RESEARCH zyxwvu REPORT^ zyxwvuts 423 zy Collected Papers on Metalinguistics, Foreign Service Institute, 1952; and Lan- guage, Thought and Reality, John B. Carroll, ed., pp. 207-219, 1956.) Woodbury, Anthony C. 1984 Eskimo and Aleut Languages. zyxwvu In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 5: Arctic. David Damas, ed. Pp. 4% 63. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Insti- tution. Evolutionary Perspectives on Permanent Breast Enlargement in Human Females FRANCES E. MASCIA-LEES Social Science Division Simon’s Rock of Bard College JOHN H. RELETHFORD Department of Anthropology State Universig OfNew York College at Oneonta TOM SORGER Institute of Aging Temple Universily Compared to the other primates, one unique characteristic ofHomo sapienr is the existence of permanently enlarged breasts in human females. While several authors have attempted to account for the evolution of this anomaly, these explana- tions are invariably based on the proble- matic concept of breasts as sexual signals. Morris’s early account, for example, suggests that with the advent of bipedal- ism, female breasts acted to shift the in- terest of the male to the front by acting as a sexual signal that mimicked “the an- cient genital display of hemispherical buttocks” (1967:75). More recently, Gal- lup (1982) has proposed that breasts sig- nal ovulation, thus selecting for males who could synchronize copulation with ovulation. Short (1976) has suggested that as hominid females became increas- ingly constrained in their movements due to increased infant dependency, male pa- rental investment became increasingly necessary. Breasts became objects of at- traction ensuring pair-bonding even be- fore the female reached maturity. Finally, Cant (1981) suggests that permanently enlarged breasts evolved as a signal to alert males to the nutritional status of fe- males. Females who were better able to build up fat and maintain it would have more reserves to convert to parental in- vestment during pregnancy and lacta- tion. Breasts, with their high concentra- tion offat, would act to signal to males the potential parental investment of the fe- male. These scenarios are based on the as- sumption that permanently enlarged fe- male breasts have arisen primarily through the process of sexual selection whereby males choose female mates based on their “attractiveness.” Breasts are seen as attractive either because they mimic the buttocks, signal ovulation, or signal potential female parental invest- ment. As Hamilton points out, such scen- arios view females as subject to selection based on male erotic reactions ( 1984:658). The validity of the concept of sexual se- lection to explain sexual dimorphism has generated considerable debate since Dar- win developed this idea over a hundred years ago. Despite this controversy, Fe- digan points out that, Indeed, one of the most curious aspects of the application ofsexual selection principles in the behavioral sciences is that in spite of widespread discussions of the shortcomings of this theory, the major tenets still operate as hidden assumptions, or even axioms, in much of the writing on social behavior in animals. [ 1982:271] In terms of these shortcomings, many authors (e.g., Fedigan 1982; Sayers 1982) have pointed to the ethnocentrism inher- ent in these kinds of explanations since they quite consistently use a recent pat- tern of sexual relations as a model for early hominid sexual interactions (Ham- ilton 1984). For instance, enticing males to contribute more in the way of parental investment is central to several of the the- ories reviewed above. Such enticement, gained through sexual appeal, is seen as necessary since this model contends that females invest more at the moment of conception than males due to the larger size of the ovum. Such a disproportion- ately large investment on the part of fe- males portends greater parental invest-