Researchers at Northumbria University in the U.K. have conducted the first rigorous study of attractive dance moves and, with a biometric analysis, can now very precisely associate them with women's ratings of male dancers.

Thank goodness somebody has finally tackled that question. I can't remember how many years it's been on my mind.

ryck

Hmm. It's an interesting study, but I'm somewhat skeptical about the conclusions. I think that unless it's replicated with a larger sample size, I'd be very hesitant to call it useful. And controlling for learned social and cultural conditioning in any kind of study like this tends to be very difficult.

If it does hold up, though, it may open all kinds of doors into our understanding of human evolutionary psychology, and even into the development and adaptation of language. Language isn't as far from dancing as one might think; the necessary prerequisite to any form of verbal language is rhythm, and there have been evolutionary biologists who have argued that our development of complex and abstract language may originally have sprung from a development of rhythm as a means of--surprise!--sexual selection. (In fact, I had a conversation about just that topic last night over dinner with a guy whose Ph.D. research was done on the coevolutionary development of rhythm and language, and how both may have at first been primarily sexual selection adaptations.)