I disagree this conclusion necessarily follows. A trait will be selected for in a population if people without that trait propagate genes less frequently than those with it. This could be due to early death, lower fertility, or early death of offspring. So if pale skin emerged in Eurasians because those with dark skin were more likely to have debilitating vitamin D deficiencies, there is no need to posit that sexual preference played a role; early death and low fertility are enough to explain the mechanism for natural selection.
If pale skin had an advantage in vitamin D terms, as you suggest, then anyone who had an innate preference for pale-skinned partners would have lighter skinned offspring (on average) who would then have that same vitamin D advantage, which would result in that preference gene being disproportionately present in succeeding generations.
FWIW it does:
Yes, but a preference in not mandatory for an adaptive trait to later become dominant. You’re supposing that if someone had such a preference, then their genes would become advantaged. Okay, that’s true hypothetically. But it doesn’t follow that such a preference would be evolutionarily necessary.
Perfecto Telles?
I have to admit, it kinda bugs me when Reynolds as Wade “Deadpool” Wilson takes off his mask… and he’s not really that bad-looking. A lot of superficial scar tissue, to be sure, but there are guys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan that are way more messed up.
I remember reading somewhere that small imperfections can actually make someone more attractive. By this I mean something like a small gap between the front teeth or a slightly larger than average nose. Maybe I just made that up because I have the latter and Ms. P has the former before braces (also the first girl I fell hard for in high school had the “spitting gap.” Dunno if there was a reproductive angle to my wife and I picking each other (she does have the waist/hip ratio, maybe a little bigger in the gluteal area), but both kids were conceived in the first try even though we were both in our thirties).
This actually comes up a lot on the Dope.
Culture absolutely plays a big part. But I still feel it gets over-emphasized, because we really *want *it to be true. We leap on, and exaggerate examples of cultures that prefer, for example, “overweight” partners. And try to ignore all the stuff that seems cross-cultural.
If you look at Chinese art, there are plenty of centuries-old paintings that are not only pretty by modern standards, but even emphasize certain curves the same way we might do in e.g. western comics. What a coincidence.
Yes, I recall reading a couple of studies on facial attractiveness where they found that the most attractive faces are those that are averaged out from a large population but then you make one minor change, so it’s not exactly average.
Right. I’ve already addressed this in post #17 (see final paragraph).
This is what you posted in that #17
And what me and naita are saying is that* it doesn’t make sense to make this assumption*.
We’re not making an assumption in either direction; we’re just not treating it as a given that an adaptive trait translates to sexual preference.
OK. We disagree on this point.
So to confirm, if someone were to say: “preferences in skin color can be assumed to be based on culture and not on innate preferences”, you would disagree with that statement. Since your position is that you make no assumption in either direction, and accept the possibility and plausibility of it being innate.
It’s not an assumption I would make, but I wouldn’t feel the need to express disagreement with it.
What I believe (not assume) is that our preferences in stuff like skin color are shaped largely by environmental factors. This includes culture, but also includes stuff as basic as what your surrounding community looks like. If you’re socialized to see pale skin as normal and good, then you’re more likely going to see it as attractive than if you’ve been socialized to see it as a deviation. If you’ve been raised to value conformity and avoid difference, this further increases the likelihood you’ll be drawn to other pale folks. Change any of the above and preferences will change; hence the increase in interracial relationships in time. We see this often enough that we can be sure that the environment plays a major role.
I don’t tend to pin a lot to our genes, because I believe humans are a lot more complex than DNA sequences. Being adaptive and malleable is what has helped us dominate the planet, and you don’t get to be this way if each generation is stuck following the same script as their parents.
What people say they find attractive, and what they actually find attractive, can be very different. They may say one thing, based on cultural conditioning and the approval of their peers, but conceal a strong attraction to something else. The long and unfortunate history of slave owners fathering endless waves of children with female slaves would indicate to me that the raw biology of physical sexual attraction overrides bullshit societal attitudes about thinking that black people aren’t attractive. Yeah, it’s a fucked up power-trip kind of attraction that essentially equates to rape, but I would assume that most of the slave owners who sexually violated their female slaves were doing so because they were motivated primarily by lust. Lust - the sexual desire that comes from looking at a person and the visual cues of their secondary sexual characteristics - doesn’t seem to have any racial barriers.
I think what we find attractive in others is very heavily culturally influenced. For example, there are people in certain cultures who find this to be beautiful. Hardly anyone in this culture would be attracted to that.
Even that waist-to-hip ratio is subjective. I recall from the same episode I mentioned above that they showed a sub-culture in Africa where the women would stuff their skirts so it looked like they had huge asses. Big butts are what got men going in that part of the world.
It seems to be the case more broadly too:
It’s affected by culture, but the tendency remains nonetheless cross-culturally in general. Especially since (from your cite) -
Regards,
Shodan
I’m with Alessan.
90%, maybe more, is innate, with cultural differences a very small part overall.
Let’s run a thought experiment: we have a magical genie who is going to bring forth enthusiastically lusty beauties from times and cultures past. We give a randomly chosen selection of bog-standard unattached white American guys the (mutually consensual and enthusiastic) chance to mate with African, Mongolian, middle-eastern, Japanese, or Sumerian beauties who were widely noted beauties for their time/culture. How many take us up on the cross-cultural opportunity presented to them? You’d have a LOT of takers, across all those available cultures and ethnicities, probably approaching 95%+.
This would be despite supposed cultural prejudices against non-white skin, despite linguistic and cultural barriers, and despite any supposed localizations of beauty for those times and places that are supposedly much broader and more varied and thus out of sync with our own.
So where are the cultural influences? Do those that believe they’re a big factor think that there would only be 50% acceptance rates in the thought experiment above?
I think “who I fantasize about sleeping with” has less to do with outcomes re: marriage and children than “who I can imagine being seen in public with and bringing home to meet my parents”. I think cultural attitudes are incredibly influential in the second category.
This.
One modern parallel, I think, is that nowadays there seem to be a lot of men, who, when asked about what they like in women, will hem and haw awkwardly and come up with something politically correct like, “I’m attracted to a woman’s education, or career, or confidence, or sense of humor, etc.” - and assiduously avoid mentioning physical appearance as much as possible, for fear of being accused of looksism or being “shallow” - but yet the truth still is that physical beauty plays an overwhelmingly large role in men’s attraction to women.
But beauty, itself, has much less to do with outcomes re: marriage and children and who you bring home to parents.
THOSE are much more “who will put up with me” and “who can I realistically expect to be with long term” with a dash of “oops I got somebody pregnant who may not actually be my ideal on any of these dimensions.”
I thought we were discussing beauty standards and to what degree they are innate or cultural, not marriage standards (which has much less to do with beauty).
Fair enough. I disagree about how much culture is involved for reasons that have already been mentioned.