Neal Cormier’s Weblog

Hey Neal-

I’ve found that many women in America are, yes, more akward than the rest of the world, however (no offense to any European women), I disagree that the facial features or body features are that much different-

Besides, isn’t France the fashion capitol of the world??? the looks that make the runway are set by European designers, mostly-

I’ll have to find some hard core evidence of this and send links out, however:

I think it’s safe to say that in conjunction with popular media, yes, fashionistas dictate what is considered “beautiful” in a certain area- however, just becuase what we see in today’s popular media are long, skinny bodies with teenage boy faces doesn’t mean that represents the majority of American women-quite the contrary-it represents an “elite” few-

most American women do have some type of European descent, and not only that, but airbrushing and makeup have done a lot to smear the facial features of many modern celebrities we’ll see in the popular media-

still dont believe me? take a look at fashion mags, etc. from 30-40 years ago, all the women look way different than they do today-it’s becuase (largely) that we’ve changed what we consider beautiful over this period of time-not that the women have actually changed-

for instance: Marylin Monroe would not be a fashion model (or even famous actress) today by American standards-she was short, petite, had a figure and roundish face- (Lucille Ball, Betty Davis, etc)
I see what you’re saying and agree to a point overall, however I don’t believe that any country has the final say on beautiful-

i don’t want everyone to be beautiful in the same way-that’s boring- i think that long and skinny or round and plump or whatever can be beautiful in turn-and really, what’s inside eventually peeks out for everyone-regardless of physiology- you can be round and petite and all that, but if you’re a bitch, you’re not really that beautiful-

“Unfortunately, I think there are still “ugly people” because the process of natural selection leaves certain people to mate with whomever they are able to. And, this is argument is purely aesthetic-based, so i’m not taking any kind of personality into account.”

Sorry, but that’s completely absurd and the inherent reasoning in it has nothing to do with evolution, but more a tweaked version of social darwinism.

Your argument is that beauty is the only, or main, decider of survival and everyone else just takes what they can get. This is false.

Mates of any species are not chosen solely on beauty. For humans specifically, one may choose a mate because they are good providers, they are push-overs, they have an attractive level of intelligence, they are in positions of social power, they may be more dominant or submissive than their mate which can create a more appropriate psychological match, all of which encourage breeding but may have nothing to do with physical beauty.

further, there is no genetic link between physical beauty and fertility. There may be a loose link between basic health and beauty which may have some influence, but it’s tentative at best. Further, the link is rendered almost moot by the fact that most women in the first world actively augment their features to appear as other than they actually are, ie, they wear blush and lipstick to present the illusion of arrousal, they wear eye make-up to fake symmetry, they wear various types of foundation to make their skin appear smoother. Not to mention various medications and procedures that may allow those features and have little to do with one’s biological make-up.

That’s not to say that beauty plays no roll, it certainly does, but when you’re talking about natural selection, it’s only a small piece of the puzzle.

Further, the only real “objective” standards of beauty are symmetry and good skin. Outside of those two parameters there is plenty of room for variation. One can have both of those features, but still be considered ugly by some and not others, or neither and be considered attractive by some and not others.

Anyway, those are tendencies not absolutes. Nature, natural selection in particular, is completely unconcerned with the human desire to categorize and define, and operates in gradients and bell curves far more often than in blacks and whites. In nature, blacks and whites are almost unheard of.

Further, reality being what it is, the premise fails to take into consideration rape, arranged marriages, artificial insemination, beer goggles etc. These may not be the norm, but these and other small deviations from “normal” are significant enough to effect natural selection. IE, everyone with naturally red hair is descended from the same person who was the first to carry the mutation. It’s considered a fairly standard trait rather than a mutation, and well within the human norms but can be traced back to one freak occurence that would not have fallen within the community’s “objective” standards of beauty.

The argument can be made that physical beauty has an objective, biological basis that has an effect, but to suggest that it is the guiding force and, by implication, that attractive people are inherently “more fit” is not only rediculously narrow, but scientifically inaccurate.

JOe-

I’m about to leave work, so i’ll have to add more later, but i couldn’t resist at least some retort.

I was responding to Sarah’s question “why are there still ‘ugly’ people?” And within my answer, I clearly state that I am not taking any other obliviously important emotional, mental, sociological, psychological elements into account; since that is not really what the discussion set out to discuss. So, to your comment “Your argument is that beauty is the only, or main, decider of survival and everyone else just takes what they can get. This is false.” That’s a great commendable statement there, but it seems its just that; a statement that I’m sure a lot of people would feel better to hear. However, it doesn’t really take in to account what I just clarified. You do throw in the obligatory, “or main” qualification to your statement which allows you to go either way when questioned. My point is that, if this were somehow a controlled scientific study (which by the way, there have been) and we were able to have the same essence of a person (all their specific personal traits and ideas, beliefs, basically their ‘soul’) duplicated but one specimen had the elements of Fibonacci, or perfect symmetry, and other factors indicating health, vitality, and just plain aesthetic appeal, and the other was just average, I’d bet you that, for lack of a better word, the ‘prettier’ one would attract the most attention. That’s the same reason why male birds are so colorful. The most colorful and symmetrical patterns attract the most mates….

Times up. Chat later…

Neal: the comment that I was considering absurd was not a scientific one. I felt that it misrepresented that data in favor of proving a predetermined point of view.

That’s, by definition, not scientific.

Further, science isn’t the arbiter of what’s tenable. Reality is. Science is meerly the best tool available for describing reality.

“It’s beauty that captures your attention; personality which captures your heart.”

ok, so anyway…

First, I think that beauty is absolutely one of the most basic and primal elements in natural selection. Not the primary, but certainly, (and especially in species that are unable to communicate in the way humans are and to the first homosaepiens),important. Studies of disparate range of animals and plants have revealed that less attractive and asymmetrical physical features render an organism more susceptible to disease and parasite assaults

True, strength and the ability to provide as you mentioned are also important especially for our great-great-great… mammoth-slaying ancestors. But, strength can be assessed by physical traits as well as actual feats of strength. To suggest that natural selection and social Darwinism are unrelated I find confusing. Social Darwinism just wants to apply natural selection in a social context.

“further, there is no genetic link between physical beauty and fertility… Further, the link is rendered almost moot by the fact that most women in the first world actively augment their features”

Just because women can alter their appearance doesn’t cancel out the still remaining notion that naturally occuring beauty is linked with fertility. And it almost bolsters my argument since these women are altering themselves to achieve a certain look – one that produces results. you might say that society and the media and models are what’s driving this; and it is to a degree. But, what is ultimately driving what “the media” wants. The fashion industry, with its boyish, stick thin flat chested models certainly doesn’t promote fullness of breasts, hips to sell its product. Yet things like beer commercials or other guy-oriented marketing does. Why? to appeal to men. How do you appeal to men in a fast, sensory driven, effective way? Appeal to their most basic primal levels. In the Newsweek article Neal linked to, scientist Victor Johnstone purported that:

“The proportions seem to point to fertility, specifically the effect of the hormone oestrogen on the female face. “Up until puberty the faces of boys and girls are similar,” says Johnstone. “But then the rise in oestrogen in girls gives them fuller lips, while testosterone in boys gives them a fuller jaw . So what people are picking out as beauty is really a sign of fertility brought on by oestrogen. Interestingly, 24.8 years – the age when most women achieve ideal facial proportions, according to the study – is the time when oestrogen levels are highest and women are at their most fertile”

You stated that “Further, the only real “objective” standards of beauty are symmetry and good skin” Check out some of the studies done. I think you’ll find there are more indicators of beauty than just symmetry and good skin. As mentioned above, full lips and large eyes are just a few other elements.

Also, I don’t think that i said that standards were “absolute”; unless you’re playing off the word objective. But the only objective absolute is reality. But we may not fully understand reality yet still know aspects of it.

As for the issue of rape, forced marriage, etc. I don’t really think that’s relative to the core topic here.

So, I think you were there when you said “The argument can be made that physical beauty has an objective, biological basis that has an effect”, But a bit naive is stating that “to suggest that it is the guiding force and, by implication, that attractive people are inherently “more fit” is not only rediculously narrow, but scientifically inaccurate.”

As Oscar Wilde said, “It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.” I think that can be interpreted in several ways; i think we are proof of that.

I don’t know that it was a straw man as much as I think I may have misunderstood the point.

Kristin’s most recent post clarified some things for me, though I’m not 100% on board.

I get the impression now that what we may be arguing is only a matter of degrees. She thinks that physical beauty weighs X amount in natural selection and I think that it weighs less. Is this accurate?

The main issue I had a problem with was the notion that “pretty people get to chose, everyone else takes what they can get”. What I’ve been getting at is that the reality of selection is a lot more complicated than that. There is a range of people from attractive to ugly because the genetic recombination throughout the species has little to do with the objective standards. Attractive people and ugly people all fuck each other like crazy because that, ultimately, is a far better strategy.

Over time, slowly, those at the very bottom of the bell curve (which would include genetic disorders, and perhaps the really unlucky mathmatical inevitability of lots and lots of well below average traits in one person) may fall out, but I don’t know that it’s possible to judge that in real time.

Did that happen in the past? Of course it did, that’s what created the standards to begin with.

But, when it comes to present-day selection, there really is no feasible way of measuring it. In fact, though I can’t find links at the moment, I’ve read papers and articles with biologists who feel that natural selection isn’t even happening with humans anymore, or, at the very least, not in the same way. Since we don’t just let people die, and since many “deviations” can be fixed, the rules of the game have changed.

(I tend to feel the latter, it still happens, but according to different rules than animals or even our own, pre-medical past)

As far as rape, arranged marriage, etc, go, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. If you leave the western world, arranged marriages are very very common, even standard among some populations and was the standard throughout much human history. Thousands and thousands of years of the practice has an effect on the population at large.

Even if it only happened in greece or india or the middle east, by the time those populations came in contact with other populations and started inter-breeding, the effects of those individual communities then began to run through the new populations, effecting them. For lack of a better analogy (and I mean it without the negative connotations), the traits moved through the population much in the same way that a virus does, reshaping the new genetic landscape.

Rape has almost always been a tool of inter-tribal warfare. Whether it’s small primate tribes warring over a water whole or if it’s american soldiers in Viet Nam, rape is what human soldiers do. If you take into consideration how much war there is (arguably, humans have been in a perpetual state of war for thousands of years), then one can very easily see that rape has a major effect on natural selection.

But ultimately, again, I think the only thing we’re disagreeing on is percentages. I place less value on pure physical beauty as far as selection goes.

No, I don’t think that all variables are equal. I do believe in chaos and randomness, which automatically means that there is a variation in “weight” (the larger the system, the greater the potential weight). However, even though not all variables are equal, the weights of each variable may change from situation to situation. In an isolated population where everyone is blonde, for example, someone who is a brunette, despite maybe not having the ideal symmetry, may have an advantage because they are considered exotic or a novelty which may give them an advantage. The genes for dark hair are dominant so, over time, those dominant traits may actually replace or equal the blonde traits throughout the population. To be fair, that situation is an exception to the rule but I think it illustrates the principle of varying weight. There are millions of situations where the game changes, all of these situations add up (even in the sum total, there is a heirerarchy of weight between the sets, though those sets must also follow the same basic rules)

Another example is what I mentioned before, in a culture where most people can “fake” the beauty standards, it changes the game from a biological standpoint. True, as kristin pointed out, that means the standards are in place, however, the ability to fake them, means that an individual’s DNA can be selected for, despite not having the beauty traits to begin with (like non-poisonous frogs that have nearly identical markings as those of poisonous ones).

(along those lines, I think that “beer-goggles” are actually an evolutionary advantage, in that they encourage mating with less inhibition/standards, etc, thereby generating more unique genetic combinations that can be “tested”)

As far as chaos and randomness go, those are vital parts of the theory of natural selection, without them, in fact, the theory doesn’t work.

The reason why organisms change over time is because every single individual has a handful of genes that are “broken”, there are so many genes that, because of sheer chance, some must have “problems”.

(a note: what I mean by “broken” and “problems” is that in the genetic recombination and replication process, some do not simply match the combination or either of the parents. They go haywire and produce something unique)

These “imperfections” are mutations. Most of the time, the mutations are imperceptible when viewing the organsim, the fingernails may be imperceptibly thicker, fingers imperceptibly longer, etc.

Since every generation is a recombination of DNA, everyone’s mutations, as well as their non-mutations, recombine. Most, I’d wager, simply disappear in a generation or two, the gaps filled in by the mate’s DNA.

However, since you’re dealing with such massive numbers of individuals over massive amounts of time, certain traits gain momentum. When they gain enough momentum to possibly make a difference, then the new traits become “tested” by the environment, society, etc where they are then selected for or against.

And this selection process is also governed by chaos and randomness, which individuals with which traits in which culture in which environment are matters of chance. Those that are an advantage are selected for, those that are not an advantage may have no effect (ie, the non-functioning appendix), and those that are a disadvantage may die without mating.

At every step of the way there is chaos.

The nature of chaos, though is not egalitarian, it’s a bell curve which contains a wide variety of complexity, weight, importance, etc.

In a chaotic system, given enough time, natural selection is almost inevitable.

A really great book to check out is Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body

http://www.amazon.com/Mutants-Genetic-Variety-Human-Body/dp/0142004820/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212080961&sr=1-1

It’s more about how genetics work than evolution, but when you look at how genetics work, variation and evolution become obvious inevitabilities.

damn, i always miss my place in line! This was meant to immediately follows Joes follow up to my post last night…

I stay away from American women, they seem to be too needy, too demanding and if every single little thing does not go their way they are the most miserable women on the planet.

You can have fun with European women, easier to talk to, get along with, more romantic, enjoy having fun with out every little thing being a headache and they do not seem to have an agenda like American women.

They just do not seem to have the entitlement agenda plus they are far hotter and even after having kids get their body back and do not turn into miserable slobs like the modern american women.

I do not date modern american women and am more than happy with my Belgium bride and does not have the attitude american women seem to have.

i would never ever marry a modern american women as they give up to easy when things don’t go there way and then take you to the cleaners.

Seriously men should not marry a modern western women. Google “Modern western women” and you will see what i mean.