Here’s an interesting little article from ultimateclassicrock.com:
We’ve always known that musicians do well with the ladies, but now we might have a scientific reason why this is the case. According to a new study, it appears to be less about looks or image and more about the music as an indicator of good genes….“The ability to create complex music could be indicative of advanced cognitive abilities,” wrote Dr. Benjamin Charlton in the report. “Consequently, women may acquire genetic benefits for offspring by selecting musicians able to create more complex music as sexual partners.”
I have a different interpretation. I don’t think women evolved to love rock stars because rock stars have good genes. On the contrary, I think people with primitive genes evolved to be good at rhythm because rhythm leads to dancing, and dancing leads to sex. Gene Simons claimed to have had sex with 5000 women!
200,000 years ago, primitive humans lacked the intelligence to survive so they needed to hurry up and have as many offspring with as many people as possible before they ended up dead, and many people, particularly cool people, still carry these primitive genes. Even today we see that many rock stars die young, but they still find time to have lots and lots of sex before this happens.
That’s not to deny that these people are often incredibly gifted Geniuses, and often extremely intelligent, but it’s a primitive form of Genius (an r genotype Genius). They are brilliant at acquiring spectacular status (social capital) because they evolved high rhythm IQ and high social IQ to attract numerous sexual partners rapidly, but they often lack the systemizing IQ to translate that social capital into spectacular wealth (economic capital) because primitive life forms thrive through high reproductive success (status), while advanced life forms thrive through high survival rates (acquiring resources). If I may oversimplify, this is very roughly the difference between sexual selection (reproduction of the sexiest) and natural selection (survival of the fittest). This is why rock stars, despite being worshiped by millions of devoted fans, often die broke, and then more advanced life forms (nerds) are hired to run their estate, and quickly turn it into a cash cow.
So even though there are lots of music stars among the 100 most popular Americans of all time, such as Madonna, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, (and Elvis even made the top 10) there’s not a single rock star among the 1,645 richest people in the world (not even one). No rock star in world history has ever been listed as a billionaire by authoritative Forbes magazine (the gold standard for wealth valuations).
And we see the same pattern among great athletes and great politicians; much better at acquiring spectacular popularity (social capital) than they are at acquiring spectacular wealth (economic capital) and it’s perhaps because the ability to acquire social capital (popularity) evolved more for high fertility (attracting numerous mates), than for high survival rates (what sociobiologists call the r strategy) By contrast, computer geeks and investment bankers tend to be dramatically over-represented among the world’s richest people, but virtually absent among the most popular people, unless they do something absolutely heroic like give tens of billions of dollars to charity. That’s perhaps because the ability to acquire resources (economic capital) evolved more for high survival rates than for high fertility (what sociobiologists call a K strategy);
So, while women love rock stars, they hate nerds.