Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [31]
First of all, let’s ditch the idea that beauty is subjective. It’s not. Studies have shown that even babies prefer attractive faces, so these preferences seem to be virtually hardwired into us—so much so that when hooked up to electrodes, people looking at beautiful female faces generated an extra electrical charge. And surveys show that there is strong agreement about whom people find attractive. Interestingly, composite pictures melding numerous faces always outscore individual faces in attractiveness and become more attractive the more faces you include, for the simple reasons that a more symmetrical face is the result. As we’ve already seen with the female orgasm, we’re big fans—albeit unwittingly—of symmetricality. Understanding why reveals the excellent evolutionary reasons for the way our desires have been shaped. In this case, being symmetrical is an excellent proxy for our general health. And how symmetrical you are is an excellent sign not just of how healthy you are now but also how healthy you have always been, since asymmetries tend to occur because of disease or illness during our fetal and childhood development. Hair is another good indicator, which helps explain the vast array of products directed at creating better-looking hair. Long, lustrous hair signals an equally long and robust good health. Skin acts as a similar signpost of health.
According to one theory, evolution has even added a wrinkle so that people with excellent genes can show off their fitness by displaying what evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi dubbed a “high cost signal.” Think back to Darwin and his original formulation of the survival of the fittest. When it comes to the utilitarian selection of certain qualities essential for the survival of a species—a gazelle’s speed or a bear’s claws—efficiency rules. When it comes to sexual selection, though, signaling to the opposite sex can involve a good bit of waste. Take, for example, the male peacock’s tail. It’s enormous, using a tremendous amount of the bird’s resources and making him more vulnerable to predators. But what it also does is signal to the female that he is so healthy, he doesn’t need to worry about hoarding his resources. In this way, the male peacock is able to distinguish himself from his moderately healthy peers. The high-cost signal can take all sorts of forms—think of the man who buys an expensive sports car as a signal that he has resources to burn. But we humans, like other animals, already have all sorts of high-cost “signals” built into us—as well as an unconscious desire to look for them in the opposite sex.
Think of the typical ideal for a man’s face—a large, square, “manly” jaw and chin. This ideal is so dominant that it is almost a visual cliché in our culture, and you would be hard-pressed to find a Hollywood leading man who doesn’t have that look. It turns out that women’s preference for that particular face is not merely some arbitrary aesthetic whim. You need a lot of testosterone during puberty to produce a face like that. The problem is that testosterone also suppresses the immune system and makes a young man more vulnerable to disease, so the ability to have such a face serves as a high-cost signal of genetic fitness. Only extremely fit individuals can afford that face and remain disease free.
Women have their own bodily signals. For instance, there is a very good reason men prefer full lips and why someone like Angelina Jolie is almost freakishly genetically fit. Although not a high-cost signal, those full lips require a woman to be hyperfeminine—at least when it comes to sex hormones. During puberty, the woman must experience both a surge of estrogen and a low level of testosterone. This also will give