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PaperclipPerfector  28d ago (text post)   2947 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 6, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is there anything to thé theory that the relatively early shift to love matches over arranged marriages has selected Western Europeans for greater phenotypic attractiveness?

This sounds similar to the armchair "war filter" theory that current day eastern european women are mostly attractive due to the fact that so many men were slaughtered in the 20th century that those who remained could choose only the most attractive as mates. I'm not sure evolution works that fast.

As @ZanarkandAbesFan suggests, there may not be a clear consensus on whether the median European (white?) woman is more attractive on the whole (and I'll use your phenotype term, meaning basically clear skin, facial symmetry, good straight teeth, healthy hair, etc but correct me if you mean something else) than her counterparts in other ethnicities. I assume we're talking about women of a certain age range?

You don't think "evolution" works fast enough to make you more likely to be attractive if you had an attractive mother and grandmother?

You don't think "evolution" works fast enough to make you more likely to be attractive if you had an attractive mother and grandmother?

Natural selection doesn’t cause population-level shifts in attractiveness in just a couple generations. Natalya might (or might not) inherit aspects of her mom’s good looks, but that’s genetics. Evolution needs sustained selective pressure across many generations to change the frequency of traits in a population. If evolution worked that fast, we’d see dramatic changes in appearance across just a few generations any time a war or famine hit. Traits like attractiveness are polygenic and influenced by culture, grooming, health, etc.

Any change in fitness is evolving. Just by grades. Heck you can make a wolf into a dog in a human lifetime. You're just arguing semantics. Genetics is evolution.

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