Brown William M, Cronk Lee, Grochow Keith, Jacobson Amy, Liu C Karen, Popović Zoran, Trivers Robert
Center for Human Evolutionary Studies, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, 131 George Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901-1414, USA.
Nature. 2005 Dec 22;438(7071):1148-50. doi: 10.1038/nature04344.
Dance is believed to be important in the courtship of a variety of species, including humans, but nothing is known about what dance reveals about the underlying phenotypic--or genotypic--quality of the dancer. One measure of quality in evolutionary studies is the degree of bodily symmetry (fluctuating asymmetry, FA), because it measures developmental stability. Does dance quality reveal FA to the observer and is the effect stronger for male dancers than female? To answer these questions, we chose a population that has been measured twice for FA since 1996 (ref. 9) in a society (Jamaican) in which dancing is important in the lives of both sexes. Motion-capture cameras created controlled stimuli (in the form of videos) that isolated dance movements from all other aspects of visual appearance (including FA), and the same population evaluated these videos for dancing ability. Here we report that there are strong positive associations between symmetry and dancing ability, and these associations were stronger in men than in women. In addition, women rate dances by symmetrical men relatively more positively than do men, and more-symmetrical men value symmetry in women dancers more than do less-symmetrical men. In summary, dance in Jamaica seems to show evidence of sexual selection and to reveal important information about the dancer.
人们认为舞蹈在包括人类在内的多种物种的求偶过程中都很重要，但对于舞蹈能揭示舞者潜在的表型——或基因型——质量的哪些方面，我们却一无所知。在进化研究中，衡量质量的一个指标是身体对称程度（波动不对称性，FA），因为它能衡量发育稳定性。舞蹈质量是否会向观察者揭示FA，且这种影响对男性舞者比对女性舞者更强吗？为了回答这些问题，我们选择了一个自1996年以来（参考文献9）在一个社会（牙买加）中对FA进行过两次测量的群体，在这个社会中，舞蹈在男女生活中都很重要。动作捕捉相机创建了受控刺激（以视频形式），将舞蹈动作与视觉外观的所有其他方面（包括FA）隔离开来，并且同一群体对这些视频的舞蹈能力进行了评估。我们在此报告，对称与舞蹈能力之间存在很强的正相关，且这些关联在男性中比在女性中更强。此外，与男性相比，女性对对称男性的舞蹈评价相对更积极，而且对称程度更高的男性比对称程度较低的男性更看重女性舞者的对称性。总之，牙买加的舞蹈似乎显示出性选择的证据，并揭示了有关舞者的重要信息。
