etc said:
. . . by love i meant, specifically, romantic love, that is, withstanding the love for ones' work, and directed towards a partner. my thinking was that good looking people are more likely to engage love and reproduce and stay with the kids as a result. while the big thinkings are generally not good looking, and i postulat(ed) that the genetic advantage for that is that they're more likely to love their work and not another person. this is to say that they'll spend their energy creating science and not wooing a mate. however, both are necessary and both further humankind.
I think your question is pretty funny, but I can't give an informed answer either about the natural selection aspect. However . . .
Have you ever seen the show "What not to Wear"? In it they take people who aren't paying much attention to their looks (or who have bizarre tastes) and teach them the "rules." It's pretty amazing what kind of transformations can take place when someone starts caring about their looks, and learns the rules behind being stylish and attractive.
I remember when I was in school some of the people others classified as "nerds," and I do recall they seemed a bit unconcerned about style. Of course, having one's face bashed up from slamming into doors because of walking around lost in thought doesn't help either.
I remember this girl in high school who was like this. I saw her at my 20 year class reunion and WOW! She'd learned a thing or two.
Then, romantic love tends to do a number on everybody, no matter how smart one is. Geniuses become idiots overnight. I've been in love many times :!), and now I think it is hormones. After you spend enough time with your love object, the intensity fades. Some people are addicted to that initial hormonal high, and so look for it all the time. As for me, I’ve learned how to enjoy love without the hormonal boost, and actually like it better. It’s more like deep friendship (with special benefits) than blinding, passionate love, but it also frees one from the painful lows that lies waiting on the other side intense passion.
So I don't know if it is really true intelligent people are less attractive than the general population. But if we are going to be generous about looks, then we might also consider the possibility that there are more kinds of intelligence than the intelligence which excels at science and math.
Math is Hard (a member here) and I were talking about Harvard psychology professor Howard Gardner. Back in 1983 he wrote a book called “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.” I find his views interesting, even though his ideas are sometimes dismissed by researchers (probably math/science types
).
Here’s some excerpts from an article about him:
When Michael Jordan performs an inexplicable maneuver in the air above a basketball court or Luciano Pavarotti extracts another shimmering high C from the gristle of his vocal chords, we don't necessarily think of either of these men as being intelligent. They might be, but we assume these talents to be peripheral to intelligence rather than proof of it.
Howard Gardner, a Harvard University professor of education and author, disagrees. When Jordan lifts off or Pavarotti opens wide, Gardner sees intelligence-something called bodily kinesthetic intelligence in the case of Jordan and musical intelligence in that of the big tenor. Gardner doesn't limit smarts to the traditional realms of logical reasoning and the ability to manipulate words and numbers. He says we are all endowed with eight distinct forms of intelligence that are genetically determined but can be enhanced through practice and learning.
Besides the physical and musical varieties, Gardner has identified six other types of intelligences: spatial (visual), interpersonal (the ability to understand others), intrapersonal (the ability to understand oneself), naturalist (the ability to recognize fine distinctions and patterns in the natural world) and, finally-the ones we worked so hard on in school-logical and linguistic.
Though Gardner's theory . . . has caught fire among educators, especially at the grade-school level. According to Gardner, children who don't excel in the "traditional" intelligences may not get the support they need. Kids who can brilliantly divine the feelings and motives of their sandbox mates, for example, won't really have an officially sanctioned chance to shine until they take a sales job or stumble into a college psychology class.
Anyway, my point is that neither beauty nor intelligence may be limited to any class of people. It might just be that our appreciation of ourselves and our fellow humans is in need of evolving a bit.
