beauty

[Luke Weiger]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Davies" <dsquared at al-islam.com>
To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2002 4:26 AM
Subject: Re:beauty


> Don't be silly. I'm absolutely agog to hear what kind of Just So Story you
> and the rest of the Dawkinsite gang are going to tell to explain how, to
> take a random example, standards of beauty take such radically
> different approaches to the question of underarm hair on adult women.

Or breast size.  The attractiveness of a number of physical traits clearly
varies from culture to culture.  It now also seems clear, in light of a fair
amount of research, that there are also many physical traits judged by
standards bridging all known cultural divides.  The latter set seems to have
more predictive power: one may show pictures of Japanese women to American
men who will rank their attractiveness in an order mirroring that of
Japanese men.

-- Luke

> And so on, and so on.
>
> People think that taking this sort of reductionist approach to complicated
> social questions makes them look all cool and clever and "hard sciencey".
> In actual fact, it just makes you look like you buy a lot of pop science
> books at airports.
>
> dd
>
>
> Get Your Free Email at http://www.al-islam.com