How many times have you seen a ugly chick and thought that's she's too unattractive to breed?
Do I get an 'A'?
:-)
Posted on 05/12/2004 4:08:11 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Today's handsome hunks may owe their good looks to a sexual power shift towards the fair sex during primate evolution.
As our ancestors evolved, the ability to attract a female mate through good looks became may have become more important in the mating stakes than the ability to fight off male rivals, suggests a new study.
By analysing the shapes and sizes of facial features in chimps, gorillas and other primates, researchers in Germany and the University of Cambridge, UK, found evidence suggesting that our ancestors may have gradually sacrificed fighting for wooing.
"Our research suggests that in early humans, a face that was attractive as opposed to aggressive conferred an advantage," says Eleanor Weston at the Research Institute Senckenberg in Frankfurt, a member of the team.
She says that changes were probably driven by choosy females who began to demand handsomeness, not brute force.
Receding canines
Prominent canine teeth which still signify a male's dominance and fighting ability in many primates like baboons and gorillas, may have been replaced by less aggressive teeth and looks.
Broader faces with prominent cheekbones, not unlike those of contemporary movie stars including Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom and Viggo Mortensen, were picked preferentially by females.
Weston drew her conclusions after initially studying facial features of chimps and gorillas. In most primates, males have much longer canines than females, a trait that often reflects which males are dominant. This difference was much less prominent in the chimps.
Sexual selection was starting to be driven by the attractiveness of a male's face in the chimps, believes Weston, and this tallied with development of broader faces with more prominent cheekbones, plus receding canines.
The same pattern emerged when Weston unearthed facial data on other primates. Wherever males had broader faces, their canines were closer in size to those of females. The opposite was true in males with more elongated faces.
"At one end of the spectrum were humans and chimps, where mate choice may have been more important," says Weston. "At the other end where you had baboons and gorillas, competition between males may have been more important."
Weston, adds she has further, unpublished data on human faces which supports her conclusions.
"Do" tell...
I don't know. Is that a universal sentiment among women, or a social affectation? Maybe the right genetic combination that gets you out of shaving without screwing up royally somewhere else just hasn't come along yet.
Well, let's put it this way. It probably wouldn't have made its way into womens' body-chemistry/psychological makeup to value men who are "good-looking" (whatever that means) if it hadn't been true, somewhere along the line, that women who had this value ended up more likely to pass along their genes, than women who didn't have this value.
Why would women who valued "good looks" have been, at some point, more likely to pass along their genes? Let's remember that in this discussion "good looks" is taken to be synonymous with "not mean-looking" and the opposite of "having long teeth and being able/willing to fight off rivals". So that gives us some guesses:
-maybe those who didn't prefer the "non-aggressive" mates, but rather were equally happy with the "aggressive" ones, got murdered by their (generally more aggressive) mates more often in violent rages, accidental bitings, etc, and thus had less of a chance to reproduce.
-similarly maybe the "aggressive mate" women had their offspring murdered more often..
-maybe those who stuck with the "aggressive" ones, ended up in large harems (since their mate was fighting lots of rivals and taking their mates..), which meant having a mate less likely to pay attention to their offspring in particular, leading to a higher infant/child mortality rate among such women
-meanwhile those who selected "less aggressive" ("good-looking") mates, were with guys who were less able to obtain and defend large harems through fighting... thus had more attention paid to them and their offspring... which as a result made it into adulthood at a higher rate.
So the point is there could indeed be some evolutionary advantages to having, say, brain-chemistry which "prefers good-looking men" as "good-looking" is defined here. And, the original appearance of that brain chemistry need not have some "evolutionary reason" per se, but could have just been a random thing. Like, in my guess #3, the females who first liked non-aggressive mates wouldn't have "known" that This guy will make a better father. She would have just been delighted by the guy's looks by internal factors.
At least that's how I understand evolution-type-stuff.
"I threw it over my shoulder and went as a gas pump".
Women such as my wife got both.
That's just plain stupid.
$710.96 was the price Frederick Douglass had to pay to ensure his freedom due to the fugitive slave laws. Douglass is his psudoname. His given name was Frederick Bailey. Anyway, after speaking in England in the abolitionist cause, he decided to come clean about who he really was. But he feared returning to the U.S. due to those laws.
Well, Douglass had contributors from England who gave him the money to purchase his freedom. $710.96 was given to Hugh Auld, and Auld signed the papers in 1846 when Douglass was 28.
Thus, my tag: $710.96... The price of freedom.
If he did that today, he'd need a mask and a gun, too.
Well, duh ! Some fool paid good money for this study.
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