Ugliness evolutionary value, natural selection and aspergers

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i think "beauty" means "something i find easy and nice to look at" (as i was told and i agree because there are things that i find "easy and nice to look at").

i like certain patterns and color schemes and i think they are "beautiful" because i very much like to look at them.

i think little birds are beautiful because they have the purest of situations going through their heads and they are utterly innocent. (they and tammy are the most beautiful)

i think that certain musical patterns and iterations can paint a beautiful concept.

and what i have said is roughly the extent to which i see beauty.

i do not see sexual beauty. i can not feel aroused by the look of someones legs or arms or teeth or hair or bangles or ankles or anything that i visually can see of them.

but i am not your target audience. you are "agonizing", and i am just saying whatever comes to mind, and it is unproductive of a solution to your dilemma, so i have to go to bed (again).

i have to mind my manners because i am sufficiently unrestrained (due to a small circuit breakdown) to a degree that peripheral "reputational" damage may ensue if i continue willy nilly to flagrantly post unconsidered thoughts.

good final and complete night.

In fact my last girlfriend was around 250 pounds (and not tall), yet she claimed to have the waist-2/3-of-hips measurements (I never verified!), and she was physically beautiful: it looked OK on her! I was concerned about her health though, but we never got to discuss that, because we broke up after 6 months or less of a mostly long-distance relationship.

But the research we're alluding to here suggests that there are some universal, perhaps unconscious, standards of beautiful faces or bodies, generally speaking -- with plenty of room for exceptions. It's evolutionary biology/evolutionary psychology.

Babies puppies and kittens are supposedly visually cute so parents take better care of them?

Or we project concepts of beauty onto objects and things that we want to be beautiful?

I remember something a few years back where people with ugly babies, thought them beautiful, while everyone else saw ugliness...

Beauty is subjective. Ugliness is subjective. There are no absolutes in life and everything has shades of gray.

Your thread makes no sense to me, OP.

Interesting

This is my idea But you just used it..

Watching for more intelligent opinions to appear before I talk anything.

Maybe it's just the aspies you have seen that you find unattractive. Maybe aspies who are beautiful have an easier time fitting in and therefore don't get DXd as much. Beautiful people are more popular in general I have found. All of my family are really good looking ( and definately impo on the spectrum and none of them are diagnosed as they are all very popular due to their looks, muscles, confidence and I suppose cheeky arrogance ( the men) . Even eccentricities are accepted if you are confident and goodlooking. Only my son and I are dxd. Me only because the child neuro psychologist mentioned that I might have it after my son was Dxd though.

Lots of ppl told me that my son looked beautiful, rather elfin when he was younger so he deffo doesn't fall in the ugly category.

It's not my physical appearance that makes me ugly. it's my personality that makes me ugly & mostly unlovable. I am lucky to have found a good man who thinks I am beautiful inspite of my personality (that's not to say we haven't had bumps in the road), & a dog who also accepts me as I am.

Beyond that, I am mostly hated & have been since infancy. My mother despised me, & my dad wasn't thrilled with me either. After that, almost everyone I met also grew to hate me.

When I look at aspie faces I do see a type, or look common to autism.

I am unsure and put this thread out speculatively, as I wondered about this aspie look and the evolutionary value of facial dimensions.

Maybe I'm just wrong about this, as replies in this thread has stated, that we are visually no different from NT?

What is that type?

Please....I am so curious!

I've always been attracted to people who look "different" in some ways. i.e. fat people are more attractive to me than skinny people, loners are more attractive than popular people, weirdos are more attractive than those who have "no personality"...etc. Maybe evolution made me this way so it's more likely for me to actually get someone. Or it's just because I'm weird. Gee now that I saw what I wrote, apparently I'm a sucker for people who are fat, weird and unpopular. And I did get such a guy who is nice and makes enough money, so that I don't have to work, and I don't have to suffer poverty due to my AS.

From what I heard, this weirdness has been in my family for many generations. There didn't seem to be any problem with producing offspring. It's not just me. One of my cousins (who's as handsome as a movies star) married the ugliest girl in his village, because she was the most efficient and hard-working woman he knew. He was not disappointed. The wife helped him make a lot of money and produced 3 beautiful children. My dad chased after my mom because he was very impressed with her work efficiency as well. I think having AS might help people to see past the superficial qualities and choose practical benefits.

Sorry, I don't understand this question at all.



Oh sure, to a certain extent. I think a lot of it comes from the advertising and entertainment industries, where preferences run in cycles. I think you could probably make a case that our perception of attractiveness is being manipulated by the advertisting industry, but that's another issue entirely. Or maybe that's what you meant by "propaganda".

I'm still not entirely sure what you're getting at here, though. The perception of beauty is a spectrum, too. It's certainly true that some people find extreme obesity to be attractive, for example, but the fact is ... most people don't. Likewise, there are "looks" that most people ... not all, but most ... find attractive.

But so what? What matters is what you find attractive ("you" meaning the generic "you", not you specifically).

I think your entire premise is flawed. Anecdotally, my DXed Aspie friend is pretty good looking, no matter who you'd talk to. My friend with NVLD/Aspergers combo in pretty much the exact same manner I have, he's a bit overweight, but he's like 6 feet tall, and wouldn't be considered ugly by any means. Another DXed Aspie I knew was good looking, too, worked out a ton, had ginormous triceps, etc, had girlfriends that were like 20+ when he was 15, was a bit awkward, but because of his like, assertiveness, managed even to do well socially much of the time, just more often he hung around older people like I do. And then there's me, everyone tells me I look great. I think some girls are actually even shy to talk to me even for it.

The only facial features I'd say common in Aspergers/Autism people are like, possibly bigger heads, and possibly more elongated forehead, that's about all. There's also a high incidence of red haired people, too, I think. This is more going with the RDOS Neanderthal theory.

Heather Kuzmich, a model, has Aspergers.


She's hot.

If anything, I'm tempted to argue the exact opposite to your premise, that people considered to have Aspergers tend to be better looking than normal people much of the time. Possibly due to genetics, hell, sometimes even due to the psychological circumstances. IE, Heather Kuzmich's lack of eye contact and stuff screwed her up in America's Next Top Model, but Enrique Iglesias chose her to be in his music video just for what he perceived as a semi-haunting look in her eyes. We're all given different cards in our hand, we just gotta figure out how to use them to our advantage, that's all.

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It's not like Aspergers would be automatically discouraged under Darwinian natural selection. That premise is off, too. Especially in times past, I think what today we call Aspergers was much more appreciated. Back in the 1700s, if you were able to pass the test to get into college at like age 12, you just were in. George Washington, etc, did this. I believe society the farther back you go, obviously it gets less comfortable, but the farther back you go, I believe it was more based upon results.

Marriages were arranged based on economics, not on romantic love, so if you, let's say, were a great hunter, you'd get a wife based on your ability to provide, not on how great you were at social engagements. Hell, in some parts of the ancient world, coed social engagements were nonexistent, even now you see a remnant of this in the Islamic world. So your ability to talk with girls was completely a nonissue, as you'd never need to talk to them anyway. So, then it's just your performance at doing stuff that's the factor, which people with Aspergers can become great at lots of things just from their ability to seemingly try harder than a normal person would, which is why people with Aspergers are computer programmers, etc. To learn any kind of useful skill requires getting "obsessed" with it, to a small degree or a large one depending on the skill and you, and I believe in the past people thought much more of you based on your useful skills, than your social awkwardness.

As far as evolution goes now. I believe it's a different story. Watching the movie Idiocracy would show my point, albeit exagerrated. Western Society now seems to be ridiculously easy, almost, to quote someone else, like an amusement park.

People in India work 8-10 hours a day for a couple dollars, to buy their basic rice, vegetables and legumes to cook and eat in their house. White rice currently is 33c a pound at the grocery store, a pound provides about 3 cups of rice, beans dried are a dollar a pound, and they generally get 2-3 times bigger when soaked and cooked. I don't want to do the calculations, but let's just say you ate a pound of rice and beans a day. That's a ton of food, first off, and it's a ridiculous estimate, but let's just say you had that much appetite. It'd cost me 2 dollars, plus probably a few pennies for seasoning, oil to saute if I wanted it that way, etc. I'd probably put a 10c onion in, too. So let's figure $2.50. $2.50 a day to eat. Now, my Indian friend here in America says his family of four's entire Indian food budget (Indian food for dinner almost every night, also his mom has a catering business, I think the business is in the budget) is $90 a month, so my estimate of $77.5 a month is very very generous.

My point after all that is, we'd have to work 20 minutes each day under our bare minimum legal wage to get what some Indians spend all day arduously laboring for. So why do we still have hungry people in America then? Ignorance or laziness. People don't learn to even cook in society anymore. My family says we have no groceries as soon as we run out of hot pockets, lean cuisine, and prepackaged bagged and seasoned rice. I have 20 pounds of dried legumes, about 30 of rice, we're set, but they refuse to cook or eat it when I cook it. Nevermind the hundred or so cans of various things we got, vegetables, beans, spaghetti Os. I'm the weird one in my family for cooking at all similarly to the rest of the world and not just pressing 2:00 on the microwave all the time like they do. So because people classified as Aspies have "obsessions" and actually want to learn things, they're looked down upon as weird for not making their obsession socializing and mating, which is all you have left to do once the hard part of surviving is taken care of for you. Learning any skills might as well be considered an anachronism in this current society.

So, you are partially right, Aspergers traits have the possibility of being mated, or if that's not possible (the genetic link between Aspergers is not completely clear, the only possible theory is the RDOS Neanderthal theory, and that's just a theory on some dude's website without really any scientific credentials at all), discouraged out of existence, simply because the requirements now for life are different. Life now in Western Societies I believe is based upon socializing and mating, or maybe more like socializing to mate. So, if you're born with any kind of predisposition toward not socializing like everyone else does, then you're disadvantaged to mating. However, the reason life goes on and humanity doesn't just revert to being like the movie Idiocracy is because there comes a point when it all crashes down. Then the "weird" Leonardo DaVincis and Newtons "obsessed" with their science and math and literature come out of the woodwork and rebuild society again.

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All right, sorry for being 20 and posting on the adult forum, and writing a whole, like, essay.

Thank you for your extensive reply.

My flawed premise of aspie genes adding to overall attractiveness, has just been supported by your examples given.

I maintain my premise: that excessively NT genes or an excessively AS genetic expression, results in a less attractive individual, than an indivual with some AS genes, and some NT genetic expression, mixed together.

Mongrel dogs usually have better health than pure bred canines

Evolutionary value, values diversity, as more traits allows for more arrows in your quiver to draw forth.....

Mixed breeding would give an NT more brains, and an AS more instinctual physical drives. The resultant neurology would be better adapted to the the technological age.

I am retired young with lots of property, can find food or money much easier and quicker than most others. On top of my latent skills, I am good looking. Nature has equipped me with an NT/AS balance that far exceeds the evolutionary value of not having an AS component to compliment my NT instinctual drives.

Again, I dont think my premise is flawed. Hybrid NT/AS have evolutionary advantage.

However, if society is controlled and steered by vested interests with agendas, natural selection would not be natural at all. The dark triad expression, as currently seen, may gain ground over altruistic appreciation, as kings serving warlords, overly favour those able to sit at the kings table, advised by advisers with short term dark triad appreciation, rather than the long term stability provided by an altruistic administration..........

Last edited by Surfman on 10 Sep 2011, 5:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

She might be, but all the obvious and extensive photoshopping makes it hard to tell.

No one knows what actually causes autism. Theories abound but no one agrees. Most seem to think it is a mixture of genetics and environment, but only more data will provide an answer. It is important to remember how little we currently understand the condition.

Any proclamation of relation between evolution and autism is likely to be unsubstantiated. Can you recognize certain facial patterns in people with autism? Sure, if you look hard enough, you can see anything. Perhaps Aspies with good looks simply do better in life and never seek out or need a diagnosis. Perhaps Aspies with good looks get better opportunities to learn and find collusion with the social tropes of NTs. As mentioned by others above, pure "attractiveness" is only one aspect of sexual selection, and hardly a consistent one.

Who knows? Most likely, you look for something as subjective as this you are bound to see it everywhere. I can't stress enough how cautious we should be to attribute specific evolutionary origin to a condition whose mechanism is still mostly elusive to us.

Welcome to WP!

Great first post, I hope your time here is fruitful and enjoyable.

I think all it is, is me deciding what is attractive while viewing my own reflection in the pond. I'm a narcissist ....

But I am attracted to partial spectrumites none the less

Hope is one of my favourite singers