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By Root 300 0

women find a well-proportioned muscular man more attractive than a scrawny man. Men also use the muscular development of other men as a signal—for example, as a way of quickly assessing whether to get into a fight or to retreat. A typical example involves a magnificently muscular instructor named Andy at the gymnasium where my wife and I exercise. Whenever Andy lifts weights, the eyes of all the women and men in the gym are on him. When Andy explains to a customer how to use one of the gym’s exercise machines, he begins by demonstrating the machine’s operation himself while asking the customer to place a hand on the relevant muscle on Andy’s body so that the customer can understand the correct motion. Undoubtedly, this means of explanation is pedagogically useful, but I am sure that Andy also enjoys the overwhelming impression that he leaves.

At least in traditional societies based on human muscle power rather than on machine power, muscles are a truthful signal of male quality, like a deer’s antlers. On the one hand, muscles enable men to gather resources such as food, to construct resources such as houses, and to defeat rival men. In fact, muscles play a much larger role in a traditional man’s life than do antlers in the life of a deer, which uses antlers only in fighting. On the other hand, men with other good qualities are better able to acquire all the protein required to grow and maintain big muscles. One can fake one’s age by dyeing one’s hair, but one cannot fake big muscles. Naturally, men did not evolve muscles solely to impress other men and women, in the way that male bowerbirds evolved a golden crest solely as a signal to impress other bowerbirds. Instead, muscles evolved to perform functions, and men and women then evolved or learned to respond to muscles as a truthful signal.

A beautiful face may be another truthful signal, although the underlying reason is not as transparent as in the case of muscles. If you stop to think about it, it may seem absurd that our sexual and social attractiveness depends on facial beauty to such an inordinate degree. One might reason that beauty says nothing about good genes, parenting qualities, or food-gathering skills. However, the face is the part of the body most sensitive to the ravages of age, disease, and injury. Especially in traditional societies, individuals with scarred or misshapen faces may thereby be advertising their proneness to disfiguring infections, inability to take care of themselves, or burden of parasitic worms. A beautiful face was thus a truthful signal of good health that could not be faked until twentieth-century plastic surgeons perfected facelifts.

Our remaining candidate for a truthful signal is women’s body fat. Lactation and child care are a big energy drain on a mother, and lactation tends to fail in an undernourished mother. In traditional societies before the advent of infant formulas and before the domestication of milk-producing hoofed animals, a mother’s lactational failure would have been fatal to her infant. Hence a woman’s body fat would be a truthful signal to a man that she was capable of rearing his child. Naturally, men should prefer the correct amount of fat: too little could be a harbinger of lactational failure, but too much could signal difficulties in walking, poor food-gathering ability, or early death from diabetes.

Perhaps because fat would be difficult to discern if it were spread uniformly over the body, women’s bodies have evolved with fat concentrated in certain parts that are readily visible and assessed, although the anatomical location of those fat deposits varies somewhat among human populations. Women of all populations tend to accumulate fat in the breasts and hips, to a degree that varies geographically. Women of the San population native to southern Africa (the so-called Bushmen and Hottentots) and women of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal accumulate fat in the buttocks, producing the condition known as steatopygia. Men throughout the world tend to be interested in women’s breasts, hips, and buttocks,