Meta Attractiveness
In the dating and mating aspect of life, most people put a great deal of weight on a person’s physical attractiveness. It is my contention that what people should do instead is consider a person’s meta-attractiveness. The point of being physically attractive is largely to lure mates with whom to have children and thus propagate your genes. But humankind has now evolved to such a rarefied level of intelligence that we have realized that this is the point of physical attractiveness, and we can now think one step ahead. If your desire is to propagate your genes, then wouldn’t you be even more successful in the evolutionary game if you were to propagate your children’s genes? Ha!
Here is how it works. Let’s say you’re a man and you find physically attractive women sexually arousing. But you have rarefied intelligence, so you are aware that your genes have programmed you to find physically attractive women sexually arousing so that you will propagate your genes.
Each woman is a composite of about 30 faces. By Pierre Tourigny. Creative Commons license.
You think a step ahead and realize that your genes would be even better off if you had physically attractive children, so you determine to mate not with the most physically attractive woman, but the woman with whom you would have the most physically attractive children.
For example, let’s say you have a big nose and you know that medium-sized noses are the most attractive. You should choose to make with a woman who has a small nose in order to have children who will have medium-sized noses. If you just blindly go for the more attractive medium-sized-nose woman, you will end up with children who have less attractive medium-large noses, which will reduce their mating prospects.
The real trick is to find a mate with whom you are equally likely to have highly attractive children of either sex. Of course those with even more rarefied intelligence will select mates with an eye toward children with meta- rather than physical attractiveness…
But don’t you think natural selection would have already programmed us to do that? what i mean is that a gene that causes us to desire the most ‘attractive’ woman with whom we do not have the most attractive offspring would not be as prolific as a gene that causes us to find attractive the woman with whom we could have the most physically attractive children? The initial scenario you’ve described seems to be a case of poor natural selection, where big-nosed men find medium-nosed women attractive. Genes that cause such behavioral tendencies would not multiply well assuming that medium-large noses (in the offspring) are not all that desirable.
And isn’t there evidence that what people find attractive IS dependent on the person’s own physical characteristics? That very thin people are attracted to women with shapely curves (Tyler, for example).
In any case, i wonder if the random lottery of meiosis overwhelms any such selection… after all, any gene from any parent only has a 50% chance of getting passed on.