It's true, I'm good looking and smart.

If this assumption is correct, all the PhD or highly educated people should be supermodel-like beautiful. If high IQ = beauty, all Jews (or East Asians) should gorgeous. We all can see the potential flaws in such assumption.

This assumption obviously is monolithic and left out many factors. Highly educated or high IQ people are not always wealthy. When the correlations are mutiple steps away from original premise, it often is not related any more because of multiple other factors contributing the final outcome.

How about conter-assumption? Ugly people need extra-smartness to compensate for their physical imperfection? Beautiful people have easy ride on most thing so they do not need to be extra-smart?

The simple answer to this assumption and problems to measure the IQ of those supermodels. I can be sure that their IQ will be average.

No. The answer is simple. Ugly people can compensate, but that doesnt make them much more intelligent than they are, but mainly more ambitious.

Furthermore beautiful people have better feature if going after the current norm.
They are healthier, taller, had usually good nutrition etc.

The chance that an ugly person which has physical defects more or less isnt that intelligent, has no good psychological background as well is just MUCH more likely.

Of course there are ugly people with an healthy and well-developed brain but statistically its a clear thing.

Are historically renown genius beautiful? In reality, their physical features might be quite variable. First person coming into mind is Einstein.

The most lilkey outcome is that beauty has no correlation with IQ.

The danger of mutiple assumptions with monolithic logic:

Muscle need to move thing. Stronger muscle need to move larger thing. Large building need large building blocks. Elephant has strongest muscle. So elephant can build sky scraper.

We know the conclusion is absolute absurd here because it disregard all other factors in buiding.

It is very likely the same kind of logical flaws happening here. The best answer is to see wether elenphant can build sky scraper.

Just select those supermodel and test their IQ would answer all speculations.

I do find it likely that beauty and intelligence are positively correlated, but even if the 4 underlying assumptions are correct, the theorem is far from "proven." What if, say, intelligent people choose mates based on educational status while stupid people prioritize raw physical attractiveness? Something like that would produce an effect opposite of what Kanazawa suggests.

Why not just directly correlate the IQ scores and attractiveness ratings of a large sample of people of similar age, race, and nutritional history.

This goes to show you what a prostitute logic can be - - the argument sounds reasonable, even if reality is screaming the obverse.

Change a few of the variables (attraction) to something else (height, shoe size, whatever) and you can come up with whatever you want the conclusion to be.

And who is saying the "supermodels" are all that attractive? They tend to look malnutritioned and vacant, hardly a recognizable pose of brainpower.

I vaguely recall that Terman, in his study of high-IQ children, did find they were better-looking than average (as well as taller, healthier, etc). But I agree with the comment that the proper way to test the hypothesis is with a direct study of random sample, with photographs ranked for attractiveness by judges without knowledge of their IQ. What is the point of deducing a fact from an elaborate chain of premises if you can test it directly?

The authors also cite some studies that study the correlation between attractiveness and IQ directly, for anyone that's interested.

Did you buy the $30 paper, it's not online?

One person on gnxp wondered why intelligent people (by which he was thinking of stereotypical 'nerds')were less attractive. I told him the opposite might be true, and that the opposite was actually the more common stereotype.

The theory is probably true. Don't look at PhDs or supermodels for proof. Everyone knows people who select to modelling are on average not much educated. Same might go for PhD's, nerds and geniuses, who select to their profession because of social deficiencies. Correlation doesn't mean that the relationship is linear.

But I'm sure, get a random population of, say 20-30 years old people, let a "panel" of people sort them to categories "ugly", "average" and "beautiful", and test the average IQ of each group... and it's all obvious. The differences might not be big, but they are there..

I think the cultural factor is also of great importance. In southern european based-cultures people considered "beautifull" are, per southern european logic, dumb while people with attratcive figures (in the mean) are the intelligent ones and the ugly are dumb too. So, I think it depends on WHERE you make your study and WHICH culture you are analyzing...

Cheers

There is no "southern European logic".

Well, I deduct there is from talking with male friends from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc, and comparing with other English, Irish, Danish and German friends. I might add that most people though at first I was greek (both from my looks and my cultural "ways" ) so I'm not saying it's a truth per se but rather my assumption.

Cheers

People usually underestimate the impact of perinatal events which have significant effects on both physical development, eventual appearance (dentition, etc) and intellectual potential. What the mother eats during pregnancy, and what happens during birth are major determinants which may produce a correlation that is not genetic.

A recent study (Gottfredson and Deary) also found a correlation between intelligence and longevity in Scotland even after controls for social class. Intelligent people may simply know how to look after themselves better and how to make the most of their appearance.

You may do well to consider that there are some people that focus entirely on pursuits (other than physical appearance) that are very intelligent and yet others that do wish, for reasons that vary as widely as do personalities, to look many different ways. There is also the effect of society on "beauty." With so many pop-culture icons to guide the masses on hair styles, *shudder* make up, and other "beauty enhancing" concepts it becomes easier for the masses, intelligent and daft alike, to be physically attractive. Now the more intelligent people may choose to avoid the styles of these celebrities, which I tend to find to be the case. I know a great deal of good looking people and many of those people appear to have come right off a hair product or make up advertisement. Being and intelligent person as well, I have also noticed that among intelligent people there is more of a desire to be an individual...or less of a desire to do what everyone else does...whichever. My point is that there are so many variables that such an experiment would be difficult to control for. Oh, and I heard of a professor that once proved there is a positive correlation between how much icecream I eat and the amount of people that die in third world nations every day.

I think that it is difficult to really untangle what is being said here at a conceptual level. For instance, what is meant by 'beautiful'? That is very relative. In the Middle Ages if guys had huge noses and chins they were considered handsome as it bespoke strength of character. Sociobiologists tell us beauty is no more than physical traits denoting reproductive fitness (symmetry, bright eyes, etc.). However, even bearing this in mind there is considerable cultural variation in physical traits considered beautiful. Marlyn Monroe would not be considered especially attractive today. Until the 70s no black person was considered beautiful. Today's gay promoted skeletal women would be thought horrendous in Victorian times.

The same with intelligence. I would imagine that the physical sciences demand the highest IQs. However, scientists do not earn a lot - just look in the New Scientist job pages to see that. Biomed scientists earn 13, 000 per year. Nothing.

My instinct is that the association is real, but the mechanism presented is at fault. The higher social classes hold wealth anyway, and tend not to sink in the social order no matter how dumb they are. They also tend to set social trends, including those for standards of physical attractiveness. Consequently they seem attractive (and are indeed more attractive by the standards they set). However, they are not especially intelligent, this assumption is very likely caused by the Halo Effect wherein people (esp. teachers) tend to overestimate middle class abilities.