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In their thorough and insightful article, Maestripieri et al. summarise evidence comparing the dominant economic, social, and evolutionary explanations for the social and employment biases favouring attractive individuals. They justifiably conclude that these biases are better explained by an evolutionary theory (relating to access to high-quality mating partners) than they are by theories put forward by economists and social psychologists.
The authors' argument implicitly invokes Tinbergen's (1963) four levels of explanation (“Tinbergen's four questions”). Tinbergen argued that complete accounts of behaviour comprise four levels of explanation: the (1) causal mechanism and (2) lifetime development (ontogeny) of the behaviour (both proximate explanations), and the (3) adaptive function and (4) phylogenetic origin of the behaviour (both ultimate level explanations). Explicitly applying a Tinbergian perspective to the authors' arguments reveals that the authors' evolutionary theory is the preferred option of those theories considered because it is the only one providing an ultimate, in this case, functional, explanation. The authors' evolutionary theory both considered the adaptive function and made predictions about the causal mechanisms of the behaviour. The other theories are strictly proximate explanations, describing only the causal mechanism of the behaviour. This is why Maestripieri et al. describe the social and economic theories as descriptive – proximate theories frequently are, as they describe how behaviours develop and manifest in an immediate sense. But when seeking to understand why behavioural mechanisms develop and manifest the way they do, only...