The current evidence would seem to suggest that LBR (leg to body ratio) is actually non-gender dimorphic, excluding a few outlier studies which have employed some odd statistical maneuvers to demonstrate their claims.
The aesthetic appeal of "leggy women" may not actually reflect preference for absolute leg to body ratio measurements, but may reflect preference for slender body shapes which place relatively more emphasis on torso weight reduction than on lower limb weight reduction. The consequent body shape (skinny torso, shapely slender legs) gives the impression of long legs in women which are currently a marketing ideal, whereas in fact it is just an illusion deriving from a shapelier body.
In men, there is greater emphasis on torso mass (especially upper thoracic mass) which confounds the overall aesthetic in the other direction, giving the impression of shorter legs. External genitalia may also add to this confounding effect.
Baldie: To examine your gracilization hypothesis, we should look back farther in time. From 400,000 to 150,000 years ago, a human species, Homo heidelbergensis, flourished in Europe, and was found as far up north as England. These humans were taller than just about all European populations today, and they were more muscular/robustly built. Between 175,000 to 27,000 years ago, another human species, Homo neanderthalensis, flourished in Europe, and whereas they were a few inches shorter than modern Europeans, they were much more muscular/robustly built. Some think that Neanderthals descended from heidelbergensis and thus there was no gracilization of body build over a period of hundreds of thousand of years; the decreased height in Neanderthals cannot be assumed to result from gracilization,. Again, this shows that if you are going to derive your food heavily from hunting, being muscular and skeletally well-built is advantageous. Losing muscle and skeletal mass to reduce energy requirements while walking to hunting grounds in the cold north would be a poor strategy.
If you change 9 miles in my previous comment to 27 miles, the energy savings is 3 times greater, but still a mere 288 kilocalories (A Big Mac (McDonald’s) has 560 kilocalories) for a 20-pound loss in weight. Consuming 7 to 8 teaspoons of animal fat would easily make up for the extra energy required by carrying 20 additional pounds, and the extra pounds will be strongly increasing the likelihood of a successful kill. And if you are not convinced of the advantage of 40 additional pounds over 20 additional pounds, also consider this. With 40 additional pounds of muscle and bone, mostly muscle, I will gather similarly powerfully built men, raid a neighboring tribe and capture its men. These men will be given the choice of castration or free food in exchange for a favor, the favor being that we shall go together to hunt, my group does the hunting (they are welcome to join but don’t have to), but they have to drag the remains back home. This way, 6-foot-7, 350-pound Fredrik Thorsson gets to bash the skull of prey but doesn’t have to drag 50 pounds of meat back home. As an added bonus, if we are intercepted on the way by another tribe looking to steal the food, we can have Fredrik greet them with the question, “Is there a problem?”
You don’t have to worry about increased likelihood of leg injuries from greater muscle-skeletal weight while walking. More skeletal mass will correspond to more extensive cartilage cushioning at the joints, and more muscle means increased capacity for work: more work for the same level of muscle injury or a lesser amount of muscle injury for the same amount of work.
Heat loss is a consideration when working in the cold. If you consider a sphere, increasing its size increases its surface area as a function of the square of its radius, but its volume increases as a function of the cube of the radius. Since heat loss depends on the external surface area exposed to the surroundings, heat conservation is better served by packing more mass in the body as the gains from more mass are more than offset by increased skin surface area. So an adaptation to hunting in the cold would be somewhat chunkier physiques with shorter limbs and larger torsos, but this is not the Northern European physique type. In other words, the cold part of hunting in the cold north does not appear to be an important contributor to modern Northern European physique norms.
I don’t know what you mean by agreeing with my explanation of the gracilization of the face. The find of broader faces in men corresponding to greater aggression is very misleading. Here is the study, and it is open access: http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/h80173234257qq01
This study is very similar to the Weston et al. cited by you, which I have addressed before, and the authors have used the Weston et al. study as a base reference. In short, they only considered the mid-facial region. Masculinization actually causes facial narrowing. If we consider shape only, if the face narrows but the mid-facial length decreases by a relatively greater amount, then the mid-facial region has become broader in shape even though the face is overall narrower.
fds: Skin color is hardly relevant to innate beauty standards. Innate beauty standards that I have talked about are usually abstract, as in a preference for average facial features without any specification of what the average needs to be exactly. The only clear analog for skin color in an international context is the absence of blemishes. Some derived beauty standards are related to how humans have deviated from the ancestral species, but humans do not differ from ancestral species in skin color range even though some skin color genes are newer than others. The skin color range in monkeys and apes varies from white to black. Skin color is a component of beauty, especially in many non-European societies, but I don’t think there is much in terms of intrinsic preferences regarding baseline skin color that holds for the great majority across populations, and it is not easy to separate innate preferences from social influences when it comes to skin color.
Not racist: I am not interested in people perceiving me in a particular manner. I believe in making arguments by citing evidence, which is what the reader should consider. I am often accused of racism, but too many people use the racist label to counter argument they don’t like rather than proving that one is a racist by virtue of believing people of other ethnic groups to be inferior and showing that this belief is not backed by evidence.
Your proof of my racism is difficult to make sense of. When I search google for high cheekbones, the first link is to this site, and there are no image or search links to majority rights. Only a search for cheekbones reveals images from majority rights, but the web page where these images appear has no reference to Erik. If you are saying that I have couched views similar to those of Richards’ in less incendiary language, then this is not true. If you are saying that I have authored Richards’ offending article, then again this is not true. If you are saying that I have incorporated elements from the offending article, then this is true, but only the scientific citations, which I wasn’t aware of beforehand. If you think I am a racist, how many racists have you come across who spend a lot of their time posting pictures of partially-nude women to promote their racist goals as opposed to primarily discussing immigration, affirmative action, restriction of speech, deracination, dispossession, crime, illegal wars fought at the behest of aliens, and the like? Said alternatively, what would be a better choice for advancing racist goals?
If you have evidence against my arguments, state it. Accusations of racism will not make me change my arguments. Evidence to the contrary or evidence I am not aware of will make me change.
Your explaination for gracilization of faces is convincing, especialy since a report (Dienkes) said that broad faced men are more likely to be violent offenders, an aversion to ancestral (or broad) faces would have an effect when women were choosey.
About "doubting the significace" I just thought I picked up from what you wrote a reluctance to beleive that many of our characteristics came about in a time and place when women could not be at all choosey. Lets say "one out of three women could never marry and have children" that would have an effect unlike anything else in human evolution.
Mea cupla - I didn't read your remarks about white skin properly.
I am no longer sure how much weight to attach to the "caring and sharing" white skin argument, I may have misunderstood what I read of P. Frost on that subject.
The gracilization theory is original to me I think, (not perhaps very persuasive evidence of its value). Thanks for addressing it and providing the energetics but what what I was thinking concerns huge distances over broken ground and the danger of breaking an ankle. I went to some trouble to find out what kind of daily distances could be sustained over several days. German Jaegers did 60 kilometers a day with their packs on handcarts, a lot of it must have been on roads. Some of Napoleon's troops from his Moscow excursion were exhumed (TV programe) and found to have fractured vertebra (not what killed then of course) from sustained 25 miles daily six days a week marching with packs. None of this covers the dangers of hiking across the Steppe Tundra in minus 15 trying to locate the herds who keep heading into the wind and whose movements are thus as unpredictable as the changing of the wind. Hunting trips of 9 miles total across this terrain would be the welcome exception though equivalent to double that on roads and they had to carry the meat home. 90 miles over a few days might be nearer the mark but it's the danger of lower body injuries that I think could make an additional 40 pounds a liability. Whether I would rather be Dolph Lungren or Max Von Sydow depends on what would be most dangerous to me animals and other men or getting hurt on the steppe. Incidently in Prof. Manning's book he says although strength in the overhead press is corralated with a low 2F4F ratio other lifts are not. He suggests the main effect of prenatal testeronisation is to produce an efficient, precision made circulatory system and has more to do with stamina then strength . If Nordic men do have low finger ratios it could have been most helpful in a Steppe Tundra scenario. The limbs are long further north but the legs are particularly so which might be an advantage for covering ground. The relative length of the lower to upper leg and the size of the calf could that that have adaptive significance for safe walking over broken ground? Thanks for your time and expertise.
Erik: Why not? The topic of skin color is a pretty big point of contention when the idea of innate beauty standards is brought up, especially with the case of racial differences that you've covered before.
Baldie: This conscientiousness thing is getting out of hand. Here is a simple consideration. What if I asked you to start eating less and suffer hunger pangs many times a day to lose weight? I am asking you to indulge in something very inconvenient and painful. If you wanted to put this off, regardless of your weight, what would be the most plausible reason, avoiding the suffering or lacking conscientiousness? Again, the most natural way of eating is to eat in accordance with desire. Those who gain body fat while eating in accordance with desire have a physiological make-up that makes them prone to obesity, and whereas these individuals will have individually varying levels of conscientiousness, lower levels of conscientiousness will hardly be responsible for the obesity-prone physiology, which is what matters in the article.
Baldie: I do not know what you mean by “...the rationale for doubting the sexual significance of steppe tumdra climatic conditions is no exception.” I do not the doubt female excess scenario due to greater male deaths while hunting, and mentioned it a long time ago; the statement before this is not a recurring theme in my thinking but, of late, a recurring theme in my replies to you because I don’t have a choice. When you have an excess of women, men potentially benefit from reduced restriction of women’s sexual freedom because the women are going to lower their standards, just not as low as men would in an analogous scenario. Take a look at these mail-order Eastern European brides, marketed to Western European or American men. You can bet that, in general, the Western men getting these women would not have gotten them if the women were Western. This is a different scenario where women lower their standards under duress, but you should get the point.
The feasibility of ending up with a more gracile body skeleton to save energy requirements while hunting in the cold north should be seen from the point of view of energetics. We consider the problem of walking 9 miles, for hunting, at a pace of 3mph. This roughly corresponds to a metabolic rate of 3.5 METS (1 MET = energy expenditure per unit body weight per unit time while resting). What would be the energy saved during this task if one had 20 pounds less of muscle and bone tissue? From this formula, we can calculate it to be roughly 96 kilocalories. Now how much food provides 96 kilocalories? Roughly, one-fifth of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, about 300 grams of carrots, about two-thirds of a 330ml coca-cola can, etc. Ask yourself, would you rather save energy that can be recovered by consuming a very small amount of food or would you rather gain 20 pounds of muscle and fat and thereby considerably improve your ability to hunt and fight? Personally, I would take 30 additional pounds of muscle and 10 additional pounds of bone.
I made no point about baby-like white skin not being sexually interesting to men. You were the one who suggested that white skin could have been selected in women because of its infantile looks, which is what I expressed doubt against. White or lighter skin may correspond to sexual inhibition in many non-human species, but not so in humans or the effect in humans is miniscule. There has been a long history of pasty-white skin being preferred in Europe. A preference for a tan is a twentieth century phenomenon, and not for reasons postulated by Peter Frost. Among pre-industrial Europeans, a tan denoted lower social class because the lower class jobs were usually outdoor jobs, whereas in post-industrial Europe, pale skin denotes lower social class because most jobs are indoor jobs and lower class individuals do not have much time to relax on the beach/get some sun. So the real issue is what social class is conveyed rather than what level of sexiness is conveyed.
You said that “deviating from lighter hair could be red.” The issue was, pertaining to sexual selection, if one will be deviating from very dark hair as the norm, then there is only one way to go: lighter hair. Why bring in red hair? Selection acts on existing genes; it cannot make hair red unless red melanin is present in some frequency to start with. Red hair is not necessarily a light form; it can range from light to dark depending on the concentration of pigment.
Visitor: Since most people make similar attractiveness judgments, in the majority of cases, people’s opinion of what they see in the mirror will be slightly better than or similar to how most others see them. Before mirrors or any equivalent reflective item, people could not easily associate their popularity or lack of it with the minutiae of their looks except for issues such as height, muscularity or fat levels, which require a developed conscience but no mirrors. So I suppose I should have been clearer.
Erik, you are quite clever in your use of words, pictures, and research evidence. You want us all to perceive you as this scientist who knows how to talk the talk and is simply just "portraying a view" but the truth is you are simply a racist using this website as a facade. How do I know? Let's see.
I typed in the search "high cheekbones" in google and came across a VERY interesting montage of pictures which are remarkably-- REMARKABLY similar to the pictures you use yourself on this website. So I went to the website called majorityrights.com and was able to procure who the author was.
The author calls himself J.Richards. As I continued reading, I noticed that while someone was critiquing him, they said "Erik". Not just "Eric" but "EriK". Yes, you are a racist using the facade of wanting to promote feminine beauty as a platform for your own racist views. Be honest here. You cannot deny that unless you go to majorityrights.com and erase every single article you have written. And for the record, I am one of your so-called "ugly" Indian women married to a white guy. So much for wanting to prevent miscegenation?
Prolonged staring at ones face in the mirror will have a negative effect on self image analogous to the way repeating a word many times causes it to lose its meaning. Speculation has the latin word for mirror (specularis) in it because staring in the mirror has a long history in meditation. Very prolonged staring into the miror is regarded by psychiatrists as ominous; it often presages schizophrenia. I doubt mirrors brought about any real change. I think women assessed their own relative attractiveness as they had always done, by noticing how others treated them compared to others rather by than such an objective method as a mirror.
However the modern age of mass media images in conjunction with mirrors may well have changed how women percieve their relative atractiveness.
fds: I don’t see the relevance of addressing skin color issues within this site.
Hugh Ristik: I wouldn’t say that female beauty needs to have something to do with femininity; it’s more like female beauty usually has something to do with femininity. One will come across less feminine women or somewhat masculinized women that look better overall than some more feminine women.
Regarding the teen beauty pageant where an overweight Chloe Marshall won a beauty pageant, I don’t think it is of much importance because something like this would be a rare or occasional occurrence, perhaps to placate feminists every now and then or because some contest organizers decided to have a little fun.
There is no place within this site to post off-topic comments. Even if I set up an entry for off-topic comments, it would only be a matter of time before the number of comments there discourage people from limiting off-topic issues to that entry only. The only way to accommodate off-topic comments is to have a forums section. But would it be advisable from the perspective of maintaining site quality? I am in no position to be moderating a forum. The forums are likely to be filled with trivial, off-topic issues, and I can’t imagine setting up a forums section without prominently displaying disclaimers distancing myself from numerous issues that are bound to come up.
For instance, a common off-topic question that I get is how feminine/attractive is a particular woman. As I have explained, I am not interested in the looks of women other than models and beauty pageant contestants, and these women are often obscure compared to female celebrities such as big-name actresses. I have also made many attempts to argue that this website has nothing to do with how women are supposed to look like but with how women in various modeling and beauty pageant scenarios are supposed to look like, but misunderstandings are rampant. Imagine what will happen when someone encounters pages after pages of discussion involving the femininity/attractiveness of top female celebrities in general in the forums. Even though none of these discussions will be initiated by me, they will make defending the site’s goals harder. Anyway, I will give the matter some thought.
James: I don’t think the negative comments are coming from obese women. The two female critics here are Danielle and the woman posting as son of Geats, Gee!, blue fog (elsewhere as Zonneschijn, Z, etc.). Danielle has given up on this site, but her comments indicated that she was greatly disturbed by this site promoting feminine beauty and the manner by which it is being promoted. Danielle indicated that she had masculinized looks by “my standards” but not by hers, and her negative comments are not really directed toward Melisande, but toward me; she was trying to trash my work or express her anger toward me. Danielle gave no indication of being overweight and her beef was mostly with the femininity part and the use of/sources of risqué pictures on my part.
The other woman, Zonneschijn, based on her extensive comments, is most likely a thin woman lacking feminine curves. She is also disturbed by this site, and has a problem with white women. She has called many of my healthy-weight examples of feminine women fat. Zonneschijn is half Danish and half southeast Asian (Thai), and the latter element mostly likely predominates in her looks. Hence the [likely] reason why she cited examples of wide jaws as examples of healthy jaw and teeth development. Whereas I agree with her that a number of problems with teeth (especially decay) in developed societies are related to eating refined foods, she doesn’t appreciate that Melisande has a well-formed jaw and face, and that the mouth-breathing expression is a deliberate pose adopted upon instruction from the photographer in order to look seductive. Melisande’s facial narrowing is partly a function of having finer facial features, which is more common among European women, and partly a result of not being feminine; there is nothing malformed in her face.
Why do all the fat chicks get on the internet and criticize normal sized, fit women? To them, any woman within 10% of her ideal body weight is anorexic, starving, or a skeleton. They do this to try to change people's thinking that they themselves are 'real women' and that they just have 'curves' and other such nonsense. No honey, you're fat. FAT. Time to hit the gym and put down the twinkies.
These women are inshape, attractive, and gorgeous. Nice to see some women like this. We need more of this and less tubs of lard walking around. The number one thing 99% of the women out there can do to look better is lose weight.
Gracilized faces do tend to go with gracilized physiques in my opinion. Absurd as it may be; gracilization as an adaptation to covering very long distances in 15 below could have been originaly acting on men who had even more bone mass and muscularity than north Europeans have today. After the special enviroment that gracilization was adapted to disappeared a heavier build may have become more common again as sexual selection became more or less balanced.
You make a good point about baby like white skin not being sexually interesting to men-- exactly!
That is P.Frosts explaination for why women think tanning their skin makes them more sexually attractive. It alters the sexually inhibiting white skin which is interfering with aspects of sexual desire.
Deviating from lighter hair could be to red, which is said to be the oldest and is most common in parts of Scotland, or golden which is most common in north west Europe, or just lighter which is ash blonde, most common in the Baltic. Baltic blondes are not as gracilized. I will give commenting a rest now.
...succeeds in one thing: proving that virtually everyone including the author of the site has too much time on your hands. Please get jobs and/or lives and cut out this useless drivel or just kill yourselves and allow the rest of us to make a real difference in uniting this world instead of using flat out racism to try to pull it apart.
Mate choice of the part of females is a recuring theme in your thinking, the rationale for doubting the sexual significance of steppe tumdra climatic conditions is no exception.
As you have pointed out elsewhere, in many parts of the world women's sexuality and ability to pick a mate is restricted while arranged marrages are often the norm. Northern Europe is the notable exception; here we find women have been largely free to choose their preferred mate. Now why is it that northern men haven't restricted women's sexual freedom to the same extent. Most men do not have very superior courtship skills nor are they exceptionally attractive to women,in fact they derive little relative benefit from women having sexual freedom, they can't impregnate loads of women like those superstuds. If a woman is impregnated by another man it takes her off the market and makes her a far less attractive mate on returning. Some men have great difficulty attracting even one woman in the first place. Restricting womens choice is aimed at leveling down the sexual sucess of a minority of men and increasing access to virgin females by the majority.(It may lower the overall quality over time as you say)
Allow me to suggest, if I may, that the period of steppe tundra hunting did drastically alter the balance of the sexes, men did not have to be concerned with womens preference for a minority of sexually very successful men. A man had to be able to survive the rigours of hunting, as many did not.( and if NE men show any selection it must be for surviving the man killing trips acoss the tundra)
This relaxed selection for the mentality that restricts women's sexual freedom has resulted in an evolved disposition for lesser restriction of womens sexual freedom in north European men
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness
"It also includes the specific traits of rule conscientiousness and perfectionalism" (in Cattell's model)
(This is what I was talking about. I was not using conscientousness as an eccentric synonym for will power in the sense of self control)
Conscientiousness is associated with social rule following. In other words attention to social obligations as threats to wellbeing if not fulfilled. If some intelligent girls of very high conscientiousness corectly percieve that the prestigious fashion industry deems normal healthy female bodyfat as obese -- and they're not wrong about that -- in their own minds they may feel guilty for not following "the rules" and fulfilling social obligations. Anorexics are considered unusually obedient by parents and teachers in the following of rules. The personality dimension they have a lot of may tend to make conform with fashion's harmful bias; they then see half starved models as paragons of feminine beauty. Other factor(s) may well be more important but I think conscientiousness plays a part. This is close to what you are saying above, Some anorexics are less typical body image perfectionalists -- yes.
Low conscientiousness is associated with procastination (in Wiki), now correct me if this sounds wrong but obese people tend to put off going on a diet (or Banting as it is sometimes called) until tomorrow, which never comes of course.
I agree will power is not the answer but in joining a weight loss group one may be feel social obligations, and feel more guilty about not carrying out ones intention to lose weight.
Baldie: Citing Peter Frost’s paper doesn’t mean that I fully endorse all his ideas or all speculations/conjectures in the paper. The evidence for stronger sexual selection in Northern Europe is, partly, in the rapid rise of a high level of genetic diversity behind hair color variation. It is clear that this diversity was selected for, and the most plausible selective factor is sexual selection. Frost has documented this data, but what enabled stronger sexual selection is a different issue.
It appears, strongly, that the enabling mechanism has something to do with excess male deaths and reduced capability of men to support multiple wives, which Frost has proposed and with which I agree, but it is naïve to believe that sexual selection basically acted on women alone.
In all populations, sexual selection, acting on both men and women, is an ongoing process every generation, including populations where marriages are predominantly arranged between partners who are effectively strangers to each others. So the questions are not 1) sexual selection or not, or 2) sexual selection of which sex? The issues are stronger vs. weaker sexual selection with respect to both inter-population and inter-sex comparisons.
An imbalance between the proportions of men and women in the population creates an opportunity for stronger sexual selection. Sexual selection is expected to act more strongly on the surplus sex because there are fewer potential partners of the opposite sex for them. Again, I have no beef with Frost on these two expectations. However, there are other issues that you have not considered and I haven’t encountered them in Frost’s writings.
Whereas mate choice on the part of both men and women are important, which of these choices is more important? Clearly, mate choice on the part of women because they are the ones who give birth and because women have a much more limited child bearing capability than men. When you have an excess of women, two major sources of the suppression of women’s sexuality are largely eliminated. With an excess of women around, most men are not motivated to restrict women’s sexuality. To complement this, whereas women normally suppress each other’s sexuality to negotiate on better terms with men, if there are not many men out there, then they have to be loser with their sexuality to compete with other women for access to men. So, the situation in Northern Europe afforded higher sexual freedom to women compared to most other places, and women naturally being more circumspect with their choices, even if their choices are limited, will be sexually selecting men also, in the form of cheating on their partner in some cases, if necessary. This scenario over many generations would tend to make Northern Europeans diverge more from other human populations on several counts. Hair color diversity is one outcome. Eye color diversity is likely another outcome. And, you can be sure that there are many other such outcomes, not limited to physical appearance.
So, sexual selection still works in the scenarios that I give you, namely less attractive women being loser with their sexuality to get impregnated by men who would be willing to have sex with them but not take them as wives, or women offering their services as prostitutes or servants to feed their illegitimate children since the advantage is with the more attractive women. You seem to argue that sexual selection must require some drastic scenario, but given that sexual selection still occurs in Asian countries where most marriages being arranged, the scenarios I gave you afford much stronger sexual selection.
It is absurd to believe that gracilization in Northern European men is an adaptation to covering large distances on ground, something facilitated by less body weight. I have been talking about fine facial features. If you deposit less bone mass in the face how much weight do you save? And why are Northern Europeans then so tall and with more bone mass and muscularity than most populations?
The other issue you have brought up is “caring and sharing” looks in women or something along the lines of infantile looks (e.g., lighter skin, lighter hair) that supposedly bring out the nurturing element in men and facilitate their acting as better providers to their wife. In many species, the males often kill babies of other males. Humans males are a little better, but they generally don’t give a damn about babies not fathered by them. Human males are typically sexually interested in women who are not fathered by them or their close relatives. So why should one expect more infantile features in distantly-related women to win over men and bring out the nurturing element in them? In other words, selection for blonder hair or lighter skin doesn’t have to be because these are more infantile.
In many cases, the shifts, if caused by sexual selection, have simple explanations. If darkness-lightness is the issue, and you are going to deviate from very dark hair as the norm, then there is only one way to go: lighter hair. No need to invoke selection for infantile looks. Similarly, if nose thickness is the issue, there are two potential shifts: broader or narrower noses. If no natural selection pressures are affecting nose thickness, and if the ancestral species had broader noses, and if some individuals can be found who are more reminiscent of the ancestral species, then where will sexual selection be leading nose thickness to? I think you can answer this. Why does your thinking have to be so muddled?
Baldie: More energy expenditure will tend to create more hunger indeed, but you forgot to consider the state of tuning of physiological control that balances energy intake against energy expenditure, some elements of which start getting detuned as early as one’s early twenties. Now what will this detuning comprise of? More instances where energy intake exceeds energy expenditure rather than the other way around, and here, those with faster metabolisms are less likely to pack on excess pounds as far as aging of the energy regulatory system goes. So no need to bring in conscientiousness here.
The typical anorexic woman is not trying to be more conscientious with respect to eating; she has come to believe that attaining perfection in one field will make her problems go away and she is convinced that perfection lies in extreme thinness. There are other anorexics where body image is not an issue and neither is conscientiousness.
The most natural way to eat is to do so in accordance with desire, and if not restricted by availability of food, most people eat in this manner. So conscientiousness or prudence in dietary matters is not of great relevance in understanding the majority of variation behind individual differences in body fat levels.
I am not trying to empathize with obese individuals. Those weight watchers programs are generally not long-term effective notwithstanding some spectacular success stories. There is a very simple and guaranteed method of loosing excess body fat: stop eating till you reach the desired weight. However, the holy grail of weight loss is how to sustain a healthy body mass. This is where people fail. It is not difficult to motivate people to lose excess body fat, but much more difficult to use psychological manipulation to keep off the pounds in the long run, simply because will power/conscientiousness is hardly the culprit in the first place.
This site has a link to a Peter Frost paper on the mortality north European steppe tundra hunters suffered 20,000 years ago, it also seems to accept P. Frost's theory that sexual selection of women took place there as can be observed in the population of this area today, though the effects of sexual selection of women are most strikingly exemplified further north in Scandinavia which was under a kilometer of ice at that time of course.
How could sexual selection of women happen if it was as viable for women to support a family as to have a man supporting woman and children by hunting: it couldn't. Never mind this particular scenario, for any sexual selection of women many women must not successfully reproduce viable children, who go on to have ther own offspring and so on.
This hunting enviroment required covering vast distances on foot in minus 15 degrees and was a man killer, the death of so many men produced a unique situation; women needed to be special to get a mate. (incidently I now incline towards beliving that gracilization in N. European men is an adaptation to covering these huge distances on foot, less bodyweight to be moved less stress on the ankle for a broken ankle would be deadly ect.)
Yes maybe some men were successfuly impregnating lone or cheating women and some of these women who got by as you suggest -- by providing services-- but they were outbred by the "married" women who had a capable provider husband; being supported by a dedicated provider these married women's children died less often. Being in demand the men might decide to abandon their dependants which would be disastrous for them AS IN NO OTHER ENVIROMENT. The solution would be that the women with the most "caring and sharing inducing" looks would tend to survive. Therefor some characteristics of N. European women have an evolutionary rationale --"are there"-- to induce men to feel good about being a faithful provider to their wife as opposed to abandoning them. White skin is an obvious contender for such a characteristic. The totaly helpless human baby has light skin (as well as a special smell) which induces provisioning and care. Light skin can be said to be child like , what terminology to use I am not sure now, "caring and sharing inducing" characteristics will have to do. I defer to superior knowledge in the matter of face shape.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeFSMnuNh2I&feature=related
The current evidence would seem to suggest that LBR (leg to body ratio) is actually non-gender dimorphic, excluding a few outlier studies which have employed some odd statistical maneuvers to demonstrate their claims.
The aesthetic appeal of "leggy women" may not actually reflect preference for absolute leg to body ratio measurements, but may reflect preference for slender body shapes which place relatively more emphasis on torso weight reduction than on lower limb weight reduction. The consequent body shape (skinny torso, shapely slender legs) gives the impression of long legs in women which are currently a marketing ideal, whereas in fact it is just an illusion deriving from a shapelier body.
In men, there is greater emphasis on torso mass (especially upper thoracic mass) which confounds the overall aesthetic in the other direction, giving the impression of shorter legs. External genitalia may also add to this confounding effect.
Baldie: To examine your gracilization hypothesis, we should look back farther in time. From 400,000 to 150,000 years ago, a human species, Homo heidelbergensis, flourished in Europe, and was found as far up north as England. These humans were taller than just about all European populations today, and they were more muscular/robustly built. Between 175,000 to 27,000 years ago, another human species, Homo neanderthalensis, flourished in Europe, and whereas they were a few inches shorter than modern Europeans, they were much more muscular/robustly built. Some think that Neanderthals descended from heidelbergensis and thus there was no gracilization of body build over a period of hundreds of thousand of years; the decreased height in Neanderthals cannot be assumed to result from gracilization,. Again, this shows that if you are going to derive your food heavily from hunting, being muscular and skeletally well-built is advantageous. Losing muscle and skeletal mass to reduce energy requirements while walking to hunting grounds in the cold north would be a poor strategy.
If you change 9 miles in my previous comment to 27 miles, the energy savings is 3 times greater, but still a mere 288 kilocalories (A Big Mac (McDonald’s) has 560 kilocalories) for a 20-pound loss in weight. Consuming 7 to 8 teaspoons of animal fat would easily make up for the extra energy required by carrying 20 additional pounds, and the extra pounds will be strongly increasing the likelihood of a successful kill. And if you are not convinced of the advantage of 40 additional pounds over 20 additional pounds, also consider this. With 40 additional pounds of muscle and bone, mostly muscle, I will gather similarly powerfully built men, raid a neighboring tribe and capture its men. These men will be given the choice of castration or free food in exchange for a favor, the favor being that we shall go together to hunt, my group does the hunting (they are welcome to join but don’t have to), but they have to drag the remains back home. This way, 6-foot-7, 350-pound Fredrik Thorsson gets to bash the skull of prey but doesn’t have to drag 50 pounds of meat back home. As an added bonus, if we are intercepted on the way by another tribe looking to steal the food, we can have Fredrik greet them with the question, “Is there a problem?”
You don’t have to worry about increased likelihood of leg injuries from greater muscle-skeletal weight while walking. More skeletal mass will correspond to more extensive cartilage cushioning at the joints, and more muscle means increased capacity for work: more work for the same level of muscle injury or a lesser amount of muscle injury for the same amount of work.
Heat loss is a consideration when working in the cold. If you consider a sphere, increasing its size increases its surface area as a function of the square of its radius, but its volume increases as a function of the cube of the radius. Since heat loss depends on the external surface area exposed to the surroundings, heat conservation is better served by packing more mass in the body as the gains from more mass are more than offset by increased skin surface area. So an adaptation to hunting in the cold would be somewhat chunkier physiques with shorter limbs and larger torsos, but this is not the Northern European physique type. In other words, the cold part of hunting in the cold north does not appear to be an important contributor to modern Northern European physique norms.
I don’t know what you mean by agreeing with my explanation of the gracilization of the face. The find of broader faces in men corresponding to greater aggression is very misleading. Here is the study, and it is open access: http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/h80173234257qq01
This study is very similar to the Weston et al. cited by you, which I have addressed before, and the authors have used the Weston et al. study as a base reference. In short, they only considered the mid-facial region. Masculinization actually causes facial narrowing. If we consider shape only, if the face narrows but the mid-facial length decreases by a relatively greater amount, then the mid-facial region has become broader in shape even though the face is overall narrower.
fds: Skin color is hardly relevant to innate beauty standards. Innate beauty standards that I have talked about are usually abstract, as in a preference for average facial features without any specification of what the average needs to be exactly. The only clear analog for skin color in an international context is the absence of blemishes. Some derived beauty standards are related to how humans have deviated from the ancestral species, but humans do not differ from ancestral species in skin color range even though some skin color genes are newer than others. The skin color range in monkeys and apes varies from white to black. Skin color is a component of beauty, especially in many non-European societies, but I don’t think there is much in terms of intrinsic preferences regarding baseline skin color that holds for the great majority across populations, and it is not easy to separate innate preferences from social influences when it comes to skin color.
Not racist: I am not interested in people perceiving me in a particular manner. I believe in making arguments by citing evidence, which is what the reader should consider. I am often accused of racism, but too many people use the racist label to counter argument they don’t like rather than proving that one is a racist by virtue of believing people of other ethnic groups to be inferior and showing that this belief is not backed by evidence.
Your proof of my racism is difficult to make sense of. When I search google for high cheekbones, the first link is to this site, and there are no image or search links to majority rights. Only a search for cheekbones reveals images from majority rights, but the web page where these images appear has no reference to Erik. If you are saying that I have couched views similar to those of Richards’ in less incendiary language, then this is not true. If you are saying that I have authored Richards’ offending article, then again this is not true. If you are saying that I have incorporated elements from the offending article, then this is true, but only the scientific citations, which I wasn’t aware of beforehand. If you think I am a racist, how many racists have you come across who spend a lot of their time posting pictures of partially-nude women to promote their racist goals as opposed to primarily discussing immigration, affirmative action, restriction of speech, deracination, dispossession, crime, illegal wars fought at the behest of aliens, and the like? Said alternatively, what would be a better choice for advancing racist goals?
If you have evidence against my arguments, state it. Accusations of racism will not make me change my arguments. Evidence to the contrary or evidence I am not aware of will make me change.
Your explaination for gracilization of faces is convincing, especialy since a report (Dienkes) said that broad faced men are more likely to be violent offenders, an aversion to ancestral (or broad) faces would have an effect when women were choosey.
About "doubting the significace" I just thought I picked up from what you wrote a reluctance to beleive that many of our characteristics came about in a time and place when women could not be at all choosey. Lets say "one out of three women could never marry and have children" that would have an effect unlike anything else in human evolution.
Mea cupla - I didn't read your remarks about white skin properly.
I am no longer sure how much weight to attach to the "caring and sharing" white skin argument, I may have misunderstood what I read of P. Frost on that subject.
The gracilization theory is original to me I think, (not perhaps very persuasive evidence of its value). Thanks for addressing it and providing the energetics but what what I was thinking concerns huge distances over broken ground and the danger of breaking an ankle. I went to some trouble to find out what kind of daily distances could be sustained over several days. German Jaegers did 60 kilometers a day with their packs on handcarts, a lot of it must have been on roads. Some of Napoleon's troops from his Moscow excursion were exhumed (TV programe) and found to have fractured vertebra (not what killed then of course) from sustained 25 miles daily six days a week marching with packs. None of this covers the dangers of hiking across the Steppe Tundra in minus 15 trying to locate the herds who keep heading into the wind and whose movements are thus as unpredictable as the changing of the wind. Hunting trips of 9 miles total across this terrain would be the welcome exception though equivalent to double that on roads and they had to carry the meat home. 90 miles over a few days might be nearer the mark but it's the danger of lower body injuries that I think could make an additional 40 pounds a liability. Whether I would rather be Dolph Lungren or Max Von Sydow depends on what would be most dangerous to me animals and other men or getting hurt on the steppe. Incidently in Prof. Manning's book he says although strength in the overhead press is corralated with a low 2F4F ratio other lifts are not. He suggests the main effect of prenatal testeronisation is to produce an efficient, precision made circulatory system and has more to do with stamina then strength . If Nordic men do have low finger ratios it could have been most helpful in a Steppe Tundra scenario. The limbs are long further north but the legs are particularly so which might be an advantage for covering ground. The relative length of the lower to upper leg and the size of the calf could that that have adaptive significance for safe walking over broken ground? Thanks for your time and expertise.
Erik: Why not? The topic of skin color is a pretty big point of contention when the idea of innate beauty standards is brought up, especially with the case of racial differences that you've covered before.
Baldie: This conscientiousness thing is getting out of hand. Here is a simple consideration. What if I asked you to start eating less and suffer hunger pangs many times a day to lose weight? I am asking you to indulge in something very inconvenient and painful. If you wanted to put this off, regardless of your weight, what would be the most plausible reason, avoiding the suffering or lacking conscientiousness? Again, the most natural way of eating is to eat in accordance with desire. Those who gain body fat while eating in accordance with desire have a physiological make-up that makes them prone to obesity, and whereas these individuals will have individually varying levels of conscientiousness, lower levels of conscientiousness will hardly be responsible for the obesity-prone physiology, which is what matters in the article.
Baldie: I do not know what you mean by “...the rationale for doubting the sexual significance of steppe tumdra climatic conditions is no exception.” I do not the doubt female excess scenario due to greater male deaths while hunting, and mentioned it a long time ago; the statement before this is not a recurring theme in my thinking but, of late, a recurring theme in my replies to you because I don’t have a choice. When you have an excess of women, men potentially benefit from reduced restriction of women’s sexual freedom because the women are going to lower their standards, just not as low as men would in an analogous scenario. Take a look at these mail-order Eastern European brides, marketed to Western European or American men. You can bet that, in general, the Western men getting these women would not have gotten them if the women were Western. This is a different scenario where women lower their standards under duress, but you should get the point.
The feasibility of ending up with a more gracile body skeleton to save energy requirements while hunting in the cold north should be seen from the point of view of energetics. We consider the problem of walking 9 miles, for hunting, at a pace of 3mph. This roughly corresponds to a metabolic rate of 3.5 METS (1 MET = energy expenditure per unit body weight per unit time while resting). What would be the energy saved during this task if one had 20 pounds less of muscle and bone tissue? From this formula, we can calculate it to be roughly 96 kilocalories. Now how much food provides 96 kilocalories? Roughly, one-fifth of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, about 300 grams of carrots, about two-thirds of a 330ml coca-cola can, etc. Ask yourself, would you rather save energy that can be recovered by consuming a very small amount of food or would you rather gain 20 pounds of muscle and fat and thereby considerably improve your ability to hunt and fight? Personally, I would take 30 additional pounds of muscle and 10 additional pounds of bone.
I made no point about baby-like white skin not being sexually interesting to men. You were the one who suggested that white skin could have been selected in women because of its infantile looks, which is what I expressed doubt against. White or lighter skin may correspond to sexual inhibition in many non-human species, but not so in humans or the effect in humans is miniscule. There has been a long history of pasty-white skin being preferred in Europe. A preference for a tan is a twentieth century phenomenon, and not for reasons postulated by Peter Frost. Among pre-industrial Europeans, a tan denoted lower social class because the lower class jobs were usually outdoor jobs, whereas in post-industrial Europe, pale skin denotes lower social class because most jobs are indoor jobs and lower class individuals do not have much time to relax on the beach/get some sun. So the real issue is what social class is conveyed rather than what level of sexiness is conveyed.
You said that “deviating from lighter hair could be red.” The issue was, pertaining to sexual selection, if one will be deviating from very dark hair as the norm, then there is only one way to go: lighter hair. Why bring in red hair? Selection acts on existing genes; it cannot make hair red unless red melanin is present in some frequency to start with. Red hair is not necessarily a light form; it can range from light to dark depending on the concentration of pigment.
Visitor: Since most people make similar attractiveness judgments, in the majority of cases, people’s opinion of what they see in the mirror will be slightly better than or similar to how most others see them. Before mirrors or any equivalent reflective item, people could not easily associate their popularity or lack of it with the minutiae of their looks except for issues such as height, muscularity or fat levels, which require a developed conscience but no mirrors. So I suppose I should have been clearer.
Erik, you are quite clever in your use of words, pictures, and research evidence. You want us all to perceive you as this scientist who knows how to talk the talk and is simply just "portraying a view" but the truth is you are simply a racist using this website as a facade. How do I know? Let's see.
I typed in the search "high cheekbones" in google and came across a VERY interesting montage of pictures which are remarkably-- REMARKABLY similar to the pictures you use yourself on this website. So I went to the website called majorityrights.com and was able to procure who the author was.
The author calls himself J.Richards. As I continued reading, I noticed that while someone was critiquing him, they said "Erik". Not just "Eric" but "EriK". Yes, you are a racist using the facade of wanting to promote feminine beauty as a platform for your own racist views. Be honest here. You cannot deny that unless you go to majorityrights.com and erase every single article you have written. And for the record, I am one of your so-called "ugly" Indian women married to a white guy. So much for wanting to prevent miscegenation?
Oilatum Scalp Treatment contains Ciclopirox it is an iron chelator I believe
Prolonged staring at ones face in the mirror will have a negative effect on self image analogous to the way repeating a word many times causes it to lose its meaning. Speculation has the latin word for mirror (specularis) in it because staring in the mirror has a long history in meditation. Very prolonged staring into the miror is regarded by psychiatrists as ominous; it often presages schizophrenia. I doubt mirrors brought about any real change. I think women assessed their own relative attractiveness as they had always done, by noticing how others treated them compared to others rather by than such an objective method as a mirror.
However the modern age of mass media images in conjunction with mirrors may well have changed how women percieve their relative atractiveness.
fds: I don’t see the relevance of addressing skin color issues within this site.
Hugh Ristik: I wouldn’t say that female beauty needs to have something to do with femininity; it’s more like female beauty usually has something to do with femininity. One will come across less feminine women or somewhat masculinized women that look better overall than some more feminine women.
Regarding the teen beauty pageant where an overweight Chloe Marshall won a beauty pageant, I don’t think it is of much importance because something like this would be a rare or occasional occurrence, perhaps to placate feminists every now and then or because some contest organizers decided to have a little fun.
There is no place within this site to post off-topic comments. Even if I set up an entry for off-topic comments, it would only be a matter of time before the number of comments there discourage people from limiting off-topic issues to that entry only. The only way to accommodate off-topic comments is to have a forums section. But would it be advisable from the perspective of maintaining site quality? I am in no position to be moderating a forum. The forums are likely to be filled with trivial, off-topic issues, and I can’t imagine setting up a forums section without prominently displaying disclaimers distancing myself from numerous issues that are bound to come up.
For instance, a common off-topic question that I get is how feminine/attractive is a particular woman. As I have explained, I am not interested in the looks of women other than models and beauty pageant contestants, and these women are often obscure compared to female celebrities such as big-name actresses. I have also made many attempts to argue that this website has nothing to do with how women are supposed to look like but with how women in various modeling and beauty pageant scenarios are supposed to look like, but misunderstandings are rampant. Imagine what will happen when someone encounters pages after pages of discussion involving the femininity/attractiveness of top female celebrities in general in the forums. Even though none of these discussions will be initiated by me, they will make defending the site’s goals harder. Anyway, I will give the matter some thought.
James: I don’t think the negative comments are coming from obese women. The two female critics here are Danielle and the woman posting as son of Geats, Gee!, blue fog (elsewhere as Zonneschijn, Z, etc.). Danielle has given up on this site, but her comments indicated that she was greatly disturbed by this site promoting feminine beauty and the manner by which it is being promoted. Danielle indicated that she had masculinized looks by “my standards” but not by hers, and her negative comments are not really directed toward Melisande, but toward me; she was trying to trash my work or express her anger toward me. Danielle gave no indication of being overweight and her beef was mostly with the femininity part and the use of/sources of risqué pictures on my part.
The other woman, Zonneschijn, based on her extensive comments, is most likely a thin woman lacking feminine curves. She is also disturbed by this site, and has a problem with white women. She has called many of my healthy-weight examples of feminine women fat. Zonneschijn is half Danish and half southeast Asian (Thai), and the latter element mostly likely predominates in her looks. Hence the [likely] reason why she cited examples of wide jaws as examples of healthy jaw and teeth development. Whereas I agree with her that a number of problems with teeth (especially decay) in developed societies are related to eating refined foods, she doesn’t appreciate that Melisande has a well-formed jaw and face, and that the mouth-breathing expression is a deliberate pose adopted upon instruction from the photographer in order to look seductive. Melisande’s facial narrowing is partly a function of having finer facial features, which is more common among European women, and partly a result of not being feminine; there is nothing malformed in her face.
Why do all the fat chicks get on the internet and criticize normal sized, fit women? To them, any woman within 10% of her ideal body weight is anorexic, starving, or a skeleton. They do this to try to change people's thinking that they themselves are 'real women' and that they just have 'curves' and other such nonsense. No honey, you're fat. FAT. Time to hit the gym and put down the twinkies.
These women are inshape, attractive, and gorgeous. Nice to see some women like this. We need more of this and less tubs of lard walking around. The number one thing 99% of the women out there can do to look better is lose weight.
Correction: should read- deviating to lighter hair.
Gracilized faces do tend to go with gracilized physiques in my opinion. Absurd as it may be; gracilization as an adaptation to covering very long distances in 15 below could have been originaly acting on men who had even more bone mass and muscularity than north Europeans have today. After the special enviroment that gracilization was adapted to disappeared a heavier build may have become more common again as sexual selection became more or less balanced.
You make a good point about baby like white skin not being sexually interesting to men-- exactly!
That is P.Frosts explaination for why women think tanning their skin makes them more sexually attractive. It alters the sexually inhibiting white skin which is interfering with aspects of sexual desire.
Deviating from lighter hair could be to red, which is said to be the oldest and is most common in parts of Scotland, or golden which is most common in north west Europe, or just lighter which is ash blonde, most common in the Baltic. Baltic blondes are not as gracilized. I will give commenting a rest now.
...succeeds in one thing: proving that virtually everyone including the author of the site has too much time on your hands. Please get jobs and/or lives and cut out this useless drivel or just kill yourselves and allow the rest of us to make a real difference in uniting this world instead of using flat out racism to try to pull it apart.
Mate choice of the part of females is a recuring theme in your thinking, the rationale for doubting the sexual significance of steppe tumdra climatic conditions is no exception.
As you have pointed out elsewhere, in many parts of the world women's sexuality and ability to pick a mate is restricted while arranged marrages are often the norm. Northern Europe is the notable exception; here we find women have been largely free to choose their preferred mate. Now why is it that northern men haven't restricted women's sexual freedom to the same extent. Most men do not have very superior courtship skills nor are they exceptionally attractive to women,in fact they derive little relative benefit from women having sexual freedom, they can't impregnate loads of women like those superstuds. If a woman is impregnated by another man it takes her off the market and makes her a far less attractive mate on returning. Some men have great difficulty attracting even one woman in the first place. Restricting womens choice is aimed at leveling down the sexual sucess of a minority of men and increasing access to virgin females by the majority.(It may lower the overall quality over time as you say)
Allow me to suggest, if I may, that the period of steppe tundra hunting did drastically alter the balance of the sexes, men did not have to be concerned with womens preference for a minority of sexually very successful men. A man had to be able to survive the rigours of hunting, as many did not.( and if NE men show any selection it must be for surviving the man killing trips acoss the tundra)
This relaxed selection for the mentality that restricts women's sexual freedom has resulted in an evolved disposition for lesser restriction of womens sexual freedom in north European men
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness
"It also includes the specific traits of rule conscientiousness and perfectionalism" (in Cattell's model)
(This is what I was talking about. I was not using conscientousness as an eccentric synonym for will power in the sense of self control)
Conscientiousness is associated with social rule following. In other words attention to social obligations as threats to wellbeing if not fulfilled. If some intelligent girls of very high conscientiousness corectly percieve that the prestigious fashion industry deems normal healthy female bodyfat as obese -- and they're not wrong about that -- in their own minds they may feel guilty for not following "the rules" and fulfilling social obligations. Anorexics are considered unusually obedient by parents and teachers in the following of rules. The personality dimension they have a lot of may tend to make conform with fashion's harmful bias; they then see half starved models as paragons of feminine beauty. Other factor(s) may well be more important but I think conscientiousness plays a part. This is close to what you are saying above, Some anorexics are less typical body image perfectionalists -- yes.
Low conscientiousness is associated with procastination (in Wiki), now correct me if this sounds wrong but obese people tend to put off going on a diet (or Banting as it is sometimes called) until tomorrow, which never comes of course.
I agree will power is not the answer but in joining a weight loss group one may be feel social obligations, and feel more guilty about not carrying out ones intention to lose weight.
Baldie: Citing Peter Frost’s paper doesn’t mean that I fully endorse all his ideas or all speculations/conjectures in the paper. The evidence for stronger sexual selection in Northern Europe is, partly, in the rapid rise of a high level of genetic diversity behind hair color variation. It is clear that this diversity was selected for, and the most plausible selective factor is sexual selection. Frost has documented this data, but what enabled stronger sexual selection is a different issue.
It appears, strongly, that the enabling mechanism has something to do with excess male deaths and reduced capability of men to support multiple wives, which Frost has proposed and with which I agree, but it is naïve to believe that sexual selection basically acted on women alone.
In all populations, sexual selection, acting on both men and women, is an ongoing process every generation, including populations where marriages are predominantly arranged between partners who are effectively strangers to each others. So the questions are not 1) sexual selection or not, or 2) sexual selection of which sex? The issues are stronger vs. weaker sexual selection with respect to both inter-population and inter-sex comparisons.
An imbalance between the proportions of men and women in the population creates an opportunity for stronger sexual selection. Sexual selection is expected to act more strongly on the surplus sex because there are fewer potential partners of the opposite sex for them. Again, I have no beef with Frost on these two expectations. However, there are other issues that you have not considered and I haven’t encountered them in Frost’s writings.
Whereas mate choice on the part of both men and women are important, which of these choices is more important? Clearly, mate choice on the part of women because they are the ones who give birth and because women have a much more limited child bearing capability than men. When you have an excess of women, two major sources of the suppression of women’s sexuality are largely eliminated. With an excess of women around, most men are not motivated to restrict women’s sexuality. To complement this, whereas women normally suppress each other’s sexuality to negotiate on better terms with men, if there are not many men out there, then they have to be loser with their sexuality to compete with other women for access to men. So, the situation in Northern Europe afforded higher sexual freedom to women compared to most other places, and women naturally being more circumspect with their choices, even if their choices are limited, will be sexually selecting men also, in the form of cheating on their partner in some cases, if necessary. This scenario over many generations would tend to make Northern Europeans diverge more from other human populations on several counts. Hair color diversity is one outcome. Eye color diversity is likely another outcome. And, you can be sure that there are many other such outcomes, not limited to physical appearance.
So, sexual selection still works in the scenarios that I give you, namely less attractive women being loser with their sexuality to get impregnated by men who would be willing to have sex with them but not take them as wives, or women offering their services as prostitutes or servants to feed their illegitimate children since the advantage is with the more attractive women. You seem to argue that sexual selection must require some drastic scenario, but given that sexual selection still occurs in Asian countries where most marriages being arranged, the scenarios I gave you afford much stronger sexual selection.
It is absurd to believe that gracilization in Northern European men is an adaptation to covering large distances on ground, something facilitated by less body weight. I have been talking about fine facial features. If you deposit less bone mass in the face how much weight do you save? And why are Northern Europeans then so tall and with more bone mass and muscularity than most populations?
The other issue you have brought up is “caring and sharing” looks in women or something along the lines of infantile looks (e.g., lighter skin, lighter hair) that supposedly bring out the nurturing element in men and facilitate their acting as better providers to their wife. In many species, the males often kill babies of other males. Humans males are a little better, but they generally don’t give a damn about babies not fathered by them. Human males are typically sexually interested in women who are not fathered by them or their close relatives. So why should one expect more infantile features in distantly-related women to win over men and bring out the nurturing element in them? In other words, selection for blonder hair or lighter skin doesn’t have to be because these are more infantile.
In many cases, the shifts, if caused by sexual selection, have simple explanations. If darkness-lightness is the issue, and you are going to deviate from very dark hair as the norm, then there is only one way to go: lighter hair. No need to invoke selection for infantile looks. Similarly, if nose thickness is the issue, there are two potential shifts: broader or narrower noses. If no natural selection pressures are affecting nose thickness, and if the ancestral species had broader noses, and if some individuals can be found who are more reminiscent of the ancestral species, then where will sexual selection be leading nose thickness to? I think you can answer this. Why does your thinking have to be so muddled?
Baldie: More energy expenditure will tend to create more hunger indeed, but you forgot to consider the state of tuning of physiological control that balances energy intake against energy expenditure, some elements of which start getting detuned as early as one’s early twenties. Now what will this detuning comprise of? More instances where energy intake exceeds energy expenditure rather than the other way around, and here, those with faster metabolisms are less likely to pack on excess pounds as far as aging of the energy regulatory system goes. So no need to bring in conscientiousness here.
The typical anorexic woman is not trying to be more conscientious with respect to eating; she has come to believe that attaining perfection in one field will make her problems go away and she is convinced that perfection lies in extreme thinness. There are other anorexics where body image is not an issue and neither is conscientiousness.
The most natural way to eat is to do so in accordance with desire, and if not restricted by availability of food, most people eat in this manner. So conscientiousness or prudence in dietary matters is not of great relevance in understanding the majority of variation behind individual differences in body fat levels.
I am not trying to empathize with obese individuals. Those weight watchers programs are generally not long-term effective notwithstanding some spectacular success stories. There is a very simple and guaranteed method of loosing excess body fat: stop eating till you reach the desired weight. However, the holy grail of weight loss is how to sustain a healthy body mass. This is where people fail. It is not difficult to motivate people to lose excess body fat, but much more difficult to use psychological manipulation to keep off the pounds in the long run, simply because will power/conscientiousness is hardly the culprit in the first place.
Erik, I'd like to see you address skin color sometime. I've yet to find much coherent data on it at all.
This site has a link to a Peter Frost paper on the mortality north European steppe tundra hunters suffered 20,000 years ago, it also seems to accept P. Frost's theory that sexual selection of women took place there as can be observed in the population of this area today, though the effects of sexual selection of women are most strikingly exemplified further north in Scandinavia which was under a kilometer of ice at that time of course.
How could sexual selection of women happen if it was as viable for women to support a family as to have a man supporting woman and children by hunting: it couldn't. Never mind this particular scenario, for any sexual selection of women many women must not successfully reproduce viable children, who go on to have ther own offspring and so on.
This hunting enviroment required covering vast distances on foot in minus 15 degrees and was a man killer, the death of so many men produced a unique situation; women needed to be special to get a mate. (incidently I now incline towards beliving that gracilization in N. European men is an adaptation to covering these huge distances on foot, less bodyweight to be moved less stress on the ankle for a broken ankle would be deadly ect.)
Yes maybe some men were successfuly impregnating lone or cheating women and some of these women who got by as you suggest -- by providing services-- but they were outbred by the "married" women who had a capable provider husband; being supported by a dedicated provider these married women's children died less often. Being in demand the men might decide to abandon their dependants which would be disastrous for them AS IN NO OTHER ENVIROMENT. The solution would be that the women with the most "caring and sharing inducing" looks would tend to survive. Therefor some characteristics of N. European women have an evolutionary rationale --"are there"-- to induce men to feel good about being a faithful provider to their wife as opposed to abandoning them. White skin is an obvious contender for such a characteristic. The totaly helpless human baby has light skin (as well as a special smell) which induces provisioning and care. Light skin can be said to be child like , what terminology to use I am not sure now, "caring and sharing inducing" characteristics will have to do. I defer to superior knowledge in the matter of face shape.
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