Download Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty PDF EPUB
Author: Nancy Etcoff
Pages: 336
Size: 3.480,67 Kb
Publication Date: July 11,2000
Category: Aesthetics
A provocative and thoroughly researched inquiry into what we come across beautiful and just why, skewering the myth that the quest for beauty is a learned behavior. Those features to which we are most attracted tend to be indicators of fertility and fecundity.Â
Beauty, she explains, can be an important and ineradicable component of human nature that’s revered and ferociously pursued in just about any civilization—and for good cause.Â
In Survival of the Prettiest , Nancy Etcoff, a faculty member at Harvard Medical College and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts General Medical center, argues that beauty is usually neither a cultural building, an invention of the style market, nor a backlash against feminism—it’s inside our biology. Furthermore, if we know how the desire to have beauty is innate, after that we are able to begin to work inside our own passions, and not simply the passions of our genetic tendencies. When observed in the context of a Darwinian struggle for survival, our sometimes intense attempts to realize beauty—both to be beautiful ourselves also to acquire an appealing partner—suddenly become a lot more understandable.