- [UNTITLED]
- Contributors
- Philosophical issues
- Evolutionary psychology in the round
- The power of culture
- Evolution and psychology in philosophical perspective
- Niche construction, human behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology
- Group-level evolutionary processes
- The comparative approach
- Homologizing the mind
- Social knowledge in primates
- Social cognition in non-primates
- Culture in primates and other animals
- Empathy, sympathy, and prosocial preferences in primates
- Evolutionary neurobiology and cognition
- Evolution of the social brain as a distributed neural system
- The neuroevolutionary and neuroaffective psychobiology of the prosocial brain
- Neural pathways of social cognition
- Mirror neurons and social cognition
- Mechanisms of ecological rationality: heuristics and environments that make us smart
- Development
- The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers and the cause of autism
- The ontogenetic origins of human cooperation
- Childhood experiences and reproductive strategies
- Parental impacts on development: How proximate factors mediate adaptive plans
- Evolution of stress response to social threat
- Birth order and sibling competition
- Mating, Reproduction and Life History
- Body Odours and Body Odour Preferences in Humans
- Reproductive strategies and tactics
- Symmetry, attractiveness and sexual selection
- Sex differences in aggression
- The evolutionary ecology of human family size
- Life-history theory, reproduction and longevity in humans
- Evolutionary psychology meets history: insights into human nature through family reconstitution studies
- Risk and decision-making
- The Self and the Social World
- Ecological and socio-cultural impacts on mating and marriage systems
- Kinship and descent
- Individual differences
- Human evolution and social cognition
- Temporal knowledge and autobiographical memory: an evolutionary perspective
- Shamans, yogins and indigenous psychologies
- Competitive altruism: a theory of reputation-based cooperation in groups
- Ethnic nepotism as heuristic: risky transactions and public altruism
- Cultural Evolution
- Dual-inheritance theory: the evolution of human cultural capacities and cultural evolution
- Modelling cultural evolution
- Evolutionary perspectives in archaeology: from culture history to cultural evolution
- Memes
- Explaining altruistic behaviour in humans
- The evolution of religion
- Evolutionary approaches to literature and drama
- Music and cognitive evolution
- The evolution of language
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article considers whether a human preference for symmetry is an adaptation for mate choice. If it is, then symmetry should be attractive and it should signal mate quality. The article begins with a brief introduction to sexual selection and its proposed relation to fluctuating asymmetry (FA), highlighting some important methodological issues about the measurement of symmetry. The article then considers whether symmetry is attractive to humans, using meta-analyses to determine the strength of preferences for symmetric faces and bodies and to examine the effects of potential moderator variables. It is apparent from this review that FA has not always been measured appropriately. Therefore, the article presents some new data on the relationship between human FA and mate choice to illustrate some of the appropriate steps required for discussion. It then considers whether human symmetry honestly signals mate quality and reproduction.
Keywords: human, preference, symmetry, adaptation, mate choice, sexual selection, fluctuating asymmetry, mate quality, reproduction
Gillian Rhodes, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia
Professor Leigh Simmons, Centre for Evolutionary Biology, School of Animal Biology, University of Western Australia
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- [UNTITLED]
- Contributors
- Philosophical issues
- Evolutionary psychology in the round
- The power of culture
- Evolution and psychology in philosophical perspective
- Niche construction, human behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology
- Group-level evolutionary processes
- The comparative approach
- Homologizing the mind
- Social knowledge in primates
- Social cognition in non-primates
- Culture in primates and other animals
- Empathy, sympathy, and prosocial preferences in primates
- Evolutionary neurobiology and cognition
- Evolution of the social brain as a distributed neural system
- The neuroevolutionary and neuroaffective psychobiology of the prosocial brain
- Neural pathways of social cognition
- Mirror neurons and social cognition
- Mechanisms of ecological rationality: heuristics and environments that make us smart
- Development
- The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers and the cause of autism
- The ontogenetic origins of human cooperation
- Childhood experiences and reproductive strategies
- Parental impacts on development: How proximate factors mediate adaptive plans
- Evolution of stress response to social threat
- Birth order and sibling competition
- Mating, Reproduction and Life History
- Body Odours and Body Odour Preferences in Humans
- Reproductive strategies and tactics
- Symmetry, attractiveness and sexual selection
- Sex differences in aggression
- The evolutionary ecology of human family size
- Life-history theory, reproduction and longevity in humans
- Evolutionary psychology meets history: insights into human nature through family reconstitution studies
- Risk and decision-making
- The Self and the Social World
- Ecological and socio-cultural impacts on mating and marriage systems
- Kinship and descent
- Individual differences
- Human evolution and social cognition
- Temporal knowledge and autobiographical memory: an evolutionary perspective
- Shamans, yogins and indigenous psychologies
- Competitive altruism: a theory of reputation-based cooperation in groups
- Ethnic nepotism as heuristic: risky transactions and public altruism
- Cultural Evolution
- Dual-inheritance theory: the evolution of human cultural capacities and cultural evolution
- Modelling cultural evolution
- Evolutionary perspectives in archaeology: from culture history to cultural evolution
- Memes
- Explaining altruistic behaviour in humans
- The evolution of religion
- Evolutionary approaches to literature and drama
- Music and cognitive evolution
- The evolution of language
- Index
