Official Babe Thread VI

[Koyaanisqatsi]

I guess Darwin and the last 150 years of biology were all so wrong!

No, it's just that some of us have brains that have evolved since the days of hunting on the savanna and realize that the viability of a mate in a modern economy has little to do with how much she can squat.

[Donegeal]

Good lord, guys! Stop nerding up our bade thread!

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Good lord, guys! Stop nerding up our bade thread!

Well, I mean, it was inevitable, wasn't it? Besides, pushing Doc's pics back in time is a good thing.

[C0ckney]

Ridiculous statements? It is nothing more than an extension of the 'Good Genes Hypothesis' of sexual selection.

Do you deny that animals are biologically programmed to prefer in a mate traits which are signals for good genes, health, etc.?

I guess Darwin and the last 150 years of biology were all so wrong!

you started out by trying to define beauty and offered this turd.

This stuff is objective. Beauty consists only in physical signals for musculoskeletal health and general health and virility. No such thing as beauty in the eye of the beholder.

and now we're being treated to your thoughts on muscle mass and big thighs and blah blah.

gribbler summed it up very well with these posts.

As for why we aren't attracted to women who look like they could make it in the savanna, it's because we aren't hunter-gatherers living in a savanna culture. Thank God.

..................

Culture plays a huge role in what people find attractive.

there are lots of things that influence what we find attractive, biology, culture, our environment, some things inside us which are hard to explain.

i really don't understand why you do this. it's like you feel that you need to justify your sexual preferences with some BS to somehow make them more valid. it's utterly ridiculous. the simple truth is that people like what they like, different people find different things attractive. the fact that you can't just accept the fact that some guys like skinny white girls and some guys like black girls with big arses is strange.

[Al B. Sure!]

No, it's just that some of us have brains that have evolved since the days of hunting on the savanna and realize that the viability of a mate in a modern economy has little to do with how much she can squat.

See but then it's conscious over-riding of biological impulses. You're leaving the innate human norm.

So what is it about then? How skinny she is?

[Koyaanisqatsi]

See but then it's conscious over-riding of biological impulses. You're leaving the innate human norm.

So what is it about then? How skinny she is?

Why do you think that it's just about one thing? Why do you think your conscious mind is completely divorced from your subconscious?

[Elok]

See but then it's conscious over-riding of biological impulses. You're leaving the innate human norm.

We're also not hunter-gathering anymore, if you're defining "the innate human norm" as "**** we did for most of our history." Perhaps you'd prefer the Venus of Willendorf?

So what is it about then? How skinny she is?

No, it's generally a matter of overall proportion. Also, I at least can find radically different women equally attractive in different ways--cute, sultry, sweet, and some that are just indescribable but have a certain appeal.

[Al B. Sure!]

i really don't understand why you do this. it's like you feel that you need to justify your sexual preferences with some BS to somehow make them more valid. it's utterly ridiculous. the simple truth is that people like what they like, different people find different things attractive. the fact that you can't just accept the fact that some guys like skinny white girls and some guys like black girls with big arses is strange.

Humans are all fundamentally the same, though. We have not diverged enough from each other nor are we removed enough from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to say that we have evolved into something else. I disagree with Heraclitus that the past 10,000 years have been sufficient for significant biological change.

Our sexual preferences should be biologically-determined just as they are for all other animals. And as with animals, they should be nearly universal for our species.

Culture is just an extended phenotype. There are biological motivations for every cultural artifact.

[Elok]

Humans are all fundamentally the same, though. We have not diverged enough from each other nor are we removed enough from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to say that we have evolved into something else. I disagree with Heraclitus that the past 10,000 years have been sufficient for significant biological change.

So...Sioux, Han Chinese, Masai, Australian Aborigines and Norwegians, with their drastically different features and body types, must necessarily have the same general rubric for what is attractive?

Our sexual preferences should be biologically-determined just as they are for all other animals. And as with animals, they should be nearly universal for our species.

What exactly do you mean by "should?"

Culture is just an extended phenotype. There are biological motivations for every cultural artifact.

Yes, there are clearly biological motivations for pet rocks, rickrolling and the macarena.

[Koyaanisqatsi]

[Elok]

Okay, I created a new thread for discussion of biological justifications of human sexual preference n'stuff. Let's take it there, leave this thread alone.

[Darius871]

No, it's just that some of us have brains that have evolved since the days of hunting on the savanna and realize that the viability of a mate in a modern economy has little to do with how much she can squat.

gribbler summed it up very well with these posts.

As for why we aren't attracted to women who look like they could make it in the savanna, it's because we aren't hunter-gatherers living in a savanna culture. Thank God.

..................

Culture plays a huge role in what people find attractive.

Uh, in fairness, I think you guys are missing what Alby's getting at here. At no time did he say or suggest a damned thing about "viability of a mate in a modern economy" or modern culture, or who would be most preferable for a long-term relationship, or who would be most stimulating on a personal and intellectual level, or who would be most able to financially support offspring. I think even he would agree that these goals are entirely irrespective of physical appearance.

What he's talking about, rather, is who would, before that captain buzzkill known as the intellect muddies the water with such considerations, catch one's eye in the first instance and make one immediately think "holy crap would I like to bang the **** out of her," which is and always has been, after all, the sole purpose of this thread. That has nothing to do with the intellect and is strictly a question of baser instincts, which developed in an evolutionary laboratory eons ago and could not possibly have been significantly impacted by the mere blip on the radar screen that the past ten thousand years of "civilization" have been in the overall history of primates. In that sense he is surely correct that conduciveness to successful procreation and survival in the wilderness would tend to be the strongest triggers to initial sexual attraction at the most basic, instinctual level, before the intellect chimes in. I'm surprised that anyone would dispute that. It is surely true that once the intellect chimes in one may hypothesize all sorts of scenarios and conditions in which a less biologically "worthy" mate would nonetheless be extremely fulfilling personally and sexually, but that's separate from the very limited issue Alby is addressing. FFS.

[Darius871]

damn x-post, fine elok

[Dinner]

Natalie Gublis is almost hot enough to get me to watch women's golf. Almost.

[Al B. Sure!]

So...Sioux, Han Chinese, Masai, Australian Aborigines and Norwegians, with their drastically different features and body types, must necessarily have the same general rubric for what is attractive?

Actually yes.

http://www.newsweek.com/1996/06/02/the-biology-of-beauty.html#

"Judging beauty involves looking at another person," says University of Texas psychologist Devendra Singh, "and figuring out whether you want your children to carry that person's genes."

It's widely assumed that ideals of beauty vary from era to era and from culture to culture. But a harvest of new research is confounding that idea. Studies have established that people everywhere -- regardless of race, class or age -- share a sense of what's attractive. And though no one knows just how our minds translate the sight of a face or a body into rapture, new studies suggest that we judge each other by rules we're not even aware of. We may consciously admire Kate Moss's legs or Arnold's biceps, but we're also viscerally attuned to small variations in the size and symmetry of facial bones and the placement of weight on the body.

This isn't to say that our preferences are purely innate -- or that beauty is all that matters in life. Most of us manage to find jobs, attract mates and bear offspring despite our physical imperfections. Nor should anyone assume that the new beauty research justifies the biases it illuminates. Our beautylust is often better suited to the Stone Age than to the Information Age; the qualities we find alluring may be powerful emblems of health, fertility and resistance to disease, but they say nothing about people's moral worth. The human weakness for what Thornhill calls "biological quality" causes no end of pain and injustice. Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any less real.

No one suggests that points of attraction never vary. Rolls of fat can signal high status in a poor society or low status in a rich one, and lip plugs go over better in the Kalahari than they do in Kansas. But local fashions seem to rest on a bedrock of shared preferences. You don't have to be Italian to find Michelangelo's David better looking than, say, Alfonse D'Amato. When British researchers asked women from England, China and India to rate pictures of Greek men, the women responded as if working from the same crib sheet. And when researchers at the University of Louisville showed a diverse collection of faces to whites, Asians and Latinos from 13 countries, the subjects' ethnic background scarcely affected their preferences.

For Johnston, the real fun starts after the judging is finished. By collecting people's ideal faces and comparing them to average faces, he can measure the distance between fantasy and reality. As a rule, he finds that an ideal female has a higher forehead than an average one, as well as fuller lips, a shorter jaw and a smaller chin and nose. Indeed, the ideal 25-year-old woman, as configured by participants in a 1993 study, had a 14-year-old's abundant lips and an 11-year-old's delicate jaw. Because her lower face was so small, she also had relatively prominent eyes and cheekbones.

The participants in that study were all college kids from New Mexico, but researchers have since shown that British and Japanese students express the same bias. And if there are lingering doubts about the depth of that bias, Johnston's latest findings should dispel them. In a forthcoming study, he reports that male volunteers not only consciously prefer women with small lower faces but show marked rises in brain activity when looking at pictures of them. And though Johnston has yet to publish specs on the ideal male, his unpublished findings suggest that a big jaw, a strong chin and an imposing brow are as prized in a man's face as their opposites are in a woman's.

Almost anything that interferes with fertility -- obesity, malnutrition, pregnancy, meno-pause -- changes a woman's shape. Healthy, fertile women typically have waist-hip ratios of .6 to .8, meaning their waists are 60 to 80 percent the size of their hips, whatever their actual weight. To take one familiar example, a 36-25-36 figure would have a WHR of .7. Many women outside this range are healthy and capable of having children, of course. But as researchers in the Netherlands discovered in a 1993 study, even a slight increase in waist size relative to hip size can signal reproductive problems. Among 500 women who were attempting in vitro fertilization, the odds of conceiving during any given cycle declined by 30 percent with every 10 percent increase in WHR. In other words, a woman with a WHR of .9 was nearly a third less likely to get pregnant than one with a WHR of .8, regardless of her age or weight. From an evolutionary perspective, it's hard to imagine men not respond- ing to such a revealing signal. And as Singh has shown repeatedly, they do.

The same pattern holds when Singh generates line drawings of different female figures and asks male volunteers to rank them for attractiveness, sexiness, health and fertility. He has surveyed men of various backgrounds, nationalities and ages. And whether the judges are 8-year-olds or 85-year-olds, their runaway favorite is a figure of average weight with a .7 WHR. Small wonder that when women were liberated from corsets and bustles, they took up girdles, wide belts and other waist-reducing contraptions. Last year alone, American women's outlays for shape-enhancing garments topped a half-billion dollars.