Aaron Sell and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby and Daniel Sznycer and Christopher von Rueden and Michael Gurven, “Human adaptations for the visual assessment of strength and fighting ability from the body and face“, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, forthcoming.
Abstract
Selection in species with aggressive social interactions favours the evolution of cognitive mechanisms for assessing physical formidability (fighting ability or resource-holding potential). The ability to accurately assess formidability in conspecifics has been documented in a number of non-human species, but has not been demonstrated in humans. Here, we report tests supporting the hypothesis that the human cognitive architecture includes mechanisms that assess fighting ability—mechanisms that focus on correlates of upper-body strength. Across diverse samples of targets that included US college students, Bolivian horticulturalists and Andean pastoralists, subjects in the US were able to accurately estimate the physical strength of male targets from photos of their bodies and faces. Hierarchical linear modelling shows that subjects were extracting cues of strength that were largely independent of height, weight and age, and that corresponded most strongly to objective measures of upper-body strength—even when the face was all that was available for inspection. Estimates of women’s strength were less accurate, but still significant. These studies are the first empirical demonstration that, for humans, judgements of strength and judgements of fighting ability not only track each other, but accurately track actual upper-body strength.
History of fighting
The questionnaire filled out by the stimulus subjects contained one question relevant to the analyses reported: “I have been in fights in the last four years. (Fights include shoving matches, fistfights, wrestling, and anything physical beyond yelling).” They were asked to not count sporting matches (e.g., wrestling, martial arts). Answers ranged from 0 (42% of subjects) to 11 fights (2 subjects). 61% had been in 0-1 fights, 70% in 0-2 fights. A square root transformation was applied to this data to normalize the distribution for analyses.
Concluding Sentence
The overall pattern of results supports the hypothesis that the human cognitive architecture contains specializations for formidability assessment.
No, it does not, since no effort is made in the study to discriminate between this hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis that the results are the result of a learned, non-specialised capacity. Moreover, I can detect from reading this article that I could beat the authors in a fight, either one by one or all at once.
Figures
(a) US face, (b) US body, (c) Bolivian face and (d ) Andean face.
Couric: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.
Palin: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there…
Couric: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?
Palin: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state.
(Katie Couric interview with Sarah Palin, 25 September 2008).
Senior officials of Russian energy company Gazprom, including personal associates of Vladimir Putin, met in Anchorage with Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources to discuss investing in energy projects in the state. Governor Sarah Palin said that she did not know about the meeting. Putin’s black labrador was given a satellite-monitoring collar. “She looks sad,” said Russian Deputy Minister Sergei Ivanov. “Her free life is over.” “She is wagging her tail,” said Putin. “That means she likes it.”
(Sam Stark, “Weekly Review“, in Harper’s, 21 October 2008).
In 1975, Andy Warhol peered into the future and saw . . . Damien Hirst? ‘Business Art is the step that comes after Art,’ Warhol wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Not only was it OK for artists to make as much money as possible, but ‘making money is art’ and ‘good business is the best art.’ At the time Warhol was the master of Business Art—he established Andy Warhol Enterprises in 1957, and films, Interview magazine, books and TV programmes were to follow—but his operation was small beer by contemporary standards. Today, artists like Hirst set the bar for ‘good business’. On 15 and 16 September he bypassed his two major dealers (White Cube and Gagosian) and auctioned 223 pieces of new work directly at Sotheby’s. The sale beat its already sky-high estimates by a substantial margin, bringing a total of £111.5 million, ten times the old record for a single-artist auction, set by Picasso with 88 works in 1993. During those same two days Wall Street melted down.
(Hal Foster, “The Medium is the Market“, in The London Review of Books, Vol. 30, No. 19, 9 October 2008, p. 23).
The British funeral-services industry faced a backlog of hundreds of corpses as undertakers, unable to obtain credit, refused to perform burials for the poor until the government guarantees reimbursements.
(Paul Ford, “Weekly Review“, Harper’s, 14 October 2008).
And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.
(Exodus 32:24).
Damien Hirst, The Golden Calf.
(White bullock in formaldehyde, hooves and horns cast in solid 18-carat gold, sold at auction for £10.3 million on 16 September 2008).
The following story by Daniil Kharms is from The Man with the Black Coat: Russia’s Literature of the Absurd, George Gibian (Trans), Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 1997, pp. 104–105. I’ve been reading a new translation of Kharms’ work available here.
