ps418

According to a study in the May issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, women's judgements about men's facial attractiveness are signficantly positively correlated with the motility and morphology, but not concentration, of men's sperm. Unfortunately, the article's abstract does not say how strong the correlation is. It would be interesting to see if the same relationship holds in other cultures as well, or is peculair to Valencia, Spain.

Soler et al, 2003. Facial attractiveness in men provides clues to semen quality. Evolution and Human Behavior 24, 199-207.


There is a press release on the New Scientist website.

Patrick

Godless Dave

So all you ladies who want to get it on but not get pregnant, the safest thing to do is sleep with ugly guys! I would be happy to volunteer my services.

Soyin Milka

Are you the Godless Dave from that picture?
http://www.sneddens.net/images/godless_dave.jpg

Sleek nose ending in a small bump, minuscule nostrils, soft eyes, delicate eyebrows, round pinchable cheeks and a small mouth... You got a baby face thing going on dude. And you look like a nice cuddle bear with that...

There's not enough latex in the world to make you look safe now.

Soyin

Gurdur

Oh gaaaawd, not again !

Soyin Milka

From memory, there are at least four factors affecting judgement of facial attractiveness, both by men and women:

1) Healthiness
2) Age, youth being favored.
3) Symetry of facial features
4) Facial expression, smiling being favored over frowning for exemple.

Maybe that correlation can be explained simply by the fact some of the "attractive" men also turn out to be young and healthy. Maybe age and general health are linked to sperm motility and morphology. From an evolutionary viewpoint, all that research would prove then is that women have a natural tendency to prefer young, healthy men to others.

That's controversial stuff

Soyin

Soyin Milka

Oh stop it Gurdur!
Yer just jealous because another guy than you got some attention.



Soyin

ps418

Interesting points. However, all of the subjects in this study were male students at a single university, and I assume that there was not a very wide distribution of ages, though the abstract does not say anything about this. Also, though I think most everyone would indeed prefer a healthy mate to an unhealthy one, I don't think its correct that women prefer "young" men.

I would be interested to see if the correlation holds if you repeated the experiment with individuals of exactly the same age and health status. Would women's judgement of facial attractiveness then still predict men's sperm motility and morphology?

Patrick

Soyin Milka

I will pretend I'm an evolutionary behaviorist and try to answer these questions. Everything I say should be taken with a very huge grain of salt however (A boulder of salt would be adequate).

Why I think women prefer young men to older ones.

The traditional model of mating behavior for women implies that women would be attracted to powerful men with lots of available ressources because her offspring would benefit from such ressources. If you accept this model, I can understand your objection that "women prefer young men to old men". It doesn't fit since older men usually are in better positions, have more power and ressources. Thus you would expect women to be attracted by older more powerful men.

It's easy to raise objections to this traditional model however. For exemple, one can wonder if women are really attracted by powerful men or if they are not simply attracted by power itself. In many cultures, the only way women could have access to wealth and power was through marriage with a man who had them. Give women other options to get money than marrying a dude who has some and everything changes.

As our societies are becoming more egalitarian, we can already see changes in the way couples are formed. Women who have power and wealth of their own rely on other, more personal, criterias to choose their partners. There's now a lot of pressure on men in the western world to be physically attractive, pressure that wasn't around a few decades ago (think about TV ads about hair restoration or skin care products for men. Could you imagine that happening in 1963?).

I understand the idea that women prefer young men to older ones might look like it goes against the traditional model of a "woman looking for a powerful and ressourcefull mate to help her raise her offspring", but I don't think it does. If a woman needs a mate to provide her with "physical support" but not ressources, she'd be better off with a young one would would be less likely to fall to diseases. A young mate is gonna be around for longer than an older one.

Given the choice and all other things being equal, it's conceivable that women would, just like men, prefer youth in their mate. A very corny test known as the "Mel Gibson" could provide proof of that. Give women a choice between the Mel from "Mad Max" and "The Patriot". Almost all of them would pick the young one..

Men age better than women, lucky bastards. They can still take comfort in that. But most women prefer younger men, just like most men prefer younger women. That's my unsubstantiated unscientific personal belief, but I stand by it.

Factors possibly linked to motility, speed and morphology of sperm AND perceived facial attractiveness by women

Aside from health and youth?
Err.

Smoking maybe? Smoking is linked to erectile dysfunction and has lots of adverse effects on spermatogenesis. Non-smokers are known to rank smokers as less attractive also. So smoking could theoretically be part of the explanation, but it's unlikely in the case of that study since they used pictures. Unless the smokers had teeth and mustaches yellowed by cigarette use?

There's a couple other lifestyle habits that could maybe be part of the explanation, like drugs or anabolic steroids use (Makes some faces look puffy and is bad for sperm). I know St Jonh's wort is bad for hamster sperm too, but I don't think it would be relevant here. I found a neat link with information about the causes of male infertility though, maybe there's a clue in there I didn't see:
http://www.fertilitext.org/p4_male/m...fertility.html

Finally, maybe there's the "horniness" factor. Men who expect to have sex in the next few days have higher testosterone levels and produce more sperm than those who don't. Type "logger testosterone beard" in google and you should find a couple amusing scientific articles about that. Maybe there's a "feedback loop" going on here. Men who are judged as attractive have more sex and men who have more sex are judged as more attractive. But that would sort of imply facial hair, even when freshly shaved, is attractive to women.

Bah.
I wish I was more knowledgeable.
I think the correlation between women's judgement of facial attractiveness and men's sperm motility and morphology is mostly explained by youth and health.

I gave it my best shot.
Feel free to mock me

Soyin

ps418

Why would I mock you? You've given me some good ideas to think about.

Like I said, I agree with you about the health aspect. In fact, that's more or less what the paper was proposing -- that the features of male faces that females tend to find attractive are the features that indicate health. The article begins by saying:

However, having read the paper now, I doubt that age explains much of the correlation between facial attactiveness and sperm motility and morphology. In the paper, two experiments are described. In the first experiment, the men were 19 to 36 years old, with a mean age of 23.4, and a S.D. = 2.7. In the second group, age ranged only from 21 to 29 years, with a mean = 23.9, and a SD of 2.3. In both cases, the correlations are strong, and the correlations in the more age-restricted group were just as strong or stronger. Therefore, I doubt that age explains a major part of the correlation.

Well, the paper did not report a correlation between women's judegement of facial attractiveness and sperm concentration, but did find significant correlations with motility and morphology. I am willing to be corrected, but I doubt that 'attractive' people are more or less horny than 'unattractive' people.


Patrick

ps418

Would you believe me if I told you I did not see that coming? Its true

Patrick