Britain: Scientists have confirmed what fans of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever have known all along: men with the best dance moves have the most sex appeal.
The finding lends support to the idea that dancing is a way to show off high quality genes and good health - both indicators of a top-quality mate. Charles Darwin was the first to suggest that dance is a courtship signal in animals, but there have been no studies on the relation of dance and genetic or physical quality in humans until now.
In a study published today in Nature, William Brown of Rutgers University, New Jersey, looked at how dancing ability correlated with a person's body symmetry, a typical measure of the quality of a mate in evolutionary biology. Across a wide range of species, bodies that are less symmetrical are associated with increased disease, quicker death and poor reproductivity. Prof Brown recorded a group of 183 Jamaicans strutting their stuff, and then presented the results to a sample of 155 peers for evaluation on a dance rating scale. A measure of body symmetry for each of the participants was also recorded.
Prof Brown found that symmetrical men were better dancers than asymmetric males. Likewise, men preferred the dances of symmetrical women, although this was not as marked.
"Symmetrical males were evaluated as significantly better dancers than asymmetrical males, accounting for 48 per cent of the variance in dance ability," the researchers said. "Even though symmetrical females were significantly better dancers than asymmetrical females, female symmetry only accounted for 23 per cent of dance ability."
The study stopped short of saying why symmetry was so crucial. "Attractive dances may be more difficult to perform, more rhythmic, more energetic, more energy efficient, or any combination of these factors. Does dance ability correlate with reproductive success? We plan to address this question with long-term data from the same population." - (Additional reporting Reuters)