I know usually there's more than one reason for any complicated phenomenon in life, and was wondering if this was a possibility. Regarding the averageness factor and beauty. Two generalizations are that Men pick beautiful looking women(representative of the average of the local gene pool), and women pick men with amazing talents. Could it be said that men pick women based on their averageness beauty to stabilize the gene pool, and women pick men to select the upcoming best set of traits?

I guess my example would be Bill Gates. Not attractive. Amazing talents. If he and his offspring never picked attractive female mates, each generation would have that great traits of high intelligence and business acumen, but the allele distribution for all the other genetic characteristics would get ever more lopsided (and so uglier and uglier kids, and unhealthier and unhealthier kids). The interplay between male and female mate preference would allow the adoption of one great trait at a time, without the penalty of all the other undesirable traits that come along with that male. Bill Gate's bad genes would be washed out by a female who represented a great variety of heterogenous alleles, but he could still pass on the good parts.

To answer why women and men would be assigned different roles instead of striving for it together is that since women have to be all around healthier to successfully bear children, it makes sense to have them double up as caretakers of the running average (which ensures the populations best guess of a healthy set of genes), while men can bear the risk of supporting and expressing the success potential of new mutations.

One supporting idea for women picking the next step would be the intelligence difference between men and women. The averages are the same, but men have more outliers, whereas the IQ distribution of women tend to hover closer to the average. Men's genes are exploring the extremes, which may or may not be advantageous, while women are protecting what, at that point in time, seems to work best.

Just an idea, no PhD, closest thing I've got is a BS in Chem E, just throwing it out there.

Great blog... I always love it when people say that beauty is "only skin deep" Right. And intelligence is only brain deep?? Neither makes any sense and anybody with a rudimentary understanding of human nature should no better.

Nice blog.. even when I disagree with what you write, I always find it provocative.

The one commenter is absolutely correct. Men can be considered a genetic filter. Woman are so much more valueable biologically. One man in a tribe of women can reset the tribe, one woman in a tribe of men means the tribe is in big trouble. One reason women are picky in mate selection is because of the genetic filter capacity of men. They go for the alpha males. I would like to add off subject, that as long as schools gear themselves to the average, to mediocrity, they will continue to oppress men on the farther end of the intelligence bell curve, and allow athletes in junior and highschool to be seen as the alpha males as ecxellence is rewarded in that field. Do we want a culture of scientists or jocks.
The geek should inherent the earth.

Thanks for this.

I despise when bleeding hearts (particularly women) have the nerve to say that they don't care about looks and then proceed to call anyone who says that they DO care about looks "shallow"; right ladies, those posters you had in college of a shirtless Brad Pitt were to highlight his kind and nurturing personality.

Satoshi Kanazawa, just because you are only beautiful on the inside doesn't mean you are any less lovable.... by other ugly people. HA!