What evolutionary reasons would make a beautiful face more important than a strong body ?

Graaarg999 · 2022-03-04T01:41:56+00:00

Simmetry denotates a healty endocryne system, so beautiful faces are correlated with genetic fitness

MicrospathodonChrys · 2022-03-04T02:39:29+00:00

It isn’t so much that evolution shapes our preferences, but that our preferences shape evolution. Sexual selection is a form of natural selection by which traits deemed attractive by the opposite sex increase the odds of successful mating, which in turn passes those attractive traits to subsequent generations. Think about brightly colored birds…the entire reason bright plumage is selected for in males is because females like it. It doesn’t confer an inherent survival advantage, just helps to attract a mate. Women like attractive faces for all sorts of reasons, often shaped by societal norms…our preferences aren’t beholden entirely to our “lizard brains.” I’m not saying that ancient signals of fitness are 100% irrelevant. Just that sexual selection is a powerful force for evolutionary change, and expecting women to prefer what their ancestors preferred because of evolution is sort of a fundamental misunderstanding of how natural selection works.

Source: i am a biologist

CG8514 · 2022-03-04T01:59:40+00:00

Good looks have nothing to do with fertility or anything like that. People just like aesthetically pleasing things, it’s that simple.

Agreeable-Fruit-5112 · 2022-03-04T02:14:45+00:00

Less risk of genetic defects and disease. If you have inborn metabolic disorders or genetic defects, it is usually apparent in facial deformities. So even if you are he-man, nobody wants your ugly mutant flipper babies.

beautysleepsodom · 2022-03-04T07:01:31+00:00

That's not how evolution or sexual dimorphism work. It's entirely possible for mate selection to result in traits not advantageous to the species.

Lots of female birds like brightly colored male birds. Males become brighter and brighter. Brightly colored birds are easier for predators to spot.

SuspiciousRule · 2022-03-04T01:35:55+00:00

What does being beauty full have to do with a women being fertile. Humans just like beautiful symmetrical things.

LalaTheSecond · 2022-03-04T01:31:43+00:00

A woman’s fertility is expressed through her body and men acknowledge and are attracted to that, there are countless butter faced women with hot bodies who are just as if not more attractive than beautiful women but we don’t see the reverse as much

Whoa is that true?!

relish5k · 2022-03-04T04:47:33+00:00

Is the question here "why does beauty exist in the world?"

There's like, a thousand years of philosophy devoted to aesthetics. start with Plato

painfurouartacc · 2022-03-04T07:09:59+00:00

No matter how '' strong'' a man is, he will never be able to beat up a bear or a lion, but a beautiful face is endearing and significies good genetics, a human' s face might even signify what kind of personality he/she would have. and i wouldn't say most men are fine with butterface, ofc they would take the thin girl with ugly face over fat girl with beautiful face, but most men still prefer faces where they look under 25 and soft/feminine, and with no hair perfect smooth skin etc. for example. Hence why they whine about 18-22 or neotenous being the ideal. Think about it, why are women pressured to use makeup while if men does anything other than shaving the beard or getting a haircut, it's said to be '' gay''?

boomawangg · 2022-03-04T01:31:26+00:00

[permanently deleted]

NockerJoe · 2022-03-04T02:03:12+00:00

Keep in mind that pre hominid human ancestors were like 4 feet tall and up until relativley recently seeing someone at six feet was vanishingly rare.

Also, a lot of that is bullshit. Some women here have posted pictures of "Dad Bods" where it was a professional body builder in their off season. Likewise their idea of what an ideal man looks like is usually still fairly fit and often has a decent amount of muscle. They just think 5% body fat 180 pounds at 5'10 is what constitutes a muscular guy and nothing else counts, same as we had like 2 weeks of arguments where a lot of women thought a 6'4 designer in NYC with designer stubble was average and didn't get how he could be a fuckboy.

carcasstribunal · 2022-03-04T01:34:57+00:00

Fisher effect ”Sexy son”

There are several arguments and we will never know which one is right

LittyKitsune · 2022-03-04T01:56:26+00:00

Genetic drift is an ongoing process that is literally happening as we speak. Beauty standards did not magically freeze in the Stone Ages.

boomawangg · 2022-03-04T01:58:25+00:00

When you're so attractive that you outbreed the ones who are not so.

DonBullDor · 2022-03-04T03:46:02+00:00

You can always make a strong body, but not a beautiful face

errrright · 2022-03-04T04:52:01+00:00

It’s true that our male nomadic ancestors were more muscular and physically resilient. But what do you think their female counterparts looked like? They certainly didn’t have hourglass figures. Humans of that time were burly, harry, and rough looking. Their figures resembled those of chimpanzees.

The large, defined muscular look that we see in bodybuilders and athletes today was practically nonexistent until the 1800s and didn’t popularize until the 1970s. The idea that this was always the standard for men is false. When humans topped the food chain with our intelligence and ability to build and use tools, physical strength became less relevant in terms of survival.

I suspect that facial attractiveness became a thing when we lived amongst other hominid species. We interbred with them, but we also fought with them. Facial features became one of the easiest ways for us to identify them as different than us. I think that’s also why people are so put off by the “uncanny valley”.

Blaphrodite · 2022-03-04T07:45:08+00:00

We evolved to shallow.

Many other more primal folks still prefer a strong beautiful body.

painfurouartacc · 2022-03-04T14:18:38+00:00

A woman's attractiveness is judged mainly on her body rather than her face which explains the hot butter-faced women whilst men's attractiveness is judged on the face.

The reason why men's faces are judged above all else is because facial bone structure shows minute genetic flaws than does the rest of the body, the amount of testosterone is expressed in the size of the facial bones(testosterone during puberty controls the growth of the manly traits in the face, mainly the wide jaws and the facial hair) and there's also the nutrition theory that posits a wider more forward jaw makes it easier to take in more nutrients with less energy, so better looking men get more nutrients too feed cells in the body, the body cells repair and multiply faster, more hormones produced, healthier bones and muscles and face, basically a positive feedback loop.

Symmetry is basically how far the difference between the right and left cheekbones size is, healthier bodies during development prevent sicknesses that inhibit bone growth, like colds, so people with better genes look more symmetrical, relatively speaking.

mistresswhat · 2022-03-04T19:08:55+00:00

There are evolutionary reasons -- beauty is often a product of genetic diversity -- but beauty standards are not as dictated by biology the way you'd assume. Both obesity and extreme thinness have been prized at different places and times, despite both causing fertility issues + other health problems.

As social animals we are all highly vulnerable to social influence, because that's something that makes the group gets along, which means we're more likely to work together to ensure the survival of the entire group. And that's the biological explanation for why beauty standards are largely cultural.

TilTheWarIsWon · 2022-03-04T01:37:03+00:00

My guess is it's less about surviving in the wild and more about being closer to God's image and god's beauty which means more good fortune in life

Michel__Ney · 2022-03-04T01:34:11+00:00

Most women don't have a very good grasp of what they want because their biological desires are at odds with 50 years of ideological and cultural programming.

A guy with an average face and good strength, resilience, self reliance, ability to provide, etc will do great with the overwhelming majority of non political women.

ffandyy · 2022-03-04T08:02:22+00:00

We don’t live in a society where evolution dictates our choices so this question is irrelevant

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beyondthegong · 2022-03-04T02:03:16+00:00

https://youtu.be/KUbVx1xmt4I

this explains it pretty good

poppy_blu · 2022-03-04T02:17:09+00:00

IIRC a “beautiful” face is simply one that denotes health and strong genes. For example a strong chin suggests high T, clear skin suggests good overall health, big eyes suggest high estrogen, etc. or the features highlight dimorphism — high cheekbones and eyebrows are considered feminine because men don’t have them etc.

So the face was probably equally important as the body in displaying overall health and fitness.

xcheshirecatxx · 2022-03-04T04:41:18+00:00

Good genes

Strenght can be trained for

downvotesanimals · 2022-03-04T05:23:32+00:00

Read up on sexual selection.

CocoBabeNYC · 2022-03-04T05:55:05+00:00

I don't believe that has been the case from what I see out there.

Siukslinis_acc · 2022-03-04T06:57:14+00:00

The face is not covered most of the time (not counting the pandemic times where we need to put on masks). While the body is covered 98% of the time in public. So you can see the face, but can't see the musculature.
Nowadays there is less ways that men can show off their body strength. As there are less physical labor jobs that one would need to use their body strength than it was 100-200 years ago.
It could be that a nice face was still important. The thing is that one who didn't have a strong, sturdy, resistant, fast body wouldn't have survived till procreation.
Nowadays the machines do the most heavy lifting, so thatmeans there is less need for human to have physical strength. So that trait is no longer that important.

Specialist_Orange946 · 2022-03-04T07:17:46+00:00

There’s an emerging thread of research saying that some beauty evolved due to sexual preferences alone, in a way that’s completely unrelated to fitness.

Darwin originally conceived this idea of sexual selection (of beauty), after he published his theory of evolution and felt that survival fitness alone couldn’t explain all of the beauty in the world. However Darwin’s followers didn’t like this departure from fitness, and spent the next century trying to use fitness to explain everything.

In the past few decades, researchers are coming around again to this idea of beauty for its own sake.

The Evolution of Beauty by Richard Prum is a great read on this topic!

Siukslinis_acc · 2022-03-04T07:54:57+00:00

A woman’s fertility is expressed through her body

Nah, wide hips just mean it's easier and less deadlyer to birth babies. And big breasts could mean that there would be enought milk for the baby.

TEREKIKI · 2022-03-04T09:32:59+00:00

Mating

Deidara-katsu · 2022-03-04T13:38:09+00:00

Attraction is not symmetrical, but some ppl think it is

CosmicBioHazard · 2022-03-04T21:03:16+00:00

I have to wonder if there are any facial features that are widely considered attractive today, simply because in the distant past there was, for instance, a man who produced an insane number of heirs with all kinds of women, who also happened to have a random fetish that ended up getting passed down.

neetykeeno · 2022-03-04T23:05:41+00:00

For most of our evolution we have lived in smaller populations and experienced considerably more inbreeding than we currently do. And we didn't have modern medicine that has so clearly defined most of the major inherited or spontaneous gene defects so they can be diagnosed and everyone know what they are dealing with. We're wired up to by preference choose the cousin who is least inbred and least likely to have something like Down Syndrome. It isn't particularly surprising that our sensitivity to how other people's faces look is exquisite. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2189683-ai-can-identify-rare-genetic-disorders-by-the-shape-of-someones-face/

Brilliant-Hornet1916 · 2022-03-05T02:05:50+00:00

The importance of face is a weird one.

Just speaking from a male perspective, there are some theories regarding why certain facial features are attractive/unattractive, mainly relating to health, dimorphism and fighting success.

Recessed jaws can be associated with poor breathing, narrow palate with crowded teeth so poor bite, misaligned jaw associated with a poor bite.

Prominent cheekbones, strong brow ridge, deep set eyes suggest eyes are more protected in a fight. Stronger angular jaw lines are a signal of high test/androgens during development.

Loveenglishpeople · 2022-03-05T15:33:13+00:00

Contrary to your belief, the stats shows thzt men are more likely to choose a pretty face over a good body for LTR

Khabeni412 · 2022-03-06T00:30:23+00:00

Symmetry, in the face especially, is an indication of good health and thus good genetic fitness. Women do care about a muscular body too even if they say they don't. That and high social status and money. These too are indirectly related to genetic fitness. For example in some birds, males build elaborate nesting areas to "show off" their ability to protect the female and thus her offspring. Money, status and good musculature are the human equivalent of the male bird's elaborate nest. Good looking men are more likely to have more success (Money, status) thus ability to protect and support potential offspring.

Siukslinis_acc · 2022-03-04T06:56:47+00:00

The face is not covered most of the time (not counting the pandemic times where we need to put on masks). While the body is covered 98% of the time in public. So you can see the face, but can't see the musculature.
Nowadays there is less ways that men can show off their body strength. As there are less physical labor jobs that one would need to use their body strength than it was 100-200 years ago.
It could be that a nice face was still important. The thing is that one who didn't have a strong, sturdy, resistant, fast body wouldn't have survived till procreation.
Nowadays the machines do the most heavy lifting, so thatmeans there is less need for human to have physical strength. So that trait is no longer that important.

Siukslinis_acc · 2022-03-04T06:56:53+00:00

The face is not covered most of the time (not counting the pandemic times where we need to put on masks). While the body is covered 98% of the time in public. So you can see the face, but can't see the musculature.
Nowadays there is less ways that men can show off their body strength. As there are less physical labor jobs that one would need to use their body strength than it was 100-200 years ago.
It could be that a nice face was still important. The thing is that one who didn't have a strong, sturdy, resistant, fast body wouldn't have survived till procreation.
Nowadays the machines do the most heavy lifting, so thatmeans there is less need for human to have physical strength. So that trait is no longer that important.

Title	What evolutionary reasons would make a beautiful face more important than a strong body ?
Author	According_Ladder_411
Upvotes	19
Comments	146
Date	March 4, 2022 1:08 AM UTC (4 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/t66scb/what_evolutionary_reasons_would_make_a_beautiful/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/what-evolutionary-reasons-would-make-a-beautiful.1104275 https://theredarchive.com/post/1104275

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