We’ve been taught that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The maxim makes a pretty Christina Aguilera song, but it’s not exactly true.

As research into human attractiveness increases, many biologists, psychologists and even some sociologists are drawing the conclusion that our choices for sexual partners are driven by evolutionary factors beyond our control – that is, hot is hot and not is not for a reason.

And, like any exciting contemporary problem, it all has to do with sex.

Much of this research suggests that the fixation of today’s youth on facial reconstruction, breast augmentation and reduction, piercing and even hair dying comes from the evolutionary desire to impress, attract or compete for members of the preferred sex. This, the thinking goes, is responsible for trends like the skyrocketing nose-job rate and shrinking waistlines on frat rows from Syracuse University to UCLA.

‘We look at attractiveness in all social domains,’ said Dr. Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico, one of the top researchers of evolutionary aesthetics. ‘There are always beauty judgments. Darwinian selection put these mechanisms of selection in our brains, because hanging out with attractive people is associated with hanging out with healthy people.’

Much of evolutionary aesthetics, an expanding field of study, claims that who we find beautiful is a function of what Darwin termed ‘sexual selection.’ This phenomenon is responsible for seemingly absurd developments like a peacock’s speckled tail and a moose’s antlers – attributes that sometimes hinder the survival of one sex of a certain species, but which evolution has programmed to be sexually attractive, Thornhill said. This same selection is also widely accepted in evolutionary biology as the reason for human male competitiveness for ‘mates,’ and why humans consider similar characteristics attractive.

While personal tastes may vary in different environments, the underlying factors of attractiveness remain the same, according to the pervading scientific argument.

There are few better proving grounds for Thornhill’s theory than the SU Quad on a spring day. Yesterday, a balmy 73 degrees, the Quad overflowed with young bodies and their grass-stained observers. In the hallowed tradition that is Quad people-watching, certain bodies get preferential treatment. Tall guys with muscular arms and taut, clear skin get more attention than the short, pudgy, pasty sort. Women with symmetrical faces, large breasts and blonde hair get more attention than women wearing glasses and baggy clothes. In the season of skin, Thornhill’s hard-earned observations seem painfully obvious.

Most students gave generic answers about what they found attractive as they people-watched with friends. ‘The first thing I look for is proportion,’ said Gary Thomas, a freshman biology and psychology major. ‘Like, if they’ve got a big ass and everything else is small, that’s out of proportion.’

His friend Marisa Wolff, also a freshman biology major, cited hygiene as a major factor in attraction but also noted the importance of an oft-overlooked aspect of an attractive face. ‘The eyebrow really makes or breaks the relationship, guy or girl,’ Wolff said.

Another group of students across the Quad gave the typical dating-show responses: eyes, arms (‘not bony, but not Popeye’), height, ‘manageable breasts’ and legs. ‘Once, I wouldn’t date a guy because he had bad legs,’ said Amy Kaufmann, a senior advertising and psychology major.

When she thought about it, Kaufmann concluded that she probably liked muscular legs because they meant a healthy guy, but health was the furthest thing from her mind when she saw a guy in shorts halfway across the Quad. ‘Now that guy has nice legs,’ she said excitedly as her friends snickered.

Kaufmann’s reaction to bulging calf muscles, while she may not know it, may actually be a psychological reward for obeying her evolutionary drives. According to Thornhill, when you see something that you are programmed to react well to (youth, muscles, breasts or pecs), your brain rewards you with a ‘beauty experience’ because the appearance of these factors are actually ‘ancestral cues of promised evolutionary function.’ In other words, muscles mean fitness, fitness means health and health is a proven evolutionary indicator of reproductive value – that’s why we’re happy when we see hotties on the Quad.

For empirical evidence of sexual selection in action, students can turn to Tirza Leader’s social psychology class, where she teaches about the types of faces people consider attractive. In her class, Leader cites research that suggests humans are most attracted to familiar images and people.

‘People that you recognize, even if you don’t understand why you recognize them, are more attractive to you than people you don’t,’ Leader said. When pictures of the faces of many people are combined through computer graphics, the result is always more attractive than any of the individual faces, Leader said, adding that this might be another function of evolutionary biology.

An aspect of evolutionary aesthetics that some criticize, however, is the influence of social and environmental factors in how beauty ideals form for an individual. Much of the latest psycho-scientific research from Thornhill and others seems to go against traditional sociological arguments for beauty ideals. From the strict sociologist’s perspective, we emerge from the womb as blank slates; our preferences are written on us by the environment in which we develop. This theory breeds an open-ended model for beauty conceptions that claims similar socialization processes produce similar conceptions of beauty, regardless of evolutionary or biological influences.

Carla Lloyd, chair of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications’ advertising department, pointed out that the media have a major influence on how physiological beauty is conceived across cultures. Lloyd recently studied the burgeoning metrosexual phenomenon and was shocked to find that masculine beauty ideals are taking on aspects of femininity. She attributes this redefinition to technology and the media.

‘This is a huge sociological shift,’ Lloyd said. ‘It comes out of a hyper-commercial, post-industrial age where everything is advertised to us in terms of how we should look, how we should consume, and there’s a status attached to that.’

The media’s effect on how we perceive bodies seems undeniable, at least on college campuses. Eric Schultz, an SU graduate and DJ at K-Rock 100.9 in Syracuse, says he thinks his ideas of body image are fairly mainstream. ‘The media’s pretty good at dictating what’s hot, and I pretty much go along with it because I’m too lazy to do anything else,’ Schultz said as he and his girlfriend lounged on the Quad yesterday afternoon. He said he likes a woman with a ‘nice, tight little ass, perky boobs, and borderline anorexic.’

‘Whoops,’ he said, ‘I was joking about the anorexic part.’

But to others who have developed eating disorders, it’s no joke. In the Pacific Ocean island region of Micronesia, Lloyd said, men have traditionally considered large, full-bodied women more attractive than thin ones. She cited sociological work that analyzed what happened to Micronesian women’s ideas of themselves after they watched pirated television from Los Angeles. That study, Lloyd said, found that American TV images, over several years, made women more weight- and exercise-conscious and contributed to a direct shift in beauty ideals in the Micronesian culture, including the development of eating disorders.

It is difficult for many evolutionary biologists and aestheticians to reconcile their scientific assertions with such a persuasive sociological theory, but Thornhill thinks he has found middle ground. He attributes the sociological argument that beauty ideals are formed by the media to an evolutionary drive in humans and other animals to mimic those with high social status.

‘We pay attention to people in the upper class,’ Thornhill said. ‘The drive is to mimic people in your social environment that have high social status.’ Such mimicry is common in many animals, from insects to chimpanzees.

Whichever theory holds more water, Thornhill stressed that evolution itself is an inescapable force of human nature. ‘You are never outside of it, because evolution designed us,’ he said. ‘It is never a question of whether it applies. It is a question of how.’

Published on April 21, 2004 at 12:00 pm