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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

Genetically, looks and brains shouldn't be linked at all and I do believe there is no serious (anti-)correlation here. There are, however some factors dependent on attractiveness that probably influence the personal development of a person to a great deal. For example, I think there is a huge ratio of assholes among beautiful people due to similar processes that inspired the German proverb "money corrupts the character". Along those same lines, good-looking people often don't have to work very hard - so they usually don't enter academic careers, leading to a disproportionate amount of ugly people in academia.

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> that probably influence the personal development of a person to a great deal.

How the world treats a beautiful person and an ugly person is absolutely and totally drastic!

A well looking individual (especially a female) will be assumed to be an angle, will have every door opened, will have smiles given, will usually be considered above all others.

An ugly individual will be ignored completely; almost like that person does not exist.

When someone that's attractive speaks, every word is listened to. When the ugly person speaks, no one even hears them.

To get ahead, an ugly person must actually produce something or make something of him/herself. Work is required, and from that work experience is gained, and from that experience, good judgment and knowledge comes.

"""Genetically, looks and brains shouldn't be linked at all and I do believe there is no serious (anti-)correlation here."""

How did that "should not" come about?

How about creatures with worse looks (less attractive to their species), cope up by being smarter to turn sexual selection in their favor?

The notion of "looks" has not just come about in the last century or so, it exists even in totally foreign species, like flowers (attractiveness to bees by features/colors/smell/etc).

And looks have been shown to correlate strongly to sexual selection (from big tits to body fat).

Because neither "looks" nor "smarts" are simple real numbers that can be adjusted up and down. It's not like eye color or ear lobe size. Both are complex phenomena with many different parameters, and there is no evidence to suggest that those myriad parameters are linked in a way to suggest worse looks lead to inherently smarter brains. The null hypothesis is that they don't and that's what we should stick with.

On a more anecdotal note, I don't think inheritance is a strong factor for bad looks over many generations (which would be necessary for the kind of adjustment you're describing). Ugly parents can have beautiful children. And stupid people can have smart children, too. There is a genetic predisposition, yes, but the simple mixing of genomes over a few generations seems to be enough to sufficiently randomize a child's outlook.

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