Ugliness evolutionary value, natural selection and aspergers

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I've often wondered, what the evolutionairy value of being an austistic is? It wouldn't exist in the population if it didn't confer some survival value to the group. We must contribute something to the overall survivability of the species or these traits would not exist, we would have been weeded out by survival of the fittest.

Creativity? Independant thought? Something required by less than 1% of the herd population, that they can't do without. They need us, we just have to figure out why?

I have been wondering the same thing about ugliness. Why does nature produce creatures that are considered unattractive by their peers in the first place? To warn others about possible genetic defects? But then, why are there so many unattractive people and why are they reproducing just as well as attractive people?

And even better, why does the human body in all its intricate complexity and regenerative ability even allow for these inferior physical attributes to manifest and be communicated to others? Shouldn't our bodies be voting for us instead of against us? It doesn't make any sense to me.

Nature and natural selection has been co-opted or corrupted?

Where is the wolf of cruel nature to eat us, the church altar to sacrifice our defective blood, the genocide of a righteous godlike charitable organisation?

My grandparents were defective, my parents were defective, I am defective.

Bill Gates in defective. Yet, we have all achieved well on the world stage.....

I think the truth is that natural selection has been having a major change of heart.....

Or if your into the bible:

The weak will be made strong
The meek shall inherit the earth
God will crush our enemies
2012 is the tipping point

Whether or not there is any evolutionary value to autism remains completely unknown. Just because there are perceived high numbers of autistic people now does not mean it was so in the past. As many evolutionary experts seem to think social function was a prime driver of our cognitive development, it seems unlikely that autism would hold a strong evolutionary benefit. But that's impossible to say for sure. Autistic people can have good focus on certain tasks, they can do all sorts of things better than neurotypicals. But autism is defined by a difficulty in communicating, something we think to be pretty important to our ancestors' survival.

We don't know what the environments were like in our genesis as a species, so we don't know what conditions made one individual more fit than another. It seems more likely to me, in my very-much-not-an-expert opinion, that social conditions in a Neolithic (post-agriculture) society gives people with higher forms of autism have a better chance of procreating and therefore spreading their genes; sort of the same way that glasses can eradicate the pressure of good eyesight in developed societies.

As to ugliness, as stated by others above, it is subjective. Sexual selection does not necessarily equate to sexual desire. Other emotional factors contribute to choosing a mate beyond sexual attraction, which combined with the other drivers of evolution - environment, gene flow, gene drift and mutation- makes it possible to have quite a variety in opinion of what is or is not sexually attractive. Also, culture offers even more disparate reasons to choose a mate, whereby attractiveness can fall pretty low on the list. Nature doesn't "allow" for anything; it is not a cognizant driver of anything, it is merely the name we give the world which houses these random reactions.

It might be something like the sickle cell disease and its connection to malaria resistance. Or maybe not.


I disagree. That would mean that the woman in the first image that you get when you search for "ugly" on Google (I can't post any links on the forum yet) is just as attractive to some men as Gillian Anderson is to others (no disrespect meant). We're all on a scale from 1 to 10, and people who are on the high end of that scale tend to have a lot more options when choosing a mate.


Yes, like making a compromise when you're too ugly to attract those that you REALLY want, for example.


Who says it's all random? That's just an opinion, a belief.

I found an interesting article about a possible evolutionary benefit to ugliness: search for "Why Doesn't Evolution Get Rid of Ugly People?" on Google.