
Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution - pdog
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/magazine/beauty-evolution-animal.html
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giornogiovanna
> Although never completely forgotten, Darwin’s theory of beauty was largely
> abandoned.

This claim is completely unsubstantiated - even my high school biology class
went over sexual selection as a form of natural selection.

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gweinberg
Yeah, I was astonished by this claim. Everyone who knows anything about
evolution has heard of sexual selection. There's no real dispute that female
sexual preference is a major factor determining male sexual success. The only
part that has been rejected is the idea that female preference is completely
arbitrary, and I'm not sure anyone ever believed that in the first place.

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_nothing
I was going to say, hasn't all of this been known for a while? I suppose it's
worth continuing to publish articles educating more and more of the public on
the topic, but the headline is rather deceptive in presenting this as a new
concept.

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coliveira
The writers of this piece don't even seem to know what evolution of species
is. Evolution has as a premise the survival of species. To survive,
reproduction is the most important consideration. Therefore, beautiful
specimens (itself a subjetive notion created by evolution) have the tendency
to reproduce more often and make it possible for the species to survive.

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ralusek
"Adaptations are meant to be useful — that’s the whole point — and the most
successful creatures should be the ones best adapted to their particular
environments."

No, they aren't. Adaptations aren't even meant to be viable. Statistically,
what they trend towards is not the "objective" of usefulness, but of
reproduction. As a consequence of that end, this tends to include traits that
aid in personal survival, attracting a mate, and ability to nurture, protect
and provide for the offspring. Beauty, while in the eye of the beholder,
obviously fits into the role of "attracting a mate." Usefulness not required.

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eutropia
This is a common misconception thanks to the term "survival of the fittest".
Evolution is a blind dumb statistical optimization by virtue and ONLY by
virtue of creatures managing to reproduce. Anything that changes relative
rates of reproduction changes relative distributions of genes and that's the
end of the story.

Nature doesn't design, foxes are not "meant" to hunt hares and hares are not
"meant" to evade foxes. It happens that the hares that evade foxes and the
foxes that eat hares are more likely to survive to pass on genes. Creatures
with an aversion to asymetrical (a proxy for unhealthy) mates are more likely
in the long run to have healthy offspring...and so on and so forth.

The critical mistake is people adding "intentions" and "meaning" to a blind
dumb statistical process akin to Russian roulette.

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tachyonbeam
I think the notion of local minima fits into this. It might be optimal for
male birds of some species to have very colorful flair to attract females.
Within that species of birds, these males with the more
colorful/visible/expensive plumage will be selected for. This will remain true
on shorter evolutionary time scales. It will work for a while. However, if the
males of the species develop flair that becomes too attractive to predators or
makes them incapable of outrunning said predators, and most males get eaten,
natural selection will ensure that things balance themselves out. That species
of birds could go extinct, or it could be that there are very few colorful
males left, and the females who are less selective win out because reproducing
with the males that are left is better than not reproducing at all.

Evolution is non-stationary. What's making an individual fit depends on its
current environment here and now: the food it can find, what predators are out
there, things that make it more attractive to mates. However, predators, food,
weather and mates change over time. In other words, what's being optimized for
is constantly changing, there are local dynamics and some amount of "noise"
that occurs, possibly resulting in silly looking animals like peacocks
happening once in a while.

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bluGill
But a male who can be visible to predators and yet still survive must have
something else (what?) that makes him more valuable.

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gigonaut
Probably the most interesting representation anything related to this I've
seen is the stalk-eyed fly[1]. Their compound eyes are at the end of long
stalks, and apparently the primary reason for this is to attract a mate.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalk-
eyed_fly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalk-eyed_fly)

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aetherson
I think a lot of critics of the article in these comments bailed out of the
article partway through.

The article is an examination of the origin of sexual selection. Are sexually
selected traits linked to adaptive traits (originally, even if they later run
away and become maladaptive), are they mere random chance, or is the truth
more complicated than either of those theories?

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wellactually
There is nothing new in this article causing scientists to rethink Evolution.
Sexual selection, on the basis of physical traits (weaponry or ornaments), has
been known and observed since Darwin. Evolution doesn't produce the best
adaptations to a given environment. Rather it produces the least worst.
Reproduction of genes through generations is the name of the game.

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alexpetralia
Evolution produces random features, which remain as long as you survive and
reproduce.

So you may get totally ornamental or vestigial or obsolete features simply
because they were never enough hindrance to reproduction. "Enough" is a key
word - even features which are hindrances but do not offset pro-survival/pro-
reproduction features will remain.

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JamilD
Ornamental features are not obsolete. Many animals are selected for their
ornamental features, which may act as heuristics for fitness (both for the
opposite sex in reproduction and for the same sex in combat/competitiveness).
I know not all of the book is still considered wholly accurate, but Dawkins
describes this at length in The Selfish Gene.

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alexpetralia
True - ornamental was the wrong choice of wording. Ornamental features
absolutely aid sexual selection.

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qwerty456127
A very interesting question but the article is so bloody huuuuge!

