10_Politically_Incorrect_Truths.pdf

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.

Adapted from Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi

Kanazawa, to be published by Perigee 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

According to the Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense

of Suicide Missions , a comprehensive history of this troubling yet topical phenomenon,

while suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, when religion is involved, it

is always Muslim. Why is this? Why is Islam the only religion that motivates its followers

to commit suicide missions?

The surprising answer from the evolutionary psychological perspective is that Muslim

suicide bombing may have nothing to do with Islam or the Koran (except for two lines in

it). It may have nothing to do with the religion, politics, the culture, the race, the ethnicity,

the language, or the region. As with everything else from this perspective, it may have 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.)

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