[ExI] IQ and beauty

[Dan TheBookMan]

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
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