The title of this post is the name of a book on “evolutionary psychology” written by two scientists trying to explain a lot of human behavior on the basis of evolutionary principles last seen in action during the stone age. This interview with one of the authors is rather interesting. The following excerpt explains the title of the book:
The basic idea is this: Whenever parents have genetic traits they can pass on to their children that are more valuable for boys than for girls, then they have more sons than daughters. Conversely, whenever parents have genetic traits they can pass on to their children that are more valuable for girls than for boys, then they have more daughters than sons. Physical attractiveness — being beautiful — is good for both boys and girls, but it’s much more advantageous for girls. Physical attractiveness of a woman is one of the most important considerations for men when they select both long-term and short-term mates, but a man’s physical attractiveness is important for women only when she’s looking for short-term mates. Women like to have affairs with good-looking men, but they don’t necessarily want to marry them, unless of course they are also rich and powerful.
So beautiful daughters will be more likely to take full advantage of their physical attractiveness than beautiful sons. Beautiful daughters are more likely to pass on their genes successfully to the next generation than beautiful sons, because they are more likely to find themselves in stable marriages to desirable spouses. In a representative sample of 3,000 young Americans, those who are “very attractive” had 36% greater odds of having a daughter compared to everyone else. Similarly, studies have found that big and tall parents are more likely to have sons, and short and thin parents are more likely to have daughters, because body size is more of an advantage to men than to women. Women are attracted to big and tall men much more than men are attracted to big and tall women.
See full article.
This is fascinating. I never imagined this particular kind of subtlety in evolution.
This now trumps the previous weirdest things I’ve learned about evolution:
1. That the eye evolved independently about 40 times
2. That in ant colonies, mathematical analysis shows that the “queen” ant is really slave to her daughters — they decide the pattern of reproduction.
Both are in Richard Dawkins works. The mathematics of evolution looks beguilingly simple — after all genetic algorithms are pretty trivial to code up. But it leads to amazingly subtle effects in practice.
There’s one more that I really like. Evolution actually explains the conditions under which we would sacrifice something (even life) for someone else – a result which is initially surprising given that it goes against the principle of survival.
The basic idea is this: An individual can maximize the representation of his genes in succeeding generations by either increasing his own personal genetic fitness or by increasing the fitness of his relatives, as relatives are likely to share a great number of his genes. Link.
In other words, you have evolved in such a way that your willingness to sacrifice something for another person is dependent upon how “close” that person is to you. I am guessing that nationalism/patriotism can also be explained this way.
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
@Idetrorce, A couple of points:
1. I don’t think you can really disagree with me here, because, if you notice, I haven’t really given my personal views anywhere in the above article. I’ve just reported what the authors have written in their book. 🙂
2. Why do you disagree? It would be interesting to hear the reasons and then we can argue about those. Specifically, they cite scientific studies to back up their claim – if you disagree then you’ll need to give an argument as to why those studies might be flawed…
don’t hate people, this is scientfically proven.