How Evolution changed humans’ appearance

Theme: How evolution improved human beauty!In our society we not only see beauty or attractiveness in the bodies of other people, but we mentally grade it and in some cases measure it in the form of beauty competitions for females and body development competitions for men amongst other competitions centred around appearance of our bodies. An outstanding competition for females is the Miss World competition for beautiful women from around the world. The winner of a Miss World competition must be considered near the pinnacle of female beauty.If we could determine the genealogical lineage of Miss World, we would see that lineage going back generation by generation without a break back to a single living cell, but for our purposes here, consider the line back near to the start of our species, say some 200,000 years ago. The line would be through a female at every generation, some tens of thousands of generations. Let’s choose a random generation at about the 200,000 year mark and give the female mother of that generation the title MotherOne. We can call her partner in producing a daughter for the next generation, FatherOne.My limited research does not allow me to conjecture up images of MotherOne and FatherOne of that generation, but I would guess that in appearance they would be closer to other Great Apes than to Miss World. So what happens during the succeeding generations that changes the images of the women to finally arrive at Miss World.The daughter of MotherOne and FatherOne inherits physical characteristics from both parents through Chromosomes X and Y and introducing FatherOne into the line could make significant changes to the child’s appearance, but they need not improve her appearance or beauty level. But there is the possibility of another factor being introduced into the biology of the child, and that is the introduction of a hereditary mutation. The probabilities of a mutation effecting an improvement in the appearance of the child may be very low, but as it can occur at every generation, in tens of thousand of generations the probabilities improve.As the generations from MotherOne unfold, changes in the appearance of the progeny are affected by the factors mentioned above, but is there another factor that may have a greater effect on the appearance of Miss World’s female ancestors? At each generation Motherx will have a Fatherx from the local male population. In many of those generations Motherx will have a choice for Fatherx and may well choose according to the beauty level of available and suitable adult males in the local population. This introduces a bias in favour of increased beauty in many succeeding generations, culminating in Miss World.If we accept that in Miss World’s earlier generations humans recognised beauty levels in each other, then the above hypothesis may be reasonable, with mate selection being a strong driving force. I wonder if recent scientific research throws any light on the hypothesis.WJK in Adelaide, South Australia.

Thread copied here from the How Evolution changed humans’ appearance thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

I don't know why you emphasize females choosing attractive males, rather than vice versa. After all, this is clearly one of the things that males do.More thoughts later.

It is shown in human mate selection that factors humans find attractive are symmetry, outward cues of good health, physical attributes of reproductive success.Humans have overtime changed many of their criteria for physical beauty, but the constant seems to be the above traits.If one accepts the theory of evolution and random mutation then it would stand that overtime the traits that proved advantagous would be passed on generation to generation. However I do not feel the physical beauty of a person was all that important.
Otherwise how does one explain so many unattractive people finding mates to procreate with?

How do you distinguish "we evolved to be more beautiful" from "our sense of beauty evolved to be better accepting of the way we are"?Edited by nwr, : No reason given.

A rather strange guess, to put it mildly.

Check out this.

My emphasis was on Motherx. If her daughter was to gain improved appearance perhaps her best chance would be for Motherx to choose an attractive mate. If Fatherx does the choosing I didn't think there was much chance of the daughter's appearance improving.

Human beauty may not have been very important to Miss World's line through the evolutionary process, but it appears to have happened and I find it interesting to conjecture the mechanism at work that effected the change. I'm only considering this one case - there are obviously multitudes of procreations that produce beauty levels like mine!!!!!

If you don't believe that homo sapiens as a species started some 200,000 years ago then my whole argument is worthless to you.

I think that is an incredibly silly thing to think. I'm sure some things like bone structure and symmetry can be inherited from either the paternal or maternal lineage. For example, my daughter looks a lot more like my mother than she looks like my wife's mother.

I'm sure you would agree that our logic allows us to examine information about a topic and accept or reject aspects as acceptable or not.
Anatomists and other human scientists have published a wealth of data about human evolution, including some theoretical images of early humans. Of course, you and I know that these images are unproven, but over a lifetime we learn to accept what is reasonable and reject what is not. You might reject, I do not!

Thanks for the Wikipedia reference. I think it is essential to understand 'sexual selection'.

I get the impression that your thoughts are dealing with present-day people.
My interest is in the 200,000-year period and tens of thousands of generations from an image I have of early homo sapiens to the present. Such marked differences and so long to make them.

Why not?