Does Sir Mix-A-Lot Have An Evolutionary Reason For His Fondness Of Big Derrieres?

Sir Mix-a-Lot delivered a dissertation on his appreciation of the female form in his 1992 hit single, "Baby Got Back," but recent research is not quite backing up his statements. The researchers who published their work in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior wanted to see just how much of a role evolution has played in male preferences for female body types. According to the researchers who conducted two related studies, men were most attracted to images of women with the "theoretically optimal angle of lumbar curvature." Among our ancestors, women with 45.5-degree lumbar curves are believed to have been put together to best handle foraging during pregnancy, thus reducing the risk of injury.

In one study, the researchers showed images of women with different spinal curvatures to about 100 men, who were then requested to rate their levels of attractiveness. Men were more attracted to women whose spinal curves were closest to the optimal angle of 45.5 degrees. "This adds to a growing body of evidence that beauty is not entirely arbitrary, or ‘in the eyes of the beholder’ as many in mainstream social science believed, but rather has a coherent adaptive logic," co-author David M. Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement.

The optimal angle would have enabled ancestral women to place more of their weight over their hips, which would have improved their ability to perform daily tasks, the researchers explained. "These women would have been more effective at foraging during pregnancy and less likely to suffer spinal injuries. In turn, men who preferred these women would have had mates who were better able to provide for fetus and offspring, and who would have been able to carry out multiple pregnancies without injury," lead author David M.G. Lewis, a psychologist at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, said in a statement.

In the other study, the researchers showed images of women with differing buttock sizes but similar spinal curvatures to about 200 men, who were then requested to rate their levels of attractiveness. Men were more attracted to women whose spinal curves were closest to the optimal angle of 45.5 degrees, regardless of their buttock sizes. "Men again tended to prefer women exhibiting cues to a degree of vertebral wedging closer to optimum. This included preferring women whose lumbar curvature specifically reflected vertebral wedging rather than buttock mass," the researchers wrote in the abstract of their report.

Based on this recent research, Sir Mix-a-Lot would have had to turn his gaze only slightly upward to have been correct in his observations, evolutionarily speaking.