Alpha Dominance

Beauty is highly prized by humans, particularly in prospective mates.  This is because beauty is believed to be a proxy for reproductive fitness and genetic strength.  Despite many unctuous diatribes by those who would have us see more than skin deep, people continue to sort themselves for procreative purposes in accordance with their attractiveness, both physical and material.  Frequently these aesthetic naysayers blame the media for men’s propensity to prize beauty above all in their partners, but this argument is backwards.  The media broadcasts beautiful people because that’s what we all, male and female alike prefer to look at.  Doubt this?  Just look at all of the women’s rags near the checkout counter of your local store, they’re chock full of beautiful, famous and rich people.  If women preferred not to look at beautiful women doubtless these magazines would be full of plain Pamela’s rather than the latest crop of perfect celebrities.

So why is this?  Because beautiful people have more children, and in the game of life, passing one’s genes on to more children is winning.  The effect is compounded if those children themselves have greater reproductive fitness due to greater attractiveness.  Thus, we all seek the most attractive partner we can muster in assortive mating and the singles scene acts as a marketplace to match the highest payer with the highest priced commodity and so forth on down into the gutter inhabited by the genetically bereft.

Interestingly this has not been widely studied in humans, but this recent paper shows the effect in humans with an interesting twist.

Findings from the WLS suggest that adolescent attractiveness was associated with reproductive success in people living in the late 20th century United States. In women, the association was nonlinear, so that attractive (second highest quartile) women had 16% and very attractive (highest quartile) women had 6% more children than their less attractive (two lowest quartiles) counterparts. This nonlinear pattern was explained by the fact that attractive and very attractive women were more likely to become parents and have the second child than their less attractive counterparts, but that very attractive women were less likely than attractive women to have children beyond the second child. Very attractive women also had longer interbirth intervals than others. In men, the lowest attractiveness quartile had 13% fewer children than others, who did not differ from each other in the average number of children, suggesting a threshold effect for men’s attractiveness–fertility association. Men’s attractiveness was associated with the probability of having the first, second, third and fourth child. At the proximate level of explanation, the attractiveness– fertility association may reflect at least four nonexclusive processes. First, attractiveness may be associated with a person’s fertility preferences and desires. For instance, very attractive women may not want as many children as their slightly less attractive counterparts and attractive men may want more children than nonattractive men. Second, attractiveness may modify a person’s mate choice criteria which may lead to fertility differences, e.g., very attractive women may expect more from the potential fathers of their children than less attractive women and this may decrease the potential fertility they could achieve with less stringent criteria. Third, attractiveness may influence how the person is judged as a father/mother candidate by others. For example, men (women) may want to have large families with attractive rather than with nonattractive women (men). Fourth, attractiveness may predict achieved fertility because it is correlated with fecundity, i.e., biological reproductive capacity. The present study did not have the relevant data to explore all the potential pathways linking attractiveness to fertility, and more research is needed to assess the contributions of the above and other alternatives. The nonlinear patterns suggest that the association may involve multiple mechanisms, some contributing to a positive and other to a negative relationship between attractiveness and fertility. Attractive individuals were more likely to get married, especially in early adulthood, but this association accounted for the attractiveness–fertility association only in part. Attractiveness also predicted higher educational achievement in women but this did not substantially influence the attractiveness–fertility association. Life-history theory suggests a further perspective to be considered (Gillespie, Russell, & Lummaa, 2008; Hagen, Barrett, & Price, 2006; Mulder, 2000). Namely, physical attractiveness may be related not only to offspring quantity but also to offspring quality — in the evolutionary sense of the word. Perhaps very attractive women are inclined to follow a reproductive strategy in which they allocate their energy to having only few offspring but spend more resources on them than parents on average. This would be in agreement with very attractive women’s high probability of having the first and second but not the third and fourth child. Furthermore, the quantity–quality tradeoff could explain the association between attractiveness and long interbirth intervals, as women investing heavily on one offspring need to wait for a longer time to have another child. The present results do not provide a direct test of the relationship between parental attractiveness and offspring quality, but future studies should examine whether attractiveness is related to parental investment and offspring characteristics to further probe the validity of this hypothesis.

Particularly interesting to me is the non-linear association between women’s attractiveness and their number of offspring.  The authors hint that this may be due to greater parental investment in fewer offspring at the uppermost end of the scale.  Since women’s attractiveness is more likely to be correlated with socioeconomic status, and the upper classes tend to have fewer children and invest in them more heavily, this effect seems logical.  For men on the other hand attractiveness merely serves as a threshold, at least in terms of physical attractiveness, so their attractiveness will not serve so well as a proxy for class.  I also have to suspect that the highest status women will be more concerned with keeping their appearance so as to retain the interest of their probably Alpha male partners, and this may mitigate their reproductive drives to a certain degree.  It has already been shown that women will forgo extra-pair copulations if the are coupled with a man of high enough status, even where he himself is unfaithful.  Hypergamy dictates that if she already has the best mate she can attract, shopping around will likely hurt her legacy more than it will benefit her.

It is good to see more research being performed on this topic in present settings and culture.  We often hear from the naysayers that evolutionary psychology held sway in the distant past but that it has somehow lost relevance today.  Their hubris is to presume that we humans have become so enlightened that we couldn’t possibly fall victim to outmoded ways of ranking one another so superficial as beauty.

The problems with this view are several.  One, we haven’t changed biologically that much since the rise of culture, the same subconscious drives which served us so well in prehistory still determine most of our behaviors surrounding survival and reproduction today.  This is known as behavioral determinism and is the reason our behaviors surrounding mating are so often contradictory to our avowed views.  For instance most people don’t think they would ever cheat, yet a great many do eventually anyway when their biology tells them to.  Another problem is that we prefer beautiful people as mates because they are better mates, both in quality and for the most part in quantity with the exception listed above.  Finally, we tend to view beautiful people as superior in other ways like intelligence, honesty and competence.  Sound unfair?  Well like most stereotypes they are based in fact.  We see beautiful people as smarter because on the whole, they are.

These views are heresy to social scientists, psychologists and feminists, but they are grounded in fact.  Once again biology is shown to be heartless and unfeeling.  As the old saying goes Nature is red in tooth and claw, and I would add, short on feel-good egalitarian dogma.  Whether we like this fact or not we all must learn to live with it.  We should not sell ourselves short in some futile attempt to correct natural law.  When selecting our mates and partners we should be armed with full knowledge of the facts, and the knowledge that our instincts will guide us to the best reproductive matches there are.  Don’t waste your time trying to correct a system that has worked so well for so long.  Fairness does not promote genetic and reproductive success.  It may be useful for social policy but dating is not an equal opportunity marketplace.