I wanted to put into pictures the idea birthed here. When we look in the mirror a myriad of generations and strange ancestral creatures peer back, if only we have the eyes to see it. It's fun to think this way! Examples abound and I post it now quite incomplete in hopes that I'll come back to it here and there and continue to amass great examples.
Teeth - Possibly from small dermal plates
Jaw - You chew with a rib.
Hair - Well, hair had to come from somewhere. Reckon it was modified scales.
Fingernails - More modified scales.
Arms and Legs - It's a different way to look at gymnastics as dancing on fins...
This dude's 73.
Tail - I sit where my ancestors swam.
Ears - It should be a little weird to think that my ancestors breathed through the equivalent of my Eustachian tubes coming from my ears.
Nose - Fish have noses; they just don't go anywhere. Amphibian evolution involved those pits deepening and finally opening to the palate.
Why isn't it men that wear makeup?
Why is that when you walk down the makeup aisle, the hair aisle they aren't monopolized by products for males?
Why do department stores have a vastly disproportionate amount of female apparel and clothing?
Why is it that 87% of all plastic surgery is performed on women?
Why don't men go and get their nails done?
Why aren't men the ones that are most likely to have long, expensive, complicated, time consuming hair dos? Why isn't it that men are the ones that take FOREVER to get ready to go somewhere?
Why isn't a diamond a guy's best friend?
Or, why is the human mating system so different from the vast majority of other animals?
Nearly across the board it's the males of a species that display. They come in every shade and hue conceivable. They hum, honk, buzz, vibrate, dance, sing, knock antlers, bash horns, strut, display...Their males are, simply put, pretty.
It isn't that human males don't have their own system of showing off--muscles, sports, status displays, material wealth, etc. It's just that you'd kinda expect men to be prettier if they were like seemingly all other animals, but it's the females of our species that are beautiful, that preen, that strut and that display and not the males.
We seem to have everything backwards.
Why?
1) Males that were picky had offspring that were more likely to survive and reproduce.
2) Females that had certain attributes could communicate some perceived advantage and make them more likely to mate.
3) There were enough females that males could be choosy.
4) Being able to care for a child is much more critical to humans than it is to other animals.
Let's look at some of the human female attributes that men find appealing and parse them a smidge. Hopefully, what we can learn is how that we're distinct from other animals.
Breasts - Why not start with the obvious? We're the only ape, let alone mammal that make a display out of their mammary glands when they aren't lactating. This, like several others to follow highlights a theme that child rearing is unusually difficult, costly, involved, prolonged in humans. Our children are ridiculously vulnerable when they're born. Wildebeest newborns need to be able to stand within a few minutes or they're abandoned. Human newborns can't even lift their head or roll over and won't be able to walk for an entire year!!! Animal Kingdom wide, that's shocking!
Nearly a third of a mother's resting metabolism goes into breast feeding. So, men want women that can hack that Herculean task.
Hips - "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children." --Yahweh
Humans run a fine line between wanting speed and ease of locomotion, which has been linked to narrow hips and wanting wider hips for bigger brained babies. Wide hips might be a more recent desired trait that shows a shifting emphasis on braininess.
Buttocks - Fat. Glorious fat. Energy reserves = successful pregnancies and ability to provide enough milk.
Taken to the extreme this produces a condition that's known as steatopygia.
Eyelashes - why is having long eyelashes considered feminine? That's an interesting question. It might have something to do with youthfulness, which we'll talk more about below. Or, maybe something to do not with eyelash length, but in eyelash prominence. Maybe masculine foreheads that have pronounced brows might conceal eyelashes, so obvious eyelashes indicate feminine skull structures. I have no clue, though...
Eyebrows - Why do women pluck their eyebrows to make them thinner? Well, because big bushy eyebrows are masculine. Why? Because it externally communicates something about the internal hormonal balance.
Lips - We're the only ape to really have lips - red, puffy, voluptuous lips. I've read some anthropologists speculate that this is some kind of throw back to the red, puffy, engorged vulvas that our ancestors were wild about (like a whole host of other simians have today). That may or may not be, but it is possible to see this body part, like many, as a dip stick - it lets you know the health of the organism. Moist (think lip gloss), red (rouge) lips contrast dry, pale or blue lips. Doubtless, there is also a hormonal connection - it's known that higher estrogen levels = fuller lips. Maybe it's yet another communication adaptation - red lips make for more obvious lip expressions.
Or, what if lips evolved simply for kissing?
To kiss.
To be kissable.
Sclera - This isn't specific to women, but it is interesting. We're the only ape that has white scleras (the whites of the eyes). Other apes have brown or dark sclera so as to camouflage their eyes. The whitening of our sclera could have happened as another dip stick adaptation (white shows you don't have jaundice, bloodshot eyes or malnutrition of some kind) or as yet another adaptation to increase our expressive abilities. One study showed that human babies look where the tester looks, as opposed to how tested apes look where a face is pointing.
Eyecolor - based on the mutation rate of certain markers it's estimated that the existence of blue eyes in humans is somewhere less than 10k years. That fact alone combined with the knowledge that it's recessive should make it shocking to think that there are areas in Europe where the prevalence exceeds 80%. So why the proliferation? It's sexy. Why is it sexy? I'm not sure there's a simple answer, but possibly because it was an indicator of desirable genetic diversity (at least initially). There are some psychological reasons I can't quite put my finger on yet. Please look at this picture and comment your thoughts. Blue does seem to accentuate where the eyes are looking (like at your eyes) by giving greater contrast to the eye's aperture. That might be why they seem so piercing. Brown, on the other hand seems more doe-eyed and innocent.
Hips to waist ratio - Hormones. Men prefer women with a waist to hip ratio of 0.7. It indicates a desirable hormonal balance. The difference between men and women's hips/waists can be a dead give away for drag queens. Notice the below picture. It's instantly obvious that's a male. Why? Because women's hour glass figure is important to communicate internal hormonal states.
You don't have to think twice about it. This is a male's hips and waist. Much about hormones is communicated through the shape of our anatomy.
Youthfulness - Young women can produce more children, better nourish them and have less chromosomal abnormalities. This is not true for men who can actually become more appealing with age (think Harrison Ford and George Clooney). Old men that are healthy and attractive often have high status (which takes time) and therefore resources and have proven that their genes came make it through the long run. The emphasis for women is ability to care for healthy children. The emphasis for men is ability to provide for a child and lack of mutations.
Hair (scalp) - More recently I think hair has communicated less about being healthy and disease free, which it does quite well, but more about personality. This is a little bit of a pet theory, but I think our head fur (follicles only grow to a certain length and then die) turned into hair (doesn't stop growing) because of what it communicated about the person that could up keep it. Think about it. Hair can take an enormous amount of work. Especially long hair. One of the easiest and clearest indicators of insanity is unkempt, wild, crazy, matted hair. Maybe, just maybe, human scalp hair developed to show that a person wasn't crazy and could wash, comb, detangle, and fix up their hair. Something like, if a women could care for her hair, which is time consuming and difficult, she could care for a child. It's a thought.
I've included a clip of a women crying after getting a nastey hair cut. I watched the rest of the show and to my recollection there were several women that refused to get their hair cut.
Why is a bearded lady so strange that it warrants being in a circus freak show? Those with one more x chromosome don't get the same attention.
Why when apparently about half of all men go bald are we so ready to spend thousands of dollars on creams, plugs, inplants, toupees, wigs, etc.?
Why are we so largely hairless as a species (as opposed to our current day relatives and conceivably our ancestors)?
Why do we have hair on our scalp that doesn't stop growing? Why is that hair so distinctly segregated from the rest of our face?
Why do we have little tufts of hair in strategic spots on our post-pubescent bodies?
Why is there such variance of hair colors, textures and straightness in different ethnic groups?
To get to the 'why' we'll have to first ask 'how.' How could they have evolved?
As a review, we'll need to look at this through the lenses of natural selection (it made our ancestors survival advantages) and sexual selection (it gave them reproduction advantages). With that in mind, let's list out some different hair attributes and consider their potential origins.
Baldness--Allow me to give separate but related example. Nightingale birds can have as many as one thousand distinct sings. It's the variety that makes it sexy to the females. One possible reason that may have come about is that it takes a long time, often years, for a Nightingale to learn that many songs, so a large repertoire of songs means the bird is old. Old equals sexy. Why? Essentially an older bird by displaying age is also displaying how well his genes have sustained him up to that point. Health+age=good genes. Isn't it possible that baldness could have evolved as a similar indicator of age/genetic virility? Just maybe. Also, as the link below points out, the farther back the hairline the more masculine the appearance of the face. Could it have been a selection for men that with age become have the appearance of increased masculinity? Perhaps you've heard that men that go bald have higher testosterone levels. Baldness could have been used as an indicator to females of men in their status and resource prime that have an accompanyingly high level of testosterone. Also, as a runner I know that I sweat the most profusely from my forehead. Why would I do that? Because without doing any tests I'd very readily care to bet that it's the site that I shed the most heat from. Could it be that baldness was a means to shed heat and increase endurance in men for hunting and fighting? I don't think that's so far fetched.
Pubic hair--puerile joke from my middle school days: what do you get when you turn 3 blonds upside down? Three brunets.
I might suppose there are really three things we have to explain here: the location of the hair, the color of the hair (that's what the joke was referring to if you didn't get it) and the curl of the hair. Location--could be related to moisture aeration and creating space between skin on skin contact, which would could help prevent fungi and other nasties from growing. It also, clearly, shows reproductive maturity (duh) and could be a through back to the preclothing days. It also interesting to consider how this might be related to the phenomena of the "little black dresses." Could it be that the dark color similar to body hair triggers an unconcious romantic response? Who knows. Or, could pubic hair have evolved to conceal STDs that might have otherwise prevent copulation?
Glabrous Skin--it's probably just a subjective preference that's been reinforced, but it could also have to do with a preference for youthfulness (or just the appearance of youthfulness), which can be concomitant with less genetic mutations.
Facial Hair--I don't have to tell you of its connection with testosterone levels, which can be paired with higher levels of sperm and muscularity, which can be an aid for strength and therefore defense and hunting. It could also be something similar to the commonly known 'silverback' status. Not only indicating a certain hormonal balance (and the beneficial phenotypes therein), but also a maturity as well and concomitantly the experience and stability to provide. Also, a full beard could be conceived to act has a "false jaw." The shape and jaw size can actually be used to sex a skull and the larger the jaw the more likely it is to be male and to be perceived as masculine. Increasing the apparent size of the jaw by covering with the prosthesis of a beard can increase the perceived size and therefore masculinity of the face.
Eye Brows--interesting to think that these evolved to emote. The ones that had more expressive faces got the date. It also may be to direct sweat away from the eyes as it descends. It makes sense that only we have eyebrows since we're natures greatest sweaters.
Gray Hair--is gray hair just a break down of pigment production or could it actually be a sign of age. In going out on a limb here, but there are times when age can be prefered. Why? Well, if an organism has lived to a ripe old age this can be an indication of superior genes. It isn't easy to survive in the wild for long. If you've done it, then you must have some pretty good genes. This can be seen in Nightinggale birds that accumulate songs over time have a corresponding amount of appeal increase. The balance that sexual selection must strike is the attraction of youth and its lack of mutations which can accumulate over time and the attration of age (think Sean Connery, George Clooney, Harrison Ford) to show superior fitness over time.
Long Hair-- Did you know that hair keeps growing indefinitely and fur stops at a certain length? So, why are we the only primate that has hair and in only one spot on their body? ya, it protects from the sun, but I think it is funner to think about how it could have been used as sort of a sanity test. In the book The Mating Mind Miller talks about how that the human mind can be analgous to a peacocks tail. It's a costly, difficult to fake, complex structre that demonstrates a number of things--purity of genes (since, for example, half our genome is brain genes--if a huge chunk is good, mostly likely the rest is, too) and ability to overcome what is known as the 'handicap principle,' which means they can sacrifice resources and still remain healthy (the human brain can burn 6-7k calories a day during intense thought, such as chess grandmasters). It'd work like this: sanity means a good brain, which means good genes and those that are able to keep their hair either long and unknotted or short and well trimmed it would show a proclivity to better brain and therefore better genes and groups that had longer hair on the top of their head had a superior means to other groups for distinguishing quality from poor genes. It very easily could have turned into a status symbol for healthiness, cleanliness, sanity, and culture saviness.
Nappy Hair--I’ve heard that it offers lice protection. They aren’t able to easily move through the dense mass of curcly hair. Body Hair--I wonder if a certain amount of body hair might actually catch enough sweat to aid cooling. Meaning, without any body hair our sweat might simply poor off our body without having the evaporative cooling effect. Hairs catching the sweat a little might cause more evaporation which might cause more cooling.
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