Question about evolution?

Question

I do not intend to be offensive here but why do some human's still possess unfavourable characteristics such as unattractiveness, low intellegence and shyness when they bear no evolutionary advantage whatsoever. i.e. why are they still in the human gene pool?

Answer 1

There can be multiple reasons:

- What is considered atttractive has changed over the years.

- All of the characteristics you mention don't necessarily show a strong likelihood of being inherited. For instance, I heard about a study recently that concluded that a child of two very attracive parents was likely to be not nearly as attractive as the parents. Likewise, there's no reason why smart parents won't have a dumb kid. Look at any family with a lot of kids - you usually see a wide variety of capability and skills in the kids.

- Love is blind. (I know not very technical, but...) We've all seen that couple where we wonder to ourselves, "What is she doing with *him*?" or vice versa.

- Related to that are things like the fact that some women like bald men. Some guys like fat women. Etc..

Answer 2

Well, I think my dear comrade, that people who have those characteristics have been reproducing, and so pass their genes on to the next generataion, and by doing so, their unfavorable characteristics are added to the gene pool.

Evolution does not make any secret of it's lack of a quality controller. The collective rules as those by which my fellow organisms and I evolve are not regulated by any factory supervisor, and are not approved by any governmental agency.

Natural selection only weeds out the defected or unfavourable characteristics by means of dead end adaptations or adaptations that are not fit or characteristics that do not increase the overall fitness of the organism, by which would reduce the organism's survival chances and thus releiving the gene pool of the characteristic.

Ugly, stupid and obsessive compulsive people just happen to be, altough not up to your standards of fitness, fit enough to reproduce, by being able to attract mates. So, to answer your question, although these people may not be Babe, they happen to have other characteristics that do get them in the sack often enough to reproduce.

Answer 3

I think that people have different standards. What is appealing to some would be appalling to others. There is an advantage to a society to have different skill sets. If everyone was an Einstein, who would do the menial tasks that society requires. Shyness is a great feature in a mate that you don't want to stray and it can keep you from offending more dangerous aggressive people.(Probably not such a problem today.)

Answer 4

Variation exists as something that evolution CAN act on. That doesn't mean that it does...

There are people who like 'dumb blondes', so these people have babies, - continuing this characteristic (dumbness, since most blonde comes from a bottle).

And, since there is no limit to what some person somewhere will find attractive, ugliness is not really acted on by evolutionary forces.

Answer 5

The process of natural selection doesn't weed out all undesirable traits, it merely allows desirable traits to be propagated more extensively. Humans evolved to have larger brains (pound for pound) and therefore higher cognitive capacity, among other things. That allowed them to stay alive long enough to reproduce. The undesirable traits were passed on along with the desirable ones.

Answer 6

its called the gene defect or not able to get genetical variation. to avercome this factor you need alots of meditation