Men who, shall we say, are not the pick of the litter tend not to be as attracted to hot women as alpha males are. Sure, there's a strategic element of "I can't so I won't try," but evidence suggests that beyond bar maneuvering, our taste automatically adapts to what's achievable.

A few months ago I came across a poster at the annual Association for Psychological Science convention titled "Men's Perceptions of Physical Attractiveness Develop According to Their Own Mate Value." Glenn Scheyd Jr., a psychologist at Nova Southeastern University, had collected data showing that, while desirable men tend to agree on which females are most attractive, the opinions of less desirable men are all over the map. (See my writeup in the magazine.) "I interpret this is evidence of an evolved adaptation that has been designed by natural selection to reduce wasted effort in the domain of mate search," he says.

The desirability of men in the studies was assessed several ways. One measure is a self-perceived mate-value scale. Another is the number of sex partners they've had in the past year calibrated with a sociosexual orientation inventory (basically, how open they are to casual sex.) In another case, people in a Caribbean village assigned each other peer ratings of mate value.

Scheyd says the "noisier" ratings of beta males may be explained in part by speed-dating research showing that less attractive people pay more attention to nonphysical features.

Is it possible that the shaping of preferences based on what's obtainable is not confined to the domain of mating? Would poor people find mansions less attractive? Scheyd suspects "facultative calibration" is strongest in mate selection because damage to your reputation from falling on your face publicly, especially in the small groups in which we evolved, is far greater than in other domains. And women may protect their own reputations by not cozying up to a guy who's already struck out multiple times. "A house does not care if it is one's second, third, or tenth choice," Scheyd says, "and neither particularly do realtors."

Ok, is it possible that ugly guys just have a history of dating women who aren't perfect 10s, and associations from their dating experience color their sense of who's hot? Scheyd hopes to control for this factor by manipulating guys' feelings of desirability in the lab, maybe by having an attractive assistant flirt with them.

In his studies, women don't show the same effect as men. On the prehistoric savannah, guys would put their sperm in almost any taker, so women didn't have to worry about being shot down by the most-wanted men.