'Humans simply do not mate randomly.'
So says New Zealand anthropologist Barnaby Dixson in a Daily Mail (Mail Online) article released a couple of years ago [1]. Taken at face value, as an inane expression of the bleeding obvious, I can't help but agree - what I can't agree with is everything else he claims, arising as it does from some extraordinarily boneheaded thinking.
This is another study of how the waist to hip ratio (whr) - found by dividing the circumference of the waist with that of the hip - supposedly is a reliable indicator of 'female attractiveness'. The pet project of evolutionary psychologist Devendra Singh, this idea resurfaces every now and then in the form of 'research', perhaps due to a temporary coincidence of a surplus of time and funding with a deficit of intelligent thinking amongst the scientific community [2].
I can immediately think of a couple of perfectly good reasons why looking like a stick on the one hand, or like a whale on the other, is unlikely to be perceived as attractive - reasons that have nothing to do with a putative hardwired instinctive appreciation of biological fitness. The first physical profile might result from an extreme case of narcissism, the latter from an extreme case of lack of self-control - both of which are traits of personality or behaviour that are not exactly appealing in their own right. Convinced? Not if you're an evolutionary psychologist.
Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that EPs don't even notice the possibilily of explaining subtle human social behaviour by using subtle human social science, as the loud rumblings of their biologically deterministic juggernaut drown out every one else's suggestions and arguments, crushing all painstakingly observed social understanding down to the reductionistic nothingness of genetic imperative.
Let's put this idea to bed now, shall we?...
...About 10 years ago, I started taking my own whr measurement. This hasn't changed over the passage of time. And, what do you know, I am in fact the proud possessor of the golden ratio myself - just under 0.7!
Now, don't all jump on me at once ;-)
But then you're not, are you?
See, over the last decade, I've been walking to work pretty much every single morning (I do recommend this for helping to maintain your whr at the required level for optimum fertility and attractiveness as mandated by the experts!) passing, as I do, a wide variety of males, species Homo sapiens. Especially during the summer months, my whr must surely have been explicitly visible.
However, on arriving at work and looking behind me, one morning after another I have noticed that hordes of ardent male suitors, stretching back in a trail from whence I have come, have conspicuously failed to materialize.
How odd. I definitely remember walking past on a typical day, oh, more than two dozen male conspecifics on my way to work. Where are they all?
Perhaps I've been doing it wrong. Perhaps I need to leer provocatively at males in passing and advertise my superior biosignal to genetic fitness by glaring pointedly at my hips, trying to tap into that ancient phenomenon of hard-wired gaze following we supposedly inherited from the ancestors we shared with other higher primates. Or perhaps I should wink vigorously at the various males I encounter on my walks and bump into them with my hips to attract their attention to my index for optimal fecundity.
However, something (which EPs would probably call my 'naive folk psychological skills' and I would call my 'bloody common sense') tells me that whilst I might provoke some attention, it would be unlikely to be informed by the kind of motivation anticipated by Singh.
Not, perhaps, attention that would indicate an immediate desire to engage in a mating episode.
I do invite interested evolutionary psychologists to try these research techniques out though (in the field as it is, where everyone knows it really counts). After all, they are the experts. As long as it is accepted that the extension of this invitation does not mean I am responsible in any way for spurious events that occur concurrently with testing in the experimental environment (black eyes, broken teeth, police arrests, sections under the Mental Health Act, etc).
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How can it be that Singh, in his 2010 study, was wrong [3]? The experiment was carried out on no less than 14 human males. Under scientific lab conditions, using very expensive shiny equipment, very possibly by people wearing white coats and almost certainly credited with scientific qualifications.
Here's an idea.
Could it possibly be that Singh might have missed something out?
Could it be that, perhaps, when human males choose a mate, they do not do so acting according to the diktat of their orbital frontal cortex operating under carefully-controlled lab conditions under the observation of an fMRI scanner when being shown a collection of photographs of surgically-altered naked human females?
Could it be that in real life, a specific human male's interest in a specific human female is not activated on being rounded up with a group of conspecifics and shooed into a lab where he is exposed to digitally-altered photographs of female midriffs?
Could it even be that in the real human world of attraction, a whole variety of complex factors are in interplay, with (whisper it) shared personality attributes, interests, a similar world view, humour, intelligence and so on all playing their part alongside rather undefinable attributes of physical attractiveness?
Seriously. I am having difficulty figuring out how evolutionary psychologists can get away with themselves.
Three possibilities present;
1. They and everyone they know really do actually behave like biologically-driven muppet Martians. They approach their intended female with a calculating expression, graph paper and a tape measure, and their idea of a first date is a trip to the nearest fMRI scanner so that they and their prospective mate can discover whether they do indeed feel attraction towards each other - by poring over a brightly-coloured scan of their anterior cingulate cortex - before they can get down to business;
2. They all need to get out even more than I do;
3. They live in some strange parallel, topsy-turvy universe where the measure of a good scientist is made according to their ability to manufacture theories completely at odds with what is under their noses and pretend as hard as they possibly can that the absence of any correlation between their subsequent 'findings' and real life is not at all relevant.
Let me put this problem another way. Imagine you are posing the question 'Why is that dog wagging its tail?' to a biologist, a chemist and a physicist respectively, with the expectation that they will be recruiting the expertise of their professional discipline to inform their response. You will likely get three qualitatively different attempts - but these would be descriptions of what is going on when a dog wags its tail.
In order to get a proper answer to your question, you must really look at the pseudosocial environment in which the dog is located -
_'the dog is wagging its tail because... its owner has returned/it is about to go out for a walk/it is about to be fed...'_
And that's just with dogs - human behaviour is many orders of magnitude more complicated, especially as it has the extra game-changing dimension of an explicit self-awareness. It operates in a real social environment, so we need the social sciences (informed by the context of individual choice) and the humanities - philosophy, social anthropology, psychology (of the non-biologically deterministic variety), political science etc - to enlighten us here. Meaningful understanding of behaviour always requires a social interpretation.
Genetics, endocrinology, neurology and so on aren't the right tools for the job. They can only give us, at best, an intriguing glimpse into a tiny part of the processes of human thought and behaviour - what is biologically involved and perhaps necessary but far removed from sufficient to provide an explanation. Most importantly, the biological part of the process is the least illuminating of our actual, distinctively unique, humanity.
So the expectation that the 'hard' sciences can inform us about human behaviour turns out to make a silly category error. If you don't realize this, you apparently become an evolutionary psychologist.
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[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1306012/Beauty-summed-To-tell-womans-really-attractive-figures.html
[2] For some sources, see the references at the end of the Wikipedia article on whr: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist-hip_ratio
[3] http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0009042#s
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