Which "many studies"? If you mean the Kanazawa (2011) "study", that's obvious bullshit for pretty obvious reasons: He doesn't independently measure attractiveness at all. In the British sample, the attractiveness of the kids was rated by their teachers("At ages 7 and 11, the teacher of each NCDS respondent is asked to describe the child's physical appearance"), and in the US sample by the interviewers just after they'd administered the intelligence test ("At the conclusion of the in-home interview at each wave, the Add Health interviewer rates the respondent's physical attractiveness on a five-point ordinal scale"), and he doesn't have any independent ratings by strangers who've had no prior contact to the kids. The most natural interpretation of his results is thus that we tend to overrate the attractiveness of people we've taken a liking to for other reasons (for example, because we know they're intelligent); there may or may not be an effect in the reverse direction too, where teachers subconsciously devote more attention to pretty kids, creating a better learning environment for them. But nothing to suggest a biological basis for the correlation.
In short, he didn't find a correlation between measured intelligence and measured attractiveness, merely a correlation between measured intelligence and attractiveness
as rated by people who know and care about the kids' intelligence. If you don't see the difference, you're beyond help.
But there's a more recent and methodologically much sounder study that finds "
No relationship between intelligence and facial attractiveness in a large, genetically informative sample". I include the abstract below:
Mitchem et al. said:
Theories in both evolutionary and social psychology suggest that a positive correlation should exist between facial attractiveness and general intelligence, and several empirical observations appear to corroborate this expectation. Using highly reliable measures of facial attractiveness and IQ in a large sample of identical and fraternal twins and their siblings, we found no evidence for a phenotypic correlation between these traits. Likewise, neither the genetic nor the environmental latent factor correlations were statistically significant. We supplemented our analyses of new data with a simple meta-analysis that found evidence of publication bias among past studies of the relationship between facial attractiveness and intelligence. In view of these results, we suggest that previously published reports may have overestimated the strength of the relationship and that the theoretical bases for the predicted attractiveness–intelligence correlation may need to be reconsidered.
Mitchem et al 2014 is a great find, thank you. Kanazawa 2011 got the most attention, but there have been other studys backing the same conclusion, including:
Judging from the abstract, they're making a claim that's totally different from yours: They're
not claiming a correlation of beauty and intelligence based on assortative mating, but that both are caused by developmental stability. This is a very different hypothesis with different predictions. If you want to switch to that one, you should make it explicit (also, if that's the case, you can't handwave away Mitchem et al.'s finding - if they correlate not just because of assortative mating but because the same genes influence both, you expect to find correlations even when you just look at siblings).
Same objection as before (not the hypothesis you're peddling), plus, it's published in the journal that accepted Kanazawa's obvious bullshit. Feel free to quote relevant passages or data, but I'm not going to read beyond the abstract (which indicates that it's a different hypothesis they defend, one that should be out of the window with Mitchem et al.'s metastudy).
I don't have access. From the abstract, this is the most relevant of your citations. But an obvious contention is: They had college students as subjects. Surely, by that age, you could argue that people might have found a style that suits their body type, and that on average more intelligent people are simply better at finding such a style, yielding higher ratings without being innately more beautiful? It's not obvious from the abstract how, if at all, they tried to control for such effects.
But I did find another study with a contrary result:
- Scholz and Sicinski - "Facial Attractiveness and Lifetime Earnings: Evidence from a Cohort Study" 2011 (http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~scholz/Research/Beauty.pdf). This study found a relationship between lifetimes earnings and facial attractiveness but not between IQ and physical attractiveness.
I am inclined to place lower relevance on Mitchem et al 2014 because the claim of the correlation between IQ and beauty would be more applicable to the genetic variations within the whole population and less applicable to genetic variations within families, as genetic variation within families would be expected to be much less. Carriers of genes for both beauty and IQ would tend to mate with each other, non-carriers would mate with each other, and the distributions of inheritance of those genes among their children would be expected to merely add randomization.
That's a relevant objection if you stick with your original hypothesis. Not if you switch to the hypothesis explicitly defended by the majority of your sources. So we apparently have another case of citing evidence that doesn't support your position.
Still, I think that is enough evidence to conclude uncertainty on the matter. The science is divided. Especially salient, to me, is Mitchem et al's finding of publication bias.
I expect you to admit explicitly that your "uncomfortable reality" from a few posts ago may as well be a figment of imagination.
