[ExI] IQ and beauty

[John Clark]

On Sat, Oct 3, 2015  Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:

​> ​
> Reproductive and selective mechanisms are also imperfect, no?
>

​Yes, nothing about Evolution is perfect. ​


> ​> ​
> And what amount of what's considered beautiful is heritable?
>

​
Yes,  if it were perfect peahens would feel that the most beautiful tail of
a peacock was the one that was the most aerodynamic
​,​
but they don't. The gene for large gaudy tails and the gene to prefer to
mate with
​ ​
peacocks with
​ ​
large gaudy tails
​ ​
are both under Evolutionary pressure, and in this extreme case it looks
like the 2 genes have gotten into a positive feedback loop
​. When such loops end, and ​
positive feedback loop
​s never last very long, the results are seldom pretty.​ I think peacocks
(and peahens) are headed for extinction.

 John K Clark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20151004/d939bacf/attachment.html>