Why good dancers are sexier

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="95%" height="1"> <tr> <center> <td valign="top" width="33%" height="33"> <b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="5">Why good dancers are sexier</font></p> </b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Arial">March 30</font><font face="Arial"><font size="1">, 2005<br> Courtesy <br> and World Science staff<br> </font> <b> <br> </b> </font> <b><font face="Arial" size="2">A new study may explain why good dancers are sexier, researchers say: it supports a theory that dancing is a measure of good health because it relies on bodily symmetry.<br> <br> Scientists have long recognized dance as a courtship signal in a range of animals, including humans. Better dancers are thought to attract more or better mates. What’s seemingly obvious in everyday life, however, has not always been rigorously verified by science. <br> <br> The study by scientists at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. for the first time links dancing ability to established measures of mate quality in humans, according to the researchers.<br> <br> In a paper in the Dec. 22 issue of the science journal Nature, Rutgers anthropologists wrote that they worked with 183 Jamaican teenagers, and asked the youngers’ peers to evaluate their dancing ability. <br> <br> But the peers weren’t allowed to watch each dancer directly. Instead, the peers were asked to watch a computer-animated figure that duplicated the movements of each dancer. Each dancer had danced with 41 a infrared reflectors attached to themselves, so that the movements could be measured and captured on a computer.<br> <br> The researchers then asked peers of the dancers to evaluate the cartoon figures’ dancing ability. The figures were gender-neutral, faceless and the same size, to keep evaluators from judging based on anything but dancing.<br> <br> “At least since Darwin, scientists have suspected that dance so often plays a role in courtship because dance quality tracks with mate quality,” said Lee Cronk of Rutgers. “But this has been hard to study because of the difficulty of isolating dance movements from variables, such as attractiveness, clothing and body features.”<br> <br> Higher-rated human dancers were typically people with greater body symmetry, the researchers found.<br> <br> Symmetry is an accepted indicator in most animal species – including humans – of how well an organism develops despite problems it encounters as it grows, the researchers said. Symmetry thus indicates health and quality as a potential mate, which scientists believe explains why symmetrical people are typically considered more beautiful.<br> <br> “By using motion-capture technology commonly employed in medical and sports science to isolate dance movements, we can confidently peg dancing ability to desirability,” Cronk said. <br> <br> He and Rutgers postdoctoral research fellow William Brown also examined results by the sex of the dancer. They found that symmetric males received better dance scores than symmetric females and that female evaluators rated symmetric men higher than male evaluators rated symmetric men. <br> <br> “In species where fathers invest less than mothers in their offspring, females tend to be more selective in mate choice and males therefore invest more in courtship display,” Brown said. “Our results with human subjects correlate with that expectation. More symmetrical men put on a better show, and women notice.” <br> <br> The participants were ideal subjects for a scientific study of dance, since in Jamaican society, dancing is important in the lives of both sexes, the researchers said. The dancers ranged in age from 14 through 19, and each danced to the same song, popular at the time in Jamaica.<br> <br> * * *</font></p> </b> <p><b><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#FFFFFF">Send us a <a href="mailto:editor@world-science.net">comment</a> on this story, or <a href="mailto:?Body=http://www.world-science.net/othernews/051221_dancefrm.htm">send it to a friend</a></font></b> </p> <p>  </center> </td> </tr> </table> </body>