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Old 10-22-2007, 06:22 PM
madnak madnak is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Brooklyn (Red Hook)
Posts: 5,271
Default Re: The Biology of Beauty

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That seems pretty "large" to me - obviously it's a bit "small" if your basis for comparison is women with three noses (who probably could be attractive based on environmental concerns), or fish, or protozoa, or rocks.

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Why should my basis be anything else?

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I just named 4 bases for comparison, dude. I can make arguments for each of them being more valid depending on the situation. Why not just take it to its logical conclusion and say that everything biological is about the same - after all, a bacterium is far more similar to a human being than 99.9999% of the universe is. Using the whole universe as a context, the difference between a human and a bacterium is minute.

Why not use that context? Because it's not very useful. We're humans and the perspective that makes the most sense is the perspective that has value for us - such a perspective will necessarily be biased toward the planet earth, and toward an anthropocentric view.

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If biological factors made me a fish then I'd be attracted to fish.

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You haven't responded to my point that some humans are attracted to fish. You think human attraction is mostly biological - do you believe that these people are attracted to fish at a biological level, then?

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I guess you'd rather I narrowed my thoughts to only those that defend your position.

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I'd rather you narrow your thoughts to whatever population is useful depending on the purpose of the analysis. It seems that the context mentioned in the OP implied that the subject was human women.

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It will always "seem" large based on the instincts of our condition, but our condition is ultimately molded by biological factors. To a dog, slightly different anal scents (which I can't even differentiate) are the entire spectrum of all that is attractive.

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That's oversimplistic at best, but the spectrum of scents is large in the context of canine attraction. To say that "all scents are the same" in terms of canine attraction is absurd.

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I guess "sense" is ultimately in the eye of the beholder,

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Then the question of whether biology or environment is "more responsible" for attraction is also subjective...

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especially when you're looking for nitty ways to not let go of an argument.

If you don't think debating which is "more" responsible is worthwhile, then you should have ignored this thread since that's what OP asked.

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You decide whether to post on a thread based on whether you agree with the assumptions of the OP? Well, I guess that's one way to do it. Regardless, the OP's use of "more" doesn't strike me as some of bull-headed attempt to suggest that nature is objectively always more important than nurture, but that the criteria according to which healthy human beings select other healthy human beings are more frequently biological than cultural. My response to the OP was perfectly acceptable given that interpretation.

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I think it's pretty clear that our condition is near entirely biologically driven but we just interpret ourselves as having more control over it than we actually do.

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What does control have to do with anything?
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