#579 - Is Evolutionary Psychology Wrong About Beauty? With Richard Prum
The Tai Lopez Show
Tai Lopez
4.8 • 6.9K Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2020
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“Beauty can function somewhat like an irrationally exuberant market bubble” - Richard Prum
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The evolutionary view of beauty has traditionally been that humans evolved a sense of what was beautiful based on practically. We’re often taught that things like the waist to hip ratio are a long-ingrained sign of fertility to men, which is why we find them attractive.
My guest today, Richard Prum, has a different view. He says that beauty can be viewed more as an “irrationally exuberant financial market bubble.” In other words, it’s not so cut and dry, and natural selection has led each of us, within our own cultures, to develop a sense of what we consider attractive, not dependent on the practicality of evolutionary considerations.
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“Beauty is a social contrivance. It’s invented by us” - Richard Prum
(click to tweet)
Points to Keep In Mind
- Certain aspects of science seem to be completely unexplainable
- Beauty can function somewhat like an irrationally exuberant market bubble
- Beauty is a social contrivance. It’s invented by us
- Humans are evolved to be satisfied, and to find satisfying relationships
- The evolutionary idea of beauty being practical neglects some of the concepts of natural selection in the human animal
- In society, it could be argued that it is actually women who are defining the idea of beauty more than men
- The idea of machismo and dominance as the core of attraction is deeply flawed and a cause of unhappiness
- Get in touch with the idea of what it means to be really caring for your partner
- Human diversity is a result of the diversity of mate-choice, therefore standards of beauty can be far different across cultures
- The men who are most attractive tend to be socially attentive
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You look at some of these archetypes of what women like nowadays. I think men, we have to learn that you |
| 0:06.3 | got to be able to turn it on and turn it off a little bit, your macho. |
| 0:19.7 | Okay, welcome to today's podcast, radio episode, The Thai Lopez Show. I've got a special guest. |
| 0:21.6 | I ran into his book somewhere in my all my book collecting the |
| 0:26.8 | evolution of beauty Richard Prum and he was gracious enough to join us. We're |
| 0:32.1 | going to be talking about a very interesting |
| 0:33.4 | subject. So one of the most common questions I've tweeted about this and he |
| 0:38.7 | always gets people riled up is should you date and marry for beauty, for looks, or for personality. |
| 0:47.0 | And I've read your book one and a half times, and so he, Richard has a very interesting take on this now Dr David Bus has been on my |
| 0:59.8 | show a few times and he is more of a classic evolutionary psychologist and you have somewhat |
| 1:06.7 | of a disruptive conversation. |
| 1:08.8 | So by the way my grandma went to Yale so by the way Richard is a professor at Yale. You do what? Is it the |
| 1:17.4 | ornithology? Yeah, I'm a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology but |
| 1:21.7 | really I'm a ornithologist which is a bird guy. |
| 1:25.0 | Bird guy and if you know anything about evolution a lot of it. |
| 1:30.0 | Darwin talked a lot about you, the peacocks plume and all this kind of stuff. |
| 1:36.3 | So birds played a big role in us understanding. |
| 1:38.7 | So I want to jump right into it even before we go live here. |
| 1:45.8 | Why is it so hard for people to accept theories of beauty? |
| 1:52.0 | Like you talk about in your book, |
| 1:54.0 | you're not the most popular person with this theory. |
| 1:56.5 | Is it because not many people are pretty? |
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