This morning, I was saw an article by notorious evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, author of such outrageously stupid hits such as Why Modern Feminism Is Illogical, Unnecessary, & Evil and Why we are losing this war, where he suggested a nuclear holocaust in answer to 9/11.
Well his recent article was so amazingly bad that Psychology Today decided to take it down. But because I know how to use Google cache, I am able to present the article to you, in which he discusses why black women are rated as less attractive along racial lines.
Brace yourselves.
There are marked race differences in physical attractiveness among women, but not among men. Why?
I lol'd after the first sentence because he's already off to a horrible start. There's no citation to back this claim, no reasoning. He just claims that there are no significant differences between the physical attractiveness of different races of men... and that's it. This is actually a sign of things to come.
Add Health measures the physical attractiveness of its respondents both objectively and subjectively. At the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale: 1 = very unattractive, 2 = unattractive, 3 = about average, 4 = attractive, 5 = very attractive. The physical attractiveness of each Add Health respondent is measured three times by three different interviewers over seven years.
The Add Health data is fine. His interpretation of it, on the other hand, is where things start to get really fucked up. Any scientist that qualifies things like physical attraction as being "objectively" measured... that's a red flag right there. But the bigger red flag comes from his lack of criteria for "objective" beauty. There's no criteria outlined in the article whatsoever, thus his controls (or lack thereof) are rightfully called into question. It makes his invocation of the term "objective" utterly meaningless, but again, applying that qualifier to something like physical attractiveness was a red flag to begin with.
Factor analysis has the added advantage of eliminating all random measurement errors that are inherent in any scientific measurement.
Not quite. See page 12 of this Hopkins lecture for a list of Factor Analysis assumptions:
- Measurement error has constant variance and is, on average, 0.
- No association between the factor and the measurement error.
- No association between errors
You're assuming a measurement error variance and mean... that's a bit different than saying "Oh, measurement error has been eliminated completely thanks to this test!"
Recall that women on average are more physically attractive than men. So women of all races are on average more physically attractive than the "average" Add Health respondent, except for black women.
He justifies the first claim with, unsurprisingly, a link to his own article on the subject which again references Add Health's data with the same interpretation issues. Furthermore, he goes back and forth between saying that a group of people IS more attractive and a group of people was RATED more attractive, reflecting some really shoddy technical writing (and perhaps some of his biases).
As bad as his methodology is, his interpretation of the results is even worse. Cue the evolutionary psych speculation:
There are many biological and genetic differences between the races. However, such race differences usually exist in equal measure for both men and women. For example, because they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health).
There is literally no basis for this claim. None. Any self-respecting evolutionary biologist would be going to WTFCON 1 about now. There's no evaluation of the individual mutations, there's no real justification for claiming that the beauty disparities measured are a result of evolutionary selective pressures here, and the only citation he provides to justify this nonsense is, SHOCKINGLY, another article he wrote (which doesn't have any real justification either).
The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone.
lol
Of course. Testosterone. BRILLIANT. It can't be that the default standard of beauty in American society is "white" and we have a media-commercialization complex that perpetuates that standard of beauty. No, let's go with some random hormone that wasn't measured, controlled, or definitively linked with the results. Because the explanation must be biological, especially one that unjustifiably connotes black women look more "masculine" than other women.
Idiot.
This is a long-standing problem with evolutionary psychology proponents, despite the field's potential use in principle: there's a desire to reduce any and all perceptions and societal norms as being the result of evolutionary selective pressures. Why? Because if it's the result of biology—not sociological trends—then we have an excuse to cling to ignorant perceptions, stereotypes, and norms. Kanazawa has a long track record of pushing studies and narratives such as this (this isn't his first time on the issue of race) and he is unfortunately not unique. All of these studies have one thing in common: they have no methodological basis to link some aspect or behavior being measured with a history of evolutionary selective pressures.
Black women are beautiful.
Black. Women. Are. Beautiful.
Fuck this asshole. Contact Psychology Today to express your disapproval. I think this needs to go beyond taking his article down.