[lbo-talk] why do beautiful women marry ugly men?

[andie nachgeborenen]

Your argument, if correct, would mean there can be no
selection for sex specific traits.  This is
implausible and indeed untrue.  Thus women typically
have bigger hips than men of comparable size, for
obvious reason; They tend to be shorter, one could go
on. The fact is that the way selection for "beauty" --
features or characteristics that are attractive in a
certain way (rather hard to even state, as centuries
of puzzlement about aesthetics has shown) to potential
sex partners would work is that organisms with
particular sex-determining sets of chromosomes and
other features would reproduce at higher rates than
organisms with those sets of chromosomes that lack
those features, and if the opposite sex (sorry about
being boringly binary, Doug) benefited from the genes
that were selected for the other sex, that would be
merely incidental. 

--- "Michael J. Smith" <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:


> On Thursday 03 August 2006 16:20, Doug Henwood
> wrote:
> > According to this news article, “Selection
> pressure means when  
> > parents have traits they can pass on that are
> better for boys than  
> > for girls, they are more likely to have boys. Such
> traits include  
> > large size, strength and aggression, which might
> help a man compete  
> > for mates. On the other hand, parents with
> heritable traits that are  
> > more advantageous to girls are more likely to have
> daughters.”
> 
> I'm baffled. How is this supposed to work,
> genetically or epigenetically? 
> Dad's little swimmers are each carrying their X or Y
> chromosome and 
> whatever beauty genes he may have contributed. Is
> the presence of the 
> latter supposed to affect the presence of the
> former? Or have Mom's 
> beauty genes somehow programmed Big Egg to turn away
> the boy-making 
> swimmers? 
> 
> -- 
> 
>   Michael J. Smith
>   mjs at smithbowen.net
> 
>   http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
> 
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> 

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