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But it doesn't hold true for women. As the abstract of this PLOS ONE paper (open publication) says, "The ability to accurately assess the intelligence of other persons finds its place in everyday social interaction and should have important evolutionary consequences."
So the authors did an experiment to find out whether people could accurately judge intelligence from photos of other people (university students, natch), whose IQ had been measured conventionally. And they could! At least, they could judge men's intelligence well from photos, but not women's. However, "Our study revealed no relation between intelligence and either attractiveness or face shape."
The full report [PDF] can also be downloaded.
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A Man's Intelligence Shows In His Face
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The people sensible enough to give good advice are usually sensible
enough to give none.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday April 02 2014, @08:28PM
No, its conscious, you just don't like it. Thats OK. The species is stronger as a group by being able to productively exploit its differences; differences are good as long as they're not too different. A wider habitat becomes available due to variation if you want to think of it that way. For any characteristic you can measure, a species is always stronger if that characteristic is between zero and "not too large" so the odds of this particular characteristic having a coefficient of exactly zero is extremely unlikely although highly politically popular, in fact its a political necessity. If the variation coefficient were zero, we'd make a stronger species by actively working to make it not zero. Its always going to be way smaller than individual variation within a group anyway, isn't it?
The more I consider the relative tradeoffs the less convinced I am that a scientifically measurable evolved ability to gauge intelligence of men better than women would have any reasonable theoretical model correlation with patriarchy / matriarchy during evolutionary history. So here I am flip flopping again, if the input data is correct I can't decide if it proves much if anything about ancient evolved patriarchy vs matriarchy after all. But it would be a fun research project!