A while back I wrote an article “why women love ugly men” in which I made the argument that because human faces varied so much, that there had to be a strong impulse to pick faces that are not “normal”. Which could not happen if there were a single concept of beauty and we all sought mates who fitted this stereotype. Because if we did seek mates who were “beautiful”, then very quickly any genetics which caused people to diverge from this standard would be removed from human race.
Logically, humans must select features that are distinctly different from the idealised standard of “beauty” – otherwise diversity of human features would disappear.
So, I was already aware that humans selected for “ugly” (or at least – counter intuitively – we actively select against some idealised form of beauty) but I didn’t understand why.
Then, watching a video on bees it suddenly occurred to me why women love ugly men:
“As long as the queen is mated with drones that are not closely related to her … otherwise spotty brood and diploid drones”.
Obviously closely related queen and drones is a big problem for bees (they become infertile), however closely related humans also causes problems as offspring of closely related parents have a much higher chance of receiving two defective genes from both parents.
How does mother nature tell us not to fall in love with closely related kin? “instinct” tells us that people who look like us tend to be closely related. So, by avoiding people who are as good looking as we all are … we end up with partners who will tend to be only distantly related.
This problem of too much inter-breeding is not such a big problem for loan animals who by their nature have to actively seek a mate, but it is a huge problem for human societies, particularly tribal ones, where “mates” tend to come from within a small social grouping leading to a lot of genetic interbreeding.
So, paradoxically, nature seems to have found a way around this problem of “inbreeding”: by encouraging us to like “ugly” – or at least variations from some idealised concept of beauty. This, to some extent explains why humans have such diverse features, voice, etc.
But of course, we are not the only animals to see such diversity. Seagulls have distinctive calls otherwise chicks would not be able to recognise their own offspring, likewise humans have distinctive voices so that we are all distinct enough to see as individuals. So, in part the reason must also be the advantage of being able to recognise individuals within a large group.
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