Survival of the Prettiest
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Men value looks more than women do in virtually every culture where the question has been asked. In the 1950s biologists Clelland Ford and Frank Beach found that the physical attractiveness of women received more “explicit consideration” than the physical attractiveness of men in almost two hundred tribal cultures. In his 1990 study David Buss found that men valued physical attractiveness and good looks in a partner more than women did in thirty-four of the thirty-seven cultures he studied."--Survival of the Prettiest (1999) by Nancy Etcoff "In a recent study, scientist Astrid Jutte found that men reacted to a woman's copulins in much the same fashion. Although they did not rate the smells as very pleasant, they gave higher attractiveness ratings to photographs of women and "--Survival of the Prettiest (1999) by Nancy Etcoff "Social scientists shunned beauty as trivial, undemocratic, and all in all not a proper subject for science. But by the late 1960s, Lindzey was chiding his colleagues for their “neglect of morphology [outward appearance]” and suggesting, “Perhaps now is the time to restore beauty and other morphological variables to the study of social phenomena.” Within the next three decades an explosion of research was to provide compelling evidence for a new view of human beauty. It suggested that the assumption that beauty is an arbitrary cultural convention may simply not be true."--Survival of the Prettiest (1999) by Nancy Etcoff |
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Survival of the Prettiest: the Science of Beauty (1999) is a book by Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist and researcher at Harvard University.
In the book she discusses the pursuit of beauty and how it may not be a cultural construct but instead a concept of human nature.
Blurb 1
Beauty is not a myth. According to scientist and psychologist Nancy Etcoff, the pursuit of beauty is neither a cultural construction, an invention of Madison Avenue, nor a backlash against feminism. Survival of the Prettiest, the first in-depth scientific inquiry into the nature of human beauty, posits that beauty is an essential and ineradicable part of human nature, from what makes a face beautiful to the deepest questions about the human condition. Etcoff sheds light on every aspect of human beauty, including why we devour fashion magazines, check our waistlines, and gaze longingly at objects of desire. Informed by state-of-the-art theories of the human mind from cognitive science and evolutionary biology, Survival of the Prettiest tells us why gentlemen prefer blondes, why high heels have never gone out of style, why eyebrows are plucked and hair is coiffed. Etcoff also explains how sexual preference is guided by ancient rules that make us most attracted to those with whom we are most likely to reproduce. Research on why we find infant features irresistibly attractive, as well as controversial new work that suggests parents show more affection to attractive newborns, is part of a broad investigation that includes insights into how beauty influences our perceptions, attitudes, and behavior toward others.
Blurb 2:
A provocative and thoroughly researched inquiry into what we find beautiful and why, skewering the myth that the pursuit of beauty is a learned behavior.
In Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, argues that beauty is neither a cultural construction, an invention of the fashion industry, nor a backlash against feminism—it’s in our biology.
Beauty, she explains, is an essential and ineradicable part of human nature that is revered and ferociously pursued in nearly every civilization—and for good reason. Those features to which we are most attracted are often signals of fertility and fecundity. When seen in the context of a Darwinian struggle for survival, our sometimes extreme attempts to attain beauty—both to become beautiful ourselves and to acquire an attractive partner—suddenly become much more understandable. Moreover, if we understand how the desire for beauty is innate, then we can begin to work in our own interests, and not just the interests of our genetic tendencies.
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