Doctors, one would hope, are making their decisions based on what is best for the patient. I must admit that the prospect of not being prescribed the best medication available simply because a cheerleader flirted with my doctor is a little disconcerting.

Perhaps we could require beautiful pharmaceutical sales reps to wear masks.

But I did love my Humanities class.

Oooohhhhhh!!! A computer-aided study! Well never mind. Clealy the humanities are overrun with empirical work. I bet that study isn’t even an outlier :).

Let me say again for emphasis, I am not saying that I don’t like the humanities. I love reading good books and listening to beautiful music. I am amazed by people who are trained to read and write carefully in their chosen field. But you don’t use a pencil to eat soup.

Sorry, I wrote that too quickly and it came off harsher than I meant it.

When I say that “you might as well be in the humanities” I mean that you aren’t doing science, you are telling stories, and for that we don’t need you, we have people in the humanities to do that. I am certainly not claiming that there is no value to the humanities (and I don’t really consider philosophy part of the humanities either), just that it is not science. Since Christian’s position revolves around how evolutionary arguments (or his anyway) are fully scientific, I’m pointing out that it is a rather weak version of science that cannot quanitifiably test its claims.

Anne,

I like the humanities as humanities. I get testy when people use the tools in the humanities and try to pawn it off as more definitive than it is. One occasionally finds people in the humanities and in the sciences waxing on about society and human nature but the evidence they bring to bear is laughable. I often find that annoying. Similarly scientific training does not generally make one a particularly good philosopher, poet, or musician.

Trowbridge, Lynn Mason.
The Fifteenth-Century Chanson: A Computer-Aided Study of Styles and Style Change.
Ph.D., Musicology, University of Illinois, 1981.

I think good looking people are more pleasant because from birth others are more pleasant to them. But I also think the reverse is true: some people appear better looking because from birth life has been pleasant to them. They have a pleasant countenance which can be, damn can’t find the word, not mistaken, but sort of, can be mistaken for beauty. Isn’t niceness lovely? Not that I would know from personal experience.

But I believe there are few truly ugly people in the world, it’s all relative.

I thought Adam’s stuff was interesting. But once again, without the quantitative link it is all just story telling.

Your physical science background is probably hurting you here. The idea that all of a difference can be attributable to one factor rarely pans out in social science work. Error terms and unobservables are large and important. In physical science work they tend to be more about small amounts of measurement error or something easy like that. In social science they include a host of unobserved factors. This is why economists spend vastly more time studying statistics than biologists and chemists.

And those statistics make clear that the answer is not 9. Pretty women in the sample also tended to have better personality characteristics than average. From the sample we know which characteristics lead to higher donations. Thus it is clear that that if they maintained those personality traits, they should score above 9 even with average looks. So right off the bat, a little statistics makes a mess of your story being the only answer.

Although it is very popular in any scientific endeavor to shout out that one’s pet theory explains everything, that wouldn’t be science, that would be rhetoric. Unobserved factors matter, even if nobody mentions them or even knows about them. Good science in this case would invovlve some methodological showing of the facts you assert, along with a statistical confidence interval. That is the standard in econometrics and it works wonderfully.

As for quantitative research in social sciences, I see why you might think this, but I can promise you that economists do tons of quantitative studies. All of my work, for example, is quantitative and there are tons of economists who do stuff like me. The ability to quanitify the theory is one of the things that makes economics so cool (and more than story-telling). And it is why I am not very impressed with the qualitative stories. If, at the end of the day, you assume that all differences are due to one’s personal theory, you might as well be in the humanities.

Frank, sorry for the extra, inaccurate exclamation point. I’m not as pessimistic as you about the testability because of the various potential proxies I mentioned earlier. Also, my layman’s sense from a few years’ of watching abstracts and news stories in Science and Nature is that there is evidence that many (though not all) aspects of beauty are conserved across time and cultures to a greater extent than you’ve suggested.

I agree that a quantitative prediction of the experimental outcome is not likely to be forthcoming; but it seems that quantitative predictions are very rare outside of the physical sciences, and I think qualitative insights are still valuable.

However maybe your quantitative question can be answered in this case: In other words, can this theory provide me with a number, between 9 and 17, of how much the Pretty Women would be getting were we to pull out the causal evolutionary factors? The answer is 9. I don’t remember any other compelling causal factors being suggested in this thread, so I feel free to ascribe the entire difference to evolution. (I’m secretly hoping you’re now going to give us the testable and quantitative theory from economics you’ve been holding up your sleeve, that blows the evolutionary hypothesis out of the water. I’m all ears et cetera, waiting with baited breath and so on, waiting to be enlightened and so forth.)