Culture may be encoded in DNA
POSTED BY: kpo
UPDATED: Saturday, September 5, 2026 00:24
VIEWED: 9894
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Is this about winning, DT?
What I was arguing against was your theory that sexual attraction is genetically limited to a Very Very Specific Type of human form. I simply see no evidence of that when I look around at how human sexuality expresses itself.
I never argued that genes play no role, but to usethe term "winning" seems inappropriate. Obviously, everything we do has a genetic basis, but exactly how that everything is expressed... that's the real question, and in many instances it is developed by nurture, quite flexibly.
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Hello,
With pointy heads, distended earlobes, radical piercing, and elongated necks all being considered beautiful by various cultures and groups, I can't advocate for any universal or intrinsic standards of beauty within the human animal. We seem able to focus on anything, exaggerate it excessively, and call it beautiful.
--Anthony
Due to the use of Naomi 3.3.2 Beta web filtering, the following people may need to private-message me if they wish to contact me: Auraptor, Kaneman, Piratenews, Wulfenstar. I apologize for the inconvenience.
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Quote:
And I did identify two things I believe are encoded (youth and health) and pointed out that even those are no be all end all border to sexual attraction, so... yeah, I feel it's largely cultural and psychological, because humans have a fairly wide range even within one culture.
Right on.
Quote:
And I think the common denominator would be youth and health, not necessarily a very particular shape, as was suggested here.
The only common denominators? No correlation for large hip:waist ratio (a proven indicatorof fertility)? What about things like facial symmetry, an indicator of good genes (if I remember right)?
I agree with almost all your other points, and I might come down to 70/30 in favour of nature - as I think youth/health/fertility etc. are *big* factors, to the male eye. I agree about human psychology, and I think beauty is person-specific to some extent because we are all looking for compatibility, in our mate selection. But as I say, the ability to *mate* should probably be first and foremost in mate selection!
Quote:
If it was encoded, there would be extremely little variability in human sexual attraction, which is simply not the case. Each person would have ONE particular type
Attractiveness *does* have a lot of common agreement: otherwise there wouldn't be commonly agreed attractive people. But I don't think it's encoded that we each have specific physical types - so okay, not 95% encoded. Blonde hair I think is a trick that women in cold climates evolved: a way of displaying their youthfulness while their bodies were covered, I think I read. And males learned to recognise it as sign of youthfulness. So this kind of sense I think may be hard-wired, but for this to be the absolute governing factor in a male's mate selection must come down to his individual psychology, I think.
Heads should roll
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Quote:*setting down the can and backing away...*
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Mal
No, I would have singled out you if I meant you, I see you have a can of whoop ass ready, maybe you should lower it from your shoulder.
I was actually including me in the people who had gone astray. I think we all wander off and started spounpting things that were pure speculation which could not be logically traced to science, and really were seeded by our own personal beliefs. I thought it was time for that particular train to stop.
I could reply specifically to the rest of that post, but it does seem that you wrote it when tired or something. It was pretty rough, not like what I've seen from you elsewhere. But bring up any specific point you want to hear back about and I'll get to it.
One topic I will carry on: I found some interesting stuff regarding babies and brains....
“Brain cells are “raw” materials — much like lumber is a raw material in building a house. Heredity may determine the basic number of “neurons” (brain nerve cells) children are born with, and their initial arrangement, but this is just a framework. A child’s environment has enormous impact on how these cells get connected or “wired” to each other. Many parents and caregivers have understood intuitively that loving, everyday interactions — cuddling infants closely or singing to toddlers — help children learn.
A brain is not a computer. The brain begins working long before it is finished. And the same processes that wire the brain before birth also drive the very rapid growth of learning that occurs immediately after birth. .”
http://extension.umaine.edu/publications/4356e/
“When we are babies, our brains are more open to the shaping hand of experience than at any time in our lives. In response to the demands of the world, the baby's brain sculpts itself.”
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/episode1/index.html
Genetics & Environment Interact
• There is mounting evidence that early experiences can dramatically alter the way genes are expressed in the developing brain.
The Basis of Learning
• The past decade has seen a massive amount of research on infant brain development & learning
• Babies know more than we once thought
A Summary of Infant Skills
• 2-day-old infants recognize their mother's voice and prefer it over other sounds.
• 3-month-olds can discriminate primary colors, & prefer red & yellow over blue & green.
• 6-month-olds recognize a mobile 2 weeks after being exposed to it for 2, 15-min. intervals.
• 7-month-olds can match angry or happy facial expressions with the corresponding vocal expression.
• 9-month-olds will imitate simple actions which they see being performed on objects, one week later.
True Memory
• Memory in the “strict sense” comes into being with the development of higher levels of the brain.
• The amygdala and frontal lobes are important in memory
• They develop relatively late in infancy, at about ten months of age.
Memory & Learning
• Sound perception develops first and fastest
• Research by Jusczyk et al. at Johns Hopkins investigated infants' long-term memory for the sound patterns of words.
• This study shows that infants have a previously unknown type of unconscious memory for detailed sound patterns
• Even if infants don't understand what they hear, “their nervous system is paying attention.”
http://www.slideshare.net/vacagodx/infant-brain-development-2891731
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Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hello,
With pointy heads, distended earlobes, radical piercing, and elongated necks all being considered beautiful by various cultures and groups, I can't advocate for any universal or intrinsic standards of beauty within the human animal. We seem able to focus on anything, exaggerate it excessively, and call it beautiful.
--Anthony
Due to the use of Naomi 3.3.2 Beta web filtering, the following people may need to private-message me if they wish to contact me: Auraptor, Kaneman, Piratenews, Wulfenstar. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Yes but I think there's a truer, more timeless and cross-cultural human sense of beauty, based on the truth of the human condition, and mating requirements: youth, health, fertility, good genes... at the very least. We could probably even move into things like personality: are some of the character traits that we call 'feminine' indicators of good potential mothers? And so on.
Heads should roll
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"Yes but I think there's a truer, more timeless and cross-cultural human sense of beauty, based on the truth of the human condition, and mating requirements: youth, health, fertility, good genes... at the very least."
Hello,
I think it is possible for the human animal to become so warped in judgment as to render even supposed universals like youth, health, fertility, and good genes entirely moot.
I do not know if we are unique in being able to think ourselves towards poorer evolutionary choices, but I do think we are capable of it.
Call it the Peacock syndrome, if you like. We can take it to absurd extremes. Everything beautiful can be re-branded as ugly, everything ugly can be labeled beautiful, everything practical be made to seem evil, and everything impractical can become ideal. We're a strange animal, that way.
--Anthony
Due to the use of Naomi 3.3.2 Beta web filtering, the following people may need to private-message me if they wish to contact me: Auraptor, Kaneman, Piratenews, Wulfenstar. I apologize for the inconvenience.
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Quote:So the word "culture" is dependent on how you define your groups. You could mean all humans as a group, as opposed to apes. You could mean African vs Asian, or American vs Canadian, or NYCers vs Bostonians.
Originally posted by kpo:
Understand me Mal4Prez, I believe human beings everywhere are pretty much the same, and that genetic differences are hardly ever much more than 'skin deep'. Differences between groups are cultural (and within groups, 'sub-cultural'?). This thread is interested in what human beings and cultures have in common, which is a lot, through history and around the world; and whether we can read something into the human condition from them. Like gender roles: are they learned, or is human society programmed to be like that? Or both (a more sensible inference)?
Your "culture" and "sub-culture" is meaningless without a specific definition of the groups involved, which wreaks havoc in a discussion with so many posters. We need a more specific definition of the word "culture".
Quote:I don't intend to ignore innateness. I see it being overapplied here, to the extend that the innateness of a trait is assumed, then all other possible causes of the trait are ruled out. It's faulty logic.
And in general I think we ignore/dismiss innateness at our peril.
I'll get to the pink study when I've got more time...
Quote:Indeed. As I was interpreting the language in this thread, I would have called such "physchological" traits just part of culture. Yes, its generalizing a bit, but everything in this thread is a generalization.
I think it's more accurate to say differing ideas of beauty are psychological
I'm open to more specific definitions. It might help us communicate better.
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Rouka,
Strangely, males and females find different things attractive. I don't suspect that genetics could have anything to do with that
Anyway, not all that specific. Blacks and whites are actually not closely related, unless you're British and call pakistanis "black" pakistanis and brits particularly are actually quote closely related, far more so than bantus are to Zulus. If you want to know how cloly or distantly related any group of humans is, trace back their anthropological history. Years of separation is a better measure of different than any form of test you can do. The average african is about 0.2% different from a European, which is 10-20% of humanity, since humanity is about 1.6% or so, in range. If you're outside of that range, you like your mates to be hairy and walk on their knuckles. Ergo, surely, there will be lots of things in common of what black men and white men might like, and sure, most of it would be cultural, but that genetic tendency of difference is likely to create the physical differences we see, which is why black men and white men do not look alike, and can be separated in ones mind. But I find this subtopic really truly inane, and have little interest in it.
Of course change isn't always good. Studies seem to show that humans have been getting dumber for some time. Hence I tend to skip wulfs posts on topics like this one, and so I missed his comment.
Wulf,
Look up the "moral center" of the brain, this was a discovery a couple years ago. Morality is a recent evolution, and probably still in the process of developing.
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Mal
Yes, the tendency of the discussion of beauty is a meaningless sidedtrail anyway. Its somewhat obvious to me that beauty has to be somewhat genetically relative or races which lived in similar climates would look exactly like one another.
Consider this: jews have big noses, thats a minor trait. Its even more minor that people might think a big nose was unattractive. However, if jewish women selected against big noses, they would have disappeared some time ago. It's more rational to assume that non-Semites are more likely to select against big noses which is why they even bother to mention it, and not, say, the semitic tendency towEd curly hair. But that may be an issue to non Semites, but not to Semites.
Anyway, on the subject of brains
BRAAAIINS
Oh, sorry. Yes and no.
The baby is born with a fairly substantial number of encoded neurons, so we know its born with some knowledge. The neural pathways that are used the most develop into synaptic superhighways, regardless of whether they were among the original ones. Typically, sex drive is a superhighway, butt for everyone.
Internally, the brain is a commnity of cells that think independent, and then essentially vote on their exchanged ideas. Each noes has a ddsignated function determined by the majori of input.
As most cells are near a node that is on a superhighway, and the most prominent superhighways are connected to sensory input, much of the differentiation is determined de facto by he layout of the brain, even though the cells are not determined specifically by genetics.
This means that a blind persons eye related cells would be free to reassociate with the ear, and often do. Extreme caes of bizarre upbringing would create this sort of effect, but its unlikely that minor social differences are going to make much difference here.
Genetically, were far more varied. If you really get into it, you realize that the major genetic differences between humans are typically invisible. The human brain usually falls between 1200 and 1400 Ccs, but has an extreme range of 800cc to 1600cc. This divide is related to genetic groups which are all extinct, and not easily discernible by people alive today. The races we know are relatively recent, and what would impact their extermal appearance as black white or Asian would be unlikely to have any impact on the size of their brain, or their intelligence, as much as some people might want it to.
Instead, the impact comes from a persons direct ancestry and a random shuffling there of. I was reading a study of the diffusion and absorption, and they said that random swedes could be found with both 800cc and 1600cc brains, as well as random Congolese. Numbers below 1200 are much rarer than the rest of the spectrum, but certainly exist in all ethnic groups.
Curiously, it's not as important as it would seem either, people with larger brains, sure, are more intelligent, or perhaps more versatile in the number of tasks they can learn. It's less of a determinant of how far you can go within one field. (Einstein had a brain of 1300cc)
Another thing which should be considered is the non genetic innate. If a child loses brain mass to feta, alcohol syndrome, it can be catastrophic, but even if it's undetectable, it will not only lower his brain mass but could disrupt essential pathways.
An adult alcohol whose pathways are already biltong is perhaps even more at risk. It's entirely possible that a long term substance abuser like the former president has lost half of his brain cells during his lifetime. If he were to start out at the low end of the gene pool, the result would be similar to that of an ape or chimpanzee. Of course, not identical, he would still have much more language ability. ;)
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Quote:To quote someone from another thread: I used to think you were smart DT. What happened?
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Internally, the brain is a commnity of cells that think independent, and then essentially vote on their exchanged ideas. Each noes has a ddsignated function determined by the majori of input.
I'm guessing that you're smoking lots of something tasty over the holiday weekend. You keep going on these amazing long tangents that have nothing to do with the topic on hand. Not that's anything wrong with attitude adjustment, if that's how you choose to spend your 4th. Just don't try mixing it with science. It's not working so well for you.
Enjoy.
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