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 ...
Not nice to post a picture of your GF on this thread, Dig. ;)
Waxman is looking more and more like Yoda every day!
Well! There's your proplem. I think George Costanza is WAY sexier that prissy, scary, Johnny Depp.
It all comes down to individual brain wiring. I tend to select my mates by there testosterone, sweat and agression and not their pampered, soft-handed good looks.
If he has any offspring at all, it’s against all odds.
Dang, that nasty global warming sure did a number on his face.
“Ugly people don’t get the chance to reproduce as much........”
“Then why are there so damned many of them?
Because they find each other.”
No, they find BEER!!!!!!!
Well that study doesn’t apply to me, so I’ll skip this thread.
We don’t all drink beer all day.
That would fix it...:)
The answer is easy.
We think we know why animals pick a mate.
But we really don’t.
We just think we do.
That’s probably the case for much of biology.
Shalom.
larger database?
lmao!
Doing my part for population control.
Of course, that depends on what 'ugly' is. To many women, a guy not having a lot of money is 'ugly'. Some may even substitute the money for power/ influence/ intelligence.
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