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A review by lpm100
Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty by Nancy Etcoff
slow-paced
2.0
Book Review
Survival of the Prettiest
2/5 stars
"Tons of waffle interspersed with bits of interesting trivia."
*******
Of the book:
-≈525 references (I did not count the number of point citations, because the format made it time prohibitive.)
247 pages/8 chapters≈31pps/chapter
*******
If you are looking for a series of experiments that discuss the way that beautiful people are treated compared to average people, you will not find them in this book.
Two major points:
1. I don't think anyone older than 12 or 13 years old needs an entire book to recapitulate what nearly everybody already knows by that age
a. We've all known that beautiful people are more favored. A lot of your success in life depends on a genetic endowment that you really can't control. And I have found ZERO relationship between attractiveness and intelligence.
b. Everybody likes lighter skin women, and everybody likes the white ladies.
2. This book is like so many books on evolutionary psychology/biology: long on speculative explanations, and very short on actual predictive power. (In the chapter "Feature Presentation," how many times does the author recapitulate that scientists have failed to forward engineer a face that is universally/widely agreed upon as beautiful?)
It's not necessarily a failing of the book / author/discipline, but just that things like this are inherently unpredictable. (Who's going to try to predict a chess game from first principles?)
If people cannot predict past beauty trends, what makes them think they could predict future ones?
And then, even after all the words that make up this book, we don't know how strong any of these effects are (And if they are strong enough and stable enough, what is somebody going to use them to engineer? Does that mean you can go to a plastic surgeon and he can change Whoopi Goldberg into Beyoncé by some well developed algorithm?)
For example:
There is not a *single* graph on all 244 pages so that we can get an idea of the strength of any quantitative relationship. How many of these relationships are statistically significant but not practically significant?
So, if we read the statement (p.37): "Mann observed that by 8 months the mothers showed a clear preference for one of the twins, spending more time soothing, holding, playing, and vocalizing with her," we have no idea what that means.
a. Does it mean that the mother spent 100 minutes per week with the least favored baby and 101 with the most favored? Or does it mean that the mother spends all of the time with the most favored and just checks to see if the least favored is still breathing once or twice a week?
b. Also, what is real effect of beauty on reproductive success? And, is it stable? Southern European women (Italian / Armenian/Greek, etc) are probably the pinnacle of human evolution. And none of those populations are above replacement levels.
If you believe the International Sex Guide (a website that describes the sex scene in countries all over the planet), VIRTUALLY NO men are going out of their way to find black women to have sex with. But the average woman in Niger has 7 children.
How to disentangle attractiveness effects from that, if they exist?
c. Black women have had (natural) steatopygia ever since the beginning of time, and it just recently became attractive as a result of the surgically engineered Kardashian butt.
Do these preferences have some underlying genetic reason? And if so, why did it take until the Kardashian booty to precipitate these preferences among white guys? (Or, is it like what the author might have hinted: aesthetics are completely random.)
Given the number of books that I have read that take an effect with statistical significance, but no practical significance.... And that then stretch that effect into a 300-page book, my eye is EXTREMELY jaundiced. ("When," by Daniel Pink is just such a book.)
*******
The author gets aggravating when she goes from being descriptive to value judgments:
a (p.119): "Europeans and their descendants are unlikely to maintain their dominance forever. In the United States they will soon be outnumbered and perhaps outspent." But just a few pages back she was talking about how they are a minority in Brazil, but almost all of the upper class and 98% of magazine models.)
b. (p.147): "All of these changes reflect in internal average where Asian, African, and Hispanic faces are helping to recalibrate norms and re-envision beauty." (Don't know what that can mean; Dominicans have a lot more negroid ancestry and Bolivians probably have more indigenous.)
Some of the research is sloppy (p.129: "Among African American women with long hair, it is upper middle-class blacks who wear dreadlocks, twists, and afros, according to psychologist Shanette Harris.") The citation goes back to a single random comment in a magazine article.
Verdict: NOT recommended
Quotes:
1. When abused children under court protection were studied in California and Massachusetts, it turned out to the disproportionate number of them were unattractive.
2. Any man with $42 million looks exactly like Clark Gable.
3. We say that time steals beauty.
4. Human Felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that sell them happen as by the little advantages that occur every day.
5. I doubt that we will see a reverse transit or preference for overweight men or women, but extreme thinness is bound to go the way of the 3 ft high hair and the 8-ft wide skirt. There's nowhere to go with it: models can't get any thinner, and fashion never stays in one place.
Factoids:
1. By 1998, there were 122,000 breast enlargements per annum.
2. The toga, the tunic, the sari, and the kimono are examples of garments that have survived for thousands of years.
3. Margaret Thatcher took voice lessons to lower her pitch after she was told that her voice sounded shrill. Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Paulina Porizkova have all taken lessons to lower it their voice pitch to sound less girlish.
4. Wedekind's research suggests that we become attracted to the people who smell the least like our family members.
Vocabulary:
nulliparous
farthingales
panniers
crinolines
bustles
pelage
wimple
cicatrization
presbyter
corrugator muscle
chador (hijab)
pourpoint
doublet
jerkin
poulaine
masseter
stridulating organs
clematis
Survival of the Prettiest
2/5 stars
"Tons of waffle interspersed with bits of interesting trivia."
*******
Of the book:
-≈525 references (I did not count the number of point citations, because the format made it time prohibitive.)
247 pages/8 chapters≈31pps/chapter
*******
If you are looking for a series of experiments that discuss the way that beautiful people are treated compared to average people, you will not find them in this book.
Two major points:
1. I don't think anyone older than 12 or 13 years old needs an entire book to recapitulate what nearly everybody already knows by that age
a. We've all known that beautiful people are more favored. A lot of your success in life depends on a genetic endowment that you really can't control. And I have found ZERO relationship between attractiveness and intelligence.
b. Everybody likes lighter skin women, and everybody likes the white ladies.
2. This book is like so many books on evolutionary psychology/biology: long on speculative explanations, and very short on actual predictive power. (In the chapter "Feature Presentation," how many times does the author recapitulate that scientists have failed to forward engineer a face that is universally/widely agreed upon as beautiful?)
It's not necessarily a failing of the book / author/discipline, but just that things like this are inherently unpredictable. (Who's going to try to predict a chess game from first principles?)
If people cannot predict past beauty trends, what makes them think they could predict future ones?
And then, even after all the words that make up this book, we don't know how strong any of these effects are (And if they are strong enough and stable enough, what is somebody going to use them to engineer? Does that mean you can go to a plastic surgeon and he can change Whoopi Goldberg into Beyoncé by some well developed algorithm?)
For example:
There is not a *single* graph on all 244 pages so that we can get an idea of the strength of any quantitative relationship. How many of these relationships are statistically significant but not practically significant?
So, if we read the statement (p.37): "Mann observed that by 8 months the mothers showed a clear preference for one of the twins, spending more time soothing, holding, playing, and vocalizing with her," we have no idea what that means.
a. Does it mean that the mother spent 100 minutes per week with the least favored baby and 101 with the most favored? Or does it mean that the mother spends all of the time with the most favored and just checks to see if the least favored is still breathing once or twice a week?
b. Also, what is real effect of beauty on reproductive success? And, is it stable? Southern European women (Italian / Armenian/Greek, etc) are probably the pinnacle of human evolution. And none of those populations are above replacement levels.
If you believe the International Sex Guide (a website that describes the sex scene in countries all over the planet), VIRTUALLY NO men are going out of their way to find black women to have sex with. But the average woman in Niger has 7 children.
How to disentangle attractiveness effects from that, if they exist?
c. Black women have had (natural) steatopygia ever since the beginning of time, and it just recently became attractive as a result of the surgically engineered Kardashian butt.
Do these preferences have some underlying genetic reason? And if so, why did it take until the Kardashian booty to precipitate these preferences among white guys? (Or, is it like what the author might have hinted: aesthetics are completely random.)
Given the number of books that I have read that take an effect with statistical significance, but no practical significance.... And that then stretch that effect into a 300-page book, my eye is EXTREMELY jaundiced. ("When," by Daniel Pink is just such a book.)
*******
The author gets aggravating when she goes from being descriptive to value judgments:
a (p.119): "Europeans and their descendants are unlikely to maintain their dominance forever. In the United States they will soon be outnumbered and perhaps outspent." But just a few pages back she was talking about how they are a minority in Brazil, but almost all of the upper class and 98% of magazine models.)
b. (p.147): "All of these changes reflect in internal average where Asian, African, and Hispanic faces are helping to recalibrate norms and re-envision beauty." (Don't know what that can mean; Dominicans have a lot more negroid ancestry and Bolivians probably have more indigenous.)
Some of the research is sloppy (p.129: "Among African American women with long hair, it is upper middle-class blacks who wear dreadlocks, twists, and afros, according to psychologist Shanette Harris.") The citation goes back to a single random comment in a magazine article.
Verdict: NOT recommended
Quotes:
1. When abused children under court protection were studied in California and Massachusetts, it turned out to the disproportionate number of them were unattractive.
2. Any man with $42 million looks exactly like Clark Gable.
3. We say that time steals beauty.
4. Human Felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that sell them happen as by the little advantages that occur every day.
5. I doubt that we will see a reverse transit or preference for overweight men or women, but extreme thinness is bound to go the way of the 3 ft high hair and the 8-ft wide skirt. There's nowhere to go with it: models can't get any thinner, and fashion never stays in one place.
Factoids:
1. By 1998, there were 122,000 breast enlargements per annum.
2. The toga, the tunic, the sari, and the kimono are examples of garments that have survived for thousands of years.
3. Margaret Thatcher took voice lessons to lower her pitch after she was told that her voice sounded shrill. Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Paulina Porizkova have all taken lessons to lower it their voice pitch to sound less girlish.
4. Wedekind's research suggests that we become attracted to the people who smell the least like our family members.
Vocabulary:
nulliparous
farthingales
panniers
crinolines
bustles
pelage
wimple
cicatrization
presbyter
corrugator muscle
chador (hijab)
pourpoint
doublet
jerkin
poulaine
masseter
stridulating organs
clematis