationship that lasted longer than breakfast the following day.

However, in this case, gender stereotype roles aren’t useful to us. And, in my experience, its better to take the view that men are a little more complicated than they’re generally given credit for; whilst women, instead of being complicated, just vary more in their responses to the men around them (which, naturally, gives them an appearance of being complicated).

This is not to say that there are no men that are simple, or no girls that enjoy sex a lot. But, society does tend to admonish those women as the sort of people you wouldn’t take home to meet your parents, and then labels them as sluts, harlots or jezebels etc.

So, bearing the above gross generalizations in mind, as well as the fact that this article makes no attempt to offer a complete or in-depth explanation, it seems that males actually have two meta-sexual strategies that constitute a proximate answer to the question:

Firstly, men are attracted to nymphomaniacs: As an example, a man sees a girl somewhere, and she offers him sex – Of course, the answer is almost invariably “Yes please!” Then, so long as she maintains good bi-lateral symmetry, good health, stays free of parasites, and most importantly, keeps having sex on demand, a relationship may develop. Or more likely, the girl changes, or becomes defective in some way, and then things break down.

It should also be noted that especially beautiful girls often tend to attract kamikaze idiots, without enough skills to find their own girls, but just enough ability to make a nuisance of themselves. Jealously seems to drive these people to play cockblock (even if they know they haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell with the girl, were the couple to split up). This usually takes the form of dragging up any embarrassing events they might know about the man’s past, pointing out and exaggerating character flaws to the girl, or maybe just old fashioned spreading rumours and lies amongst her friends, to try to destroy the relationship by proxy.

I can only guess that low-status males with no hope of finding a half-decent girl of there own get a power-trip out of this, but if anyone has a better answer, please do tell.

Secondly, men can appreciate a girl that’s intelligent, with a good personality: This is the more complex of the two meta-strategies, so an example might be most useful here. Perhaps a man meets a girl that’s clean, healthy and free from parasites; not necessarily gorgeous, but not downright ugly either. However, most importantly, she’ll be a pleasant, cheerful person that takes an interest in the world around her, doesn’t believe that everything revolves around her, and is prepared to invest a little time and effort into having fun with a new partner, maybe even trying new experiences, being reasonably open minded, and even helpful and supportive of a partner.

Now, this isn’t intended to be an absolute set of rules, just a vague description of someone that’s basically a good person, with a nice personality.

In this case, the tendency is that the woman isn’t model quality, but other factors make up for minor deficiencies, and since men don’t usually have firmly fixed rules about the women they like, they’ll tend to grant some leeway, especially if the woman is lower maintenance, doesn’t demand too much, and generally gives everyone less earache.

Now here’s the interesting bit; at the same time, friends, colleagues and relatives are seeing the pair together having fun, and they’ll start saying what a great couple they make, and similar statements; this reinforces the couple, and a relationship starts to develop. So, oftentimes, when relationships happen they seem to go via the route of ‘relationship by default’. I.e. a man goes out with a woman for a bit, they have sex a couple of times, and even though nobody said anything about a relationship, it’s just assumed that a relationship exists – often for quite a considerable length of time afterwards.

Of course, if the girl isn’t model quality, and more certainly once the relationship is on a more secure footing, then the couple become more resilient to the hassles of jealous idiots playing cockblock.

We can also turn to Behavioural Ecologists for the distal explanation. These people tell us that ultimately men want to impregnate as many women as possible, because they are driven by their genes to reproduce; sex is enjoyable, and they have a lot of sperm to distribute.

Ironically though, whilst women are certainly capable of having a lot more sex than men are, the overall risks are much higher for women, since if they become pregnant, they are gestating for next nine months, lactating for several months after that, and then responsible for feeding, clothing and educating the child for several years thereafter. Not to mention any problems that might arise from the pregnancy itself.

So, if that’s to be the case for the human race to continue into the future, the woman would very much like to know who fertilized her eggs, and the man would like to be sure that he is the father; or else there is no reason for him to stay around and provide support, parental care, protection and companionship for the mother, or even guaranteed paternity for her future offspring.

Thus, we come to the concept of hypergyny. This essentially means that women tend to pair with a man of slightly higher socio-economic status (SES) than themselves (although in more recent times, this may be more likely isogamy, meaning equal SES). In this case, that would be an indication that the man has the gumption to be able to look after himself, herself and any children they end up producing, share the burdens of life, and thus probably won’t just abandon her at a moments notice for another woman, because he has now more heavily invested in the relationship too.

It’s worth noting that in cultures which permit polygamy, the rules are always that the man needs to be able to support all the women he is paired with. Conversely, the opposite is also true (although less common), where men are unable to support even one woman, they end up sharing a wife (polyandry) with a brother or other men. Several primitive tribes in extremely harsh environments, such as the Nyinba of North West Nepal, or the Ladakhi Buddhists in the Himalayas exhibit this phenomena.

In the case that a woman decided to have sex with every man that asked, she’d be permanently sore, plus there’s the risk that she’d finish up pregnant by some man that her Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) was incompatible with, or the resulting child may receive poor quality genes from a diseased, deformed or otherwise low genetic viability father. This may result in spontaneous abortion, or a sickly child that might not survive to adulthood – obviously a bad deal after all the effort expended by the woman, and much better avoided by choosing a partner wisely, in the first instance.

A quick caveat is needed here, to debunk some common myths: (1) why don’t women dump men more often, or only choose a muscled Adonis that the media tries so hard to make guys think they have to become? And (2) why don’t men drop women every time a better looking / younger / sluttier one comes along?

The answer here is that there’s this crazy little thing called ‘love’, which so often seems to cause artists and poets everywhere so much heartache…

But then, what is love really? Obviously, it’s just a feeling. And, as every good Biochemist will tell you, all feelings are esentially biochemical. For example, you feel hungry, but you don’t eat to stop yourself feeling hungry, you eat to maintain a level of nutrition in your body – your body just told you that you needed more food by making you feel hungry. Likewise, with the feeling of love, your body tells you to stay with the person you’re with, because that person is physically (and quite possibly even biochemically) compatible with you. Thus, any children you have will tend to survive better with two parents rather than with just the one. The genes get to replicate; two people get regular sex, and all the other attendant benefits of a stable relationship.

In summary then, the answer is that a girl needs to do a little bit more than just sit back looking pretty, claiming she’s too shy, or that it’s the man’s job to do all the running in a relationship (acting like a parasite), unless she wants meta-strategy #1. On the other hand, in some ways, men are lucky that they only need to maintain a basic level of smart appearance and hygiene etc., after which the additional benefits of beautification start to diminish exponentially (remember, Adonis was only a god of vegetation (fairly low SES compared to the rest of the pantheon)), at which point sensible men will generally concentrate on incresing their rank, by being successful at whatever interests or career path they have chosen. Women on the other hand must constantly fight a battle with ageing, to remain pretty, as well as whatever else they choose to do.

Posted by Jonathan as Anthropology, Sociobiology at 12:15 AM BST

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Researchers have found that women are more attracted to men with stubble than those with clean-shaven faces or full beards, when seeking partners for love, sex or marriage.

According to the researchers at Northumbria University, British women aged 18 to 44, who participated in the study, rated men with one-to-two days of follicular growth as tough, mature, aggressive, dominant and masculine – and as the best romantic partners, either for a fling or a long-term relationships.

The explanation for the preference is not clear, but experts in human evolution say that that facial hair may be a sign of aggression, because it boosts the apparent size of the lower jaw, emphasising the teeth as weapons.

According to the researchers, stubbly men offer women the best compromise — not too strongly masculine, but mature and with the potential to grow a full beard.

Lead researcher, Dr Nick Neave said:

The results were very clear cut, the face that had the light stubble was thought to be much more attractive, much sexier.

It was preferred for a short-term partner, it was preferred for a long-term partner.

In a preliminary test, shaven male faces were rated by women for attractiveness. And, from these, the researchers selected only average-looking subjects (men who were neither especially handsome nor ugly), from those results of that study.

Using advanced computer software, each of the fifteen pictures of men’s faces was altered to give the appearance of five different facial-hair appearances: clean-shaven, light stubble, heavy stubble, light beard and full beard.

The pictures were then shown to 76 women who were asked to rate them for masculinity, aggression, dominance, attractiveness, age, and social maturity. They were also asked to note how desirable each man would be as a short-term or long-term partner.

After evaluating the various degrees of hairiness of the subjects, the majority of women agreed light stubble was most appealing, whilst men who were clean-shaven or fully beard were least appealing. Clean-shaven men were dismissed as lacking social maturity and masculinity, while faces with full beards were judged to be the most masculine and socially mature. However, full beards were also viewed as too aggressive, thought to look about five years older, were less attractive and overly dominant.

Writing in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, the researchers conclude:

Facial hair, or beardedness, is a powerful sociosexual signal, and an obvious biological marker of sexual maturity.

Facial hair may have been sexually selected by females on the basis of associated male success, despite its threatening appearance. Clean-shaven faces therefore may suggest appeasement, as well as being an obvious sign of sexual immaturity.

Increasing levels of facial hair were associated with increased perceptions of aggression, in that bearded faces were perceived as being the most aggressive, whilst clean-shaven faces were rated as being the least aggressive. And as facial hair increased in a linear fashion, so did female ratings of masculinity and dominance.

In desirability for a short-term relationship, a female preference for male faces with stubble or light beard was found, with clean-shaven and fully bearded faces being the least preferred. This indicates that females are not selecting faces displaying relatively high or low masculinity, but are rather preferring males who are clearly mature (post-pubertal) but not too masculinised. The same pattern was found for preferences for a long-term relationship.

The researchers now want to extend their study internationally; and Dr Neave was quoted as saying:

Preference for facial hair is clearly a cultural thing, but I think the underlying mechanism is that it signals masculinity, it starts off very wispy and very pathetic, really, and then gets much thicker and finally, with older people, gets scraggy. So it’s a sign of sexual maturity.

There are large cultural differences in perceptions of facial hair, and we are hoping to expand on this research by conducting a large-scale study assessing female perceptions of male facial hair in different in as many countries as possible.

Females seem to have a preference for faces that are masculine, but not too masculine, they don’t want these hulking cavemen, yet they also don’t want faces that are too immature.

Posted by Jonathan as Sociobiology, Sociology at 11:56 PM BST

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It seems that the sexual revolution of the 1960’s that was supposed to free women for casual encounters has failed.

Researchers at Durham University surveyed 1,743 men and women that had engaged in one-night stands. They then asked the respondents to rate their positive and negative feelings the following morning, in an internet survey.

Women reported negative feelings after fleeting sexual encounters and felt “used” after one-night stands, according to the research, led by Professor Anne Campbell.

The study, part of a project at Durham University, and published in the June issue of the journal Human Nature, found that after a one-night stand women were overwhelmed with negative feelings, believed they had somehow let themselves down, and were worried about the potential damage to their reputation.

Women also found casual sex less satisfying and, contrary to popular belief, did not seem to consider the experience as a prelude to a long-term relationship.

Professor Campbell explained:

What the women seemed to object to was not the fleetingness of the encounter but the fact that the man did not seem to appreciate her. The women thought this lack of gratitude implied that she did this with anybody.

On the other hand, compared to just 54 percent of women, who reported positive feeling, 80 percent of men had overall positive feelings about the experience, felt greater sexual satisfaction and contentment afterwards, as well as a greater sense of well-being and confidence about themselves. They were also more likely than women to want their friends to hear about what they had done.

The study concluded women “have not adapted” to meaningless sex, because it did not suit them at this stage in evolution; whereas men are more likely to reproduce, and therefore they would benefit from numerous short-term partners.

For women, finding partners of high genetic quality is a stronger motivator than sheer number, and it is commonly believed that women are more willing to have casual sex when there is a chance of forming a long-term relationship.

Professor Campbell went on to state:

In evolutionary terms women bear the brunt of parental care and it has been generally thought that it was to their advantage to choose their mate carefully and remain faithful to make sure that their mate had no reason to believe he was raising another man’s child.

Posted by Jonathan as Sociobiology, Sociology at 11:54 PM BST

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Good news for men with very attractive partners: in scientific terms, you’re probably having more sex (in-pair copulations) than other guys.

However, according to a new study, the reason that you’re doing this is to mark your territory, and hold on to a partner who’s more likely to be pursued by other men and thus put you at risk of being cheated on.

It might seem obvious that more attractive partners inspire more frequent sex, but according to Farnaz Kaighobadi, a PhD student in Evolutionary Psychology, at Florida Atlantic University, the reasons are found in our evolutionary past, and run much deeper than simply thinking your mate is pretty hot.

Farnaz Kaighobadi claims:

In this context, sex is a “mate retention behaviour” designed to hold on to a partner who might otherwise stray and to increase the odds that any children born are those of the woman’s mate. Other such behaviours range from kind gestures like buying small gifts or offering compliments to nasty traits like sifting through a partner’s mail or threatening anyone who shows interest in them.

The underlying reasons are deeply unconscious.

It’s not like men are sitting there and thinking, ‘My partner is attractive so it’s likely she’s going to be unfaithful, so let me have more sex with her; it could be simply, ‘My partner is hot, I’m going to have more sex with her.’

Men reported that they have sex with their partners an average of 3.3 times in a typical week, Kaighobadi says, and they assigned them an average attractiveness rating of 7.9 on a scale of 0 to 9. Then, with each one-point increase in attractiveness, the frequency of sex increased by 40 percent, she says.

The study involved 277 heterosexual men, and was co-authored by Todd Shackelford. It will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Kaighobadi also noted:

It’s not yet clear how this dynamic plays out in same-sex couples.

Posted by Jonathan as Sociobiology at 11:54 PM BST

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The problem with Science books is that they’re mostly tucked away in Libraries or technical sections of Bookshops; so that many of the more interesting points they make are often lost to the general public, or sometimes the ideas just become twisted to suit the ideals of noisy braggarts with their own private agendas.

In terms of the scientific aspects of seduction, we have already disproved the notion that amongst human society there is some sort of top dog or alpha male. But looking back at that article there is very little mentioned about human hierarchies and rank; while most reasonably intelligent observers of human society would note that human society is much more complex than the simple and often somewhat bizarre alpha / not-alpha theories touted by various commercial seduction operations.

In purely biological terms, relative resource holdings are best and most decisively demonstrated in the struggle between individuals for access to mates. For both humans and other animals, the most intense of these struggles typically involve males, the reason for this lying in the asymmetry of the reproductive strategies of the two sexes. Females, who in most species invest heavily in the gestation and care of offspring, have limited reproductive capacity relative to males, whose only contribution in many instances consists of just a few sperm cells. This asymmetry means that any single male is capable (in theory) of siring an almost unlimited number of progeny. Thus, the result for males is a genetic tournament with enormously high stakes. As an example, in one species of seal, 4 percent of the breeding-age males sire almost 90 percent of all surviving offspring.¹

The variability of male reproductive success in humans, although smaller than in many other animal species, is nonetheless substantial. More than 85 percent of past and present human societies for which data is available were polygynous.² And, in such societies, high-ranking males often take numerous wives, with the biggest winners enjoying prodigious reproductive success. For example, Moulay Ismail (1646-1727), the last Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, fathered more than a thousand children during the course of his lifetime.² But even people who would be delighted if everyone had lots of grandchildren thus have ample reasons to want high relative incomes.

In modern industrial societies, of course, there is no longer a strong link between income and the number of grandchildren one expects to have, since the government generally subsidises families that have numerous children. Even so, there is still evidence that relative earning power continues to be an important factor in mate selection. And, according to various relationship surveys, women consider earning power the most important characteristic when evaluating potential mates; and, apparently recognizing the growing importance of two-earner families in modern society, men in the same surveys usually rank a woman’s earning power second behind physical attractiveness.

Anyway, to continue, over the course of human evolution, if individuals differed in the intensity of their respective desires to achieve high rank, and if those with more intense desires were more likely than others to achieve it, then it would be most unusual if the relentless forces of natural selection had not produced a human brain that strongly motivated its owner to seek high rank.

So, it seems natural to ask why a brain moulded by natural selection would urge us to seek relative rather than absolute wealth, as in most cases, a person who maximizes their absolute wealth will have maximized their relative wealth as well. We might also ask why our inner voices don’t simply urge “Do the best you can,” rather than “Try to achieve high rank.” After all, most of us are destined to be outranked by at least some people in virtually every domain of life, making a relentless focus on relative position seem more like a formula for misery than a useful motivational tool.

Evolutionary Psychologists stress, however, that the purpose of human motivation is not to make us happy, but to make us more likely to succeed against the competition. Someone who is unhappy about his low relative position in one arena may be more motivated to compete in a different arena. For instance, a talented entrepreneur who is not willing to put in 80-hour work weeks will have a better chance of becoming a success in a small regional town than in Central London.

There is also the linguistic problem that a command like “Do the best you can” is hopelessly vague. Each of us has a unique mix of talent, ability and experience, so in most cases, doing the best we can doesn’t yield much fruit, unless we first discover just what it is that we’re good at. For example, once you’ve chosen to become an Accountant, it may be sensible to say try to become the best Accountant you can; but how did you know that becoming an Accountant was the right choice in the first place?

Much of human learning takes place as a result of the positive or negative reinforcement we receive from different actions. Slowly, and often by trial and error, we purge our mental inventories of behaviours that don’t work, and then replace them with ones that do. If you’re tone deaf, your relatively poor performance in primary school music classes will have spared you the trouble of seeking a career as a Pianist. If you are a slow runner, your poor performance in early races will have steered you away from training for the Olympics. Then, with a little luck, your strong early performance in some other field will have helped guide you towards a career that provided a more fertile ground for your talents. Thus, when it comes to finding the right field to compete in, an inner voice urging “Try to achieve high rank” is likely to be far more informative than an inner voice urging “Do the best you can.”

There is yet another important reason for being concerned about rank per se, and this is that rank serves as a convenient benchmark for us to use in regulating the amount of effort we expend. To use the military as a vivid illustration, we know that human beings under duress can accomplish extremely demanding physical tasks with little sleep for weeks at a time, even when faced with imminent threats of death. However, there are limits, because each persons struggle for survival typically plays out over many decades, and the expenditure of maximum possible effort at every moment is almost certain to be a losing strategy. So, to avoid burning out, we also need to set aside time to reflect and restore ourselves.

A far better general strategy is therefore to conserve energy for the occasions when threats to survival are greatest. Here, also, an intrinsic concern about relative position appears almost tailor-made for the task at hand. So, as a general rule, the farther an individual fell in her local pecking order, the more serious were the threats to her survival. A decline in rank typically provokes distress and anxiety, and these feelings can often spur the additional effort it requires to recover lost ground.

This is not to say that anxiety vanishes once someone achieves a threshold level of high rank. On the contrary, we all know people whose drive to advance remains unsatisfied no matter how much they may have achieved. This could be explained in part by the fact that individuals differ in their respective drives to succeed, and those with the highest drives are more likely than others to have made it near the top.

But the Evolutionary Psychologist’s perspective suggests the additional possibility that we ought not to have expected the relationship between subjective well-being and relative income to have been a simple, static one in the first place. From an evolutionary design standpoint, the most successful organisms will be concerned not just with their relative position but with changes therein, since in competitive environments, complacency about high rank often results in losing it.

Thus, psychological well-being seems attuned to relative income in roughly the following way: Increases in relative income increase wellbeing, and reductions in relative income reduce wellbeing, but both effects tend to decay at least partially over time.³ Once people become adapted to their new circumstances, these constitute a new norm against which further changes are reckoned. (Hence the folk wisdom that “Life is a journey, not a destination”)

The Evolutionary Psychologist’s framework also calls attention to the fact that the relevant reproductive battles were typically decided by competitive balance in highly local environments. For instance, an ape’s reproductive success depended not on how strong he was relative to the entire population of apes on the African continent, but on his strength relative to rivals in his immediate vicinity. Similarly, the economic and psychological rewards of today’s tennis player depend not on his performance vis-à-vis all other athletes, but on how well he performs relative to other tennis players in the particular arena in which he competes. Achieving high or improving rank in this ‘local hierarchy’ will make him feel good, and the reverse will be true for low rank or downward movements.

People in each different category are involved in their own competitions to move forward in their local hierarchies. But in each case, only half of the contestants can rank in the top half.

References:

1. Dawkins, R., ‘The Selfish Gene‘ (1989) United Kingdom: Oxford University Press
2. Wright, R., ‘The Moral Animal‘ (1994) New York: Pantheon
3. Diener, E. & R. Lucas, ‘Personality and Subjective Well-Being’ in Understanding Well-Being: Scientific Perspectives on Enjoyment and Suffering (1998) eds. Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener & Norbert Schwartz, New York: Russell Sage

Posted by Jonathan as Sociobiology, Sociology at 3:02 AM BST

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