Beauty, beholders and there's one born every minute

Sucker, that is.

It's funny. Someone posted a comment on the last post alluding to fact that I had been suckered by the media for finding people like Isabelle Adjani beautiful, ie the media tell you they are beautiful and you just go along for the ride. And was I being sexist? Not just by choosing all women (I am heterosexual after all and would find a Valentine's day card from a man not a little disconcerting) but by focusing on their 'beauty', which as we all know is only skin deep, I was seeing them as objects (sex or otherwise) not as people with their own virtues and vices.

Now I don't think I'm so shallow as to ignore the fact that people are people irrespective of what they look like (hell, I should know) and beauty or lack of it in a conventional, socially agreed way does not determine the value of someone but that list wasn't composed of people, real people, it was composed of ciphers, representations of something, not the something itself, although the name of the cipher and the name of the thing are the same to aid comprehension.

Now I know that this sounds just as demeaning as treating them as 'objects' but it isn't. What was the purpose of the list? To 'bemoan' the fact that no-one sent me a Valentine's day card! :( Not even as a joke :( A way of garnering a bit second hand sympathy :) A little cyber compassion for a lonely soul with no love and no-one to love :) It's ok, you can put the hankie away now. :) Now I could have given a list of real people, people that perhaps I might actually like to get a card from but the chances of anyone recognising them is marginal, so I chose names from a list of the 'usual suspects'. Having said that, I do consider the three Isabelle(a)s to be genuinely beautiful in the way that the 'Madonna on the rocks' is beautiful. I don't need to understand it. In the same way that I don't have to have a relationship with them, know them as people, just sometimes looking at beauty is food for the soul.

Pfeiffer and Jolie are first in the list as a pointer to where the list 'is going' just in case no-one recognises the three 'I's. So yes, in one sense they are there because they are deemed by all and sundry to be beautiful. I might even be persuaded that I was suckered by the media over Isabella Rosselini, who I encountered as a testosterone fuelled teenager, but Adjani and Huppert? No, they come from a wee affair with French cinema in my youth when no-one here even knew who they were :)

It's funny what you turn up in those idle hours when you can't sleep, can't make a noise because it's 3am but you want to do something, anything. I was doing a little reading around on Wiki about evolutionary psychology when I ran into a research paper on why post natal depression might actually be a positive evolutionary adaptation. Now I suppose to anyone who's had it or knows someone that's had it, that might sound a little weird but the argument is along the same lines as 'fever is a positive adaptation'. 'Boil' the germs to get rid of them!

The idea goes something like this. Parents invest a considerable amount in their offspring, mothers especially. As a result, there is a 'weighing up' process which tries to work out whether the investment in this particular offspring is actually worth the benefit, ie will this offspring survive to produce offspring of its own and thus perpetuate the mother's genes. This of course is not a conscious process.

PND is often found when the pregnancy or delivery have been difficult, where the baby is sub-optimal or where the mother has doubts about the level of investment she can expect from the father. So, the theory goes, the mother engages in a 'strategy' designed to elicit more support from other members of the group to reduce the cost to herself and thus increase both her chances of survival and that of her offspring. She effectively threatens to 'defect' from her responsibilies to gain what she needs.

As I have said this is not a conscious thing but a lot of work has been done over the last twenty or thirty years in 'game theory' on what are known as evolutionary stable strategies. What has been shown is that quite complex behaviours can evolve without any thought being given to them by the individual, decisions happen autonomically. Take 'Tit for Tat'. This is a behaviour like 'If I am nice to you, I expect the same and vice versa or else!' which is quite simple, I think, to naturally occur in a social group. Once it arrives on the scene, it proves enormously successful and is very resistant to 'cheats'.

In the case of social monkeys or apes it succeeds because these animals rely on mutual grooming for both parasite control and to reinforce bonds within the group. It is however expensive because you are not grooming yourself but others. However any animal which tries to 'defect', ie doesn't return the grooming favour, doesn't get groomed and so ends up having to co-operate in order to get groomed. In this way the strategy remains stable.

So perhaps it is possible that what seems to be a debilitating and traumatic condition might actually enhance a female's reproductive success by providing the support she needs at a crucial time. I mean if evolution can come up with a blog writing penguin..........