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Summary: "Nancy Etcoff is the Nancy Drew of Sociobiology!"
Review: Nancy Etcoff is the Nancy Drew of Sociobiology! Have you ever wondered why you couldn't win the heart of a certain special person? Like a Nancy Drew mystery, Nancy Etcoff solves the mystery of sexual attraction in Survival of the Prettiest. And like one customer reviewer has said, "like it or not..." Nancy's right! With sensational prose, some famous people as references--she calls my all time celebrity dreamgirl Cindy Crawford a "genetic freak!"(and gets Cindy to write a response on her jacket cover!)--and some incredible numbers crunching about waist to hip ratios, width of noses, and height, Nancy Etcoff has written the best scientific analysis ever for understanding sexual attraction. If you like magazine articles where writers talk about attracting people with confidence, a sense of humor, and personality, you probably won't like what Nancy says, but if you want to solve the mystery of sexual attraction, then this is a book you must buy! I did!
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Summary: Insightful and Exciting
Review: Etcoff provides fresh insight into a topic of extraordinary interest. she writes beautifully, her scholarship is broad and deep,and she makes her insights understandable. New perspectives, new thoughts, exciting ideas.... a real winner!
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Summary: Etcoff's Correct, Like It Or Not
Review: Although Dr Etcoff and I live in the same town and are both psychologists (but not in the same field), I had read and admired this book BEFORE I ever met her, so this opinion isn't cronyism. There were only a couple of customer reviews when I first read the book, and today I scrolled through all of them -- which prompted me to put in my 2 cents worth: I really don't understand the perception of this book as a political statement -- it seems to me in the best tradition of the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology as exemplified by R Wright, R Dawkins, S Pinker, M Ridley, A Dugatkin, J Tooby & L Cosmides, etc etc etc. Dr Etcoff's book is a unique combination of clinical acumen, breadth of research interests, and beautiful writing style. It's so unusual to read a book that presents powerful ideas first of all, and presents these ideas accessibly to the nonspecialist who nonetheles has read broadly to acquire broad general knowledge. Survival of the Prettiest pulls together all original research literature on the psychophysics of human attraction (including Etcoff's own work on facial recognition), the relevant literature on evolutionary psychology, and an enormously amusing storehouse of illustrations from art, poetry, and literature -- everywhere in short -- not even scorning scandalous gossip if it proves her point. The book is organized to gallop along, yet the text is scrupulously documented in endnotes and exhaustive bibliography. This is a work of real scholarship -- yet without a single turgid paragraph or opaque footnote. Anybody that reads it with even a half-open mind can see that Etcoff has presented a careful and balanced account of the current state of the art. And the research supports her conclusions: like it or not, we are hard-wired to respond to what is called "beauty."
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Summary: Flawed Science and a Political Agenda
Review: The main theme of this book is that the phenomena of human beauty have their roots in evolutionary adaptations. It's a good idea, but a very weak book. I am a scientist, and my working assumption is that every feature of human behavior has its roots -- on some level -- in evolutionary adaptations. But to locate the specific adaptations that underlie a given feature is extremely difficult, and it is very easy to lapse into "just-so" stories which sound plausible but could be hogwash. Dr. Etcoff seems unaware of this pitfall. Whenever she comes across a piece of beauty trivia that can be plausibly linked to some evolutionary adaptation, she mentions it, and the book often reads like a first-year doctoral student's lit survey. But almost nowhere in the book does she consider competing explanations or counterexamples. Dr. Etcoff also has a political agenda, which is to "debunk" feminist concerns about the effect of cultural pressures on girls' and womens' self-image. She seems to think that, since our beauty impulse is wired into us by evolution, there is no room left for a critique of the way our culture instantiates those impulses. One thing that particularly offended me was her smug dismissal of the role of media images in the rise of eating disorders. Her main point is that media images can't be the sole "cause" of eating disorders, since a majority of women (who are exposed to the same images) don't develop full-blown bulimia or anorexia. Technically, she is correct, but she has missed the forest for the trees.
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Summary: Informative
Review: I found this to be informative and readable. Two members of my family are plastic surgeons, so that might have increased my interest above the normal. Anyway, I'd read two other books about the same subject, that were dry and academic. This was refreshingly accessible. (Incidentally, one of the sadder studies mentioned in one of these other books involved girls in a fifth grade class who were asked, individually, who they thought was the ugliest girl in their class. 75% of the girls said "I am.") The criticisms of other reviews that character isn't addressed in this book are wrong, because Etcoff closes the book with the wonderfully warming story of how Edith Wharton (I believe it was) was an unbelievably ugly woman, but then quotes men that got to know her, and ended up attracted to her because of her intelligence and personality. I just wonder how good-looking those people who give this book high scores are, versus those who give it low scores, because the bit closing the book shows one CAN transcend ugliness with character. Just before visiting this site, I was at the supermodel Heidi Klum's web site. But I did not become a big fan of hers strictly from her fashion lay-outs, but after I saw her talk on TV, and she was utterly graceful and kind and warm. THAT's what won me over. But looks do matter. Somerset Maugham said, "Women are smart, in that they know a pretty ribbon placed strategically in their hair, can mean the difference between true love and no love." We like to think love transcends all natural laws, but love is made up of petty details. Anyway, those who argue that attractiveness is purely cultural (it is to some degree: Brazilian men love big derrieres and small breasts, the opposite of American men) ignore the study Etcoff mentions of three month olds babies whose gaze lingers longer on photos of supermodels than those less attractive. This is a first-rate book.
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Summary: Not quite
Review: I've been reading this book over the last week and while it makes sense to me based on what she's reporting on, it doesn't make sense to me based on what I see in the real world. Etcoff claims that babies stare longer at attractive faces and that babies, kids, teenagers, and adults of both sexes agree on what is attractive. ??? Has she never watched Howard Stern, when he has a couple of young women strip down to their skivvies and he and his cronies evaluate them? They never agree! I never agree with a certain friend of mine what makes a woman pretty (he likes thin blondes), but my brother and I always do (we like full bodied women with big eyes). I know Etcoff makes a distinction between fashion and beauty, but I think that distinction may be minimal.
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Summary: It's both culture and biology.
Review: Our perception of things is both cultural and biological. There are no simple explainations and we should beware of such from either camp.
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Summary: Harvard Science?
Review: Consider this an engaging piece of fiction from a Harvard professor usually known for writing dry science grants. In _Survival of the Prettiest_, Etcoff has created a vividly imaginary world in which "beauty" seems obvious and universal to her characters: what people call "pretty" always seems the same and what appears beautiful never really varies because us male breeders always look for the same attributes in our women. Lesser imaginative readers might want to contest some of her claims on the basis that not all of us are straight, white, bourgeois unitedstatesians living in the late 20th century. Others may be tempted to ask Etcoff where a myriad of different counterexamples -- from non-European cultures and different historical periods -- might fit into her "study." But in the face of the many comforting certainties Etcoff provides, it should be easier to simply go along for the ride. This is an incredibly naive book, too bad public money probably went into funding the research.
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Summary: Good effort, but focused too much on visual beauty
Review: A good effort, but the beguiling simplicity of the sociobiologist position obscures the uncomfortable truth that standards of beauty vary cross-culturally, and exhibit wild swings in fashion. Only a more complex linking of the social constructionist and the essentialist influences in society adequatly the spectrum of human relationship behaviour. Also, this book ignores mounting evidence of the non-visual cues used by various modalities within human consciousness to detect and respond to other humans. C+
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Summary: A Real Eye Opener
Review: If you want to know (nearly) every scientific, philosophical and aesthetic reason why some people are thought to be more attractive than others read this book. The author, Nancy Etcoff, has collected information on beauty from only God knows how many sources and has compiled them together for a great discussion on beauty. This book covers everything from people's physical attributes to their fashion and also contains some of the best nonfiction writing I have ever had the joy of laying my eyes on. Great job, Nancy.
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