Judging by some of the amusing search queries I find every Friday people have a wide range of tastes and fetishes when it comes to pornography. From what I can tell the realized phenotypic interval in mate choice is less varied and eye-opening, but exists nonetheless. Why? Is there a rhyme or reason, or is it simply random chance and the necessity of the biological clock ticking? These are not issues which aren’t discussed or mooted thoroughly regularly. The popular science literature is littered with hypotheses from social and evolutionary psychology. How else could you have a books such as The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature and Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. This is sexy science by definition. Not Physics Letters.
There are three broad issues which have interested me in the domain of attraction and evolution. First, what is the character of cultural universals of beauty rooted in biological preferences? Second, what is the character of cultural variation in beauty rooted in contingencies or local conditions? And third, what are the genetic and non-genetic factors in individual mate preference? In this post I’ll …