Thank you, thank you, thank you, for taking the time to thoroughly refute that article of his.

I agree with a lot (maybe all?) of your criticism of Kanazawa's article, but I think comparing ANYONE to Rush Limbaugh is needlessly cruel...

To be fair, while Kanazawa's article may have been provacative/attention grabbing, there are TONS of distinctions to be made between what Kanazawa was doing and what unethical used car salespeople do or what Rush Limbaugh does--for example, Rush Limbaugh goes on hateful rants and stuff.

What do you have personally against Kanazawa? If you wrote an article with some flawed arguments and a misinterpretation of a study, would you want one of your peers to compare you to Hitler or to a prostitute or something?

You claim that Kanazawa is like Rush Limbaugh by trying to get attention and be provactive, but your post is a blatantly disrespectful and personal attack, and I feel it is patently hypocritical since personal attacks are very provocative. This isn't science, this is like the Jerry Springer show, watching scientists bash each other (which is kind of lame, because your insults are not that creative or entertaining).

I have to agree, thank you for a well thought out reply to that article.

And I have read this post twice now and I can't seem to find any personal attacks of any kind. All the attacks are on the (lack of) integrity of his articles.

Oh well again thanks for the reply to the origonal article

Thanks for setting the record straight on this "bully" pushing around false ideas. Your points are simple and convincing. I too read about this study in the news and was immediately skeptical when I found that more of the heavier girls reported having sex themselves. It's hard to imagine there wasn't plenty of stretching of the truth in their reports. This is dubious science and of course further studies are needed before such "sure" conclusions can be reached about it.

Come on...All you had to do was Google the guy to find out whether he holds a Ph.D. or not (he does, from the University of Arizona--see link below). You should have at least done a LITTLE research before publicly casting doubt upon Kanazawa's academic credentials. Sheesh...

http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/MES/people/kanazawa.htm

I did do "a little research." I looked at his bio on the Psychology Today web site, as I pointed out.

Whether or not someone holds a Ph.D. (or any other degree) is immaterial to the integrity of their arguments. No casting of doubt was intended. It was more a matter of not wanting to seem disrespectful by repeatedly calling the writer "Kanazawa" with no "Doctor" or "Mister" before.

Funny how the negative responses to the post all try to personalize the matter, rather than responding to the analysis of the argument. Wonder why that is?

Kanazawa writes:

"Men have little say in the matter … He can say 'yes' or he can say 'yes, please'

Kanazawa is a man. Does that mean he has sex every time it's offered to him? I hope not :)

Okay maybe that was a tasteless joke, but sometimes men actually do say no to sex. Sometimes women go for the nerdy guy with the Phd who teaches at a university and makes crappy wages, over the more higher status and beefer banker or lawyer. As a former nerdy female professor, I know that some women prefer the company of a fellow nerd rather than heading towards the nearest martini bar and trying to pick up a higher status medical doctor.

And sometimes a woman with the proper waist-to-hip ratio will be dumped by a guy so he can pursue a woman just as pretty, symmetrical, and just as old even though she might slim hips. I guess that guy knows although sometimes slim hipped women have a harder time birthing babies, c-sections are generally safe.

Thank you for showing the PT blog readers some of the many debates surrounding evolutionary science. People who spend a lot of time at R1 universities know that evolutionary psychology get critiqued on many different sides (neuroscience, religion, sociology, cultural anthropology, demography ect).

But you pointed out that on the pop culture front evolutionary psychologists do alright because their arguments are headline grabbing and sexy.

I do have one major problem with your post. Why are you so critical of used cars? Everyone knows new cars depreciate once you drive them off the lot. In fact, I might actually go for the sensible guy who recognizes this fact over the guy who wants to be a show off by buying an expensive new car every year. Maybe I am just bad at "mating"? Kidding.

"Funny how the negative responses to the post all try to personalize the matter, rather than responding to the analysis of the argument. Wonder why that is?"

Because your post is mostly an inappropriate, content-free, embarrassingly low and ignorant personal attack. This post is actually much closer to the pugnacious style of the conservative attack pundits you list than anything on Kanazawa's blog.

"High status males have a wide range of options when it comes to mating. Ask any professional athlete, musician, or high-flying businessman what he thinks of Kanazawa's claim..."

Yes, and these very high status males, who are a very small fraction of all men, have about as much mating opportunity as an *average* female. Recall the famous Clark and Hatfield study: *75%* of the desirable men that were approached by average women agreed to casual sex. The figure for men was 0%.

If Johnny Depp walked around a shopping mall asking women to come back to his hotel for sex, it is plausible that even he wouldn't have a 75% success rate.

I don't get the impression you are thinking too deeply about the extent and significance of female choice. The same can not be said of Kanazawa.

"One could fly a blimp through the gaping holes in that argument. Only a man who has never had occasion to pass up an offer of sex could follow that line of reasoning."

Seriously? This is about as immature as personal attacks get. If you are trying to take the high road against sensationalism, you shouldn't engage in low class, machismo sexual insults like this. I'm embarrassed for you.

Anyway, using the General Social Survey, I too have found that overweight women have more sex partners than normal weight women. However, men in developed nations do not find overweight women more desirable and there is much research that converges in this direction. Parental investment theory squares this circle. Men are more likely to *invest* in ecologically attractive women, and simply have no-strings sex with unattractive women if the opportunity presents itself. Unattractive women are more likely to use sex to seek investment than attractive women, who can more successfully withhold sex to obtain investment.

e.g. See this paper:

"Attractive men and women were more successful in implementing their preferred mating strategies according to parental investment theory. Men with attractive faces and bodies enjoyed significantly more short-term mating success than their peers, with no cost in their long-term mating success, whereas women with attractive faces had more long-term mating success than their peers."

http://www.lwsimmons.org/ElectronicPapers/rhodes_et_at_05.pdf

Regarding determinism in Psychology/Social Sciences, my article “Determinism and the Antiquated Deontology of the Social Sciences” might be of interest:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004152/

It basically argues that the common gut-level reaction in the psychology/social sciences to anything deemed “deterministic” is overly simplistic and out of touch with the last half century of important developments concerning free will and ethics in philosophy.

Thanks. Very good response.

You make some very good points, and if you read the comments to Kanazawa's piece you'd see that the readers themselves pointed out many flaws. I, myself, pointed out many flaws and over-simplifications in the argument presented and suggested alternative hypotheses that are supported by the apparent study results.

Now that you've clarified the actual conditions of the test, the potential list of supported hypotheses grows even greater, mean it leaves more questions than answers.

That being said, you make a valid point about some areas of EP being presented as if by used car salesmen. This is true to some degree, and I always highly recommend that everyone play devils advocate to try to come up with an argument that disproves the presented hypothesis while being consistent with the data.

However, I don't believe this is limited to EP. You see this sort of confirmation bias in many fields of science. The more complex the system being studied the easier it is, and greater pressure exists, to oversimplify. Even in something as simple as toxicity studies (e.g., BPA) and cancer statistics (cell phones) there are great efforts to "sell" a certain point of view.

Granted, much of that occurs once the activists take over and the sales brochures look less and less like the science they pretend to represent, but scientists do tend to come with their own pre-conceived notions. I recall a huge argument locally over a study suggesting that biking on the street is safer than on dedicated bike paths, something the study author incorrectly concluded when the exact opposite conclusion could be supported by the same data with a slightly modified hypothesis.

Perhaps it is unique in EP that the scientists also tend to be a little bit activist. Perhaps it is a field just too young to have developed thorough and robust methods to maintain objectivity. My hope is that this side of EP firms up before it becomes more mainstream. I see it as a revolutionary leap in understanding, but it hasn't caught on in the mainstream press, public, or activist circles yet which still seems to think in terms of the long discredited tabula rasa model.

I just hope that EP can get its act together before it obtains escape velocity into the wilds of public space. There are some pretty radical and important EP ideas so I can see many longterm public rifts forming into EP religions if EP doesn't get it's act together in that respect.

That being said, EP offers the potential to develop such a mitigating gravitational pull to keep the ideas from flying off publicly. If EP put as much effort into studying how and why people develop such "dig your heals in" activist biases, regardless of the real data, perhaps it could offer the best way to present its own findings without causing such sociopolitical chaos.

I amazes me that in all this evaluation of theory, it is taken as fact that overweight women are not sexually desirable and therefore any number of sex partners she may have would all be men that she propositioned, who are unable to turn down free casual sex. A male's first choice would be to have sex with someone attractive. This is just plain rubbish.
I am an overweight, attractive woman. I don't think that I have more sexual opportunities than my thinner sisters, but I would say that I have a much easier time finding single, heterosexual men that are willing to commit to a relationship.I have an equally attractive sister that is very thin who has a hard time with men. She runs into men that say they will call and don't or just aren't interested in a relationship. During one six month period, she couldn't find someone to date at all. During that same six months, I had to explain to several very eligible men that I was just not looking for a serious relationship. I have, at different points in my life, looked for casual sex without much luck, because typically if I sleep with someone, they tend to start pressuring me for a commitment. I realize that this goes against the whole premise, but it is true.
It has nothing to do with the idea that women get to chose, and that men have no say in the matter. The truth is women don't always get to chose. Take a quick look at the statistics for arranged marriages, the selling of virgin daughters, stranger rape, date rape, societal pressures, forced female genital mutilation and coerced sex and you will see that women don't get to chose most of the time. It is all well and good for men to hold a pity party about how women can have sex with any man they want while "Joe the plumber" has to try hard just to get the fat chicks, but we still live in a world where there are men that SELL women to other men.
Back to the point, if I assume that "overweight women have more sex", and I don't think that is true across the board, it has more to do with living in an image based society. The men who are looking for a trophy lay don't bother approaching an overweight woman. Other men are looking for a woman that is comfortable in her own skin. A woman that they can be themselves with and not worry that they aren't good enough. I think that in our image based society there are many men who are tired of trying to have everything in their life look like an advertisement, only to end up broke and alone when they get left for a bigger, better deal. Believe it or not, there are a vast number of men that find a smart, funny, beautiful, good-hearted woman irresistible, regardless of size.
I blogged about a similar thing here http://princessofquitealot.wordpress.com/2007/12/16/living-large/

Did anyone note the irony that Christopher Ryan, a PhD and thus a "high status male," believes he can, through speculation and an uncanny ability to ignore common sense, propose to set the record straight about female sexual choice?

"only a male who has never had an occasion to turn down sex would agree with such an assumption."

I would wager that's the vast majority of American men. In my 30 years as a low status male, I have never been hit on by a woman or offered sex by a woman acting on her own initiative. Maybe I should have gotten a PhD so I could play make believe too. What the study clearly shows is what everyone knew anyway: women choose when and with whom to have sex, while men mercilessly compete for the opportunity with women obese or otherwise. Any woman who doesn't believe this can test the theory: go to a bar and sit there alone, see how long it takes for a male to attempt to pick you up.

*Only* high status males choose. Durrr. To be a high status male implies that you are not the average status male, you are therefore a minority among males. Is this rocket science? Meanwhile, average to low status females, including the obese, as the study shows, enjoy the freedom to choose only afforded to the high status male. Of course women are confined to the status as the *object* of male sexual competition, but then again, they're free to court males any time they please, which they seldom do (something we all know is true, although the obligatory female will come out of the woodwork and claim otherwise, of course). Therefore, the ball is in the females' court. For us average to low status males, which is the majority of us, the female, obese or otherwise, remains the employer who sits behind the desk and screens applicants. They choose, we do not. It must be nice to live in the fantasy land that your PhD affords you.

Thanks, Christopher. Well done. Did Mr. Kanazawa author anything good at all? What a quack.

I would assume the study to be true because it's commonly known fat girls will have sex with anything, in any way because of a notoriously low self-esteem. Attractive women are pickier and tend to wait for someone they find especially desireable. That's all the study really says. I'm sure normal weight women have considerably less sex than their overweight counterparts and that would be by having higher standards than a one night stand with a desperate chubby chaser that happened to look at them twice in the bar when they were drunk.

You argued,

"In the context of parental investment, "mating" refers to forming a durable pair bond that will last until the offspring are more or less independent, and has little to do with sex."

This is simply wrong. The pattern of parental investment in a species affects mating pattern of that species but these two concepts are different things. Even in the context of parental investment, a "mating" does not requires a durable pair bond. For example, in many animal species, males simply "mate" and leave the female and future offspring but we still can talk about the parental investment by the male and female, which is asymmetric in this case. The term, "short-term mating" strategy, will be a nonsense under your definition of "mating". But it is legitimate to talk about short-term mating strategy of the male and female in a species which is shaped by the pattern of maternal and paternal parental investment in that species.