[ExI] IQ and beauty

[John Clark]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 11:24 AM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com>
wrote:

​> ​
> My guess regarding detection mechanisms is these are imperfect too.


​Yes certainly. A particular trait is determined by a gene and the fondness
a animal has for that trait is also determined by a gene, usually a
different gene; and both genes are under Evolutionary pressure.  The female
needs a rule of thumb to choose which male to mate with,  but that rule of
thumb could turn out to be a bad one.  A bird species with a very small
tail can't fly very well so a gene that said "mate with a male with a
bigger tail" would be a good rule of thumb, but as the generations went by
and the tail got bigger and bigger it would start to get too big and if
that rule of thumb is not modified it could lead to trouble as in the
peacock. If the gene for having a big tail and the gene for preferring a
big tail were the same or if the 2 genes were close together on the
chromosome and thus usually inherited together then the possibility of a
disastrous positive feedback loop would increase.

A mutant bird with a smaller more aerodynamic tail would probably live
longer because he would be better at getting food and avoiding predators,
but fewer of his genes would get into the next generation because he would
have trouble finding a mate.

 John K Clark

   ​








On Oct 7, 2558 BE, at 1:24 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Oct 4, 2015 at 8:35 AM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Oct 4, 2558 BE, at 12:09 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki <
>> rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 3, 2015 at 1:33 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Why hasn't Evolution insured that everybody is beautiful? I can think of
>>> 2 reasons and they both involve sex:
>>>
>>
>> ### Seeing everybody as beautiful means you are unable to look at
>> potential mates and rank them according to their fitness. Such failure is
>> likely to be costly for your own fitness, which explains why evolution
>> weeded out beauty-blind men and power-blind women.
>>
>>
>> I believe John meant not that somehow the processes should've weeded out
>> beauty detection or discrimination mechanisms, but that it should've weeded
>> out any differences in beauty -- but for the two "reasons" he offers.
>>
>
> ### A process that weeds out differences in beauty will lead to the loss
> of adaptations needed to perceive differences in beauty. In evolution one
> follows the other.
>
> But in real life, it's unlikely that any evolutionary process would remove
> all externally perceptible fitness differences, which means there is always
> pressure to exploit such perceptible differences to adjust mating behavior,
> and thus there is evolutionary pressure to create and maintain the ability
> to see such differences as varying levels of beauty.
>
>
> Isn't there also genetic load here? I mean it might not be the case that
> there's one beauty gene that's easily selected for but a host of related
> genes that are difficult to individually select for given their
> interactions -- as well as the interactions with the rest of the genome.
>
> And this is presuming there's even a simple relationship here between
> genes and beauty.
>
> My guess regarding detection mechanisms is these are imperfect too.
> Obviously, if something like the red dress effect is real, they can be
> fooled quite easily. (Or is selecting the red dress a behavioral beauty
> trait, so the detector is not being fooled at all? But my guess is people
> wearing red dresses learn that red attracts attention rather than there's a
> variable genetic component under this. I could be wrong, of course.)
>
> Beauty would only disappear in a designed system, specifically one where
> no interactions between individuals can impact their fitness. But this
> would no longer be evolutionary.
>
>
> That would seem to be the case with many beauty enhancements now,
> including choice of clothing, grooming, etc. Of course, these might be read
> as signs of enhanced fitness -- grooming, especially -- or might be
> selected for under supposed sexual selection, no?
>
> Regards,
>
> Dan
>   Sample my Kindle books via:
> http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/
>
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