[tt] [silk] Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

[Eugen Leitl]

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From: Udhay Shankar N <udhay at pobox.com>
Date: Sun, 08 Jul 2007 16:34:38 +0530
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Subject: [silk] Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature
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http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070622-000002.xml

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

Why most suicide bombers are Muslim, beautiful 
people have more daughters, humans are naturally 
polygamous, sexual harassment isn't sexist, and blonds are more attractive.

By:Alan S. Miller Ph.D., Satoshi Kanazawa Ph.D.

Human nature is one of those things that 
everybody talks about but no one can define 
precisely. Every time we fall in love, fight with 
our spouse, get upset about the influx of 
immigrants into our country, or go to church, we 
are, in part, behaving as a human animal with our 
own unique evolved nature—human nature.

This means two things. First, our thoughts, 
feelings, and behavior are produced not only by 
our individual experiences and environment in our 
own lifetime but also by what happened to our 
ancestors millions of years ago. Second, our 
thoughts, feelings, and behavior are shared, to a 
large extent, by all men or women, despite 
seemingly large cultural differences.

Human behavior is a product both of our innate 
human nature and of our individual experience and 
environment. In this article, however, we 
emphasize biological influences on human 
behavior, because most social scientists explain 
human behavior as if evolution stops at the neck 
and as if our behavior is a product almost 
entirely of environment and socialization. In 
contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human 
nature as a collection of psychological 
adaptations that often operate beneath conscious 
thinking to solve problems of survival and 
reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel 
in certain ways. Our preference for sweets and 
fats is an evolved psychological mechanism. We do 
not consciously choose to like sweets and fats; they just taste good to us.

The implications of some of the ideas in this 
article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, 
or offensive. We state them because they are 
true, supported by documented scientific 
evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct.

Excerpted from Why Beautiful People Have More 
Daughters, by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi 
Kanazawa, to be published by Perigree in September 2007.

   1. Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)

      Long before TV—in 15th- and 16th- century 
Italy, and possibly two millennia ago—women were 
dying their hair blond. A recent study shows that 
in Iran, where exposure to Western media and 
culture is limited, women are actually more 
concerned with their body image, and want to lose 
more weight, than their American counterparts. It 
is difficult to ascribe the preferences and 
desires of women in 15th-century Italy and 
21st-century Iran to socialization by media.

      Women's desire to look like Barbie—young 
with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, 
and blue eyes—is a direct, realistic, and 
sensible response to the desire of men to mate 
with women who look like her. There is 
evolutionary logic behind each of these features.

      Men prefer young women in part because 
they tend to be healthier than older women. One 
accurate indicator of health is physical 
attractiveness; another is hair. Healthy women 
have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of 
sickly people loses its luster. Because hair 
grows slowly, shoulder-length hair reveals 
several years of a woman's health status.

      Men also have a universal preference for 
women with a low waist-to-hip ratio. They are 
healthier and more fertile than other women; they 
have an easier time conceiving a child and do so 
at earlier ages because they have larger amounts 
of essential reproductive hormones. Thus men are 
unconsciously seeking healthier and more fertile 
women when they seek women with small waists.

      Until very recently, it was a mystery to 
evolutionary psychology why men prefer women with 
large breasts, since the size of a woman's 
breasts has no relationship to her ability to 
lactate. But Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe 
contends that larger, and hence heavier, breasts 
sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller 
breasts. Thus they make it easier for men to 
judge a woman's age (and her reproductive value) 
by sight—suggesting why men find women with large breasts more attractive.

      Alternatively, men may prefer women with 
large breasts for the same reason they prefer 
women with small waists. A new study of Polish 
women shows that women with large breasts and 
tight waists have the greatest fecundity, 
indicated by their levels of two reproductive 
hormones (estradiol and progesterone).

      Blond hair is unique in that it changes 
dramatically with age. Typically, young girls 
with light blond hair become women with brown 
hair. Thus, men who prefer to mate with blond 
women are unconsciously attempting to mate with 
younger (and hence, on average, healthier and 
more fecund) women. It is no coincidence that 
blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern 
Europe, probably as an alternative means for 
women to advertise their youth, as their bodies 
were concealed under heavy clothing.

      Women with blue eyes should not be any 
different from those with green or brown eyes. 
Yet preference for blue eyes seems both universal 
and undeniable—in males as well as females. One 
explanation is that the human pupil dilates when 
an individual is exposed to something that she 
likes. For instance, the pupils of women and 
infants (but not men) spontaneously dilate when 
they see babies. Pupil dilation is an honest 
indicator of interest and attraction. And the 
size of the pupil is easiest to determine in blue 
eyes. Blue-eyed people are considered attractive 
as potential mates because it is easiest to 
determine whether they are interested in us or not.

      The irony is that none of the above is 
true any longer. Through face-lifts, wigs, 
liposuction, surgical breast augmentation, hair 
dye, and color contact lenses, any woman, 
regardless of age, can have many of the key 
features that define ideal female beauty. And men 
fall for them. Men can cognitively understand 
that many blond women with firm, large breasts 
are not actually 15 years old, but they still 
find them attractive because their evolved 
psychological mechanisms are fooled by modern 
inventions that did not exist in the ancestral environment.

   2. Humans are naturally polygamous

      The history of western civilization aside, 
humans are naturally polygamous. Polyandry (a 
marriage of one woman to many men) is very rare, 
but polygyny (the marriage of one man to many 
women) is widely practiced in human societies, 
even though Judeo-Christian traditions hold that 
monogamy is the only natural form of marriage. We 
know that humans have been polygynous throughout 
most of history because men are taller than women.

      Among primate and nonprimate species, the 
degree of polygyny highly correlates with the 
degree to which males of a species are larger 
than females. The more polygynous the species, 
the greater the size disparity between the sexes. 
Typically, human males are 10 percent taller and 
20 percent heavier than females. This suggests 
that, throughout history, humans have been mildly polygynous.

      Relative to monogamy, polygyny creates 
greater fitness variance (the distance between 
the "winners" and the "losers" in the 
reproductive game) among males than among females 
because it allows a few males to monopolize all 
the females in the group. The greater fitness 
variance among males creates greater pressure for 
men to compete with each other for mates. Only 
big and tall males can win mating opportunities. 
Among pair-bonding species like humans, in which 
males and females stay together to raise their 
children, females also prefer to mate with big 
and tall males because they can provide better 
physical protection against predators and other males.

      In societies where rich men are much 
richer than poor men, women (and their children) 
are better off sharing the few wealthy men; 
one-half, one-quarter, or even one-tenth of a 
wealthy man is still better than an entire poor 
man. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, "The 
maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth 
share in a first-rate man to the exclusive 
possession of a third-rate one." Despite the fact 
that humans are naturally polygynous, most 
industrial societies are monogamous because men 
tend to be more or less equal in their resources 
compared with their ancestors in medieval times. 
(Inequality tends to increase as society advances 
in complexity from hunter-gatherer to advanced 
agrarian societies. Industrialization tends to 
decrease the level of inequality.)

   3. Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy

      When there is resource inequality among 
men—the case in every human society—most women 
benefit from polygyny: women can share a wealthy 
man. Under monogamy, they are stuck with marrying a poorer man.

      The only exceptions are extremely 
desirable women. Under monogamy, they can 
monopolize the wealthiest men; under polygyny, 
they must share the men with other, less 
desirable women. However, the situation is 
exactly opposite for men. Monogamy guarantees 
that every man can find a wife. True, less 
desirable men can marry only less desirable 
women, but that's much better than not marrying anyone at all.

      Men in monogamous societies imagine they 
would be better off under polygyny. What they 
don't realize is that, for most men who are not 
extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at 
all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much 
less desirable than one they could get under monogamy.

   4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim

      Suicide missions are not always 
religiously motivated, but according to Oxford 
University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of 
Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion 
is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. 
Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide 
bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran 
(except for two lines). It has a lot to do with 
sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.

      What distinguishes Islam from other major 
religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By 
allowing some men to monopolize all women and 
altogether excluding many men from reproductive 
opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of 
available women. If 50 percent of men have two 
wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.

      So polygyny increases competitive pressure 
on men, especially young men of low status. It 
therefore increases the likelihood that young men 
resort to violent means to gain access to mates. 
By doing so, they have little to lose and much to 
gain compared with men who already have wives. 
Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, 
increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even 
after controlling for such obvious factors as 
economic development, economic inequality, 
population density, the level of democracy, and 
political factors in the region.

      However, polygyny itself is not a 
sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in 
sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much 
more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the 
Middle East and North Africa. And they do have 
very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa 
suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide 
bombings.

      The other key ingredient is the promise of 
72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in 
Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to 
virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has 
even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy 
virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is 
quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak 
reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.

      It is the combination of polygyny and the 
promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven 
that motivates many young Muslim men to commit 
suicide bombings. Consistent with this 
explanation, all studies of suicide bombers 
indicate that they are significantly younger than 
not only the Muslim population in general but 
other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme 
political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. 
And nearly all suicide bombers are single.

   5. Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce

      Sociologists and demographers have 
discovered that couples who have at least one son 
face significantly less risk of divorce than 
couples who have only daughters. Why is this?

      Since a man's mate value is largely 
determined by his wealth, status, and 
power—whereas a woman's is largely determined by 
her youth and physical attractiveness—the father 
has to make sure that his son will inherit his 
wealth, status, and power, regardless of how much 
or how little of these resources he has. In 
contrast, there is relatively little that a 
father (or mother) can do to keep a daughter 
youthful or make her more physically attractive.

      The continued presence of (and investment 
by) the father is therefore important for the 
son, but not as crucial for the daughter. The 
presence of sons thus deters divorce and 
departure of the father from the family more than 
the presence of daughters, and this effect tends 
to be stronger among wealthy families.

   6. Beautiful people have more daughters

      It is commonly believed that whether 
parents conceive a boy or a girl is up to random 
chance. Close, but not quite; it is largely up to 
chance. The normal sex ratio at birth is 105 boys 
for every 100 girls. But the sex ratio varies 
slightly in different circumstances and for 
different families. There are factors that subtly 
influence the sex of an offspring.

      One of the most celebrated principles in 
evolutionary biology, the Trivers-Willard 
hypothesis, states that wealthy parents of high 
status have more sons, while poor parents of low 
status have more daughters. This is because 
children generally inherit the wealth and social 
status of their parents. Throughout history, sons 
from wealthy families who would themselves become 
wealthy could expect to have a large number of 
wives, mistresses and concubines, and produce 
dozens or hundreds of children, whereas their 
equally wealthy sisters can have only so many 
children. So natural selection designs parents to 
have biased sex ratio at birth depending upon 
their economic circumstances—more boys if they 
are wealthy, more girls if they are poor. (The 
biological mechanism by which this occurs is not yet understood.)

      This hypothesis has been documented around 
the globe. American presidents, vice presidents, 
and cabinet secretaries have more sons than 
daughters. Poor Mukogodo herders in East Africa 
have more daughters than sons. Church parish 
records from the 17th and 18th centuries show 
that wealthy landowners in Leezen, Germany, had 
more sons than daughters, while farm laborers and 
tradesmen without property had more daughters 
than sons. In a survey of respondents from 46 
nations, wealthy individuals are more likely to 
indicate a preference for sons if they could only 
have one child, whereas less wealthy individuals 
are more likely to indicate a preference for daughters.

      The generalized Trivers-Willard hypothesis 
goes beyond a family's wealth and status: If 
parents have any traits that they can pass on to 
their children and that are better for sons than 
for daughters, then they will have more boys. 
Conversely, if parents have any traits that they 
can pass on to their children and that are better 
for daughters, they will have more girls.

      Physical attractiveness, while a 
universally positive quality, contributes even 
more to women's reproductive success than to 
men's. The generalized hypothesis would therefore 
predict that physically attractive parents should 
have more daughters than sons. Once again, this 
is the case. Americans who are rated "very 
attractive" have a 56 percent chance of having a 
daughter for their first child, compared with 48 percent for everyone else.

   7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals

      For nearly a quarter of a century, 
criminologists have known about the "age-crime 
curve." In every society at all historical times, 
the tendency to commit crimes and other 
risk-taking behavior rapidly increases in early 
adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early 
adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s 
and 30s, and levels off in middle age.

      This curve is not limited to crime. The 
same age profile characterizes every quantifiable 
human behavior that is public (i.e., perceived by 
many potential mates) and costly (i.e., not 
affordable by all sexual competitors). The 
relationship between age and productivity among 
male jazz musicians, male painters, male writers, 
and male scientists—which might be called the 
"age-genius curve"—is essentially the same as the 
age-crime curve. Their productivity—the 
expressions of their genius—quickly peaks in 
early adulthood, and then equally quickly 
declines throughout adulthood. The age-genius 
curve among their female counterparts is much 
less pronounced; it does not peak or vary as much as a function of age.

      Paul McCartney has not written a hit song 
in years, and now spends much of his time 
painting. Bill Gates is now a respectable 
businessman and philanthropist, and is no longer 
a computer whiz kid. J.D. Salinger now lives as a 
total recluse and has not published anything in 
more than three decades. Orson Welles was a mere 
26 when he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane.

      A single theory can explain the 
productivity of both creative geniuses and 
criminals over the life course: Both crime and 
genius are expressions of young men's competitive 
desires, whose ultimate function in the ancestral 
environment would have been to increase reproductive success.

      In the physical competition for mates, 
those who are competitive may act violently 
toward their male rivals. Men who are less 
inclined toward crime and violence may express 
their competitiveness through their creative activities.

      The cost of competition, however, rises 
dramatically when a man has children, when his 
energies and resources are put to better use 
protecting and investing in them. The birth of 
the first child usually occurs several years 
after puberty because men need some time to 
accumulate sufficient resources and attain 
sufficient status to attract their first mate. 
There is therefore a gap of several years between 
the rapid rise in the benefits of competition and 
similarly rapid rise in its costs. Productivity 
rapidly declines in late adulthood as the costs 
of competition rise and cancel its benefits.

      These calculations have been performed by 
natural and sexual selection, so to speak, which 
then equips male brains with a psychological 
mechanism to incline them to be increasingly 
competitive immediately after puberty and make 
them less competitive right after the birth of 
their first child. Men simply do not feel like 
acting violently, stealing, or conducting 
additional scientific experiments, or they just 
want to settle down after the birth of their 
child but they do not know exactly why.

      The similarity between Bill Gates, Paul 
McCartney, and criminals—in fact, among all men 
throughout evolutionary history—points to an 
important concept in evolutionary biology: female choice.

      Women often say no to men. Men have had to 
conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, 
compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, 
paint cathedral ceilings, make scientific 
discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new 
computer software in order to impress women so 
that they will agree to have sex with them. Men 
have built (and destroyed) civilization in order 
to impress women, so that they might say yes.

   8. The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of

      Many believe that men go through a midlife 
crisis when they are in middle age. Not quite. 
Many middle-aged men do go through midlife 
crises, but it's not because they are 
middle-aged. It's because their wives are. From 
the evolutionary psychological perspective, a 
man's midlife crisis is precipitated by his 
wife's imminent menopause and end of her 
reproductive career, and thus his renewed need to 
attract younger women. Accordingly, a 50-year-old 
man married to a 25-year-old woman would not go 
through a midlife crisis, while a 25-year-old man 
married to a 50-year-old woman would, just like a 
more typical 50-year-old man married to a 
50-year-old woman. It's not his midlife that 
matters; it's hers. When he buys a shiny-red 
sports car, he's not trying to regain his youth; 
he's trying to attract young women to replace his 
menopausal wife by trumpeting his flash and cash.

   9. It's natural for politicians to risk 
everything for an affair (but only if they're male)

      On the morning of January 21, 1998, as 
Americans woke up to the stunning allegation that 
President Bill Clinton had had an affair with a 
24-year-old White House intern, Darwinian 
historian Laura L. Betzig thought, "I told you 
so." Betzig points out that while powerful men 
throughout Western history have married 
monogamously (only one legal wife at a time), 
they have always mated polygynously (they had 
lovers, concubines, and female slaves). With 
their wives, they produced legitimate heirs; with 
the others, they produced bastards. Genes make no 
distinction between the two categories of children.

      As a result, powerful men of high status 
throughout human history attained very high 
reproductive success, leaving a large number of 
offspring (legitimate and otherwise), while 
countless poor men died mateless and childless. 
Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, the last 
Sharifian emperor of Morocco, stands out 
quantitatively, having left more 
offspring—1,042—than anyone else on record, but 
he was by no means qualitatively different from 
other powerful men, like Bill Clinton.

      The question many asked in 1998—"Why on 
earth would the most powerful man in the world 
jeopardize his job for an affair with a young 
woman?"—is, from a Darwinian perspective, a silly 
one. Betzig's answer would be: "Why not?" Men 
strive to attain political power, consciously or 
unconsciously, in order to have reproductive 
access to a larger number of women. Reproductive 
access to women is the goal, political office but 
one means. To ask why the President of the United 
States would have a sexual encounter with a young 
woman is like asking why someone who worked very 
hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it.

      What distinguishes Bill Clinton is not 
that he had extramarital affairs while in 
office—others have, more will; it would be a 
Darwinian puzzle if they did not—what 
distinguishes him is the fact that he got caught.

  10. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

      An unfortunate consequence of the 
ever-growing number of women joining the labor 
force and working side by side with men is the 
increasing number of sexual harassment cases. Why 
must sexual harassment be a necessary consequence 
of the sexual integration of the workplace?

      Psychologist Kingsley R. Browne identifies 
two types of sexual harassment cases: the quid 
pro quo ("You must sleep with me if you want to 
keep your job or be promoted") and the "hostile 
environment" (the workplace is deemed too 
sexualized for workers to feel safe and 
comfortable). While feminists and social 
scientists tend to explain sexual harassment in 
terms of "patriarchy" and other ideologies, 
Browne locates the ultimate cause of both types 
of sexual harassment in sex differences in mating strategies.

      Studies demonstrate unequivocally that men 
are far more interested in short-term casual sex 
than women. In one now-classic study, 75 percent 
of undergraduate men approached by an attractive 
female stranger agreed to have sex with her; none 
of the women approached by an attractive male 
stranger did. Many men who would not date the 
stranger nonetheless agreed to have sex with her.

      The quid pro quo types of harassment are 
manifestations of men's greater desire for 
short-term casual sex and their willingness to 
use any available means to achieve that goal. 
Feminists often claim that sexual harassment is 
"not about sex but about power;" Browne contends 
it is both—men using power to get sex. "To say 
that it is only about power makes no more sense 
than saying that bank robbery is only about guns, not about money."

      Sexual harassment cases of the 
hostile-environment variety result from sex 
differences in what men and women perceive as 
"overly sexual" or "hostile" behavior. Many women 
legitimately complain that they have been 
subjected to abusive, intimidating, and degrading 
treatment by their male coworkers. Browne points 
out that long before women entered the labor 
force, men subjected each other to such abusive, 
intimidating, and degrading treatment.

      Abuse, intimidation, and degradation are 
all part of men's repertoire of tactics employed 
in competitive situations. In other words, men 
are not treating women differently from men—the 
definition of discrimination, under which sexual 
harassment legally falls—but the opposite: Men 
harass women precisely because they are not 
discriminating between men and women.


-- 
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))


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