I thought of another reason for him to stay alive. Even if he doesn’t want to spread his genes, he might be useful in supporting those with what he considers better genes. He can adopt, he can become a teacher, he can do all sorts of stuff to help others. I think he’s crazy to diss his own genes, but if you can’t talk him out of that you can at least talk him out of doing something stupid.
These are personal, subjective preferences and not at all universal. Are you implying that stupid, dishonest, ugly people have trouble reproducing? Look around you, man.
Good point. I didn’t think I was discounting the role of mutations and variation. After all, there has to be a reason why there’s something to select on, some reason why some of us have more intelligence, honesty, good looks, etc. for us to be choosy about.
hehe, yes they don’t have problem reproducing. What i don’t get is why we feel attracted to good looks. I mean, intelligence is understandable, honesty as well. But what advantages would have good looking people? are they healtier? However, i never noticed that ugly people get sick more often… but i could be wrong.
“Good looking people” get more social help, in the form of long-term mates to help them raise their children, more food in times of scarcity (and more food in times of famine = greater fertility), better jobs, more money, etc. People that we’re attracted to (aka, “good looking people”) are people we want to be around, and people we’ll give stuff to so that we can be around them more.
So yes, there is a survival advantage to being good looking, however “good looking” is defined in that time and place.
Good looking has at least two aspects:
Youth - Many standard characteristics of beautiful women are ones that are more obvious in young women. Young women are healthier (more likely to produce good and many offspring), and less likely to already have someone else’s baby in them. Why do you think every cosmetics product is supposed to make you look young?
Good looking is also very highly correlated with symmetry and certain mathematical ratios. Again it takes a healthy organism to look that way. Sickly people often look out-of-proportion, and people with serious genetic issues are often trivial to spot. We are very good at detecting small imperfections.
Both of these add up to the fact that good looking people are more likely to produce healthy offspring and more of it.
Remember also that a trait doesn’t need to have a survival advantage to be selected for. Consider the peacock’s tail. At some point presumably having a somewhat pretty tail was an indicator of good health. But once peahens started factoring tail plumage into their mating decisions the males got into the evolutionary equivalent of an arms race. Peacocks have elaborate tails because peahens LIKE elaborate tails. At this point the big gaudy tail probably makes the peacock LESS likely to survive compared to a bird with more sedate plumage.
The human preference for an attractive mate probably has some of the same forces at work.
Following along that way of thinking, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, etc. should be the healthier people in the world?
If good looking people are healthier, why not also smarter? Again, it should take good genes to produce intelligence, and since they have them because they are good looking, why aren’t uglier people dumber and good looking people smarter then?
On average, good looking people are more likely to be healthier (in the producing good offspring sense) than those that aren’t. It doesn’t say anything about any particular person. Additionally, modern cosmetics and surgery can trigger perceptions that may not be true. Also, Nicole Kidman’s a total dog. 
I think I don’t understand your second point. A person can have some good genes and some bad genes.
And rereading this conversation, I want to backtrack on one thing. I accepted your assumption that we are attracted to honesty and intelligence, but I don’t really think that’s true. I don’t see any reason to believe that.
Then again, it’s likely that the large plumage is a signal to the female, not just of good looks, but of good health. See, for example, this article. It could be an obvious sign to potential mates that the peacock is parasite-free, or it could be an indicator of a healthy immune system. Others have observed that the large tail makes it a more likely target for ambush predators than the body of the bird itself, allowing for greater chances of escape. Thus, the tail does not necessarily actually negatively effect the bird’s survival, and probably represents a clear indicator that the peacock in question is, in fact, “all that and a bag of chips”.
Indeed, if it were the case that gaudy displays made one more vulnerable to predation, then there would be a high selective pressure against such displays. It doesn’t matter how many chicks you can get if you’re dead. Most such displays are meant as indicators that the bearer is bigger-better-stonger-faster, not that he is as likely to be lunch as get laid. As such, I view sexual selection as a subset of natural selection (though others disagree, of course).
More intelligent people have more survival chances, honest people, have likely more friends, friends that are really friends, since they base their friendship on honesty, thus having more survival chances as well, for instance.
A person can have good genes and bad genes, but since good looking people are generally the ones with better genes, since it takes good genes to produce simmetry (right?), etc, a good looking person should also be more likely to be healthy, smarter, and other positive traits, than a ugly one since it takes good genes to produce good characteristics… isnt it?
Unless, very good looking people were as likely as very intelligent people to be healthy. So in addition, the more positive traits one has, the more healthier one is?
There is no correlation between physical attractiveness and intelligence. The genes produce traits of physical attractiveness are completely different than thos which contribute to relative “intelligence.”
In addition, traits like “honesty” and “health” are dependent on non-genetic factors. I’m pretty sure there is no “honesty” gene, and while health may have a genetic component, it’s still affected by a whole bunch of non-genetic variables.
Why are we attracted to good looking people? Well, for one thing, “good looking” is pretty much defined as “looks we’re attracted to”.
Dishonest people get a lot of advantages also. You’d have to demonstrate that the advantages of honesty outweigh the advantages of dishonesty. It’s possibly true, but not self-evidently.
There’s lots of good research/game theory about equilibriums in a population of honest and dishonest people. I think either might be selected on depending on the environment.
In any case, while it seems there are some built-in preferences, a lot of what is good looking is socially conditioned. You are told who is attractive by the media, and you observe people attracted to others when you are young. Some hundreds of years ago the “optimal” weight for a woman was greater than it is today. Even when I was a kid stick-figure starlets wouldn’t be considered particularly beautiful, with the exception of Audry Hepburn. Anyhow, it is clear that standards of beauty are very individual, so there is plenty of room for diversity.
Although is cultural variation, there are wide universal standards of beauty.
“Strong correlations between attractiveness and particular physical properties have been found across cultures. Despite significant variation, there nonetheless exists a tremendous degree of agreement among cultures as to what is perceived as attractive when it is associated with human health. Healthier looking skin is universally associated with attractiveness.”
One thing which I don’t think anyone here has picked up on, is that what is in humankind’s interest and the course of evolution are not the same thing by any means.
For instance, we might say that the personally trait of being a responsible father is a “bad” gene, because “deadbeat dads” tend to father more children.
(And since in our modern society infant mortality is very low, survival prospects of the offspring is really not a factor).
But from humankind’s point of view, I know I’d prefer to see children with both parents present than single-parent families or children in care.
Seems that when i said beautiful people were healthier i was closer to the truth than i thought:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/05/07/scisymmetry107.xml
Even if someone is absolutely convinced he’s got genes he’d rather not burden his children with, all he’s got to do is use protection.
As for the symmetry thing, I just don’t know enough to have formed a complete opinion. I submit that people can have faces that are perfectly symmetrical *and *butt ugly, and that may or may not be an indicator of physical/emotional/moral health.
I will also point out that while I believe things like healthy skin and well developed form are comparable with examples from the animal kingdom such as antlers or tail feathers, I think facial features aren’t. This is because those in the former category are signs of health by virtue of the fact that you must eat and live healthy to have them. An anorexic or just plain incompetent buck will never develop majestic antlers, nor the strength to carry them and still compete. Here the logical explanation to me is that giant antlers are a sign that the bearer has favorable traits that allow him to be a well fed and disease free individual (because thats the only way he could have grown and maintained head branches), NOT that cool antlers come from “better genes” which also include those needed for survival. See the distinction? Attractive facial features, which are almost entirely decided upon conception, cannot be the same kind of indicator.
Actually, typing this out has organized my thoughts, and I have a theory I’d like to bounce off you guys: that the beauty we see in facial features (and nice hairstyles and stylish clothes and perfume) and the beauty we see in a healthy body (or the texture of hair, or glowing skin) are fundamentally different, though obviously related and intertwined. It’s quite apparent that the latter category is a sexual attraction (i.e. helps reproduction) for many reasons, but I think that the first category contains fundamentally aesthetic beauty.
This can explain why tastes in the former category change with time and place (just like music or visual art, firmly in the aesthetic beauty camp) while the latter group doesn’t vary nearly as much. Try to come up with an innate evolutionary benefit to attractive faces, stylish clothes, or cool hairstyles and you come up short (the link from the telegraph only rehashes the idea that symmetrical faces are attractive, and offers no correlation between those attractive faces and other attractive traits–i.e. its useless)–but what CAN explain our attraction to those things is that they’re just straight out aesthetically pleasing, like a view of a secluded misty fjord in Norway or the sound of a cello. As a final thought experiment to support this (for men; IANAW and don’t even play one on the internet): what is more physically arousing (i.e. boner inducing), a mental image of a beautiful woman from the neck down, or just the head?
Bit of a wall of text there, and not a single sentence contains a factual answer, it’s just that this is the kind of question that is really interesting to me. I’ve actually thought of MUCH more to write, but I’ll wait to see if anyone even replies to this.
Since we don’t know what those genes are, how can we tell they are “completely different”? Do we even know what intelligence is and how to measure it?