On Beauty and Biking
Our recent podcast “Reasons to Not Be Ugly” examined the beauty premium, as well as the “downside of ugly.” A new paper by evolutionary biologist Erik Postma in Biology Letters highlights one more advantage of beauty: better endurance performance (in the form of faster cycling). Bill Andrews of Discover‘s D-brief blog summarizes the study’s setup:
As the paper’s abstract explains, “Females often prefer to mate with high quality males, and one aspect of quality is physical performance.” So the more physically fit a human male is, the more human females might want to bang him. But how to test for this — and, specifically, how to test for this with the measure of physical performance being endurance, a trait not easily quantified?