Steve Sailer’s Sunday column is on blondes, and his “it’s cute because it’s shiny” theory makes a lot of sense. I dyed my hair “blonde” two winters in a row, though the first time it was more coppery since my black hair needed multiple treatments and I couldn’t stand the itch. It was kind of popular in the late 90s among the punk/snow-board & soccer player set-but the light blonde tips look was more a “gay thang” from what I remember. One of the reasons I did dye my hair blonde was encouragement from a friend of mine who happened to be gay (hi Syd!), and perhaps that colors my perception that non-extreme-sports guys who go blonde tend to be a bit queer.
Back on the topic of paedomorphy in human populations, I do want to add that I believe northeast Asians also exhibit a large degree of child-like traits. The epicanthic fold, more subctaneous fat in the face, flatter facial profile and small nose, all to me suggest a tendency toward selecting for “younger” looking individuals (my Asian friends tended to look the most like their baby pictures as adults to my eye). Perhaps it’s no coincidence that paedomorphic selection occurred among the northern Eurasian populations that today also have high mean IQs? I don’t know, but something to think about.
Godless comments:
Well, I generally like Steve’s ideas….but in my opinion, this sort of theorizing is what gives behavioral genetics a bad name. First of all, the theory is pretty much untestable. There might be a way to test it short of cordoning off a section of wilderness in Northern Europe and letting blondes, brunettes, and redheads attempt to hunt…but in the absence of a test this is a “just so” story, like much of Rushton’s explanations (though not his *data*) [1]. Indeed, in 1997 the famous neuroscientist VS Ramachandran subjected the evolutionary psychology community to an Alan Sokal-like hoax on this very topic:
In summary, I suggest that gentlemen prefer blondes in order to enable them to detect the early signs of parasitic infestation and aging – both of which indirectly reduce fertility and offspring viability. Although originally intended as a satire on ad hoc sociobiological theories of human mate-selection, I soon came to realize that this idea is at least as viable as many other theories of mate choice that are currently in vogue.
In other words, many of those other theories are bunk as they’re entirely armchair philosophizing. Second of all, the “blonde universality” theory doesn’t take an important piece of contrary evidence into account: the disproportionate presence of East Asian females as European male mates and sex objects. In a situation with a 1:1 East Asian/Euro ratio (e.g. UC Berkeley), anecdotally speaking the relative losers in the mating game are Asian males and white females.
We’d have to do polling to verify the latter part of the hypothesis, which many here may find controversial. But as I said before:
For once, though, I’d invoke a cultural explanation [for blonde overrepresentation]. In my opinion that’s probably because the US has white models and the US rules the cultural world. But in terms of pure sex appeal, I subscribe to Sailer’s “whites are intermediate” theory. Probably muscular West African guys and neotenous East Asian females would do best in a competitive mate/advertising market if we controlled for income, language, IQ, etc.It’s impossible to control for the black-white gap in real life, but when the white-Asian gap is controlled for, I think Asian females beat out white females for white guys. Evidence in favor:
1. Vastly disproportionate demand in the white world for Asian porn relative to the # of Asians (don’t know how best to survey this, but a reasonable methodology would validate)
2. Anecdotally, at the UC’s in which Asians and whites are at parity (or greater, e.g. Irvine where Asians outnumber whites 2:1), white females complain in a manner very reminiscent of Asian males about how Asian women are “too obedient” and how “they’d never be slaves like that”. Again, I’m pretty sure a survey would validate this, e.g. “do you think white males on campus date Asian women *too much*”?
Here, Asian denotes “East Asian”, not my kind of Asian (South Asian).
[1] There’s a big difference between describing what *is*, and describing how it came about. That’s not to say that evolutionary explanations are off-limits, but rather that one needs to test them rather than simply postulate them.
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