Strollerderby

This reminds me of a Canadian study written up in the NY Times a few years ago about the correlation between the attractiveness of a child and whether the parent clicked said child into the shopping cart using the safety belt. The researchers found that the children whom they judged attractive were more likely to be strapped in. Which of course leads directly to the question about how one defines attractive. I would argue that there are days when my toddler rates as objectively attractive--she's got her pigtails up, a "cute" dress and her Mary Janes on, and fits the stereotypical cute toddler girl mold. But then there are all those other days, when her awkwardly growing out hair is down, she's got leftovers from her lunch on her face, she's wearing her brother's hand-me down sweats, and she's screaming her lungs out because she doesn't want to be put in the cart seat but wants to walk like the big people. She is going to be judged differently in each of these cases which highlights the difficulty in arriving at an objective criteria for attractiveness. The more troubling aspect of the Canadian story however was that this was carried out by an evolutionary biologist who then argued that "attractiveness" was directly related to the amount of energy that parents would be willing put in to raising their progeny, i.e. the parents would invest more heavily in their attractive offspring because they, unconsciously, concluded these would have the best chance of passing along their genes. The problems with this conclusion based upon the study are legion. As a researcher I wonder how this study could even get funded? Do parents not think their child is the most wonderful and adorable thing ever, what Jen notes allows for parents to bond with their children? More to the point though, is that the research design does not even get at this. How did the researchers know that the children were actually the offspring of the parents? In spite of the warnings on the cart, did the parents who did not use the seat strap actually have an opinion about the efficacy or not of the safety belt? How does attractiveness measure against other qualities which would presumably aid in passing along the genes such as intelligence and wit? And are humans really simply driven by the biological imperative of ensuring the continuation of their genes or do other social and cultural issues factor in our behaviours and actions?