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 ...
Yup. It would seem so.
Her mother died very recently from cancer. There was a fairly recent photo of Angelina and her mom...even though her mom had been very ill, you could see the beauty and strong resembelance between the two.
I really do respect the Gates’ for their unaltered appearance. Really...I do. They have all of the money in the world and they could have ‘anything’ done...but they haven’t. So I kind of admire Bill’s $10.00 haircut look...it says ‘I know my hairstyle isn’t important.’
:-)
Thanks!
I also have to respect Bill's choice for a life mate. He could have his pick of some of the world's most gorgeous women. Instead, he used a different criteria.
I hope I live long enough to see how their progeny turn out as human beings.
this study was not taken at 2 AM closing time.
That's a pretty long carrot, but if you look around in the produce section you can find longer. Most of the time I buy baby carrots. They go better in roasts and are more tasty.
I like roasted carrots along with pot roast. Tasty.
Hurts me to say that too, because I was born in Tacoma. I think there may be something to this peacock theory. Thankfully I married a bellevue girl.
Re post 121, what you wrote makes eminent sense from the viewpoint of women seeking out successful mates who would provide them with economic security. I was just looking at this particular union from the initial post of this thread in which biologists wonder why matings do not produce good-looking progeny and they think that females would seek out attractive males. Well, at least that was my understanding of the initial post.
*Or vice versa...
None that would ever admit to it.....or who likely lived (intact or not insane)to tell the tale.
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