Science writer and former broadcast meteorologist Katrina Voss looks at why we don’t all look the same.
Download a PDF of the articleIn the last 20 years race and desirability have become much more thoroughly (or at least much more publically) linked. There has been a shift in what we find ‘attractive’. The blond, WASPY “All-American” idols of my teenage years – Farrah Fawcett, Christie Brinkley, Cheryl Tiegs - have been replaced by a very different ideal of beauty and status.
At least in mainstream culture, racial “purity” no longer commands cachet. Quite the opposite.
Today’s idols and stars - Tiger Woods, Barak Obama, Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez to name a few - show that Euro is out, and exotic (or “multiethnic” in American English, “mixed-race” in British English, and “admixed” in Scientist English) is in.
Notions of beauty – what traits we value and find attractive - change over time, reflecting cultural differences but also perhaps reflecting a deeper biological - evolutionary - meaning. Charles Darwin for instance theorized that much of the human diversity we see around us could be attributed to sex – competition (between men) for sex and attraction of one sex towards the other. The male peacock’s feather has evolved to be larger and more colourful not because it’s practical but because it’s attractive to females, a mark of his status and therefore of his genes. Something similar could in part be responsible for the racial diversity we see around us.
Different populations may have had different notions of beauty in recent evolutionary time, and over thousands of years these may have become written into our genes. Red hair, blue eyes, larger buttocks: these and other varying characteristics may have signaled increased fertility and virility, driving their frequency up in a local population. But we don’t know this for certain.
Darwin had his ideas about sexual selection in 1871 yet in 2009 we still don’t have many of the answers. Why? Because the controversy that subsumes the study of race, sex, and beauty often means that those few scientists who dare to look often come in for criticism.
Superficial racial differences, and why they evolved, continue to elude scientific enquiry. Certainly some of the genes that vary from one population to another are known - like those that determine malaria resistance or lactose tolerance, but many of the others, including those determining lip shape, hair growth patterns and breast size remain mysterious. We might say that when it comes to superficial traits, science has only begun to scratch the surface.
Katrina Voss is a science writer and former broadcast meteorologist.
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