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Comment by mvleming | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you. I've read about how a curvy figure (a high hip-to-waist ratio) is more attractive to males because it means offspring are more likely to survive when they pop out of the woman (small hips and big brains don't go well together).

The point I was trying to make though is there are some aesthetic qualities we like that are not evolutionary products, the example I gave was the duckface. Another example is women in China bind their feet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding), or yet another is Kayan women elongate their necks (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ak1yxTngxW4/Tnen0_FXpgI/AAAAAAAAAW...).

I believe what aesthetic qualities we like are the result of our nature and our nurture, and it is in this way I believe society does create a perfect image.

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The point I was making is, and the reason I dislike SCT, is that there is a very strong and relatively stable genetically-determined set of aesthetic preferences found in all cultures. There are no cultures where diseased and ulcerated skin on the face is considered sexy. "But of course" you might say - but that's the point, we take the real commonalities for granted.

And then, yes, on top of those there is a whole conflicting mess of different desirable appearances which depend upon the period, culture, and person, driven by all the complexities of interacting human beings. But those factors can be boiled down to some fairly simple drives which have all emerged for one reason: to maximise reproductive success.

Which is all what you would expect from the result of selection pressures acting across tens of thousands of successful generations of descendants of ancient DNA-replicating machines.

Another way to say this is that it is in our nature to be highly responsive to environmental conditions, i.e. nurture. Nature builds the platform and tools needed for nurture to occur - but just because we are plastic in the face of nurture does not mean nurture negates or transcends the principles of nature (at least not so far, I believe.) If individuals had arisen in which this was so, they would have been selected against. You should read The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker makes this point about people who try and argue that the brain is effectively infinitely plastic and comes with no built-in "software" for processing and generating language.

(PS The main complication in trying to read human behaviour for evolutionary logic is that selection principles do not act upon individuals solely, because humans are all integrated into often multiple kin and common-identity networks of greater or lesser complexity. Evolutionary logic resolves at the level of these more-complicated networks.)

(PPS I believe that the head size-hip ratio theory is erroneous. Read http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2012/08/timing-of-c...)

I haven't read about SCT, but in the wikipedia article about social constructionism I read: "When we say that something is socially constructed, we are focusing on its dependence on contingent variables of our social selves rather than any inherent quality that it possesses in itself." You said: "on top of those there is a whole conflicting mess of different desirable appearances which depend upon the period, culture, and person, driven by all the complexities of interacting human beings." At first I thought are "the period, culture, and person" not "contingent variables of our social selves"? But you went on to say "those factors can be boiled down to some fairly simple drives which have all emerged for one reason: to maximise reproductive success." In other words, you're saying those factors can be boiled down to something that is an inherent quality that we possess in ourselves, which is we maximise reproductive success.

Does this make sense? I dislike SCT too now but I wasn't trying to imply the perfect image society creates is socially constructed when I said "personifying what society has deemed as the perfect image." I meant regardless of whether society is socially constructed or not, this system that I'm referring to as "society" creates an ideal image of what a human being should look like. If society is not socially constructed, and is in fact defined by our biology, then that would mean this ideal image also originates from our biology. Regardless of all this, there is a perfect image we strive for.

I feel like we're on the same page, and I totally relate to your view that, and I'm going to paraphrase you: "it is in our nature to be highly responsive to our nurture." Our nurture is not an individual entity from the system, our nurture is grounded by our biology.

1) I just called it "SCT" as shorthand, not to imply that it's a coherent theory. I don't think it's particularly coherent - from what I know it's one of the many parts of modern cultural theory, stemming from sociology, anthropology, and history, among others, which in modern times have become extremely theoretical and disconnected from reality, and tend to say very little with a lot of very complicated words.

2) Ultimately everything, including human behaviour, boils down to the principles of fundamental physics. Human behaviour is just the most complex expresion of these principles of which we are aware.

3) I mostly jumped on the hint of social constructionism because I absolutely hate it when people try to argue that beauty and aesthetic standards are purely constructed and hence artifical or arbitrary, which is patently not true. It's driven by a misguided desire to defend ugly people or something, I don't know, anyone it's stupid. Again I recommend Steven Pinker, his book The Blank Slate also touches on this I believe.

4) Mostly though I wanted to offer some logical reasons why people on online games might tend to wish to present themselves as, for men, muscular, strong, dominant figures, and for women, attractive, assertive, desirable figures.

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