NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 2, 2009
Joke science
One of the great attractions of popular Darwinism, as a financial investment, is its appeal to what we in the media refer to, in our jaded way, as the "tabloid audience." That is to say people who, through no fault of their own (lack of education, native dullness, mental injury, etc.) are extremely credulous. You can sell stuff to them that you just couldn't sell to -- you know, "people like us."From another point of view, it may be a misfortune that our schools and media have been working, for decades now, on expanding this "tabloid audience." But that has been a subject for many other days. Today we're only looking at the business angle. The incredible tabloid Darwinian story of this last week was about the evolution of beautiful women. "Scientists," led by Markus Jokela at the University of Helsinki (flag that name), have now "proved" that, for reasons of "sexual selection," women are becoming ever more beautiful, while men remain as ugly as we were in the caves. Stands to reason, don't it? Men prefer to impregnate beautiful women. The daughter of a beautiful woman is more likely to be another beautiful woman. Nature thus "selects" for beauty in women. Indeed: as Jokela et al. report with the straight face, beautiful women have 16 per cent more offspring than non-beautiful women, and (please don't laugh) they yield a higher proportion of daughters to sons. Roll that evolutionary clock forward, and my tabloid readers will see that within a few short millennia, all the women will be beautiful, even if the men are still fairly repulsive. Before we go a column inch farther, let me explain why this study is rubbish. It is based on so-called "objective criteria." That is, a bunch of people look at a bunch of pictures, and tell the labcoats which ones they like. The labcoats, for their part, then decide which criteria are meaningful, thus restoring the "subjective" dimension. Then they run the numbers until they like the result, which might equally well be presented as "the evolution of human preferences in photographs." (The fact that girls are prettier than boys explains the "more daughters" illusion.) Now, I do not doubt for a moment that some women are more beautiful than others. I cannot doubt it, since my own mind has been making just such esthetic distinctions for a very long time. So, apparently, have been the minds of all the men I know, and all the women, too. Indeed: the women seem to be more subtle and unsparing observers, of beauty or its absence in both sexes. So much so, that even the labcoats have noticed. What the labcoats have not noticed, however, is that while certain perceptions of symmetry, textural smoothness, and the like, remain constant over the centuries, there are "social" perceptions that swing with fashion. This is true even of so raw a dimensional issue as the ratio of body mass to height. For as any art historian can confirm, this ratio varies not only from one artist to another, but from one generation to another, and one nation to another. Fashions change. It follows that we will find, in any statistical segment of the population, a large crude bias in favour of the fashions of the moment. My reader may test this by looking at pin-ups from the 1980s, 1960s, 1940s, etc. The babes of today will seem much more attractive, over a period of time in which evolutionary developments have been nugatory. Unless, of course, my reader is one of those esthetically sophisticated types, whose perception of beauty is, to a much greater degree than in the general population, able to free itself from the bigotries of fashion. What we have is a new faculty of what I call "Darwinoid imposture," based on an entirely fatuous proposition: that the fashionable ideas of the moment are somehow objective, and universal to human kind. Note that the labcoats cannot statistically sample that vast majority of the human population who are already dead. Beauty is and isn't in the eye of the beholder. A more interesting, and in the grander sense "philosophical" inquiry, than any conducted by Jokela and friends, might be made into the criteria themselves. What are, and what are not, constants through human history? To what degree is feminine beauty "in the eye of the beholder"? To what degree is it conversely something beyond the control of any human mind? Note that such a study could have nothing to do with Darwinism, and would start from what we know, rather than from what we theorize. But there are deep questions here: questions which conventional, contemporary, statistical and empirical scientific method is unequipped to answer. Consider, for instance, this unquantifiable yet true assertion: that in the eyes of Love, what at first seemed plain or even ugly, becomes beautiful. Is this because this beauty was "invented"? Or is it because there was real beauty there, that we were at first too stupid to discern? David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top