Evolutionary Psychology Question: Beauty in dangerous things

[Lusankya]

Righthandedness may be a product of increased manual dexterity and tool use, with one hand specializing in fine motor control and the other in holding onto things being manipulated by the dominant hand. It probably isn't that important which hand is dominant, just that one is, and whatever mechanism was at work wound up favoring the right. Most other species either do not have a dominant "hand", or, if they do, it seems which hand is dominant is a 50/50 chance through the whole species. The one exception I've heard of is parrots, many species who are predominantly lefthanded. Why, no one knows.

Well, when you're making tools, having one dominant hand across the whole species could be advantageous, because a tool that's made to fit the right hand doesn't necessarily work as well when you use it with the left hand. Think scissors. Or shields and weapons when used in formation.

[Edi]

Elephants actually have a handedness the same way humans do, but in them it manifests with the tusks. They usually prefer to use the tusk on one side more than the other, which is why you often see elephants with one tusk somewhat shorter than the other due to wear. And that's something I read about around 20 years ago.

[Junghalli]

As for earlobes - I think it's one of those things that didn't matter enough to get edited out of the gene pool. I can't see that they serve any real useful purpose, but they cause no harm, either.

Don't they help channel sound into the ear itself? Or are the acoustics wrong for that?

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

As for earlobes - I think it's one of those things that didn't matter enough to get edited out of the gene pool. I can't see that they serve any real useful purpose, but they cause no harm, either.

Don't they help channel sound into the ear itself? Or are the acoustics wrong for that?

The ears do. Those little fleshy lobes on the bottom of them? Not so much. They might help keep the ears warm, but otherwise, they appear to serve no discernible biological function.

[Broomstick]

They keep the ears warm? How in the hell could THAT work?

[TheLostVikings]

Righthandedness may be a product of increased manual dexterity and tool use, with one hand specializing in fine motor control and the other in holding onto things being manipulated by the dominant hand. It probably isn't that important which hand is dominant, just that one is, and whatever mechanism was at work wound up favoring the right. Most other species either do not have a dominant "hand", or, if they do, it seems which hand is dominant is a 50/50 chance through the whole species. The one exception I've heard of is parrots, many species who are predominantly lefthanded. Why, no one knows.

Well, when you're making tools, having one dominant hand across the whole species could be advantageous, because a tool that's made to fit the right hand doesn't necessarily work as well when you use it with the left hand. Think scissors. Or shields and weapons when used in formation.

Hmm the left hemisphere of the brain is (in the wast majority of people) the dominant part as far as language goes, and is also the one controlling the right arm. Maybe the right hand being more dexterous helped aid non-verbal communication as language was being formed, or some other such correlation?

[Akkleptos]

Tribal/pack/family members willing to seek out danger and learn about it may bring back information advantageous to the rest of the group, thereby helping to perpetuate their genes.

This is true. The drive to venture into the unknown and explore can offer a species a significant advantage in terms of new resources and vital space.

Personally what really puzzles me is the origins of the human tendency toward rampant self-deception, because that just seems so utterly maladaptive. Seriously, if you had two guys and one of them objectively weighed the evidence of whether a predator was stalking him or not but the other one ignored it because he didn't want to believe it, how in the blue hell did the first guy's lineage not outcompete the second guy's back in the dawn of human sapience?

That's an easy one: social adaptation. Though nobody has had the opportunity to test this in real life (no more real cavemen), it's almost sure that the scene you depict almost never happened (and when it did, it often led to the disappearance of the bearer of such genetic treats). The thing here is that an individual in a group has a strong motivation to fit in, to adopt the groups' views and cosmogony as his own. Social approval and acceptance often overweighs even one's own empyrical evidence, as we know full well in this forum where we frequently debate social and religious issues (and how people sometimes cling to indefensible positions even when confronted with hard evidence).

Beauty isn't defined on a per-animal basis; it would be impractical to encode that into the genome even if it was possible to do it on a neural level. Subjective impressions of beauty are generated by the weighted combination of a host of feature evaluators. Most of the selection pressure was focused on making this work for selection of mates, habitat and food sources.

It's like how you can admire a Great White Shark being shown in National Geographic. But if you're in the water with one, you're definitely not going to find anything pretty in it.

People can consider something beautiful and scary at the same time- that lions can kill you doesn't make them stop being pretty, and I don't think it's some artefact of modern civilisation that explains it or else people wouldn't have worshipped lions or snakes or hippos in egypt.

As to the beauty of predators, it is probably symbolic of qualities that people admire or emulate in other people. People are drawn to strong, capable physically fit humans. The archetypal strong warrior gets the devotion and admiration of his fellow men and the attention of the women. Now see enormously powerful big cats successfully bringing down large prey to feed their offspring, and you probably wouldn't be surprised to see spillover of the feelings people have for a successful tribe member projected onto the animal.

Again, nobody know these things for sure, but apparently humans have always -since we came to be- had a fascination for things that are perceived as powerful, strong, fast and dangerous. This might be because those became traits we admired in our own, and of course, we had to accept that in a one-on-one situation, before an unarmed human, most apex predators possesed these qualities in greater amounts. Thus, we wanted to be identified with them, to be like them. This is a very well-known concept in Anthropology, called Totemism. You know, not entirely unlike the warrior who eats the hearts of a wild beast to magically partake of its strength.

What evidence? People draw things for many reasons, certainly not just because they are beautiful. You can find spiders in "primitive people's" decorative art, too. Are "we" now supposed to find spiders beautiful? Some people may take issue with that...

Most spiders ARE beautiful. Maybe we're talking a personal bias here, hmm? Take the Black Widow (Latrodectus mactans), for example: its shape is highly-stylised, delicate and elegant in its lines. They're shiny like a well polished black shoe, and their locomotion consists of precise, well-measured movements.

There are other, very interesting views ont he origin of æsthetic appreciation in humans, like these ones that were recently featured in a Newsweek article.