Passage Seventeen
Tall men are more likely to have children than their vertically challenged friends because women find height attractive, a new study shows. The preference may be putting evolutionary pressure on men, even today.
In an earlier study, evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool decided to find out which attributes men and women like in their partners. He noticed that men only put their height in their ads if they are tall. “Men never say ‘I’m a 5-foot-2 Danny DeVito look-alike’,” says Dunbar. “You only advertise things that are advantageous.”
If tall men are truly more attractive to women, Dunbar reasoned, they might have more children than short men. To test this, he teamed up with two colleagues in the Polish city of Wroclaw. Together they examined the medical records of more than 4400 healthy men aged 25 to 60 who were given compulsory medical examinations in Wroclaw between 1983 and 1989.
The team noted the men’s heights and whether they had children. They then adjusted the figures to account for factors such as the trend for people to be taller the more recently they were born, due to improving diet and healthcare.
The results showed childless men were on average significantly shorter than men with one or more children. This confirms that women prefer taller men, says Dunbar. And the finding was backed by another feature of the Wroclaw men: bachelors were shorter than their married counterparts.
There may be several reasons why women prefer tall men. Society generally associates lofty men with wealth, success and good health. But the fact that the effect is so prominent suggests to Dunbar that the preference is also programmed into women’s genes. This might date back to a time when tall men in hunting societies were stronger and genetically, better equipped for the struggle to survive.
Dunbar hopes his study will persuade scientists that sexual selection influences behaviour. “In the social sciences, people seem very reluctant to believe that evolutionary principles guide human behaviour at all. It must help to turn the tide.”
“It’s an interesting study that suggests many more questions,” says Robert Barton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Durham. For example, does the same effect occur in different cultures? Other research suggests extreme height is unattractive to women, which may explain why evolution has not stretched the height gap between the sexes further. “Clearly, something has limited that process,” Barton says.
1. From this passage we learn that ________.
A. short men are more attractive to women.
B. tall men consider their height to be an advantage.
C. short men don’t like to advertise themselves.
D. women only pay attention to the heights in men’s advertisements.
2. Robin Dunbar and his colleagues conducted the study of 4,400 healthy men aged 12 to
A. help the medical world to advance more rapidly.
B. find out why some men choose to remain single.
C. see whether tall men are more likely to have children.
D. see what factors enable men to be taller today.
3. Dunbar’s finding “bachelors in Wroclaw were shorter than their married counterparts” proves that ________.
A. shorter men don’t like to attract women.
B. shorter men are out of the sight of women.
C. shorter men don’t like to have children.
D. shorter men are less attractive to women.
4. Women prefer tall men because ________.
A. tallness is associated with wealth, success and health.
B. taller men are more athletic.
C. taller men are likely to live longer.
D. the genes of taller men are better programmed.
5. Which of the following would be the best title for this passage?
A. Comparison between Tall Men and Short Men.
B. Tall Men Are More Wealthy.
C. Height and Attractiveness.
D. The Higher, the Better.
<< 上一页 [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] 下一页
