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Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

> The essential object of competition is "ability to attract and influence men"

I completely disagree. communication via appearance starts from an early age. Young girls (less than 7 yrs old) try to look pretty. There is communication too between girls via appearance. boys don’t enter the picture until much later.

Remember the red and blue journalists attending China’s presidential address. The red coat journalist got the mic and spoke of unrelenting support. The blue coat journalist was so taken aback by this weird support she began to eye the person from top to bottom. Both were women. And were native Chinese working for American media companies. They communicate with looks.

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>I completely disagree. communication via appearance starts from an early age. Young girls (less than 7 yrs old) try to look pretty.

This is because the behavior is ingrained in biology. But make no mistake behavior ingrained in biology is from selection pressure and that selection pressure is sexual selection. Men select the women who are more interested in making themselves look pretty.

>There is communication too between girls via appearance. boys don’t enter the picture until much later.

The communication is this: If a girl looks prettier she is saying, "I'm better at attracting and manipulating men than you." That's the only thing communicated.

>They communicate with looks.

You're thinking too much. Do men communicate by getting rough and rowdy? Do men communicate by playing sports? Maybe? But the extent of the communication is minimal and it's the same thing with women and looks. There's hidden communication network that men don't know about, that's much to imaginative. Additionally, if such a network existed, some woman would eventually spill the beans.

Men don’t communicate (as much).

The rest of your hypothesis rests on an idea that women evolved (into a species?) with reinforced traits focusing on appearance. Disagree here Because Men and women didn’t evolve into different “species” And neither do we find similarities between them in this regard.

Selection pressure is an idea that tries to explain the trends in evolution. It is just an idea. It would be careless to trace everything in current state of behaviors to evolutionary changes.

You would be better off leaving evolution out of the picture.

(Edit: I’m deeply disturbed by your view. The people who advocate for child-love use similar reasoning.)

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