Does beauty play a role in evolution?

Q:Does beauty play a role in evolution?

When choosing a wife, almost all men prefer beautiful women, and the standards of beauty seem to be universal across races and cultures. So I assume the preference to beautiful women is in our gene. How did we get to this?


A:What an excellent question. Something I have wondered about for many years. The short answer to your question is YES.

Before going further we need to consider what is meant by "beauty". This is always a bit awkward when it comes to modern human beings. But it is this definition that is what you are asking. As you noted, there does seem to be a universal sense of beauty. Ultimately beauty seems to be defined by symmetry.

A useful overview of the issues of female beauty can be found at
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f01/web1/ekanayake.html
This also discusses a little about the waist to hip ratio issue.


But how did we get to this?

There are a couple of theories. One main principle is that a when selecting a mate especially within in human populations one key feature is the ability to nuture and protect the young. The classic example is the waist to hip ratio of a woman probably says something about her ability to carry off-spring.

But with regard to more subtle issues, particularly of facial features, the connection is less clear. One aspect of facial beauty (also of body beauty overall) is symmetry. There is some evidence to suggest that symmetry of body indicates the level of health of the individual. One major health factor for many animals is what the parasite load of an individual is.

A key piece of research related to this can be found by Anders Pape
Møller

"There is considerable evidence for secondary sexual characters in a wide variety of organisms reliably reflecting levels of parasite infections (Møller 1990), and studies of a diverse array of plants and animals show that parasites render their hosts more asymmetric and hence less attractive than unparasitized individuals (Møller 1996). This is also the case in humans: Men throughout the cultures of the
world value female beauty higher than any other attribute, but the importance of beauty is the highest in cultures with serious impact of parasites such as malaria, schistosomiasis and similarly virulent parasites (Gangestad and Buss 1993). "

the orginal source is at
http://www.mindship.org/moller.htm


With regard to the specifics of facial beauty of females ( and possibly males too ) there is an excellent list of scientific papers located at:
http://digilander.libero.it/linguaggiodelcorpo/beauty/

Aspects of facial bone structure also may allow for subconcious measurement of symmetry of a person and be able to get a sense of how healthy they are. There was a series on the BBC about the human face that may provide even more insight and this can be found at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/humanface/index.shtml

However all is not lost. Here is an easy to read article from NewScientist magazine that suggests that being ugly at may be a useful reproductive strategy
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991239

Also from newscientist there is some evidence that beauty wins out over youth in the partner selection game of life
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999940


But in conclusion it is likely that male(or female) perception of female beauty is a result of evolution to suggest something about the overall health of person. Beauty is selected for because it gives the greatest chance of healthy off-spring in the most efficient way.


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Q: The answer and comments are very helpful. But they haven't completlely quieted my inquiring mind yet.

I don't how much I should believe the parasite theory. It doesn't sound very convincing.

My biggest question is for woman's facial beauty. It is easier to accept men's preference to women's figure beauty, such as the right waist/hip ratio, because it is biology relevant. But in our time, facial beauty has nothing to do with a woman's ability to bear healthy children.

People mention facial symmetry, but symmetry and beauty are two different things; it may be true that most beautiful faces are symmetric, but only certain symmetric faces are beautiful. It is not hard to find perfectly symmetric but unattractive faces. I think symmetry is just a (overly) simplification of beauty that scientists
make, so they can measure and quantify.

Is it possible that our preference of woman's facial beauty (assuming it is in our gene) is just a fossil feature that was formed during a certain period of evolution but has no biological relavance of the present-day human?



A: Female facial beauty is a very interesting issue.

You are correct, attractivness(or beauty) is not simply dependent on symmetry. There have been various studies that look at skin complexion also. I recall a study once that indicated a preference for certain facial types that females choose which their view of attractive men changes depending on where they are in their menstrual cycle.

You also state that " But in our time, facial beauty has nothing to do with a woman's ability to bear healthy children." . It seems that hormone levels have an influence on how subcutaneous fat is distributed in the face.

This idea is discussed in an article by Natalie Angier at
http://fig.cox.miami.edu/~bhoward/bil150/Man_woman.html
Discusses a number of studies in relation to faces including babyfaceness here is a little quote from the article " By the Perrett scenario, social skills like cooperativeness, honesty and gentleness proved generically desirable in the early stages of human evolution. Because such nurturing traits are associated with femaleness and juvenileness, the appeal of the feminine, youthful look became
pansexual, and helped to counter such standard engines of sexual dimorphism as competition between males."

Some typical features are the cheek bones, though it turns out not to be neccessarily bone but rather the distribution of subcutaneuous fat.

Your last comment about 'a fossil feature during a period of evolution' is the key issue. It is possible that these features evolved at a time before language/speech had evolved and provided a means of communicating their health status.

An interesting article by Jürgen Schmidhuber analysed facial beauty using fractal geometry. The abstract states that " They yield a short algorithmic description of all facial characteristics, many of which are compactly encodable with the help of simple feature detectors similar to those observed in mammalian brains. This suggests that a face's beauty correlates with simplicity relative to the subjective
observer's way of encoding it."
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/locoface/newlocoface.html

So there could well be a gene (or more likely several) in our brain
that sets up a recognition of beauty/attractivness.

There is also a site that does a geometrical analysis of the face at
http://www.beautyanalysis.com/index2_mba.htm
That is worth investigating.




I think that you would find these books useful in your investigation of this topic. Summaries and reviews are available from the links provided:

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
by Naomi Wolf
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0385423977/
Argues that standards of beauty are thrust upon society through the media.

Survival of the Prettiest : The Science of Beauty
by Nancy L. Etcoff
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0385478542/
"Survival of the Prettiest argues persuasively that looking good has survival value, and that sensitivity to beauty is a biological adaptation governed by brain circuits shaped by natural selection."


I am currently unable to escape the notion that standards of beauty change over time, which might indicate that, in addition to any evolutionary or genetic basis for beauty, we are conditioned to find certain people beautiful. Also, some people differ in who they deem beautiful, though norms can be documented.

For example, compare voluptuous film stars and "pin-ups" from the first half of the 20th century, to "Twiggy" or Goldie Hawn in the 1960's, to today's Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. The further one travels back in time, the more variety in the standard of beauty one will discover.

Bombshells: Jayne Mansfield
http://www.bombshells.com/jayne/gallery/color/index.shtml

Swingin' Chicks: Twiggy
http://www.swinginchicks.com/twiggy.htm

Sports Illustrated: Heidi Klum
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/2002/swimsuit/gallery/heidi/6.html


Women also prefer handsome men, though this has been downplayed in mainstream culture. My own theory suggests that men don't want to be seen as ornamental and have to measure up to a woman's standards, so he compensates for his looks with money, job, etc.

Women today strive for the "hanger" look that fashion models possess.Men and women alike don't immediately recognize or understand the reason behind the very slim look (especially unnaturally slim or "boyish" hips on a female) comes from the fashion industry itself where women are paid to be walking hangers. Clothing must drape a
certain way, and clothing is the number one priority. Therefore the clothing takes precedence and a designer won't want a woman's natural features such as breasts, hips, etc. "marring" the line a dress would have when on a hanger.

In the survival of the fittest, biology would dictate that men seek women without very slim hips because of their inability to properly carry children. But the media today has heavily influenced society in what it believe is the "right" and "good" way to look. Thus Marilyn Monroe is being called "fat" today (a misnomer when you are comparing a "human female" with a "female hanger")and Courteney Cox (who is
gaunt, drawn and feeble looking) is seen as the embodiment of health and good fortune.

The only other theory I hold is that slim women are seen as weaker by males and thus easier to dominate. Larger, more robust women are seen as "masculine" and therefore a challenge to the fragile male ego. Items such as high heels and corsets were/are also used to keep women subdued. A woman can not outrun an attacker in high heels and heels as well as corsets present harm to the bones, back, legs, and internal
organs.

Beauty still is in the eye of the beholder. I personally don't believe "beauty" is evolutionary but the concept of beauty as maintained and fed by the massive media surely is. If we were looking at things from a survival standpoint, beauty doesn't save your life in and of itself, but a "beautiful" woman would be more protected, such as a fine item or an "ivory box" (to quote from E.M. Forster) would be protected. Thus woman is seen as thing, as ornament, while man continues to be
seen only as instrument.

Women's desires for a Brad Pitt over a Michael Douglas are often ignored, and this we have media rife with images of morbidly obese, old, balding, "ugly" men often paired with slim, young, "beautiful" women.

The question is, why has evolution/men continued to ignore women's desires? And why aren't more attractive men seen from a biological standpoint as having stronger potential children and virility?


Taken from here.