dkomo wrote:
> "Anon." wrote:
> 
>>dkomo wrote:
>>
>>>kbc wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>I am curious whether there is any scientific explanation for the
>>>>role  facial appearance plays in mate-selection in humans.
>>>>
>>>>Are beautiful people genetically better ( such that their survival
>>>>chances are more ) ? ( i am not hinting anything.  just explaining
>>>>my question. )
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>I don't think so.  If beautiful people were genetically better their
>>>numbers in the human population would increase until everybody is
>>>beautiful (or handsome).  Clearly this hasn't happened.  Beautiful
>>>people have always been in the minority. As have ugly people.  These
>>>are at the two ends of the bell curve.
>>>
>>
>>Are you aware of how ugly people _could_ be?
>>
>>I think that there are plenty of other factors affecting the evolution
>>human populations (including differing concepts of beauty), so one might
>>not expect fixation of a beautiful phenotype to have occured.
>>
> 
> 
> The main point being that if beauty was genetically important there
> wouldn't be dramatically different concepts of beauty across various
> cultures.  

Not true.  If beauty is only a signal, then different signals could be 
use by different cultures.

Bob

-- 
Bob O'Hara

Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics
P.O. Box 4 (Yliopistonkatu 5)
FIN-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland
Telephone: +358-9-191 23743
Mobile: +358 50 599 0540
Fax:  +358-9-191 22 779
WWW:  http://www.RNI.Helsinki.FI/~boh/
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