Mr Average

Following on from my earlier post on the subject of attractiveness, I saw today that university researchers have published an article which suggests that women will choose Mr Average rather than a high-flyer. The article itself is subscription only but the BBC has written it up.

The subject, 186 female students, were shown photographs of 60 young men which they were asked to rank in order of attractiveness. Those they thought would make the best partners were the ones they had assessed as most attractive.

The photographs were divided into three ranges of attractiveness: very good looking, average, and unattractive and six were chosen from each range. The women were shown these photographs again but this time they were given details about the man’s age, job, and what he would like in a partner. After the second ranking was done, the men chosen as potentially the best partners were the ones with middle-ranking jobs. There was however still a preference for the best looking ones.

Selecting attractiveness

While I’m feeling interested in the evolutionary benefit and genetics of sexual behaviour, another report worth mentioning has turned up, this time from the University of Newcastle, which explains why there is such an unexpected diversity of individual appearance in the population. Evolutionary theory would suggest that there would be strong positive selection for attractiveness, leading to far less diversity (and everyone boringly attractive?), and this fact is often used as evidence by creationists that Darwin’s theories of evolution are flawed.

The new theory is that some individuals will create greater genetic diversity because some spontaneous mutations will damage their DNA repair functions. This in turn will mean that in these individuals any other spontaneous mutations will not be repaired. When these mutations happen in the disease resisting parts of the gene, it gives the individual much greater resistance to infections. A computer model has shown that this extra diversity giving disease resistance (as well as diversity in appearance) would be of greater benefit than the reduction in diversity caused by sexual selection leading to more attractive people.

So next time you decide someone is unattractive, just think, they could be much more healthy than you are.