Love à la Darwin

Do inner values matter? Mate choice from the perspective of evolution

The first look is crucial. It is what decides whether two people find the way into each others hearts – an effective mechanism that has evolved over the course of mankind’s evolution and has proven itself. Beauty is an indicator of good health, youthfulness and resilience, and these attributes in turn are signals that indicate that this is a person stands a good chance of reproducing successfully. This means that physical appearance is a feature that provides a quick way of assessing whether a person is suitable as a partner with whom to have children.

But what is “beauty”? For biologists, beauty is equated with sexual attractiveness. But what is it that constitutes this attractiveness? Ideals of beauty change over time and also vary from one culture to another. For instance, today’s slender models would hardly have been sought after in the 16th century. Beautiful people are “attractive”, and science is just beginning to understand why that is the case.

The branch of research that deals with such issues is called evolutionary psychology. At the Institute of Zoology and Anthropology at the University of Göttingen, a group of researchers and scientists is looking at the question of how human mate selection has developed over the course of our evolution. This is because, as we now know, 150 years after Charles Darwin, the appreciation of human beauty and thus of our choice of a mate, has strong biological roots. This is because the main factor that governs our choice of a mate is, from the biological point of view, is ensuring our procreation and thus the persistence of the species – and this applies just as much to humans as any other species.

There are no set quantifiers for beauty, but there are rules according to which we assess beauty. It is a well-known fact that facial features play a particularly important role in this, but there are also other features of human appearance that have received less attention to date. What parts do body movement or the appearance of our skin play, for instance?

In their studies, the researchers in Göttingen are measuring the signal effects of mobile and immobile facial and bodily features on others. In cooperation with a partner university in England they are using motion-capturing technology to capture people’s movements, and then using digital image analysis to take a look at different people’s skin “under the magnifying glass”. For example, faces displayed on the computer screen are made more masculine or feminine, so that the researchers can observe how the subjects respond to which stimuli. On the one hand they are interviewed, but that is not all. They are also subjected to a closer look using state-of-the-art technology, in order to be able to draw conclusions that are as objective as possible. For instance, their eyelid movements are studied using eye-tracking technology, in other words, the movements of their eyes are precisely recorded and evaluated together with the interviews.

The signal that has the greatest effect on our choice of a mate is not yet known, but one thing is for sure already: Appearance plays a very decisive role, and beautiful people really do seem to have it a little bit easier in life. Nevertheless, biology refrains from committing itself to one particular ideal, because true beauty, from the biological point of view, lies in diversity. This rule has proven successful in nature for plants, animals and also for humans time and time again, and applies to partner selection too.

To Galleries