Well, to play devils advocate, people with schizophrenia think the stuff they see is real and NAMBLA thinks pedophilia is a good idea. We don’t give their ideas any credence, why should we give his any?
I’m at a loss to understand what duck standards of beauty have to do with our own. Maybe I was unclear. I don’t think there is a universal standard of beauty, like Plato’s forms, that are independent of us. I think that we are hardwired to find certain things beautiful.
The only thing I find beautiful is one particular woman - who doesn’t meet conventional standards of beauty. Mountain vistas, architecture, flowers - all that can go stuff it. I consider myself the counterexample that disproves your thesis.
I suggest you change that ‘hardwired’ to ‘softwired’ - seems to me that people are taught what is beautiful, which for most people tends to hit the norms of their culture, for the simple reason that that very culture taught them the norms.
The same thing that my standards of beauty have to do with yours, just on a different scale.
I tend to agree more with the OP - unlike you, I think people’s sense of beauty is mostly innate. I think that if someone sees something that they have never seen before they will be able to make a beauty judgement (ie. say someone who has never seen a snow-covered landscape before - they will either find it beautiful or not). Frankly, it doesn’t make sense to me why “my culture” should teach me that mountain landscapes or sunsets over the sea are beautiful - I just do find them beautiful, and I think many agree. While not everyone’s beauty spectrums align, there are GENERAL TRENDS amongst the population where the majority of the people will have aligning beauty spectrums. I think the cultural standard for beauty actually flows OUT of the recognition by a large group of people that something is beautiful - after all, how does the standard arise in the first place?
To some extent it is probably possible to overlay your own personal sense of beauty with cultural standards - yet your post seems to indicate that doesn’t have to happen, if you don’t find mountain vistas, architecture and flowers beautiful? Or are you purposefully rejecting the teachings of your culture as to what beauty is and making up your own? It seems your post contradicts itself - unless of course you are saying that you were taught that only one particular woman in the world is beautiful - she must be a good teacher 
I do think it is possible for people to find many things attractive about various things/people other than visual beauty - obviously indicators of success, smell, taste, personality, etc. contribute to attractiveness, sometimes to a much greater extent than the visual aesthetics. Of course, to some extent each of these metrics (which could be considered different measures of beauty) all have their own scales which are mostly innate (though can change with time and experience).
Forgive me for saying so, Delayed Reflex, but that’s a very convenient theory you have there. It’s innate, but only generally, and there are personal standards in addition to innate ones, and the innate one can be changed anyway.
Hard to be wrong with a theory like that!
Schizophrenics are objectively wrong. If voices really were talking to them, we wouldn’t label them schizo.
And the NAMBLA example goes against your “innate” theory and backs up my “cultural” theory. Consider that the Greeks were notorious Man-Boy Lovers, and no one at the time thought any different. Nowadays, our culture has changed, and men who love boys are despised criminals.
Have you ever seen the “Beauties” of the 1920s? Chunky, big-teethed, googly-eyed women with greasy bobbed hair were all the rage. Times change, so does beauty. I’d be willing to bet that Helen of Troy was a monster by our standards.
I also think you’re going to find there is a difference between “beauty” and naturally selected traits like health, confidence and virility. The former is cultural, the latter is innate. I’d venture to guess (wildly) that natural selection makes up only about 1% of what we call beauty (like the acne example). The rest is cultural.
It’s true though.
Consider the example of fear of heights. It’s innate, but only generally (few people get vertigo when in an airplane, for example), and there are personal standards in addition to innate ones (some people are less scared of heights than others) and the innate ones can be changed anyway (over time you could decrease your fear of heights).
So…fear of heights is just a cultural thing?
That’s quite a nice counter-example actually. I find those two women almost scary.
However, on the same page, from 1926: link.
Clearly it’s not as “black and white” as tastes were different in those days: I’d definitely boink the latter girl.
Yeah, but as humans, we’re 99.9% genetically equivalent. You can’t say the same for us and ducks. So in a discussion of whether our sense of physical beauty might be hardwired into us, other organisms are irrelevant.
I have never found mountain vistas, architecture, or flowers beautiful - so it’s not that I am rejecting and burying a response I have; it’s that I never had that response to begin with, ever.
And as for the lovely lady, I have known her for half my life, and am quite sure that my longtime association with her molded my perception of beauty somewhat, though there is some evidence that aspects of her appearance appealed to me before I met her (I like 'em short, always have). If you want to be pedantic, I’m quite sure that women who look a lot like her would also fall into my standard of beauty for women; it is a standard of beauty, and thus a reaction to the purely visual, after all. But the main point is, that my standard of beauty, even regarding women, isn’t much like the norm at all.
But it seems like you’re not taking counterexamples. Hmm, for some reason that makes me feel like a scotsman. Not a true one, of course; I was born in california after all.
Of course! It can’t be false. That’s the beauty of it.
I’d like to agree with you, but I can’t. I don’t think your examples are fair because they are things that are, more or less, black and white as far as beauty goes. I don’t think I can find a single person that would a rose ugly or a bramble pretty. I can, however, find someone who thinks someone like Paris Hilton is one of the most beautiful women alive and someone who finds her utterly repulsive.
As you say, many people may not find a rose the most beautiful flower, but no one will argue that it is ugly. That is, there are some traits that are universally considered beautiful or ugly, at least within a given culture, but there are certainly some traits that are far from universal. Let’s take something pretty striaghtforward like music for example. Surely it’s universal that well performed, in tune music is more beautiful than music that isn’t. However, some prefer one genre or another. So, sure, that fits your phrase when comparing two beautiful pieces, but what about a borderline case where it’s not already in the beautifual class? Let’s say we have a rock guy, and a jazz guy, the first might prefer a rock song that is less well performed than a jazz piece, while the second would see it as a no-brainer the opposite way. Given a second set where you have a somewhat poorly performed jazz piece, their roles would be reversed. This is a situation where beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
So, basically, this is a long way of agreeing with the first response. Beauty is not purely objective, as you imply, nor is it purely subjective as the originally quote implies. There are plenty of cases where a preference may override a universally perceived beauty characteristic, even substantially so. For instance, there’s plenty of very well performed pieces in genres I just can’t stand that I don’t consider remotely beautiful; similarly, there’s tons of music I have that I love and is very well performed, but others find repulsive. Is one of us necessarily more or less right than the other?
This carries over to physical beauty, just to a lesser degree. Sure, everyone probably finds symmetry and certain body proportions and such universally attractive, but one person may prefer tall women, or certain hair color, or certain sized breasts, or anything such that someone who fulfills those particular characteristics, while generally less symmetric or proportioned than a second, may be found more attractive by whoever holds those preferences.
So, yeah, there’s probably some things that are universally beautiful or ugly, but that doesn’t mean everything is so.
It’s not beautiful. It’s not ugly. It’s just a plant.
(I’ll be over here…not truly in scotland.)
How are you defining “in tune”? There are lots of different tuning systems.
Sure. How else would a child learn the word “beautiful” or the word “ugly”?
Obviously, different cultures and genres have different tuning systems, that’s not what I’m refering to; in fact, I’m quite fond of a number of scales and tunings that are uncommon. Strictly speaking, I’m talking about a piece that is well performed and in tune with reference to the appropriate tuning for the genre/piece. Like, for instance, someone playing a classical guitar piece on a guitar that is not appropriately tuned for that piece (maybe some strings are sharp or flat). That is, the same piece, played by the same musician, on two different instruments, except one is in tune relative to how the piece is intended to be played and one is not, the first will pretty much universally be considered more beautiful.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure what your point is.
Fine. If you want to look at it like that. It can’t be false.
So we’re all agreed that attraction is basically innate but there is obviously some variety in individuals and a cultural component.
I guess we can close this thread. 
I’m really not sure what your point is.
You’ve already conceded that what you personally find appealing is basically innate, and that your preferences differ from the “norm”.
…this is all completely consistant with what I and people like Blaster Master have been arguing.
What we find beautiful is basically innate, and roughly the same for most people, but obviously with some variety and the rare exception (just like every biological feature).
My position is basically that I do not think that there are any universals regarding what is beautiful or ugly. “Universal”, “Everyone” and “No one” are terms that exclude the exception and are, I believe, unsupportable in this context.
And I do not recall stating that my preferences were “basically innate” - other than to state that I innately lack wide swaths of popular preferences. I actually have no reason in the slightest to think that all my preferences were not learned.
There are probably some nearly universal agreed upon standards on human beauty which have a genetic basis. With for instance symmetry and such. But it will only take you so far. For instance, most of the size-0, death camp escapists you see on the cat walk of international fashion shows, and which are supposed to be very beautiful, I personally find them to be ugly and revolting. I know I’m not alone in that.
I think you’re missing the point of the argument that I was putting forth. No specific person or object is necessarily universally beautiful; however, there are characteristics that are universally beautiful, save for maybe the extraordinarily rare outlier. For instance, imagine a face. One may have preferences for blue eyes or brown, for light skin or dark, for high cheek bones or strong jaws; there is no such thing as a universally beautiful face. As a thought experiment, all other things being equal, if you had one face with blue eyes and another with brown, a given person may choose one face or the other.
However, symmetry is universally beautiful. That is, given that all other things as equal between two faces, that a given person would always choose the more symmetrical face.
Now, that’s not to say that a given person won’t occassionally find a somewhat less symmetrical face more beautiful because it has certain other things he prefers, but if he saw a more symmetrical version of that prefered face, he would always prefer that one even more.
What I’m trying to say is that the trend related to a universally beautiful characteristic would be very strongly correlated to beauty. In most other cases, the trend is not as clear, or perhaps in the case of something like skin tone or eye color, there is absolutely no trend. Thus, a face is quantitatively more beautiful than a different face if it has more of the traits that have positive trends when compared to beauty, and it is subjectively more or less beautiful when the quantitative trades are relatively similar but the subjective trades differ.
That’s all very well to assert, but I’m not buying it, and I don’t see you giving me any reason to buy it. Given that it’s quite clear that the vast, vast majority of characteristics are not universally preferred, why should I believe that there are any that are?