Zero sum world, my post about HLA locii and biracial children resulted in many comments. A lot of them have to do with beauty, which is often a gestalt assessment that is difficult to reduce. Scientists have come up with many vectors that sum into a general ascertainment of the hotness of any given individual, symmetry, paedomorphism and exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics are just a few of the primary variables. Here is a quote from Survival of the Prettiest:
If it seems improbable that an attractive face would be one that would blend into a crowd, think about the average model-not a supermodel, but the person who advertiseses products in the daily papers…Similarly, beauty pageant winners often appear generic looking-extremely attractive but not distinctive. The face seems familiar, a better-looking, less irregular version of other faces we have seen…An innate preference for the average may be a way that evolution ensures that human faces rather than other similar-appearing things grab attention….
…Some distinctive faces are beautiful. The features of supermodels aren’t the norm anywhere but on the runway or the movie screen. Naomi Campbell’s and Christy Turlington’s lips do not fit population means…As we might suspect, average faces do not score off-the-scale beauties…Average faces are attractive, but they are usually not the most beautiful.
For brevity, I’m not going to quote everything, you can look up the text yourself with Amazon’s search feature. The gist is that the author is contrasting two types of beauty: the conventional “girl next door” cuteness/attractiveness, and the “sex-bomb” supermodel/super-secondary-sexual-characteristic-woman. The latter type is often tall, large-breasted, with extremely childish features and a curvy figure. The author terms these women “genetic freaks,” and they basically inundate the male sexual image processing centers (the fact that they are airbrushed and done up perfectly helps).
How does this relate to my previous post? Well, it doesn’t relate directly. As godless noted, mixing two populations ought to increase variance assuming additivity on traits. Additionally, with many different alleles on various locii you will see novel combinations of phenotypes expressed (more “distinctive” looks). But, to some extent, the mean of a mixed population will usually fall between the means of the parent populations (prior assumptions held).
So what is our stereotype of a “supermodel?” Generally, tall, large-breasted, thin and curvy. As racial justice activists always complain, they also are almost always white (with a minority of nonwhites like Tyra Banks who are also tall and large-breasted). I have read that models in Asia are often mixed-race, or European imports. Why is this? I recall some assertions that Europeans have “better figures” (from Asians of course). What does this mean? There is a lot of subjectivity in terms like “better,” but, I think many would agree on the following points:
European (origin) women are taller.
European women have larger breasts than Asian women correcting for size.
Europeans tend to exhibit more “sexual dimorphism” between the sexes, that is, European women are often “curvier.”
Now, I haven’t done deep research on these topics, they have been gleaned from past readings (I read an anthropology text that placed “Mongoloids” as the least sexually dimorphic and “Caucasoids” as the most sexually dimorphic when I was in elementary school) or anecdotes from friends (“Rice Kings” always talk about how “thin” and “narrow hipped” their girlfriends are). But, assuming the validity of these assertions, one might suppose that if supermodels have to be tall, curvy “genetic freaks,” there will be more white supermodels proportionally than Asian supermodels. If Eurasian women on average lay equidistant in height and curviness in comparison to Asian and European women, there will be fewer Eurasian supermodels (though if dominance and heterosis are a factor this might not be true).
But…what about the other type of attractiveness? The idea that Eurasians (or mixed-race children in general) are beautiful is common in some segments of society (I recall a Brazilian saying that you have a “white woman as a wife and a morena as a mistress,” morena being a term for someone of ~1/4 African heritage). But, this has always not been so, especially in the 19th and early 20th century, when mixed-race individuals were denigrated as defective freaks. Some today would still make this assertion, so I won’t assume this to be true. On the other hand, if mixed-race individuals tend to display more “developmental stability” and express fewer deleterious recessives, their features might be “more average” than those of their parents. If mixed-race people are “more attractive,” it might be the “generic beauty” affect (elaboration: if symmetry is a cue toward “health,” and mixed-race individuals are healthier because deleterious alleles are more likely to be masked by a “good copy” of a given gene, then they might be more symmetrical).
Addendum: My conjecture that mixed-race individuals might produce less who are “supermodel” worthy is premised on an idea of what a supermodel looks like obviously. If you assert that blondes are the best looking, obviously a mixed white/non-white population would have a lower frequency of the best looking people. I would like to ask readers if they have any recent literature citations of Europeans (or Caucasoids in general) being more “sexually dimorphic.”
Addendum II: On second thought, I recall that Northeast Africa is a potentional future “supermodel” hotspot, as many of these populations tend to be thin and tall.
Posted by razib at 05:24 PM