Beauty, and the Failure of Sexual Selection

Back in 1859, Charles Darwin gave the world his hijacked view of natural selection in Origin of Species. It was in 1874 where he called his proposal evolution and made his racist views known in Descent of Man. The second part of the latter book's title is Selection in Relation to Sex.

Essentially, he said that the good-looking males get the female mates. He did not say how beauty and the female's ability to choose a handsome mate arose, and admitted that his sexual selection idea had problems from the beginning.

Courtship / Edmund Blair Leighton, 1903

People who know about societies and culture should question this principle, as it doesn't make sense even on the surface. Despite stories of romance, women do not tend to select the handsomest gent for marriage (I'm a prime example). Appearance is not the most important of criteria, which also include personality, humor, financial prospects, and more.

Nor are women in charge, since men are involved in choosing someone to get hitched up with. There have been times when I've seen women who are extremely attractive, but have had such foul personalities, they suddenly dropped off my radar. (A picture on the internet shows a gorgeous — by Western standards — woman and a caption that says something about how she may look good, but another guy is fed up with her antics.) Men like personality in women and other things too. Darwin is wrong here, too.

Attractiveness varies by culture. I knew a man from Trinidad whose wife was, uh, hefty. He didn't like the "hot babes" of Western culture.

In nature, critters fail the test for beauty and sexual selection. What attracts a mate for the male bowerbird? The shelter he constructs for her approval. While monogamy is a part of our Creator's design for humans, it is not the case for critters. Hatchlings in the next may not necessarily have the same father, and a bit of research shows many animals that mate from opportunity.

Male birds are not always the ones with the brightest plumage, either. In fact, some bird species have equivalent coloration.

The old saying that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" may apply. There are some creatures that are horrendously ugly to us, and we may wonder why they didn't have the good graces to go extinct simply because they're so unpleasant. Indeed, there are science fiction stories where humans are repugnant to space aliens — which are revolting to humans. There are some humans that are married, but using superficial standards of appearance, should each remain alone. Utilitarianism, anyone?

Evolutionists admit that Darwin's ideas of sexual selection were terribly flawed, but they still try to keep the myth alive. Dr. Michael J. Ryan studies animal behavior and conducted some research on all this. It seems that he, too, is trying to keep the storyline active. He also admits that there are problems with it despite rescuing attempts. It's as if the Creator had his own purposes, and living things are recalcitrant when it comes to fulfilling Darwin's dream.

Darwin argued that sexual selection explains the difference between the sexes in sexual organisms from eukaryotes to humans. Sexual selection not only produces sexual dimorphism, but also aids the evolutionary process, he thought. Sexual selection must have been active therefore in the transformation from apes to humans. To Darwin, sexual selection provided a solution to criticisms that differences in appearance of his postulated transitional forms were too great to connect us to ape ancestors. In truth, the apes would not be considered paragons of beauty today. Sexual selection gives evolutionists a theory to explain how hairy apes transformed into the physically attractive humans we see all around us now.

You can read the full article by stretching forth your appendages and scratching your way over to "Sexual Selection Fails to Explain Beauty".