“It might just be (for example) that menstrual hormones just affect muscles or joints in such a way that a particular walk is (dis)favoured.”

This would be a proximate explanation (how) – which is rather different from an explanation of ultimate causation (why).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinbergen%27s_four_questions

Proximate (how) and ultimate (why) causes are not alternatives – they are complementary.

It might just be (for example) that menstrual hormones just affect muscles or joints in such a way that a particular walk is (dis)favoured.

Yes, the bloke may find it more sexy, but that’s just luck – or maybe the evolutionary effect is on the bloke’s perception, rather than the woman’s walk.

[Of course there is no real causal link anyhow - just selection]

“Medical Hypotheses takes a deliberately different approach to peer review. Most contemporary practice tends to discriminate against radical ideas that conflict with current theory and practice. Medical Hypotheses will publish radical ideas, so long as they are coherent and clearly expressed. Furthermore, traditional peer review can oblige authors to distort their true views to satisfy referees, and so diminish authorial responsibility and accountability.”

It is not clear whether “a radically different approach to peer review means that it uses a peer reviewing process or not but the telling statement is:

“Medical Hypotheses will publish radical ideas, so long as they are coherent and clearly expressed.”

Pretty easy to see, then, why Ramachandran chose this journal to publish his “hoax”.

Ramachandran’s paper was NOT published in an Evolutionary Psychology Journal. It was published in the journal “Medical Hypotheses” which is a journal for medicine and biomedical sciences.
It was therefore unlikely to have been reviewed by anyone with any in-depth knowledge of evolution. Furthermore, although the article is wildly speculative, it does not contain the kinds of errors and downright contradictory nonsense that were contained in Alan Sokal’s hoax “post modernist” paper “Transgressing the Boundaries” published in Social Text.

If you’re not familiar with this intriguing and sometimes hilarious episode read all about it here:

physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/

Reference

Ramachandran VS. (1997). Why do gentlemen prefer blondes? Medical Hypotheses. Jan, 48(1):19-20.

What does evolutionary psychology – as opposed to evolutionary thinking in cognitive neuroscience – have to tell us about blindsight and ‘parallel’ visual pathways?

When looking at psychosocial issues though it’s generally little better than guesswork. Cultural pressures seem to totally dominate any evolutionary pressures. As Ben pointed out in the pink/blue article, 100 years ago it was pink for boys and blue for girls – how long would it take to imagine an evolutionary psychological reason for this?

By the way, for an excellent spoof I recommend reading VS Ramachandran’s “Why Gentleman Prefer Blondes” paper which he sent as a joke to en EP journal and managed to get published:

www.chass.utoronto.ca/~sousa/teach/rama.pdf

Nigella:Oxford:Clever:QED

I can’t access the link referenced in the article, I guess it has gone. I do think that context is vital to know what that quote meant. Perhaps (speculating wildly) Cosmides and Tooby were referring to the “legend” as opposed to the “science” (of which I think there is some) of WHR?

For example, Freese and Meelan conclude that “the unsupported repetition of an astonishingly narrow and invariant convergence to a 0.70 WHR in beauty icons only distracts attention from some of the field’s more measured discussions”. Couldn’t agree more.

should have been clearer: the first paragraph of the playboy paper (which found a WHR of less than 0.7) give the cosmides and tooby quote about 0.7 being an urban academic legend, it’s from an unpublished letter but i couldnt be bothered to type out the ref for it specifically, it’s in that paper tho.

I’m not trying to suggest that convincing cross cultural differences won’t be found, or that if they are found that this won’t be a serious problem for this particular theory but I don’t think the evidence is there yet. Until somebody gets a grant to fly a large sample of real women with varying WHRs, ethnicity, hair style, breast shape etc. between different cultures rather than using 2D representations of women, it’s going to be very difficult to have any confidence in the validity of the cross cultural results.

…brief -

I don’t have the source for the original “academic legend” quote, but the context of the article you link to is measurements of Playboy and Miss America centrefolds. This is not really what I was talking about – certainly I didn’t suggest that WHR is either the only or the most important determinent of men’s attractiveness ratings of women. It would be easy to produce a list of the physical features of women that men are attracted to apart from the ratio of waist to hips (all at the mercy of cultural variations), and I don’t think the pages of Playboy are where you’re likely to find these features best controlled for!

The same argument (that factors other than WHR were judged) can be applied to cross cultural research into male preferences. For example, from the references you cite, Freedman et al (2004) note in their discussion that the figures used were confounded for hair style and BMI, amongst others.

Marlowe et al (2001) presented line drawings of white, western women in bathing costumes to Hadza hunter-gatherers, so problems there with ecological validity.

By 2005, Marlowe et al (with the same Hadza tribesmen) used different stimulus figures and found agreement, noting “…these results imply there is less disparity between American and Hadza preferences for the actual WHR of real women. We suggest men’s preferences vary with the geographic variation in the shape of women who have wider hips in some populations and more protruding buttocks in others.”

Dixson et all (2007) found that men in Cameroon prefer a WHR of 0.8 (the range I stated in my original post was 0.7 – 0.8).

I honestly haven’t cherry-picked the references you mention, I just went through them at random. I don’t think the references on wikipedia apparently showing cultural variations really show that when you examine the methodology in enough detail, unless you assume that the original work insisted upon a WHR of exactly (or nearly) 0.7, which it didn’t.

Certainly it is important to demonstrate that an ideal WHR (and the majority of evidence *so far* points to it being in the range of 0.7-0.8) is found to be universally attractive, and I would be amongst the first to disagree with experimental data being based solely on white, middle class, American college students. However, once one considers the confounding factors in terms of male ratings of female attractiveness it becomes extremely difficult to present stimuli that control for them all. Those studies that do at least attempt to mimic the ecological context in which these decisions take place (for example, by using manipulated colour photographs and brief -

www.jeremyfreese.com/docs/FreeseMeland%20-%20SevenTenthsIncorrect.pdf

even the wiki page on WHR has a list of references of transcultural findings where WHR is not 0.7

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Waist-hip_ratio&oldid=154515358

“In other cultures, preferences vary,[8] ranging from 0.6 in China,[9] to 0.8 or 0.9 in parts of South America and Africa,[10][11][12] and divergent preferences based on ethnicity, rather than nationality, have also been noted.[13][14]”

# ^ Fisher, M.L.; Voracek M. (June 2006). “The shape of beauty: determinants of female physical attractiveness.”. J Cosmet Dermatol 5 (2): 190-4. PMID 17173598. Retrieved on 2007-08-04.
# ^ Dixson, B.J.; Dixson A.F., Li B., Anderson M.J. (January 2007). “Studies of human physique and sexual attractiveness: sexual preferences of men and women in China.”. Am J Hum Biol 19 (1): 88-95. PMID 17160976. Retrieved on 2007-08-04.
# ^ Marlowe, F.; Wetsman, A. (2001). “Preferred waist-to-hip ratio and ecology”. Personality and Individual Differences 30 (3): 481-489. Retrieved on 2007-08-04.
# ^ Marlowe, F.W.; Apicella, C.L. and Reed, D. (2005). “Men’s Preferences for Women’s Profile Waist-Hip-Ratio in Two Societies”. Evolution and Human Behavior 26: 458-468. Retrieved on 2007-08-04.
# ^ Dixson, B.J.; Dixson A.F., Morgan B., Anderson M.J. (June 2007). “Human physique and sexual attractiveness: sexual preferences of men and women in Bakossiland, Cameroon”. Arch Sex Behav 36 (3): 369-75. PMID 17136587. Retrieved on 2007-08-04.
# ^ Freedman, R.E.; Carter M.M., Sbrocco T., Gray JJ. (Aug. 2007). “Do men hold African-American and Caucasian women to different standards of beauty?”. Eat Behav 8 (3): 319-33. PMID 17606230. Retrieved on 2007-08-04.
# ^ Freedman, R.E.; Carter M.M., Sbrocco T., Gray J.J. (July 2004). “Ethnic differences in preferences for female weight and waist-to-hip ratio: a comparison of African-American and White American college and community samples”. Eat Behav. 5 (3): 191-8. PMID 15135331. Retrieved on 2007-08-04.