In my mind, I have this picture of you. You’re in a crowd, deluged in an ocean of nameless people. But you’re not lost in them. In the middle of a sea of grey, featureless forms, you stand out in fierce, vibrant, individual, radiant beauty. You’re the only one I can see.
Tag: beauty
Of Hearts and Minds
A hard mind and hard heart tends to unrelenting ruthlessness, but a soft mind and soft heart tends to wayward wandering. A soft mind and hard heart tends to flappable foolishness, but a hard mind and soft heart is the chosen clay of which the crafter says, “Of this refuse will I make something beautiful and of this frailty will I make a strong vessel.”
mjg/11
Are women getting more beautiful?
Slashdot.org is a site I’ve been visiting since forever. It’s like the geek mecca online. They recently had an article entitled “Are women getting more beautiful?”
Slashdot.org is a site I’ve been visiting since forever. It’s like the geek mecca online. They recently had an article entitled “Are women getting more beautiful?” Here’s the excerpt,
“Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors. The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern.”
Now, slashdot has a lot of science related discussion. They’ll often post articles or studies discussing the latest and greatest advances in science.
I’m sure most readers of slashdot will have already forgotten about “New Zealand Tree Stuck In Evolutionary Time Warp“. Here’s the excerpt:
“A eucalyptus-like tree from New Zealand is still waging a battle that should have ended over 500 years ago. The tree continues to sport evolutionary adaptations, such as barbed leaves, to protect it from a large, flightless bird known as a moa. There’s just one problem: the moa went extinct around 1500 AD.”
Why are these two at all related? Well, if you read the comments, you’ll see arguments along the lines of “500 years is a blink of an eye in geological reckoning.” And, indeed, it is. That argument is consistent with evolution.
So, when I see the article about female beauty, which is about 8 times more popular in terms of comment volume, I wondered who was going to point out the obvious like they did with the other article. Someone to say, “Hold on a second, this science is bogus. Evolution takes a great amount of time to accomplish even small things. We can’t possibly see great change on such a small evolutionary time scale.”
All of this is not to mention that previous generations would view our supermodels as grotesque.
I bring up these two articles because Slashot, although a geek mecca of sorts, is also part of mainstream popular culture. It will not always be logically consistent.
Always be on the look out for logical inconsistency. Science and evolution are full of it. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, as science is the process of refining knowledge. We should, however, always strive for logical, reasonable answers, even amidst the incoherence of all the ideas we’re hit with from popular culture.