Millions of people watched the live telecast of the Oscars this past Sunday. Most nominees navigated through the media circuit uttering roughly the same message: "It's enough to have been nominated amongst such an illustrious group of peers." Well, dear nominees, several intriguing studies suggest that you should have hoped to win, if you care about your life expectancy and fertility!
The epidemiologist Donald Redelmeier and his coauthor Sheldon Singh published a paper in 2001 in the Annals of Internal Medicine wherein they contrasted the life expectancy of academy award winners, academy award nominees who lost, and a control group of actors and actresses who had appeared in the same films. Incredibly, they found that winners lived 3.6 years longer than the nominees, and 3.9 years longer than the control group. Hence, whereas being nominated for an Oscar does not yield a life expectancy advantage, winning an Oscar does. The authors did not investigate likely causes for this effect, but they did provide several speculative possibilities none of which struck me as particularly compelling (as they should apply equally to the nominees). Nonetheless, this finding is in line with substantial scientific evidence that social status is beneficial to one's health (see for example Marmot, 2004).
More recently, the behavioral ecologist Marc Hauber published an article in the Journal of Ethology wherein he documented a positive correlation between the numbers of Oscars won by actors/actresses and the numbers of biological children that they reported having (i.e., unconfirmed biological children are not counted). Sorry Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt...adopted children do not count in this metric! Interestingly, the effect was found for both sexes although the strength of the correlation was greater for actors. This is in line with the Bateman effect, which suggests that the variance in reproductive fitness is greater for men than it is for women. I should mention that at a more macro level, scientists have found a negative correlation between countries' fertility rates and their wealth (as measured by say GDP), a phenomenon coined the demographic-economic paradox. Hence, whereas at a national level, socioeconomic status appears to reduce the macro fertility rate, the opposite holds true at an individual level (see Skirbekk, 2008). The fertility story is indeed complicated!
Natural selection proposes that organisms must survive long enough to reproduce. Sexual selection posits that it is insufficient to survive, as organisms must be sufficiently desirable in the mating market to pass on their genes. Whereas the increased life expectancy of academy-award winners is outside the direct purview of natural selection as the increased life expectancy occurs outside the maximally fertile period for men (and during menopause for women), sexual selection might indeed be operative here.
The latter findings suggest that not only will Sean Penn live a long life but also more copies of his genes are (will be) present in the human gene pool than say those of Kate Winslet (one-time winner) or Mickey Rourke (losing nominee)!
References:
Hauber, M. E. (2007). Fame, fortune, and fitness at the Academy Awards. Journal of Ethology, 25, 201-204.
Marmot, M. (2004). The status syndrome: How social standing affects our healthy and longevity. New York: Times Books.
Redelmeier, D. A., & Singh, S. M. (2001). Survival in Academy Award-winning actors and actresses. Annals of Internal Medicine, 134, 955-962.
Skirbekk, V. (2008). Fertility trends by social status. Demographic Research, 18, 145-180.
Source for Image:
http://images-cdn01.associatedcontent.com/image/A5858/58581/300_5...
