Physical attraction is a measure of mate value relevance, hence the reference. And before someone jumps in and says but people have sex without reproducing, yes that is true but only in a proximate causal sense, in a distal causal sense all attraction and sex is related to gene replication.
Excellent word use! Very weak grasp of logic and abysmal comprehension of biology but, seriously now, that sure did sound all deep thinky!
Now, let's assume that you actually want to understand the biology a bit better (as opposed to time honoured alternative of just wanting to use some sciency sounding words to mask and justify an ugly social agenda). If we take it as given that the basis of the whole game is a drive to replicate the genes then we have to ask what kind of mechanisms do genes use to get that job done. Certainly there is no direct control. People don't have a couple of drinks at the bar and then feel the burning urge to increase allele frequency in the population and they certainly can't directly tell that another individual is comprehensively optimal. Instead we have a sort of palimpsest of drives and behaviours that have, in the past, generally tended to spell reproductive success in ancestral organisms.
We see all kinds of behaviours driven by all kinds of underlying strategies. Most organisms don't sexually reproduce at all. Of those that do most don't directly pick a mate. Some adopt the strategy of dumping all the eggs of all the females into a big heap and letting all the males wander over and mass fertilize the whole works, shotgun style success depending upon production volume. Many very sophisticated, recently evolved sexual reproducers depend largely upon inducing members of other species to pick between their various potential mates for them and have them do all the sexual transfer work for them. In species that do choose a partner for sexual reproduction the mechanisms of choice vary greatly and, upon examination, are found to be incredibly complex.
The thing is that once a species starts looking for indicators of suitability the issue of signalling arises. How does a potential partner show that they have what is being sought? All sorts of discussion about honest signalling vs cheating could take place (google it if you aren't familiar) and we could trot out the usual things like prolific redundant nest building, the tail of the peacock, the antlers of the Irish elk etc. as examples but the upshot is that once you start looking for certain things under the "assumption" that they indicate suitability you are down the rabbit's hole. We are without question capable of "looking" for a broad spectrum of indicators. We (as a species) pair bond to a certain extent, we are cooperative long term parents of highly dependent offspring, we are somewhat territorial, we practice learned exosomatic information transfer, we are complexly economically competitive and on and on and on. So "reproductive" signals could run the gamut from "likes puppies" (as a proxy indication of strong early parenting instinct) to "wears the right clothes" (conspicuous consumption, honest signalling of competitive success.)
-----TL/DR Starts here------
So the idea that X is attractive is almost never going to be true except in the sense that X is, in some individuals, one of the many indicators which contribute, to a varying extent, to attractiveness. Very, very few things are universal and they tend to be the things that are hardest to fake* like bilateral symmetry and even they represent only a fraction of the whole-picture attractiveness of an individual. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder and there really is no accounting for taste.
*Hardest to fake until humanity came up with plastic surgery.
Ce sujet est fermé
Retour en haut
