[ExI] IQ and beauty

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

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.

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.

Rafał
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