Survival of the Prettiest : The Science of Beauty

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Summary: There's still hope for ugly people!
Review: I found this book an interesting compiliation of facts and studies, one of those that you can pick up, open to a page, and find out some fun thing to share with your spouse. However, coming from a biology background, I saw again why biology is still the "softest" of the "hard" sciences (and psychology isn't a science at all!)--human beings, and all living organisms, are systems that are too complex to follow hard and fast rules. In chemistry, you combine hydrogen and oxygen in the right proportions and conditions, and you will always get water. But in behavioral biology, you combine a clear-skinned, symmetrical, 36-24-36 20-year-old blond with a slightly older, tall, muscular, well-dressed man...and you're not always going to get even a phone number exchanged. While this book talks about what the average person finds attractive, if sexual selection went strictly by these rules, Marilyn Monroe should have had 10 children (in biology, # of children=fitness) and the toothless potato-woman down the street should have none--and we've all seen how that doesn't work! Etcoff does briefly address the phenomenon of people ending up with others at their same level of attractiveness, but doesn't explain how that happens, and how these end up as happy, successful unions if, according to these studies, neither partner could ever find the other attractive!

One thing that did disappoint me is that Etcoff didn't explain the varying "fashions" of women's body shapes, compared to the consistancy of what's found attractive in men (Venus de Milo looks rather paunchy, but David's still a hottie!). She actually seemed to deny its reality, saying that whether what's deemed attractive in a woman is voluptuous or reed-thin, [spoiler alert!] an "attractive" female body has a consistant waist-to-hip ratio around .7. That may be, but you can't deny that Mae West is a very different vision of pulchritude than Lara Flynn Boyle, and the one body type wouldn't have been considered desireable in the other's time period. If an idea of beauty is instinctive, we shouldn't expect it to deviate so widely over such a short evolutionary period of time.

A former professor of mine, David Wilson, published a study showing that ratings of each other's attractiveness increased after two people had worked together on a task successfully. This is just one of the many ways in which what most people consider attractive is modified by circumstances and interactions. So don't let this be a depressing read if you're a short bald man or a woman over 20 who's had a child and looks like it-- while Etcoff has written an interesting book, and perhaps even a factually accurate book, you need only look around at the couples you know to see that "Survival of the Prettiest" isn't strictly how things play out in the real world!

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Summary: more intriguing evolutionary psychology fare
Review: "Survival of the Prettiest", to me was yet more fascinating evolutionary psychology fare. I just love this stuff. Don't be turned off by the introduction. It reads like an editorial and is actually more like a conclusion. It contains few of those juicy research tidbits that makes evolutionary psychology so interesting. The juicy bits of information start in the second chapter and keep going right on into the last. This book read like a page turning murder mystery. If you liked "Survival of the Prettiest" you might also like the following books: Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why we are the way we are, the new scinece of evolutionary psychology; David Barash, The Whisperings Within; Matt Ridley, The Red Queen; Matt Ridley, Nature via Nuture; David Barash, The myth of Monogamy; and David Barash, Making Sense of Sex. Other books on my reading list are: Barash & Lipton, The Gender Gap, David Buss, The Evolution of Desire, and Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind.