Psychology Today has an article on their website called “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature”. These are things that the author believes to be true, is convinced that science can demonstrate, but may be controversial to state in today’s society. I thought it might be interesting to examine each one of them.

1. Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them) – The article disagrees with the commonly accepted notion that popular media glorifies what men find attractive and what women wish to look like. They point out that women were dying their hair blonde centuries ago and that even in repressive countries women wish to have a Barbiesque physique. The assertion is that this is biologically driven, that shiny blonde hair is a sign of health, a slim waist indicates a greater ability to have children, large breasts signal fertility, etc.

Women's desire to look like Barbie—young with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, and blue eyes—is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to the desire of men to mate with women who look like her. There is evolutionary logic behind each of these features.

Translation…. Gentlemen prefer blondes and blondes have more fun? Like many of the items here, this is predicated on the notion that men have a biological imperative to reproduce as much as possible and that young women with blonde hair, big breasts, blue eyes, and slim waists are the most likely women to successfully produce children with. Its all about the evolution, baby!

2. Humans are naturally polygamous – I wrote about this some time ago in this post. There is certainly much in human history to indicate that monogamy does not come naturally. My friend Patrick commented on that post that monogamy evolved to keep men from killing each other in competition for women. Monogamy increases the number of available women as opposed to wealthy men monopolizing them in a polygamous society. The article agrees with Patrick’s assertion.

Among primate and nonprimate species, the degree of polygyny highly correlates with the degree to which males of a species are larger than females. The more polygynous the species, the greater the size disparity between the sexes. Typically, human males are 10 percent taller and 20 percent heavier than females. This suggests that, throughout history, humans have been mildly polygynous.

Translation – Tall dark handsome men get to have more sex and produce more children, thus increasing the average height of men as compared to women.

3. Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy.

I found this one to be interesting and somewhat counterintuitive. If you propose the idea of polygyny (one man marrying multiple women) to the average couple the woman will shrink at the idea, thinking, “I don’t want to have to share my guy with a bunch of other women.” Men, on the other hand, get a gleam in their eyes, pondering the idea that, “I get to have sex with a lot of women and not get in trouble for it. Whats not to like?”

Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don't realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy.

What the men don’t get is that for most of them it wouldn’t mean they would have a bunch of wives to have sex with. The Bill Gates of the world would have large harems of beautiful wives and be able to amply support all of them. Less wealthy but still well off men might have 3-4 wives. The average guy on the street? He’d be left out completely or forced to compete with all the other average guys for the small number of still available women.

As George Bernard Shaw puts it, "The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one."

Have you seen actor Fred Thompson’s wife? Total knockout. If he was Fred the plumber or Fred the grocery store bagger would he have attracted a woman like her? In a polygynous society women would flock to Fred the actor/politician. The other Freds would be left out in the cold.

Translation – Guys, you better watch for what you wish for. Girls, you don’t know what you’re missing!

4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim – I think we already knew this, as I can’t remember any other type of suicide bomber. Almost all of them are Muslim. The author ties this to polygyny as mentioned above. Muslim society allows for polygyny, thus depleting the pool of available women for the guy on the street. There is also the mention of the 72 virgins available for Muslims who martyr themselves. Stay on Earth and have no wife and no sex or blow yourself up and find 72 virgins at your disposal?

It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.

Translation – the lack of sex and promise of it in the hereafter makes men blow themselves into little pieces.

5. Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce. – This one seemed a little puzzling to me. What possible difference could the child’s gender have to do with a decision to divorce?

Since a man's mate value is largely determined by his wealth, status, and power—whereas a woman's is largely determined by her youth and physical attractiveness—the father has to make sure that his son will inherit his wealth, status, and power, regardless of how much or how little of these resources he has. In contrast, there is relatively little that a father (or mother) can do to keep a daughter youthful or make her more physically attractive.

Translation – Beautiful girls will always have a leg up but guys need wealth and power to succeed. This affects the parent’s decision to divorce.

6. Beautiful people have more daughters – Huh? I always believed that gender was a roll of the genetic dice. Heads you have a boy, tails it’s a girl! Au contraire says the author:

Physical attractiveness, while a universally positive quality, contributes even more to women's reproductive success than to men's. The generalized hypothesis would therefore predict that physically attractive parents should have more daughters than sons. Once again, this is the case. Americans who are rated "very attractive" have a 56 percent chance of having a daughter for their first child, compared with 48 percent for everyone else.

Translation – I’m not sure about this one. The reverse of this would be that ugly but wealthy people would be more likely to have boys, as wealth and power are the most desirable things they can pass down to their children.

7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals. – We all know that most criminal acts committed by men occur in their late teens and into their twenties. Relatively few of those crimes are committed in middle age. Is the same true for geniuses? Do they produce their best work at a young age and then tail off as they get older?

Paul McCartney has not written a hit song in years, and now spends much of his time painting. Bill Gates is now a respectable businessman and philanthropist, and is no longer a computer whiz kid. J.D. Salinger now lives as a total recluse and has not published anything in more than three decades. Orson Welles was a mere 26 when he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane.

It could explain why so many of us in middle age revel in the glory that was our youth.

The similarity between Bill Gates, Paul McCartney, and criminals—in fact, among all men throughout evolutionary history—points to an important concept in evolutionary biology: female choice.

Women often say no to men. Men have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them. Men have built (and destroyed) civilization in order to impress women, so that they might say yes.

Translation – Guys will do almost anything to get laid. Once they get what they want (sex) they become less driven and less productive.

8. The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of. – Many men do buy red sports cars and stylish clothes in midlife. Is this because they are trying to recapture their youth? Not quite, the authors say:

Many middle-aged men do go through midlife crises, but it's not because they are middle-aged. It's because their wives are.

Therefore, if a fifty year old man is married to a twenty five year old woman he has no midlife crisis. Therefore….

When he buys a shiny-red sports car, he's not trying to regain his youth; he's trying to attract young women to replace his menopausal wife by trumpeting his flash and cash.

Translation – Middle aged men like hot younger women. Addendum – Men are jerks.

9. It's natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they're male).

“……while powerful men throughout Western history have married monogamously (only one legal wife at a time), they have always mated polygynously (they had lovers, concubines, and female slaves).”

It is not because they are powerful that they want to have illicit sex. Becoming powerful is a great way to get laid.

Men strive to attain political power, consciously or unconsciously, in order to have reproductive access to a larger number of women. Reproductive access to women is the goal, political office but one means. To ask why the President of the United States would have a sexual encounter with a young woman is like asking why someone who worked very hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it.

Bill Clinton started his career as a law professor. I’m sure there was a pool of women around the school that he could seduce. Then he was elected attorney general of Arkansas. The pool of women grew. Then he became governor and it grew even more. Then of course he became president and the pool was huge. The trouble was that opportunity was smaller and the consequences for getting caught were great.

Translation – Most of what men do, what they achieve, the wealth and power they accumulate is so that they can have more sex with more women.

10. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist – Contrary to commonly accepted ideas that sexual harassment is about power and not sex, the authors state that it is about both. They bring about a study to illustrate men’s attitudes about sex:

Studies demonstrate unequivocally that men are far more interested in short-term casual sex than women. In one now-classic study, 75 percent of undergraduate men approached by an attractive female stranger agreed to have sex with her; none of the women approached by an attractive male stranger did. Many men who would not date the stranger nonetheless agreed to have sex with her.

Therefore, men sexually harass women because they want to have sex with them. The leering overweight boss that “accidentally” rubs up against a woman and is always asking her out for a drink? He wants her to have sex with him and is using his power to try and get it.

The author states that men harass women like they used to harass other men…as a competitive way to dominate and get ahead in the workplace.

Many women legitimately complain that they have been subjected to abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment by their male coworkers. Browne points out that long before women entered the labor force, men subjected each other to such abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment.

Translation – Men act like jerks because they are driven to have sex.

I’ve never known quite what to think about evolutionary biology and psychology. It boils down to the idea that men are driven above all to reproduce and that women are driven by maternal instincts and a desire for stability and security for their children. Are we really as simple as all that?

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