Reddit mentions of The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology

I noticed one or two commentators the other week castigating evo psych for being a fledgling field, devoid of scientific consensus and ripe for trivial objections.

Well, this essay puts that to rest, particularly as it concerns gender differences, but the field is even broader, examining all facets of all observable species, and is so dense that it now has respected tertiary literature.

And even this is just one element of the growing HBD understanding we're moving toward, against unchecked leftists, who want the ability to invent new realities and disregard existing ones, even if (and precisely because) it's based not in science, but moralizing anti-productive and anti-social behaviors into existence (see "r/K wars" to understand why they do that and why they can only pick that path).

No, it's a good question that I have encountered on other occassions when I have raised the issue of the siginificance of physical attractiveness (PA).

Firstly, beauty is valued in and of itself, it is intrinsically valued and the origin of this valuation appears to be phylogenetic (see Chapter 10 of Buss' Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology). An obvious area of evidence for this claim is the celebration (and even worship) of beauty in the arts. Human's -- of all cultures -- adore beauty.

Secondly, an influential paper by Dion, Berscheid, and Walster (1972), titled What is beautiful is good found that positive characteristics are attributed to people with high PA. They termed this the "beauty-is-good" stereotype. The beauty-is-good stereotype can be understood as an instance of the more general Halo Effect. So people that are physically attractive are perceived to be more intelligent, more socially competent and more capable. The finding of the "beauty-is-good" stereotype has been replicated many times and Griffin and Langlois (2006) have also found an "ugly-is-bad" cognitive bias.

Thirdly, confidence alone can only get you so far. To be blunt, what actually underlies the confidence of beautiful people is that others want to fuck them. Because others want to fuck them (or associate with them because they think their chances of pulling in a high quality partner are increased eg. less attractive (heterosexual) men grouping around a more attractive (heterosexual) man in the hope of collecting his "scraps") people will do things for them or give them gifts. This is typically how stupid people often get good corporate jobs. Because most managers are heterosexual men this is how stupid women often get good undemanding corporate jobs. I don't think this is sexism because female managers are vulnerable to the same bias.