Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and his colleague, Jody L. Kovar, assert that beautiful people also tend to be smart people -- and vice versa.
In the July issue of Intelligence, the sociologists offer a theory to explain the confluence of beauty and brains. Their argument, in a nutshell: Intelligent men achieve higher status and marry beautiful women, who pass their genes on to their disproportionately attractive and smart kids, who win mates who are good-looking or brainy, and so on. Or at least that's what they put forth in the journal article, "Why Beautiful People are More Intelligent."
Click through and read the evidence. Their argument seems very likely to be correct. Of course, this also means that there is a flip side of dummy-ugly hybrids being bred as well.
Unfortunately, there is some pretty strong evidence that at least in Western societies intelligence currently is being selected against. This does not bode well for the future of either intelligence or natural beauty. If the brains are hooking up with the beauties and not having many kids then successive generations will be dumber and uglier.
If you are looking for some ray of hope in current human evolutionary trends there is one factor I've yet to see accounted for in any study on reproduction and intelligence: are smarter and higher class men more likely to divorce and remarry and have kids by their second spouse? My guess is that they are and that this effect will promote the spread of higher IQ genetic variations. But how big is that effect as compared to the glaringly obvious and quite strong phenomenon of people having fewer kids the more education they receive?
There is another interesting twist to the currently active selective pressures on human evolution in Western societies that I've yet to see discussed anywhere: Since people who have post-graduate degrees are politically more left-wing than people who have only bachelors degrees and since the more education one has the less likely one is to have kids (see the previous link) then are the genetic variations that code for a predisposition to left-liberalism being selected against? My guess is that high IQ people who do not go on to grad school are politically to the right of high IQ people who do. Well, the latter are probably having fewer kids than the smarties who do not go to grad school. So are the future generations of high IQ people going to be more right-wing than they are now?
In the longer run genetic engineering of offspring will be used to make offspring both better looking and smarter and likely more out-going and charming as well. What is less obvious to me is what their politics will be like. Once offspring genetic engineering becomes possible will people tend to choose personality characteristics for their children that make them crunchy granola liberals, paleoconservatives, highly individualistic libertarians, or what exactly? My one guess along these lines is that there will be a polarization with people choosing personality characteristics for their offspring that are stronger versions of various personality types.
By Randall Parker at 2004 May 30 01:29 PM Trends, Human Evolution | TrackBackI think you've got a typo in the first line (where I've capitalized the word)...
Brainy men use their abilities to achieve economic status that allows them to mate with beautiful MEN and this is selecting for beauty-brain hybrids.
I'm pretty sure you mean women not men!
So, Randall,
(1) Have kids?
(2) Are you now, or have you ever, gone to grad school?
(3) Do you consider yourself left-wing?
Sniffy M:
What difference would it make? In any large population sample very few individuals are terribly close to the average. Randall could be a fundamentalist Muslim with 12 kids and 3 PhD's and still not invalidate his observation.
A smart ugly guy marries a beautiful dumb gal, and they have four kids.
The first child is smart and beautiful, gets an MBA, goes into business, and winds up rich, with a spouse who is also beautiful, and they have three kids (it almost seems a duty to have more children, plus they're so cute). Living in a competitive world that rewards merit and being well endowed, this firstborn buys into the philosophy of personal responsibility, and always votes Republican.
The second child is smart but ugly, gets a PhD and enters academia, finds a spouse with a postgraduate degree and they have one child. Competition seems to always reward superficial traits, the salary always comes from the government, and there is a comfort in being surrounded by like-thinking and intelligent people, so voting Democrat is de rigeur.
The third of the four children is dumb but beautiful, gets an undergraduate degree and goes into Marketing or Sales, marries a midlevel exec and has three kids. Politics is boring, but voting is a responsibility. The supported candidate is chosing on the walk to voting booth, but seems nice and has a full head of hair.
The fourth child is dumb and ugly, gets an education degree, and has no offspring. Democrat.
Why is it always brainy men and beautiful women? Why the brainy men divorcing? Usually it's brainy women doing the divorcing - after they've become bored with their not-so-brainy, less interesting with age, hankering-after-glory-years husband.
Yes, beauty and brains often come together - in the women. The women are smart. Get that through your biased skulls when reporting. Yeah, duh, we know men like pretty women and women are supposed to not care, but really we do, we're just too "nice" to emasculate men by criticizing that they could take better care of themselves (and they say we should do that for them). There are enough cases where beauty and brains get traded for each other and for other benefits. Stop always painting women into the dumb, gold-digging, trophy-existing corner.
This is possibly the dumbest thing i have ever read.
To even compare something as subjective and culteral as beauty to something as empirical as intelligence is just ludicrous.
"theories" like this make me wonder how many peoples parents pay for them to get through graduate school( ie buying test answers and possible professors dignity).
if this is the culmination of your education I highly suggest you get a new dayjob!