Why Are Women Pretty? Or, Why Do Men Like Porn?

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.

Women communicate with hair.

Works Sighted [sic] :

http://thesymbiont.blogspot.com/2010/05/are-humans-evolved-for-polygamy-or.html
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E38279704E9EA499
http://soar.wichita.edu/dspace/bitstream/10057/2357/1/LAJ+2008-p18-34.pdf
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15625720/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/14/health/main623083.shtml
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091215160851.htm
http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/LOCAL-ONLY/FHC/FHCL1495-6.html
http://wikidoc.org/index.php/Steatopygia
http://www.cultbeauty.co.uk/blog/2010/02/page/2/

The History of Nice - Compassion in Human Fossils

We've been nice for a really, really long time.  It's basically the reason we're still around.  How else could we have survived ice ages, famine, skirmishes, hunted together, colonized every corner of the globe and communally created technology.  Take a moment to marvel at just a small sampling of the archeological findings that teach us the long history of human empathy, compassion, caring, affection, loyalty, commitment, and generosity.  We are the loving ape.

Where: Dmanisi, Georgia
Who: Homo erectus
When: 1.75 million years before present
What: toothless skull
Importance: this human lived many years without teeth and was most likely extremely decrepit.  He was being cared for; maybe even having his food chewed for him.

Where: Java, Indonesia
Who: Homo erectus
When: 800,000 years before present
What: severely broken femur
Importance: What happens to an animal if it brakes its leg?  It dies.  It lays there are slowly dies of thirst or starvation.  This human was cared for, feed, carried for months on end.

Where: Atapuerca, northern Spain

Who: Homo heidelbergensis

When: 500,000 years before present

What: hobbled spine.

Importance: he probably could barely walk.  Undoubtedly couldn't hunt.  Someone must have shared with him for years.

Where: Atapuerca, Spain

Who: Homo heidelbergensis

When: 530,000 years before present

What: deformed skull of child estimated at 8-12 years old

Importance: differences were accepted.  This deformed child was cared for for years until he passed on.

Where: northern Iraq

Who: Homo neanderthalensis

When: 60-80,000 years before present

What: crushed left orbit blinding that eye, withered and long since healed right arm most likely causing some paralysis, deformed right lower leg and foot.

Importance: couldn't see well, couldn't handle object well, could barely walk and yet he survived for many, many years with the help of a most likely loving community.

Works Sighted [sic]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanidar_Cave

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/skull/

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/origins/2009/03/did-early-humans-really-care.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19568-huntergatherers-cared-for-first-known-ancient-invalid.html

http://tsjok45.multiply.com/photos/photo/154/1

Evolution of Acne

I had a bunch of ideas that I wanted to blog about this week.  Guess which one I picked?  The one that had the word 'evolution' in the title!!  teehee.  I just love thinking about the evolutionary origins of all the things that we take for granted...like, acne!

So, here's the question: what's the evolutionary explanation for acne?  What, if any, selective advantage did acne (or something that causes acne) bestow to its possessors?

I've compiled a short list of possibilities that I'd like for you to help me expand.

Spend six hundred bucks scaring bugs away from your yard by clicking here at home Depot.

The Sexual Repellent Hypothesis: some have said, although I'm skeptical, that acne keeps you gross enough during puberty that others will wait to mate with you until you're old enough adequately deal with the child. I can see a couple of problems with this.   First, acne happens more frequently in males, since a large trigger is testosterone which increases the sebum production (pore blocker and lubricant).  Males, evolutionarily, although they can have selective advantage in investing in offspring have little selective disadvantage in not trying to produce offspring.  So, our explanation of acne has to address the male problem and this one doesn't seem to adequately.

"It's Because I'm White, Isn't It?" Explanation:  Whites have more acne than non-whites.  So, how come?  Well, I've thought about this for a bit since a close friend of mine suffers from Rosacea (a reddening condition of usually the face).  Whites are white to absorb solar radiation to synthesis stuff like Vitamin D.  We feed off the sun.  The farther north one gets and the more clothing you wear means the whiter we need to get to make enough Vitamin D.  There's another strategy evolution can use, though - don't just make the skin whiter, fill it with more blood.  Is it possible that whites get more acne because our facial skin is flusher because it's trying to get enough blood to the surface to make Vitamin D?  Maybe.  It's a thought.

Dirt Don't Hurt Hypothesis: maybe we wash our face too much.  I don't know this to be true and I don't want to be the one to test it either, but it's a worthwhile thought.  We didn't regularly bath for most of our evolutionary history and maybe constantly removing the surface oil from our face (which is desperately trying to keep the face supple and emolliented to stay young looking) causes the production to go haywire.  Maybe.

The Lucky Loser Hypothesis:  some evolutionary biologists have proposed that maybe we go pizza face because it prevents us from getting murdered.  The argument simplistically goes like this, if you look good, you're a threat to other males' harems and therefore you get killed.  On the other hand, if your face looks like the surface of the moon then you probably aren't a threat for their mate to cheat on with.  Or, so they think!  This argument receives anecdotal support by a good number of monkey species that have beta and omega males producing more offspring than alpha males.  Zits are the perfect cover to sneak a mate with or to survive until your fully grown.

You Eat Yourself Pimpley Hypothesis: this argument says that it isn't an adaptation at all, it's a side effect of the fact that our diet has changed so drastically, so recently in our evolutionary history.  What are the two most recent additions to our diet?  Agriculture (by which I really mean grains) and dairy.  Both of which have been linked to increased levels of acne.  The study in the linked article talks about tribal Canadians and Japanese that broke out after being introduced to dairy.  It also talks about aboriginal people from Paraguay and Papua New Guinea that ate hardly any complex carbs and likewise had no occurrences of acne.  Now, I should say diet and acne is a highly debated subject, but one I think we should listen to.

Are Humans Evolved to Be Religious?

I see several things wrong with this question.  First, to say that we’re hard wired to be religious is a lot like saying that we’re hard wired for video games, porn or to really like Rocky Road ice cream.  Yes, there are reasons that we like those things, but we couldn’t have evolved for them.  They’re far, far too recent.

Secondly, which religion are we referring to?  It’s axiomatic that there are quite a diversity of religious ideologies - one god, two gods, no god, four, one after life, many afterlives, laws, prayers, meditations and on and on.  That makes it difficult to say that we as a whole have evolved for a particular religion.

With that being said, I do think that there are psychological proclivities that we can look to explain the reason why a robust majority of the world is profoundly religious.  I’ll just touch on a couple that stick out to me.

1. Trust

It’s been quite selectively advantageous for our ancestors to trust each other--knowing which snake not to pick up, which leaves are medicinal/poisonous, how to make a stone tool, learning vocabulary/syntax, how game are migrating, where a watering hole is and so on and so forth.  The ones that didn’t believe their elders went the way of the dodo.  Those that unquestioningly accepted what they were told even if they didn’t understand it were more likely to survive.  Stated in the positive is that we’re communal thinkers.  We think best together.  There are, however, times when this backfires.

2. Creative vs. Logical

As a species, in my opinion, it has been more advantageous to be a creative story teller, a shaman, a mythologizer than it has been to be a critical thinker, a questioner, a logician or a mathematician.  Thus, why we fabricate and then believe the things we do.

3. Animate thinking

If you hear a bump in the night, is it better to assume that it is a threatening beast or a harmless branch falling?  It’s been selected for to err in the direction of being overly precautious, of animating the inanimate.  

This is why we name hurricanes.  It literally saves.  People can’t think well about wind, storm surges and flash floods, but they can think about ‘Andrew’, ‘Katrina’ and ‘Eduardo’.

Advanced social situations, like those requiring conversation skills, have been highly selected for.  Having a good conversation is actually much more complicated than it may seem on the surface.  We’ve had to make major cognitive advances in order to navigate even the simplest conversation.  ‘Theory of Mind’ in psychology refers to our ability to understand other human’s behavior as a product of a conscious mind like our own.  By contrasting ourselves with other species we can see this is no small feat.  There are many, many species that don’t ‘know’ that others of their species have thoughts, emotions, fears, joys, etc or even recognise themselves in the mirror (thereby showing they can tell a ‘real’ being from a fake one).  They can only tell that when one thing happens a being may do another thing in response--cause and effect, a machine’s cogs turning.  Humans, in contrast, have a super charged brain engine that is incredibly adept at simulating other’s minds and their thoughts and emotions to anticipate how they will react.  Furthermore, we take this cognitive advance one step further with ‘bicameralism’, or our ability to simulate conversations by playing simultaneously the speaker and the reactor.  Summary, we are really skilled at giving agency to things that have no mind.  Couple those together and it’s not too hard to see how we can make spirits out of anything.  That is also why we ‘punish’ the tv for not working by hitting it, like it’s volitionally rebelling.  We give it a ‘mind’ when it has none.

Does this negate the truthfulness of any religious doctrine?  Not in any way.  That’s a completely different debate.

Are Humans Still Evolving?

In biology it's very important to understand situations in which evolution will not occur so that you can understand when it does and why.  A system that will not evolve is spoken of as being in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium.  Here are the conditions that would have to be met for that and then we'll discuss our exceptions to that.

Humans would have to have...

A huge population.  We got that down pretty cold and are working on improving it.  This is a double edged sword, though.  It stabilizes genetic drift (the random wander of evolution), but it also increases the amount mutations that can be selected for.  More on that below.

Completely random mating.  Condition not met.  93% of marriages are couples who married their own race.  Besides, by in large nerds marry nerds, jocks, jocks, etc.

People are all 100% equally as likely to both survive and reproduce.  This is blatantly false.  Just look at the country demographics.  Some countries in Africa the women have on average 6 or 7 kids while some European countries are in negative population growth.  Furthermore, if you've ever watched the movie Idiocracy you'd know that the less educated are reproducing much faster than the super intelligent.  Also, see Darwin Awards for examples of how clumsy and stupid people generously agree to take themselves out of the mating gene pool. <http://www.darwinawards.com/>

Lastly, there'd have to be no mutations in DNA transfer.  This, also, is of course not met.  Each baby comes out about 2 or 3 mutations different from her/his parents (hundreds of times more than that actually, but since there's so much "junk" DNA in us it doesn't manifest itself).  O, and 90% of those mutations came from your dad.  It should be noted, too, that this will only increase as couples trend toward getting married later and later.

Despite essentially none of those conditions being met it's still a controversial subject.  Hence, why it's nice to be able to put forth some examples of evolution from the recent past to show that, yes, it really is happening.  Lactose digestion is around 8,000 years old and yet in certain countries like Denmark and Holland the percent of people that have it almost reaches 100%.  Based on gene studies, blue eyes are less than 10,000 years old.  That being the case, it should be ridiculously rare unless it had some edge over other colors.  You can look at the skulls of earlier humans and see that our skulls just aren't the same.  Within the last 40,000 years they've gotten measurably smaller by several hundred ccs and higher vaulted to increase the frontal lobe size.  Interesting to note that we exhibit much of the same changes that domesticated animals, like dogs and sheep, skulls undergo - smoother, taller, more spherical skulls.

Next, as a review there are two ways in which true evolution occurs.  One is that a survival advantage is paired with a particular mutation - longer neck makes some giraffes get more food, a thicker beak makes cracking more nuts possible to eat, a variant color moth conceals itself better etc., etc. That's known as natural selection, of course.  But, there's another equally important factor that must be considered in these discussion and that's having a differential reproductive advantage - some people have more babies than others.  This latter factor is by necessity going to have to be the focus of our discussion since modern medicine has such an effect on the former.

First, let's consider natural selection and genetic drift.  For millennia humans would die if they had bad enough vision to not be able to hunt/flee predators.  That's no longer the case.  For just as long humans likewise been offed if they had couldn't fight off a pathogen or deal with a genetic disease.  That's not true anymore.  So, what will the net effect be in our evolution?  Well, it means that genetic drift will take over where natural selection dropped off.  Basically, the mutations will continue to accumulate in parts of our genome that aren't being selected against.  Fined tuned systems like sight, hearing, metabolism, immune system, etc. will start to break down.  We can already see this in play with our sense of smell.  The majority of our smell genes (51%) are mutations that have turned off our ability to smell many, many different scents that were formerly important in our ancestors.  This can account for why some people like some foods and it makes others want to hurl - different mutations.  Another that's made it through the cracks is our ability to synthesize Vitamin C.  Prior to primates our ancestors used to be able to make this vitamin on our own.  It's kind of a handy thing to be able to do, but since our diet often included items that were high in Vitamin C, like fruit, we didn't have to.  Use it or lose it is the name of the game.

We've come to my favorite topic now - sexual selection.  What attributes are being selected for by sexual selection?  Meaning, why do some people have more babies than others?  Well, it might be easiest to contrast this with what used to be the case.

Formerly intelligence was selected for.  Males that were brighter gained more status thereby gaining more mates.  Monogamy is killing this and the career over family focused intelligencia is reversing it.  

It should be noted, however, that this trend isn't unidirectional.  Meaning, it isn't just that smart people are having less babies.  Severely mentally handicapped people are having less, too, (causing stabilizing selection) and thus enters rape into the discussion.  For time and memorial rape has been a sadly significant reproductive strategy for humans.  Couldn't get a mate?  Make one.  Rape selects for completely, completely different characteristics--aggression, victimization, dominance, anti-social behavior and even possibly retarded intelligence.  Nowadays those that are aggressive and antisocial won't reproduce if they can't get a stable long term relationship.  That's big.  Don't underestimate the evolutionary power of that.  I see a glimmer of hope in this.  Nicer, gentler, more social people can reproduce more.  Yay!

What else might be selected for?  Social skills like fluency, empathy, attachment, risk taking behavior that results in teen pregnancy, decreased standards and pickiness, more attractive features, resistance to getting fat (for health and reproductive reasons) from a high carb diet (we've only eaten grain for less than 10k years), horniness and I've read that women that are shorter and stockier are more fertile than the gracile, twiggy models of the run way.

In summary, it isn't possible to summarize because it's possible everything I just said is either wrong or irrelevant because of future genetic modification. haha!  That's not entirely true, actually.  I think the take away summary is that while humans may get both dummer and less healthy we may also become nicer, more pro-social, more empathic beings that may, because intelligence is always communal and synergistic, end up, as a systemic whole, become more intelligent.  But, who knows?  600 million years ago before chordates you never could have predicted the dinosaurs.  65 million years ago when the dinosaurs died out you never could have predicted humans.  We struggle to predict the weekend's weather, 50 million years from now is impossible to predict...but so fun to think about!!!

Vid: Our Evolution 63 Million Years Condensed

Link: Emotions Had Selective Advantages

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19232-did-emotions-evolve-to-push-others-into-cooperation.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Link: "Armed and Deadly: Shoulder, Weapons Key To Hunt"

http://www.wbur.org/npr/128830458

Link: Cartoon Old Friends Reunited from Deep Time

http://abstrusegoose.com/286

Human Evolution Hilarity

Link: The Onion News Network: Eons of Darwinian Evolution Somehow Produce Mitch

Eons of Darwinian Evolution Somehow Produce Mitch