Originally posted by: Dumac
Originally posted by: Gigantopithecus
Originally posted by: DangerAardvark
Originally posted by: Gigantopithecus
Originally posted by: GodlessAstronomer
Originally posted by: z1ggy
Have we even been alive to evolve that much? Doesn't something like evolution take like hundreds of thousands of years to actually have happen?
Human beings have been around for about 200,000 years.
O RLY? According to what evidence?
He's probably talking about the oldest Homo Sapien fossils.
...which are not 200,000 years old.
Anatomically modern humans first appear in the fossil record in Africa about 195,000 years ago, and studies of molecular biology give evidence that the approximate time of divergence from the common ancestor of all modern human populations was 200,000 years ago.
Since when is wikipedia an authority? That's a gross oversimplification, just like the 'science' described in the OP. I guess you can't expect much when they ask a model to define heritability, lol.
My point in questioning the 200 kya date for the beginning of the species is simple: you can't do it. It's not how evolution works, and just because a noted paleoanthropologist comes up with a character suite (chin, arched occipital bone, high parietal vault, high frontal, etc.) that starts showing up around 200 kya, that's not when modernity begins. Hell there are plenty of people alive today that don't have many of the characters we'd consider modern...I saw a dude with browridges out of the Pleistocene on the bus this afternoon.
Similarly, how do you quantify 'attractiveness?' It's a completely subjective measure, there are no genes that produce 'total hottie,' 'fugly troll,' or 'meh' physical appearance phenotypes. It's not just subjective between cultures, it's subjective within cultures. To say "physical attractiveness is a highly heritable trait" is so absurd it's laughable. The only objective indirect measure that could possibly relate to attractiveness is symmetry, but that has more to do with health during development & is only an indirect proxy of disease resistance & normal metabolism - not exactly something the average person is going to recognize as attractive. When was the last time you said, "Wow, your face is so symmetrical, I want you now!"
No wonder these types of studies are published in psychology journals & not genetics journals. The peer reviewers probably learned all they know about genetics in high school. If you can't quantify it, you can't study its heritability, period. The same logical fallacy produces books like The Bell Curve (also written by psychologists who illustrate that a little knowledge can be dangerous).
Further, ?For women, looks are much less important in a man than his ability to look after her when she is pregnant and nursing, periods when women are vulnerable to predators. Historically this has meant rich men tend to have more wives and many children. So the pressure is on men to be successful.?
I don't know where to even start with this breathtaking bit of nonsense. Studies of living hunter-gatherers have shown time & again that humans 1. are not subject to intense risk of predation 2. are not especially subject to predation risk when pregnant (women get eaten less than men because they don't spend as much time by themselves as men). And what is a 'rich' man? You can't even be rich until you live in an agricultural society, and those are only 12,000 years old, so to extrapolate this into the distant past is silly.
I'm not saying that men & women look for the same things in their partners, that's obviously not the case. But this is the worst sort of fast-food junk science that gets touted in less scrupulous media outlets & gives laypeople wrong ideas about what science is, how it works, & what it can do for society. Science doesn't justify crass stereotypes of hot women being with ugly but rich men.