Elliot: “Why did you kiss me?”

Bowie: “Because I like you.”

Elliot: “I kissed you because I like you. I kiss you ’cause you like me.”

Amen lil’ brother. Wouldn’t it be cool if life was this simple? Well… sorry to burst your rationalization bubble, but it kind of is.

Maybe choose a girl with all her teeth next time, but hey, I’m not judging.

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But behind the scenes, we have something a little more relevant for evolvify.com. It starts off all puppy dogs and ice cream, and the first half is important, but check out the transition in Elliot’s responses at around 2 minutes when he’s really pressed on what’s important…

I’d originally intended to write something about the article “Preschoolers Already Think Thin is Beautiful“, but the videos were more fun and kinda sorta tied in nicely. That article leads…

“Kids as young as 4 think thin is beautiful, suggesting that media associations of thinness with beauty sink in early.”

Sorry, but that statement (whether it’s true or not) is logically flawed. There is nothing in “kids as young as 4 think thin is beautiful” that suggests anything other than that kids as young as 4 think thin is beautiful. Another option is that humans have behavioral heuristics that are innate and kids as young as 4 are capable of expressing this. Yet another option is that humans are innately more susceptible to learning to associate thinness with beauty and kids as young as 4 have learned the preference and are capable of expressing this. Evolutionarily speaking, which is most likely?

The article continues…

Even the youngest 4-year-olds in the study ranked the “most beautiful” body as significantly thinner than the normal-weight original. On average, participants thought the prettiest body was the one that shaved about 5 percent off the width of the original. Meanwhile, the body ranked “most normal” was the original normal-BMI image.

This may be evidence of a cultural influence, but it also may be a heuristic along the lines of error-management theory. Probabilistically, if being overweight was more detrimental to survival and/or reproduction over the course of evolution, a simple “skinny is better” bias could have evolved as a behavioral mechanism. Again, it also could (read: probably would) have evolved in such a way that resource signals from the environment shape the preference. The latter instance seems to be the case in adults coming from resource abundant urban areas when cross-culturally compared with resource scarce agrarian communities.

This is a lead-in to a future article discussing the stigmatization of obesity. If you haven’t already, you should subscribe. I’ll be discussing the following studies

• “Stigmatization of obesity in medieval times: Asia and Europe.”
• “Evolutionary origins of the obesity epidemic: natural selection of thrifty genes or genetic drift following predation release?”
• “The relationship between obesity and fecundity.”
• “Pathogen-avoidance mechanisms and the stigmatization of obese people”
• and maybe a few more

For now, I’m most curious about your thoughts on the second video. How much (and what) of that is socialization, and how much do you think has a basis in evolved behavior? Also, is the linked article convincing in arguing for a cultural explanation for the preference for skinny?

Applied Evolutionary Psychology: Male Attractiveness

Over the course of running a few blogs, I’ve met some of the most interesting and fun people I know. When I started evolvify, I reached out to them for ideas for products that might be a good fit to advertise here. In general, the response was along the lines of “I have no idea what an evolutionary psychology blog would look like, and I’m not sure if I even know what evolutionary psychology is”. It seems that there’s not a huge market for “applied evolutionary theory” when spoken of in the abstract. Shocker, right? Yet two people mentioned some guy Clay who was working on some sort of bodybuilding or fitness program that had something or other to do with evolution so it might be a fit. Upon further inquiry, I discovered that this was a Clay that I’ve known for over a year. Note: Clay and Derek are both pictured (shirtless, ladies) in the product link later.

Anyway, shortly after hearing that Clay was working on “some evolution related thing”, I got an email from the man himself. It turned out he had been studying the evolutionary psychology relating to what makes men physically attractive to women for a couple years. And when I say studying, I don’t mean that he just read an article in Maxim. In fact, one of his college professors was none other than one of my Top 5 Favorite Evolutionary Psychologists, Martie Haselton…

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In addition to her work on attractiveness, Dr. Haselton is one of the developers of the infinitely insightful Error Management Theory which deals with the evolution of human cognitive biases and heuristics. But I digress…

Clay’s work was focused on a synthesis of the evolved physical cues women find attractive in men and the application of that to bodybuilding. Upon hearing this, I was immediately intrigued. In fact, when we compared notes, I already had three of the journal papers he was using for references in my personal library. So we were quite literally “on the same page” with all of this. A component of this that I’d totally missed was the tie-in to the male Hollywood actors that all men love to hate. You know, the Brad Pitt, Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Daniel Craig types with the abs and the shoulders and the swooning adoration of women they’ve never met. Yeah, those guys.

It turns out that those guys happen to develop their physiques to dimensions that match up perfectly to what evolutionary psychology predicts women will find attractive. It’s not clear that the trainers of the Hollywood physiques are consciously aware of the evolutionary relationship of their clients’ physiques and what women find attractive, but the correlation is uncanny and the results are undeniable. Clay developed a combination paleo friendly, whole foods, no supplement training program to build bodies that women find attractive according to Hollywood and the best data evolutionary science has to offer. But let’s take a step back and look at what women find attractive…

Keys to Male Physical Attractiveness

Fist things first: This is article not about “status”. Status is important and I’ll write about how women find it attractive in the future. For now, I’m focusing on physical attractiveness. This topic is particularly important to me for a few reasons.

1. Men have body image issues too. In fact, fashion advertisers use photos of more muscular men in men’s magazines than in women’s magazines. Men tend to think women find bulkier men attractive than what women generally find attractive (Frederick et al. 2005)
2. The generally douchebaggy pickup community is often superficially based on evolutionary psychology to a greater or lesser degree. In many instances, it’s actually based on sociobiology. Unfortunately, the roots of sociobiology are in entymology (the study of bugs) and don’t necessarily apply to humans. Further, much of the pickup stuff is based on models of alpha-male dominance found in other primate species that don’t look anything like the social dynamics of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Finally, I haven’t seen any pickup guru who didn’t say that “looks don’t matter. While it’s true that looks aren’t the only thing that matters, it is absolutely incorrect to say that “looks don’t matter”. To say as much demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution.
3. Whether faked or real, status is a subjective social metric. By definition, it doesn’t exist without respect to other individuals.
4. Status seeking is generally seen as negative and can be inferred whether said status cue is fake or real.
5. Status is often disconnected from legitimate fitness cues in the modern world because of inheritances, luck (e.g. winning the lottery), et cetera.
6. Physical attractiveness can be improved by simple means. As we’ll see later, this is even true of facial attractiveness.

Women Have Been More Superficial than Men Across Evolutionary Time

Despite the 20th century encroachment of men into superficiality, and the subsequent backlash by women at having their tactics aped, women have been judging men on the metrics of wealth and physical beauty for millions of years. This isn’t a judgment call, and there are no moral implications intended in that statement. It is a simple fact of evolutionary biology that the sex that invests most in reproduction is almost invariably the most selective about mating. In mammals, this is almost always females. In humans, the biological investment is drastic – 9 months (minimum) for women versus a few seconds for men. Thus, we would expect women to be more leery about mating with men of low mate value.

With status in our out of the question, women use superficial cues to determine the genetic quality of potential mates.

Let’s be clear; this is not necessarily a conscious calculation. Emotions are evolved motivational heuristics that preclude the need for intentional analysis. Instinctual attraction is not a choice. Love is not a choice. Lust is not a choice.  Certain physical attributes simply act to signal the genetic quality of individuals. I’ve previously discussed the relationship of female attractiveness to waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), and similar cues can be applied to male attractiveness. This is merely a standard principle of Darwinian evolution. In particular, Darwin termed this “sexual selection”, and more specifically, “mate choice.” It has been updated and integrated into parental investment theory.

Known Points of Male Physical Attractiveness

There is no doubt that nuances and specifics of male physical attractiveness are yet to be discovered. For now, they can be grouped into three main sensory categories.

1. Olfaction (smell)
2. Auditory (hearing)
3. Physical (vision)

Let’s go ahead and set aside taste, touch, and ESP for today. Numerous studies have been conducted to assess what, if any, role smell, hearing, and vision play in women’s assessments of male attractiveness. All have been shown to have measurable and predictable impact. Perhaps more interestingly, these sensory inputs tend to shift and increase in intensity during the peak fertility of a woman’s cycle. Aside from possible mentions of smell and hearing in passing, we’re going to look at visual cues.

This isn’t an arbitrary decision. Just as in my critique of racism as misguided sensory bias, it makes sense that our mating assessments be made based on our most perceptive sense(s). Most humans are heavily visually biased so the decision is made for us. (Foster 2008) Before proceeding, we need to break things down one further step. Studies have shown significant differences in attractiveness cues between face and body. Since there is little to be done about facial attractiveness outside of surgery (facial plastic surgery may be the number one evolution thwarting measure), we’ll mostly focus on physical cues found in the body.

“We found two factors that captured face and body attractiveness, respectively. Together they accounted for 49.9%… of the total variance in the variables . The first principal component in the male PCA was a body attractiveness factor that loaded significantly on body attractiveness, body sexual dimorphism and body averageness… The second principal component in the male PCA was primarily associated with attractive face traits and loaded significantly on face attractiveness and face sexual dimorphism. This study showed that rated face and body attractiveness contribute independently and substantially, with no interaction, to overall… male attractiveness. Importantly, face and body attractiveness did not significantly interact in predicting overall attractiveness in males or females. These results are critical because they confirm and quantify the assumption that the face and body both contain independent cues to overall attractiveness. Thus, even though our preferences have evolved by viewing the whole person, overall attractiveness judgements are based on separate, unique contributions of the face and body, with no interaction between the two.” (Peters et al. 2007) [emphasis mine]

Caveat: Since the previous study was done, another study found something particularly interesting:

“Humans are also good at assessing strength based on the face alone. Even though no part of the men’s bodies was available for inspection in these photos, the subjects were able to successfully perceive strength. Indeed, in our data, upper-body strength independently predicted facial ratings of strength, while leg strength did not. [M]any anthro-pologists might expect that humans would learn to exploit culturally specific cues through exposure. However, our subjects were just as good at judging strength from the faces of men of other cultures as from their own. That is, thousands of times more experience with members of one’s local culture had no effect on the accuracy of the system.” (Sell et al. 2009) [emphasis mine]

Clay doesn’t know I’m subjecting him to this impromptu and highly biased “study”, but see if you can detect a difference in his face in the before and after photos. Granted, his facial expression is slightly different, but aside from that…

Now, in the referenced study, the faces were isolated so even the neck couldn’t be seen, and the bodies were isolated and rated separately. Like I said, showing the pictures like this biases the study, but can you see a difference? It turns out that having a sexy body is contagious enough to at least reach your face.

Sexual Dimorphism: Surprise! Men and Women Look Different

Physical differences between the male and female of a species give a general indicator of the amount of sexual selection that has taken place – the more sexual selection, the greater the physical difference. These are often referred to as ornaments. Common examples of this are the antlers of male deer, the large canine teeth of male gorillas, the audacious plume of the male peacock, and the increased height and upper body musculature of male humans. In strict evolutionary biology terms, sexual selection is broken down into male-male competition and female mate choice.

Technically, these mechanisms often overlap into feedback mechanisms so I’m going to gloss over the minutia of that distinction momentarily. Briefly: In some species, men compete to show off and be chosen by females. In some species, men compete to dominate resources and mating opportunities. In some species, these overlap to varying degrees. To further complicate things, some traits in a single species may be acted on more by female mate choice and others by male-male competition. (Hunt et al. 2009)

Implications of Women’s Mate-Choice

Have you put the pieces together? This is a big point: Like natural selection and artificial selection (breeding), women have literally shaped the physical characteristics of men to their taste over the course of human evolution. That’s right, women find men physically attractive because men are shaped by female mate choice. Which leads to an obvious question…

How do women “know” what to choose?

Sexual selection can seem like a bit of a circular argument at times. However, it’s important to remember that it operates in concert with natural selection. Women who chose men with evolutionarily advantageous genes would have had more successful offspring. In this way, natural selection has a way of shaping the preferences of females over time. Because of the interplay, women will tend to evolve preferences that compel them to choose traits that correlate with “good genes.” Hypotheses on what is being signaled by each physical trait vary.

Since one of the main points women report as attractive is sexual dimorphism (masculinity), testosterone is a likely candidate and is studied often. A man’s ability to produce and regulate optimal levels of testosterone (and all other hormones) is advantageous for survival and reproduction. Cortisol has been the subject of studies of hormones and attractiveness as well, but have not yielded results as strong as those focusing on testosterone (Moore et al. 2010).

One other line of regular inquiry into adaptive benefits of mate choice is fluctuating asymmetry (FA). This the general assumption that symmetry is good, and asymmetry is bad. The locus of asymmetry may vary from trait to trait and may have multiple influences in any one particular trait. Oxidative stress at the genetic level may be responsible for some FA, and individuals with greater capacity for reducing oxidative stress may have survival and reproductive advantages (Gangestad et al. 2010).

Other hypotheses around sexual selection focus on fighting ability between individuals and its technical corrolary resource-holding potential (RHP). Without putting to fine a point on it, being big and strong has advantages in multiple domains. And guess what influences strength? Yes my astute lovelies… testosterone. It keeps coming back to the testosterone.

The proof is in the ____ing

The studies above relating to facial attractiveness versus body attractiveness relied on women’s ratings of attractiveness. There’s value in that, but conscious assessments aren’t necessarily a perfect substitute for how people behave in the real world. In the real world, the most effective measure of attractiveness is… um… apparently the PhDs call it “mating succcess”…

“Overall, body attractiveness was a better predictor of self-reported mating success than facial attractiveness. In line with our main hypothesis, we found a positive relationship between a composite measure of men’s physical fitness (PF) and men’s body attractiveness. This was obtained not only for aggregated attractiveness ratings but also for all 27 female raters individually. This finding is remarkable because individual attractiveness judgments reflect a strong idiosyncratic component, at least for faces. Attractiveness judgments were made fast and effortless. The strength of the attractiveness-fitness relation- ship obtained here suggests that signalling physical fitness may be one of the key functions of male attractiveness.” (Honekopp et al. 2006) [emphasis mine]

Not surprisingly, physical fitness “may be” important for physical attractiveness. You learn something everyday I guess. Thanks science!

Back to Clay’s Evolutionary Body-Hacking Program

I’m already approaching the 3,000 word mark in this article and I haven’t even gotten to the specifics of what exactly makes for a body that women find attractive. Fortunately, Clay has already done all the work of synthesizing this research into a clear physical model ( to be fair, he claims that the trainers and actors in Hollywood did the work for him, and he just reverse engineered it). So rather than talk about the numbers, here are the blueprints representing the intersection of Hollywood and Darwin.

The Hollywood Physique Blueprint (1 of 8)

Why the “Hollywood Physique”?

Clay found that essentially every feature in the research here is demonstrated in nearly every Hollywood actor after one of their scrawny-to-superhero transformations. In other words, although we have no proof it’s intentional, Hollywood trainers are leveraging the same principles in all of the research consciously or unconsciously. The system is designed to sculpt precisely the aspects of muscle necessary to highlight that exact cue and maximize the evolutionary factors most responsible for natural attraction. Most are simply emulating physical features associated with naturally elevated testosterone levels and other indicators of key fitness features related to survival purposes.

The name “The Hollywood Physique for Men” is designed for an audience not limited to the enlightened anthro-evolution nerd readers of evolvify. However, Clay himself is somewhat of an anthro-evolution nerd, but I haven’t yet asked him to change the name to “The Uber Abstract Darwinian Compendium of Hyper-Copulatory Hypertrophy.” While the system itself is built on a foundation of paleo and evolutionary psychology principles, Clay has designed it for a more mainstream audience. In other words, he’s cleverly disguising the stuff we love and bringing it to the masses.

What the Hollywood Physique is NOT:

• A fitness program designed around evolutionary movements
• A strength training program
• A functional fitness program

What The Hollywood Physique is:

• Methodical, detailed, and specific regarding food and workouts
• Applied evolutionary psychology
• 100% Paleo diet friendly
• Whole food nutrition plan
• Supplement free
• A completely aesthetic bodybuilding system designed to strategically achieve a body that’s naturally attractive to women in a short amount of time

How do Andrew and evolvify tie into this?

As I mentioned before, I worked with Clay on this for a couple months before he launched it. However, it’s totally his brainchild. My contributions have been reviews and suggestions regarding the evolutionary theory and minor tweaks (if anything). I had pre-release access to the materials and have gone over everything contained within. I’m not going to comment on any of the training methodology or jargon, but I have seen Clay’s and Derek’s results and they’re pretty amazing.

Here’s the thing… and it’s not a sales pitch, just the info. Clay is just now making this publicly available. He hasn’t even set up a full page selling it quite yet, and he’s not promoting it on a very grand scale at the moment because, simply put, he wants to make sure the information jives with a more intelligent, savvy crowd who are driven and ready to APPLY it and PROVE it works before unleashing it on a wider scale. I’m glad he came to me about this a while ago because it’s allowed us to team up to give evolvify readers to get the first crack at it.

UPDATE (August 2012): I ended up using THP for a couple months shortly after writing this originally, and I’ve since checked in on the progress of others. I can reissue whatever recommendations I had at the beginning. Theory shmeory, it works.

If you’re looking for an aesthetic approach to quickly building muscle that’s based on the evolutionary principles of physical attractiveness, then you can’t go wrong with The Hollywood Physique for Men.

Check Out Clay’s Site »

*don’t miss the individual muscle blueprints and topless Derek!

References

Foster, Joshua D. “Beauty is mostly in the eye of the beholder: olfactory versus visual cues of attractiveness.” The Journal of Social Psychology 148, no. 6 (December 2008): 765-73. [PDF]

Frederick, David a, Daniel M T Fessler, and Martie G Haselton. “Do representations of male muscularity differ in menʼs and women’s magazines?” Body image 2, no. 1 (March 2005): 81-6.

Gangestad, Steven W., Leslie a. Merriman, and Melissa Emery Thompson. “Men’s oxidative stress, fluctuating asymmetry and physical attractiveness.” Animal Behaviour 80, no. 6 (October 2010): 1005-1013.

Honekopp, J, U Rudolph, L Beier, a Liebert, and C Muller. “Physical attractiveness of face and body as indicators of physical fitness in men.” Evolution and Human Behavior 28, no. 2 (March 2007): 106-111.

Hunt, John, Casper J Breuker, Jennifer a Sadowski, and Allen J Moore. “Male-male competition, female mate choice and their interaction: determining total sexual selection.” Journal of evolutionary biology 22, no. 1 (January 2009): 13-26.

Moore, F R, R E Cornwell, M J Law Smith, E a S Al Dujaili, M Sharp, and D I Perrett. “Evidence for the stress-linked immunocompetence handicap hypothesis in human male faces.” Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, (September 2010).

Peters, M, G Rhodes, and L Simmons. “Contributions of the face and body to overall attractiveness.” Animal Behaviour 73, no. 6 (June 2007): 937-942. [PDF]

Sell, Aaron, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Daniel Sznycer, Christopher von Rueden, and Michael Gurven. “Human adaptations for the visual assessment of strength and fighting ability from the body and face.” Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society 276, no. 1656 (February 2009): 575-84. [PDF]

First, we do need to add some qualifiers that would have existed in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). The main non-biological cost that would have been generally persistent over time is the social component. In a world of hunter-gatherer bands with almost pervasive contact with kin and known individuals, men did have real potential social costs. In some instances, these costs would have been real to the point of physical inducement. From a pure social perspective, the variability of social norms and potential for geographic distance makes it hard to draw modern general parallels in this regard. So this cost is something to consider, but it’s not easily factored into the discussion in a reliable way. For now, let’s just say that men do have some non-biological calculations with respect to reproductive investment.

Excepting social costs, we would expect men in the EEA to be motivated to attempt to reproduce with any and all available females. While this motivation may still exist, we don’t see see this carried out by and large. Something has changed.

The main disconnect from the EEA to today is the legal reification of male parental investment. The introduction of authority enforced child support effectively negates the extreme imbalance pervasive throughout human evolution. Arguably, the roles of parental investment are reversed. Kanye West is quick to point this out in his song ‘Gold Digger’. Some legal structures are such that males are liable for 18 years of financial investment set against 9 months of biological investment by the woman. Granted, this is an oversimplification as time investment needs to be factored in as well. Again, the variability of circumstances and legal differences makes it difficult to generalize. And, all of this is amplified by the cultural and religious imperative toward lifetime monogamy.

This shift poses interesting questions for human wellbeing. Human brains evolved under the extreme imbalance in male-female investment. Remnants of this influences emotional motivations and cultural mores in-turn. Both of these conflict with the new parental investment paradigm. What are the impacts of this mismatch in terms of behavior and psychological health?

In terms of behavior, we should expect to see an increase in male choosiness commensurate to the increase in male investment. In practice, this may present as an adoption of stereotypically female behaviors by men. This could range from things like coquettishness to the traditionally female role of objectification of males based on physical attributes. In fact, we have seen a rise in male propensity to make mating judgments based on physical characteristics – much to the objection of women. How does this translate to things like the feminist movement? The nuances of this paradigm shift likely ripple throughout society in ways that aren’t obvious and aren’t always positive.

What implications should we expect to see with this collision of legal structures and biologically influenced motivations? Does another balance need to be struck? Do the legal pressures effectively accomplish their goals?

Just as there’s truth underlying what makes comedy funny, there’s some truth in stereotypes. Rather than a reflection of truth, stereotypes typically represent a cultural amplification of minor differences. As such, it’s difficult to disentangle what’s real from what’s cultural (yes, I just said culture isn’t real). In the realm of stereotypes, the association between men and meat is pretty strong. From the [debunked] “Man the Hunter” hypothesis to the staple imagery of Dad “manning” the grill, we have no shortage of references from which to draw. Maybe it’s the fire, maybe it’s the meat, but I’ve always embraced the opportunity to run the grill. I’ve also been curious about where cultural indoctrination gives way to instinct in this area. Recently, my attention was directed back to this from a strange direction.

As part of the ongoing paleo debate about the amount of animal products vs. plant products we should consume to achieve optimal health, I turned my attention to vitamin C. The topic is doubly interesting to me because, from a “why evolution is true” standpoint, the genes to synthesize vitamin C singlehandedly refute the notion of an “intelligent” design. Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is necessary for certain biological functions, and therefore, most animals have evolved to synthesize it. Humans have the gene coding for vitamin C synthesis, but it has been deactivated. The [almost certainly correct] hypothesis is that it was deactivated during a period of high dietary fruit consumption in distant primate evolution. Since vitamin C was ample in the diet, there was no positive selection pressure for the activated gene. Which brings us to scurvy…

Scurvy

Acute vitamin C deficiency in humans leads to scurvy. I noticed a strangely consistent risk-factor for scurvy while doing preliminary research on the condition. It seems that being a single man is itself a risk factor. It was listed in every result I saw from a basic Google search on the topic so I’m chalking this one up to common knowledge for medical professionals. Not only is being male and single a risk factor, but it’s also referred to colloquially, and in medical literature as “bachelor scurvy” (Connelly, 1982) or “widower scurvy” (Hirschmann, et al. 1999).

One of the hypotheses forwarded to explain why men are more prone to scurvy is that they don’t know how to cook. That seems strange considering that cooking destroys vitamin C. It’s found in high concentrations in a wide range of foods (raw fruit in particular) readily available to any grocery store culture. If a single guy can get to the store to buy hot dogs, he can buy an orange. Thus, I have to emphatically reject the “single guys can’t cook” hypothesis before even considering whether it’s factually accurate to say that “men can’t cook”.

Since vitamin C is ridiculously easy to consume, I’m inclined to view “bachelor scurvy” as a result of voluntary food selection choice. It seems the “single” part is because women opt for an increase in fruit/vegetable consumption rather than a Leave it to Beaver cliche of women in the kitchen. As it turns out, quasi-scientific studies confirm a certain level of disdain for vegetables by men…

Most Vegetarians Are Women

I think it’s safe to say that the go-t0 resource for wisdom related to evolutionary based diets is Vegetarian Times (VT). Thus, I’m happy to report that a study they commissioned in 1992 found that women are more than twice as likely to be vegetarians as men. At that time 68% of vegetarians were women compared to the remaining 32% of men. They went on to speculate that this difference is because women care about health and men don’t. There may be some truth to that, but since the assertion was unsupported, I remain highly skeptical. There are certainly other explanations available.

The premise of the VT article was that the president of the North American Vegetarian Society (a heterosexual female) couldn’t find a suitable vegetarian man to date (understandable, as I have recurring nightmares of this guy and his hat). Tapping into folk wisdom once again, I refer you to Pulp Fiction…

“…my girlfriend is a vegetarian, which pretty-much makes me a vegetarian.” – @ 0:53 below
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Rather than assuming that only 32% of men are vegetarians, I wonder if it isn’t true that less than 32% of men would be vegetarians if they weren’t influenced by, or trying to impress, vegetarian women.

In a sidebar of the same VT article, a referenced study surveyed individuals in the 18-35 age bracket regarding their food cravings. The results showed that 33% of men craved meat or fish in the previous year, compared to only 9% of women. It seems that when thinking about taste and/or satisfaction, men display an almost fourfold increase in a desire for meat when compared to women. So aside from the ideas that men can’t cook and don’t care about health, what evolutionary explanations are available?

Hunter-Gatherer Explanation?

If the bulk of human evolution consisted of hunter-gatherer tribes in which men did most of the hunting (and therefore killing), and women did most of the gathering/foraging, could natural selection have favored mental traits that favored men with less reservations about killing animals? Could this have resulted in males more comfortable with processing, and ultimately in eating, meat? In environments in which hunting and eating animals afforded survival and reproductive advantages, it would make sense for males who psychologically objected to this practice to suffer increased selection pressure. In other words, quasi-moral vegetarian tendencies would be a direct disadvantage to men in hunting societies.

The meat craving study referenced in VT also found that the gap in cravings between men and women decreased from 24% to 16% in populations over the age of 65. While the 36-64 age group is missing from the article, we can make some assumptions about the 65+ group. Perhaps most importantly, this is beyond the reproductive age of nearly all women. Women’s cravings for meat more than double from the lower age bracket to the upper one. Thus, there could be a relevant factor in the consumption of plant matter in relation to fecundity (fertility) and/or diet during pregnancy and breastfeeding. The data in this study is insufficient to clarify this, but it’s an interesting question worthy of further study.

Parting Ponderings

First, I’m interested in any research or insight that may be relevant to this question. I find it unlikely that there isn’t research that I simply missed. If you can point out other information that may shed more light on this, please add it in the comments below.

As I said in the beginning, I can’t commit to a solid hypothesis on this. There seems to be some instinctual inclination toward increased meat collection, preparation, and consumption in men. There’s certainly a significantly larger percentage of women who are vegetarians. I find current explanations of why men would shun consumption of vitamin C containing foods to be absolutely unconvincing. So… what’s the deal?

References
Connelly, T. J., Becker, A. and McDonald, J. W. (1982), Bachelor Scurvy. International Journal of Dermatology, 21: 209–210.
Hirschmann J.V., Raugi G.J. (1999), Adult Scurvy. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. 41(6): 895-906.

I hate postmodern feminism. As a man by birth, not by choice, I call shenanigans on the idea of a vast male conspiracy in which I’m hopelessly complicit. The charge that I am conditioned from birth to oppress all of the women I love, all of the women I know, and all of the women on the planet is not one with which I’m likely to acquiesce. The notion that I’m doomed to omni-directional socialization smacks of Christianity’s putrid communicable mind-disease of “Original Sin”. But while Christianity offers potential salvation through authoritarian subjugation of our minds and the rest of our human nature after a life of guilt, postmodern feminism offers nothing more than perpetual guilt and a labryinthian trial of futility that would lead Josef K to rejoice in the relative clarity of his nightmare of Kafka’s prison. Like the magical monotheisms’ strategic defense by placing its rules outside the observable world and beyond the understanding of feeble brains, postmodern feminism holds its truths just on the other side of spectacular society’s aim or grasp. We are all inside the conspiracy, and thus, forever powerless to question its pervasive hold with our tainted minds.

But let’s get to the bad news…

Apparently, I am guilty as charged. I openly view women as different from men… and I like it. What’s worse, I have been known to love women precisely because of their femininity. And I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I have been successful in being smitten by oppressing women to degree that they have appreciated my undying appreciation of said femininity. Thus, I have apparently pulled off the masterstroke of Pavlovian conditioning by convincing women that there is something special different about them worthy of distinction, and that that inherent beauty defect is a point of delineation warranting irrepressible affection and admiration objectification.

Yet despite my actual loathing for postmodern feminism, and tongue-in-cheek embrace of their accusatory program, I consider myself a Darwinian feminist. Let’s be clear… that is a political position of feminist bias influenced by Darwinian science. This is not to be confused with the scientific position of feminist Darwinism, in which scientific hypotheses are formed through the perspective gained by freeing oneself from the scientific community’s irrepressible patriarchy (Vandermassen 2008). I take this position of political bias because since the agricultural revolution, feminists have an indisputable point (generally speaking). One of the first sociopolitical developments of agricultural society was property. Besides land, women were subjected to the forefront of the legal ownership construct. It’s difficult to disentangle the development of agriculture, writing, law, oppression, and theistic religion. This difficulty is explained in their mutually supportive natures (the Matrix beta version?).

In my overlap into the paleosphere, I wonder about the influence of gendered conflagrations of caveman romanticism. I think the first of Melissa McEwan’s posts I ever read was on the question of ‘Sexism and Paleo‘. Though I disagree with a few of the points in that piece, I share a disdain for the popularized caveman stereotype. On one level, I’ve wandered around a lot of wilderness looking for caves, and I can verify that they’re not a reliable strategy for shelter from the elements or protection from predators. Thus, I vote for burying the “caveman” concept along with agricultural dominance hierarchies and the vegetarian myth. On the psychosocial level, I see the caveman image of a clubbed woman being dragged off to be used as a reproduction machine as an overt misogynistic cultural amplification of testosterone-drunk wish-thinking. As a man, I’m also not going to pretend that I can’t imagine where that impulse comes from. If you take that last sentence as a justification, you don’t understand me and should probably stop reading now.

*Much of what follows was influenced by a 4-participant, 5-article throwdown in the “Feminist Forum” feature on the intersection of feminism and Darwinism in a 2008 issue of Sex Roles…  a peer-reviewed, openly feminist leaning journal. The journal is offering free and direct access through December 31, 2010. Rebecca Hannagan wrote the target article which was reponded to by feminists Laurett Liesen, Griet Vandermassen, and Celeste Condit. Hannagan also provides a follow-up on the others’ comments.

“Ignorant” Evolutionary Psychology vs. “Ignorant” Feminism

And thus begins the typical impasse between evolutionary psychology and feminism. Feminists charge evolutionary psychologists with indiscriminate justification of evil, and evolutionary psychologists accuse feminists of misunderstanding that the “job of scientists is to find out how things work, to try to be evenhanded with the evidence, and to present their findings…” (Vandermassen 2008). The project of science is understanding. The project of evolutionary psychology is understanding psychology in the context of evolution. Beware anyone who conflates understanding with justification.

“Evolutionary psychologists’ continued ignorance of feminism and their ongoing failure to recognize the vast contributions by feminist evolutionists is at worst the continuation of male bias, and at best scholarly negligence.” (Liesen 2008)

“[P]reviously considered an “archaic debate” [, genetic determinism], turned out to be a real concern still in the minds of many feminists. As Jonathan Waage and Patricia Gowaty (1997) write in their conclusion, “[t]erminology, politics, and ignorance are, inretrospect, major barriers to the dialectic of feminism and evolutionary biology” (p. 585).” (Vandermassen 2008)

Darwin: More Feminist than the Feminists

Darwin’s world-view was certainly steeped in a world of Victorian ideals. As such, he tended to ethnocentrize, anthropomorphize, and Victorianify a bit too frequently. However, behind the now anachronistic veneer, his wisdom was potent.

“Darwin also attributed a more important evolutionary role to females than did most evolutionists for nearly a century after him: female choice in sexual selection. Since females bear the greater parental investment through pregnancy and lactation, they have more to gain from being highly selective about with whom to mate than do males. As a result, certain traits are selected for in males if, over time, females choose to mate with the males that bear those traits more than those who do not.” (Hannagan 2008)

That first sentence could have also read, “Darwin also attributed a more important evolutionary role to females than did most feminists for nearly a century after him.” In the concept of sexual selection, we have a solid foundation from which to sweep away all attempts to legitimize gendered patriarchy. In the concept of sexual selection, we have a power structure that, excepting violence, is nearly irrefutable for men. Across the millions of species of the animal kingdom, females exercise ultimate say in selecting with whom to reproduce. The whims of females have given us everything from the peacocks’ tail (Darwin 1972) to the bowerbirds fantastic nests and 12 foot antlers of the Irish elk (Coyne 2009) to our very creativity and intelligence (Miller 2001). Sexual selection is almost universally ignored, and when it is considered, is often misunderstood as a patriarchal mechanism for herding women. Competition between men acts as a fitness cue that aids women in selecting mates (intrasexual sexual selection). Direct displays by men to women also act as fitness cues to aid women in selecting mates (intersexual sexual selection). This isn’t to say that dominance hierarchies don’t exist in various species, but it is necessary to question the assumption that intrasexual selection is a dominance hierarchy rather than a fitness cue. Intersexual selection is always the latter.

The positive implications of sexual selection for a Darwinian feminism are many. Yet ironically, and to the detriment of their program, postmodern feminism has attacked evolutionary biology after missing the point.

Another area that’s often ignored or assigned to the evils of patriarchy is competition between females. It would be naive to assume that sexual selection is unidirectional. It is true that females have the highest degree of choice, but men also gain reproductive advantage by choosing the “best” mate. Intrasexual female competition has serious negative consequences. Stereotypically female behaviors from fashion to makeup to anorexia have been attributed to competition between females (Li, et al. 2010). Interestingly, Li, et al also found this intrasexual competition functioning similarly in homosexual men. Activities motivated by intrasexual female competition have traditionally been prime targets for postmodern feminists to assign to patriarchal power structures. However, it seems that this may be a misguided confusion of intrasexual and intersexual competition.

Men and Women Are Different

That is not a claim or implication that a male brain or a female brain is better, it is a statement of fact. While – Top 5 target of anti-evolutionary psychology deniers – Steven Pinker had already convincingly refuted “blank slate” conflagrations in his 2001 book, “The Blank Slate” (linked below), neuroscience has since been demonstrating differences via fMRI and other brain studies. Sexual dimorphism (differences) in brain development have been observed to be directly influenced by differences in XX vs. XY chromosome factors (that is at the genetic, pre-hormonal level), and by gonadal hormone differences (e.g. testosterone) (Arnold 2004).

“Genes that are found on the sex chromosomes influence sexually dimorphic brain development both by causing sex differences in gonadal secretions and by acting in brain cells themselves to differentiate XX and XY brains. Because it is easier to manipulate hormone levels than the expression of sex chromosome genes, the effects of hormones have been studied much more extensively, and are much better understood, than the direct actions in the brain of sex chromosome genes. Although the differentiating effects of gonadal secretions seem to be dominant, the theories and findings discussed above support the idea that sex differences in neural expression of X and Y genes significantly contribute to sex differences in brain functions and disease.” (Arnold 2004) [emphasis mine]

“Many neurological and psychological diseases vary in incidence or severity between the sexes. Some of these diseases are known to involve X-linked genes. The vulnerability of males to mutations of X-linked genes is an obvious source of sex differences in diseases. However, more subtle variation of the same loci probably accounts for some of the differences in psychological and neural function among populations of males and females.Recent improvements in methods to manipulate and measure gene action will lead to further insights on the role of X and Y genes in brain gender.” (Arnold 2004)

Recent theoretical developments in neuronal plasticity have given the postmodern feminists and other blank-slaters a new angle to make us all the same. Some now claim that the overarching and nefarious social construct causes brains to physically develop gender identities based on patriarchal domination by way of language faculty alteration (Kaiser, et al. 2009). That’s right folks, males are so crafty that we’ve figured out how to physically alter the neuronal structure of women’s minds to do our bidding as hapless automatons. To say that gender bias goes deep is apparently an understatement of mind-bending proportions. Curiously, all such studies seem to recognize, or ignore, sex differences in the brains of all other animal species, but resort to neck-down Darwinism when considering humans. Again, the postmodern feminist position parallels that of religion in its insistence that evil forces corrupt us on unseen levels, and by excluding the human brain as the one thing Darwinian considerations can’t mustn’t be applied to.

Years after Pinker’s work, Hannagan is still comfortable enough about sex differences to say: “Broad personality constructs, such as neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness, are heritable and there are small but consistent differences between men and women on two of the big five personality constructs—extraversion and agreeableness.” (Hannagan 2008b) [emphasis mine]

This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg regarding physical (brain included) and psychological differences.

Against the Caveman Mystique

It’s hard for me to imagine the caveman stereotype existing without the logically flawed, but evolutionarily advantageous, human cognitive availability bias (or heuristic). In short, since we find evidence of humans in many caves, but not out in the open, we tend to assume humans were more often inhabiting caves than out in the open. The art and human remains found in caves are not found there because a majority of our ancestors were “cavemen”. They are found there because caves offer protective value for preservation, and because caves are geographically obvious places to look. Thus, the probability we’ll look in caves multiplied by the probability of evidence being preserved in caves skews cave evidence to secure an artificially elevated place in our consciousness. It’s also the case that human remains are dragged to caves by whatever ate them, or humans died in caves by becoming trapped. All of this is further multiplied by the caveman narrative in culture… it’s easy to picture, and therefore remember, and therefore spreads.

The following excerpt is from a review of the apparently poorly received book, ‘The Caveman Mystique‘ by Martha McCaughey. While it’s directed at the McCaughey’s view of the caveman stereotype, I suggest that it should also be tested against feminist theory.

Perhaps the most curious omission in the book is any discussion of the evolutionary psychological view of the human female. We are repeatedly told the dubious notion that the evolutionary view of the male is that of the stereotypical caveman who drags women off by the hair for sex. But what is the corresponding picture of the female? Evidently McCaughey doesn’t think this is informative. If men are interested in having sex with as many women as possible, what does this say about women? It is a fact of simple arithmetic that the average number of sexual partners must be identical for males and females (assuming a 50-50 sex ratio). So if men have X female partners on average, the average woman must also have X male partners. What does this logic imply about the female side of mating? (McBurney 2009)

Hunter-Gatherers: Hierarchy vs. Egalitarianism

The hunter-gatherer stereotype often does no better than the caveman tripe. Rather than the overt “masculinity” of clubbing all women of one’s choosing, it’s replaced by the overt “masculinity” of killing a wily beast and the implied “masculine” domination associated with bestowing such a gift upon the rest of the band. Unfortunately, the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis that was forwarded to explain human cognitive development has been considered inaccurate almost consistently since the 1970s (Hannagan 2008).

In discussing sexual selection above, I argued that there is a fundamental refutation of patriarchy inherent in the Darwinian framework. That itself should sound the death knell for any attempts at misogyny or gendered political dominance. However, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer existence takes that a step further. It is likely that the prevailing form of social arrangement for the bulk of human evolution was social anarchism in the context of small hunter-gatherer bands. It is important not to assume contemporary stereotypes of socialism and anarchy here.

As found by anthropological studies of recent hunter-gatherer bands, hunter-gatherer bands exhibit high levels of communitarian and cooperative behaviors combined with an often explicit rejection of hierarchy. To observe this clearly, we also need to make a distinction between immediate-return hunter-gatherers and delayed-return hunter-gatherers. The immediate vs. delayed distinction refers initially to the timeframe in which they consume hunted and gathered food. With immediate-return bands, we see daily consumption of most food, little storage, and a tendency to an almost perpetually nomadic existence. Delayed-return hunter-gatherer bands tend to differ in that they are geographically isolated, or have borders imposed upon them by surrounding populations . In this transitional stage between ancestral hunter-gatherer existence and agriculture, we see more evidence of hierarchy, despite a lack of private property relative to modern agrarian cultures (Gray 2009).

Overall, we see a general lack of ownership or conceptions of private-property within hunter-gatherer social arrangements. The division of labor is an economic strategy that benefits both individuals and the group. Value is not necessarily assigned a priori to male or female, or to hunter or gatherer.

In some examples, anthropologists have noted a significant degree of male group control over “marriages”. This is often imposed not by potential suitors, but by the male family members of the woman. This is misleading as it’s often an ethnocentric assignment of our notions of monogamy on cultures which don’t necessarily share the same sexual norms. Even in societies with supposed marriages, females exercise a high degree of mate choice when it comes to actual reproduction:

“Having high status as a good hunter has been shown to raise a man’s reproductive success everywhere the relationship has been investigated, one of the pathways being that it gains him sexual access to more and higher quality women, whether officially or in extra-marital affairs.” (Vandermassen 2008) [emphasis mine]

At first glance, this would seem to refute my comment a couple paragraphs back about non-assignment of value to the hunter role. However, it merely reinforces my qualification that such value is not assigned a priori. Hunters, as a category, do not automatically benefit. Hunters who excel are assigned a higher fitness value and therefore tend to be selected by females to father offspring. This does however, refute the claim that arranged marriages act as true control over women’s reproduction.

Autonomy

In another word, freedom. Why is every sovereign individual (by that I mean every individual) in the 21st century born not as a human, but as a proprietary asset on the balance sheet of a nation-state? Why do all agricultural societies suffer from drastically diminished levels of freedom? Why do geographically and otherwise isolated delayed-return hunter-gatherer bands tend toward political hierarchy while their immediate-return analogues do not? The atomization of individuals within the supra-organism of culture has been elevated over the autonomy our ancestors were born with, but why?

For 99%+ of human evolution, every able-bodied human has had the option of leaving oppressive regimes. Every individual had the choice to opt out of social games stacked against them. The fact of human migration across the totality of earth is proof that this strategy was employed many times. However, it would have happened more rapidly if remaining in a group was not generally more advantageous for each individual. The ability to round up a group of like-minded individuals to leave was somewhat balanced by the group’s recognition of a general strength in numbers. Call it the invisible hand of exploration, or call it migration, but it acted as a perpetual check on all forms of unwelcome domination. Their complete lack of the geographical and legal boundaries we’re faced with today allowed an entirely different paradigm for human social interaction. This concept is not new. The right to cross all borders to leave oppression is legitimized in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, it is ignored by every country on earth for reasons beyond the scope of this piece. Further, the concept loses its actual value when there is no more frontier, but only trading one domination hierarchy for the flag of another.

The temptation to form in-groups and out-groups along lines of gender, ethnicity, education, running skills, or other coin flips is a curse of a stone age brain in an information age world. Yielding to such temptations will invariably lead to error. The unbearable lightness of paranoia that accompanies postmodernist cynicism is a direct path to your own distracted energy. You’re all formally invited to ditch the postmodern feminist doomsday machine for a refreshing trip to the history of the Galapagos…

Hey! I finished in under 4,000 words! Is this the part where I get called a misogynist then burned at the altar of Margaret Mead, or… perhaps you have other thoughts? (If you have questions or comments that you think are too far off topic, you can also post ’em in the forum.)

References
Arnold, Arthur P. “Sex chromosomes and brain gender..” Nature reviews. Neuroscience 5, no. 9 (September 2004): 701-8.
Curry, Oliver. “Who’ s Afraid of the Naturalistic Fallacy?”. Evolutionary Psychology (2006): 234-247.
Gray, Peter. “Play as a Foundation for Hunter- Gatherer Social Existence s.” The American Journal of Play 1, no. 4 (2009): 476-522.
Hannagan, Rebecca J. “Gendered political behavior: A Darwinian feminist approach.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7/8 (2008).
Hannagan, Rebecca J. “Genes, Brains and Gendered Behavior: Rethinking Power and Politics in Response to Condit, Liesen, and Vandermassen.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (September 2008): 504-511.
Kaiser, Anelis, Sven Haller, Sigrid Schmitz, and Cordula Nitsch. “On sex/gender related similarities and differences in fMRI language research..” Brain research reviews 61, no. 2 (October 2009): 49-59.
Li, N. P., Smith, A. R., Griskevicius, V., Cason, M. J., & Bryan, A. (2010). Intrasexual competition and eating restriction in heterosexual and homosexual individuals. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 365-372.
Liesen, Laurette T. “The Evolution of Gendered Political Behavior: Contributions from Feminist Evolutionists.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (July 2008): 476-481.
McBurney, Donald H. “REVIEW – The Caveman Mystique: Pop Darwinism and the Debates over Sex, Violence, and Science.” Sex Roles 62, no. 1-2 (June 2009): 138-140.
Trivers, R.L. . Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871-1971 (1972) : 136-179. Chicago, IL: Aldine. ISBN 0-435-62157-2
Vandermassen, Griet. “Can Darwinian Feminism Save Female Autonomy and Leadership in Egalitarian Society?.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (August 2008): 482-491.
Waage, J., & Gowaty, P. (1997). Myths of genetic determinism. In P. Gowaty (Ed.), Feminism and evolutionary biology: Boundaries, intersections, and frontiers (pp. 585–613). New York: Chapman & Hall.
Walter, Alex. “The Anti-naturalistic Fallacy : Evolutionary Moral Psychology and the Insistence of Brute Facts.” Evolutionary Psychology, no. 1999 (2006): 33-48.
Wilson, David Sloan, Eric Dietrich, and Anne B Clark. “On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychology.” Evolutionary Psychology (2003): 669-682.

Louann Brizendine, M.D. graduated from UC, Berkeley in Neurobiology, Yale University in Medicine and Harvard Medical School in Psychiatry.

She served on the faculty at Harvard Medical School from 1985-88 when she came to join the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. At UCSF, Dr. Brizendine pursues active clinical, teaching, writing and research activities.

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In 1994, Dr. Brizendine founded the UCSF Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic at LPPI, and continues to serve as it’s director. The Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic is a unique psychiatric clinic designed to assess and treat women of all ages experiencing disruption of mood, energy, anxiety, sexual function and well-being due to hormonal influences on the brain. In addition Dr. Brizendine instructs and supervises residents, fellows, and medical students in this Clinic throughout the year helping young doctors learn more about this important area in women’s mental, sexual and physical health. She annually teaches courses to medical students and residents addressing the topics of the brain effects of hormones, mood disorders, anxiety problems and sexual interest changes due to hormones throughout the country. She is an expert on the effects of testosterone on sex drive in both premenopausal and postmenopausal women.

Topics

• History of Studying Sex Differences
• Comparing the Male and Female Brain
• History in the Field
• Differences in Little Boys and Girls
• The Boy Smell
• The Teenage Brain
• The Daddy Brain
• The Emotional Life of Men
• Sex, Love and the Male Brain
• The Mature Male Brain

Q & A

• Differences in Development of Single Men
• Social Construction of Gender
• Individual Differences
• The Gay Brain
• Males Using One Side of Their Brain
• Males Raised by Single Mothers
• Men’s Fear of Dancing
• Changes in the Brain During Pregnancy
• Hearing Differences
• The Brain in Love
• World Studies
• Older Men vs. Younger Men

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