Why most suicide bombers are Muslim and beautiful people have more daughters: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

From Psychology Today:

Excerpted from Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, to be published by Perigree in September 2007.

Most suicide bombers are Muslim

Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, but according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex. What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all. So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates.

Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)

Long before TV—in 15th- and 16th- century Italy, and possibly two millennia ago—women were dying their hair blond. A recent study shows that in Iran, where exposure to Western media and culture is limited, women are actually more concerned with their body image, and want to lose more weight, than their American counterparts. It is difficult to ascribe the preferences and desires of women in 15th-century Italy and 21st-century Iran to socialization by media. Women's desire to look like Barbie—young with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, and blue eyes—is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to the desire of men to mate with women who look like her. There is evolutionary logic behind each of these features.

More here.

Comments

[Philip Graham]

"Evolutionary logic"? Weak thinking, rather. In West Africa, women fatten themselves up to attract men. The value of being thin and blonde is cultural. Please read some anthropology before making generalizations about human behavior.

[WalterBoswell]

"It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex".

Perhaps in Afghanistan or Pakistan and other out of the way locations but many of the 'home grown' variety have wives and are having sex, we know this because some of them have kids. The UK's 7/7 mob had the same access to tail as the rest of us. Mohammad Atta like strippers & hookers.

I am getting a royal pain in the hole from these authors & publishers who throw out any old generalisations knowing they'll sell because the reviews mention the term politically incorrect.

[Andrew Gelman]

Unfortunately, neither Psychology Today nor the Journal of Theoretical Biology have the most rigorous peer-review process. I wouldn't recommend linking to this stuff without a warning.

A year or so ago I heard about a couple of papers by Satoshi Kanazawa on "Engineers have more sons, nurses have more daughters" and "Beautiful parents have more daughters." The titles surprised me, because in my acquaintance with such data, I'd seen very little evidence of sex ratios at birth varying much at all, certainly not by 26% as was claimed in one of these papers. I looked into it and indeed it turned out that the findings could be explained as statistical artifacts--the key errors were, in one of the studies, controlling for intermediate outcomes and, in the other study, reporting only one of multiple potential hypothesis tests.

See here for more discussion (including a link to my letter in the Journal of Theoretical Biology detailing these points):
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/07/how_should_unpr.html

[Chris]

This is an astounding endorsement of the abnegation of accountibility.

The entirely unsubtle message is that since bad behavior is a biological imperative, blame is superfluous. What a coincidence that each of these "truths" also happens to be a pubertarian fantasy.

What, as a culture, do we want to say to middle aged men who buy red sports cars, or young women who get boob jobs and go blond? To say that these impulses are "natural" is hardly the point. The sort of
reductionism that claims only the selfish aspects of human nature are "real" and that the more sublime components are illusory can easily become a self-fulfilled prophesy, denying us the opportunity to say: you (and we) deserve better.

I honestly marvel that juvenile circularities such as this are published by high-profile journals. But I'm sure it is somehow explainable in terms of the authors' and editors' enhanced ability to couple with large-breasted young blond women.

[Nizam]

This is one of the more poorly-thought-out attempts at explaining suicide bombings I've come across.

No attempt is made by the authors to demonstrate a high incidence of polygyny in the populations described. They cite the hypothetical scenario, "if 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all." But they don't actually come out and say what percentage of the men actually do have two or more wives - and thus they are unable to draw any legitimate conclusions as to the causal relationship between polygyny and suicide bombing. It's just speculative guesswork designed to fit into their evolutionary-psych agenda.

What's worse, they actually admit that "societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa." But that means that among these regions, the ones that produce the most suicide bombers (M.E. and N. Africa) are the ones that have a lower incidence of polygyny. In other words, there is a negative correlation between the prevalence of polygyny and the prevalence of suicide bombers among that sample group. The authors make no attempt to explain how their theory stands up to this evidence.

[Mr. A]

I was thinking of becoming a suicide bomber a few years back, but then I got me 3 wives!
Life is good.

[Abbas Raza]

I have posted a more serious look at suicide bombing here. ( http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/07/on-suicide-bomb.html )

[Scott Ahlf]

While this goes against my conditioning and political ideology, I'm leaving this open for investigation--
Just as the Gould VS Dawkins camp on Evolution has created such animosity between the camps (I was rooting for Gould, stemming from my Marxist past, but Pinker and others have reluctantly pushed me to the Dawkins side)--
The establishment always brings out Orr to do a hit piece on the Pinker-Dawkins-Dennett writings, so Gould has all the positive press and power behind it--
This is why I'm going to examine the evidence a bit further--

[Luke Lea]

Of known male suicide bombers, how many have been married with children? Any? (Prostitutes don't count.) BTW, I am not saying that there have not been any. I honestly want to know.

[CCBC]

The first sentence of the excerpt is simply not true. Quite prominent among suicide bombers are the Hindu Black Tigers of the Tamil LTTE. Esitimates vary, but they may have carried out half of all suicide bombings in the world 1980 - 2000. Cf: Robert Pape Dying to Win which analyzes suicide bombing as a considered tactic used by a weak player in a struggle.

[Nick Smyth]

"Men also have a universal preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio"

HETERO men, I assume? Oh, wait, now I'm expecting carefully thought-out positions from a person who obviously has the analytical powers of Teddy Ruxpin.

I'm 28, and I often wonder how I'm going to stand another 40+ years of life in a culture where this stuff is so widely read. I might in the end have to strap some TNT to my chest and head down to Psychology Today headquarters. It's the only reasonable response.

[sherri]

Satoshi Kanazawa owes America an apology for his intentional distortions. Prof Gelman from U of Columbia has explained clearly why his assertion that beautiful people have more daughters is not a valid inference. he owes it to the public to apologize for seeking fame over the truth. He would rather be rich than honest. I would discount this book as fiction passed off as science by two people who should know better.

[CaptainBooshi]

Why decide to focus only on suicide bombers that are religiously motivated? Even then, does he mean specifically suicide bombers, or anyone on a suicide mission? As far as I can tell, he chose those qualities because otherwise the data wouldn't fit his hypothesis. I mean, we have the Hindu Black Tigers, we have the Japanese kamikaze pilots in WWII, we even have lone crazies with a gun on suicide missions like the recent Virginia Tech shootings (which was at least partially religious, since he explicitly compared himself to Christ). Once again, we have someone who's making outlandish claims apparently only to get attention.

By the way, I'm a guy, and I can say that I actually prefer brunettes or redheads with bra size C or smaller. At the very least, the author would have to qualify that statement with 'many' or 'most' men.

[Scott Ahlf]

We live in a causal based world--
Unless you are one of the "Invisible friend" believers, where divine creation is possible, everything contains causality--
"the phenomenon "has nothing to do with" the barbarous teachings of Islam. This is nonsense. Beliefs absolutely have behavioral consequences, and suicide bombing is one consequence of Islam's conquering mentality and cult of martyrdom."

[Pete Chapman]

The biggest hazard in reverse engineering is the very real possibility that the cart ends up in front of the horse. I realize that these guys think that their article deals with the "big" numbers but I have to ask, "What about female suicide bombers?". Where does that fit in?

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