14 DAY TRIAL // An Academy Award is a guarantee of an actor's fame, money, roles and ...sex!
An Oscar seems to boost the evolutionary success: these actors have more children than the national average, as found by a new research.
Does this golden statue, just like a lion's mane, signal the best male in the pack?
In the end, the reproductive success of people - whether rich or poor, famous or anonymous - is determined by the same factors like in the case of all animals: the number of surviving offspring.
The Academy Award winners are also known to have longer life spans than actors who did not win it have. "So it was natural to ask whether snagging an Oscar also confers reproductive fitness," said Mark Hauber, a behavioral ecologist at New Zealand's University of Auckland.
Hauber analyzed the biographies of 59 actresses and 37 actors, who won the Academy Awards between 1929 and 2001, focusing on their ages, number of legal spouses and biological children.
The male Academy winners have an average of almost 4 children; the record is detained by Marlon Brando with 11 children. The national average in the U.S. is of just 1.2 children per couple.
But not everybody agrees with the conclusions of this research. "The concept that an academy award is 'an honest signal' is a startlingly unfounded assertion," said Mike Wade of the Indiana University, Bloomington.
He warns that the Oscar winners are not so fairly chosen due to "the immense political and social machinery mobilized by the movie studios to promote their products" and because there's a huge gap between the roles played by an actor and what their own lives are like. "It's hardly an honest signal. Moreover, Hauber didn't control for potential confounding factors, such as comparing award winners with those who just got nominated", Wade argues.
The research also found that Oscar gaining women are just slightly more fecund than the average: 1.5 children, even if many of them had multiple divorces. But that's only normal: it's quite difficult for women who invest a lot in their children to win an Oscar, as they can't dedicate the same huge amounts of time and energy to their carriers, too.