Posted on 04/04/2007 1:06:34 PM PDT by blam
Study Explains Why We're Not All Beautiful
By Andrea Thompson
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 28 March 2007
09:47 am ET
A new study explains why we aren't all born with Brad Pitt’s perfectly chiseled features or Angelina Jolie’s pouty lips.
A long-standing thorn in the side of biologists has been the difficulty in accounting for the enormous variation between individuals when sexual selection by females for the most attractive mates should quickly spread the “best” genes through a population.
“It is a major problem for evolutionary biology,” said study team leader Marion Petrie of Newcastle University.
The lek paradox
For some species, females select the most attractive males to mate with: female peacocks will choose males with the longest tail feathers—the peacock version of George Clooney. These more attractive features usually indicate some other level of genetic fitness, such as disease resistance, that the female’s offspring will then also inherit.
According to this method of sexual selection, if females only bred with the most attractive males, then all males should be equally attractive and sexual selection could not take place. (In the peacocks’ case, all males would have similarly long tails.) But clearly this isn’t the case: for every Johnny Depp out there, there’s a George Costanza—in humans, birds and other animals alike.
This so-called “lek paradox” (a lek is a group of males congregated for mating) has plagued evolutionary biologists for decades.
“If you had no variation at all, you wouldn’t get evolution,” Petrie told LiveScience.
But a group of British scientists think they have found the answer to the paradox in the human body’s “DNA repair kits.”
DNA repair kits
A cell’s DNA repair kit is not really a kit but a set of molecular processes that routinely repair the damage
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Evolution calls for evolutionarily successful women to have made the choices that guarantee social and biological success the most- and this is usually linked to intelligence, wealth, power and/or beauty, not necessarily together.
You assumed that the woman in question, who, in your words, was beautiful, wouldn't make a dumb choice. Evolution doesn't guarantee that. What evolution would have decided is whether her progeny with that man is wanted enough by the prevailing conditions at the time of their biological maturity, to be allowed to mate successfully.
To sum it all, evolution is blind to just beauty.
ping
Costello: When I get married, I'm marrying an ugly girlAbbott: Why?
C: A pretty girl might leave me
A: An ugly girl might leave you too
C: Yeah, but who cares?
btt
that is exactly who I thought of! LMAO!
I don't agree. Just google her name + "young" on google and look at the images. She be having big lips for a long time:)
Henry Waxman and Helen Thomas do not require any explanation under evolutionary biology because they are most certainly not of human origins........ whatever processes create hideous alien creatures, if they even have a gene pool, must be different than what creates human beings.
Did you spell “spits” correctly?
;<)
Her nose looks like the head of a penis.
That’s certainly an impressive pair of Jane Russell Terriers.
Another subject of this behavior is Princess Di. She had a nice smile, nice clothes and was against land mines. But that's it.
Give me Anna K any day :)
Not so hard to figure. They tug on the ocular muscles.
< }B^)
(--from an old Playboy cartoon)
rich and powerful is okay, since rich and powerful means your offspring will be taken care in reguards to food, shelter, clothing, etc...its a biologically based drive......
IMO....men that are handsome actually probably have a good dose of feminine characteristics....that is not necessarily good because maybe they also don't have as much testosterone as the the uglier men.....
but its a trade off......you marry an ugly or very plain man, you might also have one with a lot of masculine features, and who might have a good dose of testosterone as well....
or you marry a pretty man, and God only knows if he'll come thru in the pinch....providing for you, facing down death for you, etc etc...
You won the ugly post on this thread! Ewwwww!
Females don’t pick the best males, unfortunately. The females of the animal kingdom do a much better job of male picking than we do.
Well, at least a great deal of us.
And Angelina Jolie’s lips are gross.
The beautiful Miss Russell.
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