Thursday, July 06, 2006

Memetic Nature of Sexual Selection?

What if the phenomena that we associate with Darwin's sexual selection (e.g. large breast size in humans, hair/eye color and other properties which cannot be traced to advantage reinforced by natural selection) are a consequence of memetic imitation? In other words, the underlying mechanism of sexual selection is memetic imitation in the same way that the underlying mechanism of natural selection is genetic survival.

That would be consistent with Schelling's neighborhood, the observation that people tend to prefer mates of a physical form to those encountered in childhood and possibly Jared Diamond's comments in The Third Chimpanzee regarding sexual selection.

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