考研

Sexual selection

A growing body of research suggests that their preference for certain types of malephysiognomy may be swayed by things beyond their conscious control―like prevalence ofdisease or crime―and in predictable ways.

Masculine features―a big jaw, say, or a prominent brow―tend to reflect physical andbehavioural traits, such as strength and aggression.

They are also closely linked tophysiological ones, like virility and a sturdy immune system.

The obverse of these desirable characteristics looks less appealing.

Aggression is fine when directed at external threats, less so when it spills over onto thehearth.

Sexual prowess ensures plenty of progeny, but it often goes hand in hand with promiscuityand a tendency to shirk parental duties or leave the mother altogether.

So, whenever a woman has to choose a mate, she must decide whether to place a premiumon the hunk's choicer genes or the wimp's love and care.

Lisa DeBruine, of the University of Aberdeen, believes that today's women still face thisdilemma and that their choices are affected by unconscious factors.

In a paper published earlier this year Dr DeBruine found that women in countries with poorhealth statistics preferred men with masculine features more than those who lived inhealthier societies.

Where disease is rife, this seemed to imply, giving birth to healthy offspring trumps havinga man stick around long enough to help care for it.

In more salubrious climes, therefore, wimps are in with a chance.

Now, though, researchers led by Robert Brooks, of the University of New South Wales, havetaken another look at Dr DeBruine's data and arrived at a different conclusion.

They present their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Dr Brooks suggests that it is not health-related factors, but rather competition andviolence among men that best explain a woman's penchant for manliness.

The more rough-and-tumble the environment, the researcher's argument goes, the morewomen prefer masculine men, because they are better than the softer types at providing formothers and their offspring.

An unhealthy relationship

Since violent competition for resources is more pronounced in unequal societies, DrBrooks predicted that women would value masculinity more highly in countries with a higherGini coefficient, which is a measure of income inequality.

And indeed, he found that this was better than a country's health statistics at predicting therelative attractiveness of hunky faces.

The rub is that unequal countries also tend to be less healthy.

So, in order to disentangle cause from effect, Dr Brooks compared Dr DeBruine's health indexwith a measure of violence in a country: its murder rate.

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