God, I hate the news media sometimes.

A story caught Dr. O’C’s eye in our local Murdoch owned fishwrapper the other day, the juicy lead of which was:

MODERN men have got it so good. According to scientific research, women are gradually becoming more attractive in an evolutionary ‘beauty race’.

50sfashion

Without reading either the article or the ’scientific research’, I issued a summary judgement:

“That’s crap. Rubbish science.”

It is silly season for the Northern Hemisphere news media and that means time to publish pseudo-science swill featuring a sexy lead backed up by little or no fact. I hypothesized that this was one of those stories.

So let’s see if my experimental hypothesis holds up, let’s take a look at this tripe. Is it bad science, bad journalism, both or neither?

The article that appeared in the Advertiser and countless other Western papers is pulled from a story in the Times of London (another Murdoch rag) by their Science Editor, Jonathan Leake. Leake draws more or less the same conclusion as the Advertiser’s reporter does:

“Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.

The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female*. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern.”

yearbookHe cites a study by Finnish psychologist Markus Jokela. The first hurdle in breaking this story down is that Leake does not state the source of this study. Is it a peer-reviewed paper? A conference abstract? A barroom chat? I contacted both Leake and Jokela to figure it out. No answer from Leake,  but Jokela promptly replied  that his paper is in press in Evolution and Human Behavior (a peer-reviewed Elsevier Journal). The paper in its entirety is available at Jokela’s website.

What Jokela did was to attempt to correlate physical attractiveness with reproductive success – in other words, to see whether beautiful people have more children. To this end, he used the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a long-term study based on a random sample of 10,317 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957, and assessed whether attractiveness of the participants could predict the number of children that individuals bore. To gauge attractiveness, Jokela used a panel of judges who rated the study participants’ yearbook photos on a scale of 1 – 11.

Let’s stop here, for just a moment. Let’s even leave aside the fact that what one person finds beautiful another person finds horrifying. Let’s give Jokela a pass on  that. But yearbook photos? Christ, I wouldn’t want anyone judging my attractiveness based on my Senior yearbook photo. Also, yearbook photos are headshots. A lot of what’s attractive about people is below the neck, if you get my meaning. Nudge, nudge. Know what I mean. Say no more.

happydaysBut even if we give Jokela these obvious discrepancies, let’s take a look at his data. Based on these attractiveness scores, he then looks at a number of demographic factors including years of education, number of children, years of marriage and so on in unattractive, less attractive, attractive and very attrative results. Jokela writes that his results suggest that attractive women have slightly more children than less attractive ones and the unattractive men have less children than attractive or average looking men. He supports this finding with some statistical analyses but if you look at his data, there isn’t strong support for this finding. The differences seen in men is within the margin for error. The data for women does hold up but the real difference is that unattractive women have slightly fewer children on average than attractive women. However, when you adjust for marital status – leave out the unmarried women and that difference vanishes.

But my biggest problem with this work is that this study looks at a single generation, and a culturally and ethnically homogenous one. No offense to readers who grew up in Wisconsin, but the Cheese State (or whatever it’s called) in 1957 was Happy Days. Literally. “Happy Days” was set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There wasn’t a lot of cultural diversity in 1950’s Wisconsin and there isn’t a lot of cultural diversity in the show and there isn’t a lot of diversity in this study.

To be fair, Jokela points these shortcomings out and is hesitant to make any conclusions regarding the evolution of beauty. His only real statement about evolution is “that fertility behavior of modern humans may still be partly under the influence of evolved psychological adaptations. I don’t know much about ‘psychological adaptation’, but I spent an Oxford post-doc looking at evolution and recognize that this is a pretty tame statement. Probably because Jokela knows that you can’t say a damn thing about evolution by looking at a single generation.

Leake, however, doesn’t appear to be restrained by this fairly basic fact and writes:

“Over generations, the scientists argue, this has led to women becoming steadily more aesthetically pleasing, a “beauty race” that is still on. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans.”

That term in his quotes, ‘beauty race’, does not appear in Jokkela’s paper, nor does the sentiment. If Leake got the quote from an interview with one of his sources, he doesn’t say which one. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Times science editor is quoting himself. Because this statement, to be blunt, is bollocks.

So, what’s the verdict? Bad science? Bad journalism? In my opinion a bit of both but more of the latter. What do you think?

UPDATE

After a series of e-mail with Times Science Editor Jonathan Leake, I want to offer him a chance to respond regarding the source of the ‘beauty race’ quote:

“The phrase beauty race came from the other academic quoted. I think her name was Gayle Brewer (a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Central Lancashire)*. It also seemed to encapsulate the points being made by Karnazawa. And, as I said, I did send her a draft of the story in advance.”

*My parantheses.

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Irish popsters The Thrills had a geographic problem. Musically grounded on the sandy beaches of California, but feet firmly planted on the damp cobbles of Dublin. Their music doesn’t have much staying power, but it was fun it its time and I can’t think of a better song to accompany this post. The Thrills’ “Let’s Bottle Bohemia” is available from The Thrills - Let's Bottle Bohemia.

Image credits:

1950’s fashion

Yearbook

Happy Days

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*Leake’s statement that attractive women have more female children comes from a 2007 paper looking at the Trivers-Willard hypothesis which states that “large healthy mammals produce more male offspring when living in good conditions, such as areas where there is an ample food supply. Conversely, female mammals living in less desirable conditions would tend to have female offspring.” Doesn’t really apply here, but every now and again someone trucks it out and tries to apply it to humans and in this case invokes physical beauty – the case in the 2007 paper. Leake apparently wasn’t bothered by the fact that in Jokela’s paper, very attractive women have more male offspring than female, though this is not statistically significant.

 
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