New Research Science confirms it - smooth dancers are sexier Archived article from Jan 23, 2006 By Carl Blesch

Credit: Illustration Courtesy of the University of Washington This virtual dancing machine helped researchers link dancing ability to mate quality. The computer-animated figure duplicated the movements of Jamaican teenagers dancing to popular music. Dance has long been recognized as a courtship ritual in many animal species, including humans. Better dancers presumably attract more mates or a more desirable mate. Now, a new study by Rutgers scientists links dancing ability to desirability. Reporting in the science journal Nature, Rutgers anthropologists, collaborating with University of Washington computer scientists, describe how they created computer-animated figures that duplicated the movements of 183 Jamaican teenagers dancing to popular music. The study showed that higher-rated dancers were typically people with greater body symmetry, a trait associated with attractiveness. Lee Cronk, associate professor of anthropology, and postdoctoral research fellow William Brown also examined results by the dancer’s sex: Symmetric males received better dance scores than symmetric females, and female evaluators rated symmetric men higher than male evaluators rated symmetric men. “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 says. “Our results with human subjects correlate with that expectation. More symmetrical men put on a better show, and women notice.”

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