Sexual Selection, Physical Attractiveness, and Facial Neoteny

Abstract

Physical attractiveness and its relation to the theory of sexual se- lection deserve renewed attention from cultural and biological an- thropologists. This paper focuses on an anomaly associated with physical attractiveness-in our species, in contrast to many oth- ers, males seem to be more concemed than females with the at- tractiveness of potential sexual partners, perhaps because hu- mans show far more age-related variance in female than in male fecundity. The resulting selection for male attraction to markers of female youth may lead incidentally to attraction to females displaying age-related cues in an exaggerated form. This paper reports cross-cultural evidence that males in five populations (Brazilians, U.S. Americans, Russians, Ache, and Hiwi) show an attraction to females with neotenous facial proportions (a combi- nation of large eyes, small noses, and full lips) even after female age is controlled for. Two further studies show that female mod- els have neotenous cephalofacial proportions relative to U.S. un- dergraduates and that drawings of faces artificially transformed to make them more or less neotenous are perceived as corre- spondingly more or less attractive. These results suggest several further lines of investigation, including the relationship between facial and bodily cues and the consequences of attraction to neo- teny for morphological evolution.