Not only that, but even the very best of us are miserable failures at facial structure recognition. We can become almost unbelievably good at it through training, but in the absence of training we’re only very slightly better at it than we are at unassisted levitation. I’m sure there’s an online test if you want to find out just how bad at it you are.
Point is if they were real faces, they’d still look all the same to us.
Ahah, looks like that population genetics course paid off!
Seriously though, besides some obvious “deviances” humans tend to be rather similar in terms of facial structure and general phenotype, it’s only on modern civilizations, with multicultural societies, that we get to see such a large variety; more, with the constant crossing of different phenotypes in a couple of centuries we’ll all share pretty much the same phenotype and will look even more like each other.
Scrax
2023
But will there be chest hair?
Supposedly not. Seems the Beornlings like me will get extinct some time in the future. sadface
Scrax
2026
Well shoot, I suppose they can mod it in like in Dragon Age ;).
Jeez, those dudes are hairy (and I speak as a rather hirsute fellow myself–I have chest hair, and from the navel down, and hairy legs). Number 2 is practically an ape.
What the heck’s a Beornling?
Beornling or Beorning: basically the tribe of Beorn, a really hirsute guy from a tribe of dudes who shape-shift into bears; from Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”.
Yeah, if only someone would invent the razor. Oh wait… :p
They’re JRR Tolkien’s take on skinwalkers/werebears. Hairy viking’ish guys by day, bears by night.
Shaving (or not) has nothing to do with hirsutism; as for it becoming increasingly rare and vanishing altogether, well, it’s inevitable, it’s part of our evolutionary legacy and as we continue to evolve and don’t need it for protection/warmth it will get thrown out of the gene pool. Sadly. :P
Blips
2032
I don’t think you understand how evolution works. Now on the other hand, it could be bred out through sexual selection.
No single factor can be assigned to the loss of hair in human evolution, it’s rather a combination of factors, including weather adaptation, diet, cultural factors (which impact partner selection), etc.
But thanks for telling me I don’t understand it and pointing out one of the least important evolutionary triggers.
Blips
2034
What’s the difference between partner selection and sexual selection? They sound like two different words for the same concept.
But I’m curious about how you think our modern diet and comfortable living conditions (in developed nations at least) are going to eliminate beards from people.
Am I seriously seeing this argument? This is just my imagination, right? I’m pretty sure it is. Silly imagination!
I won’t claim anything that could be called understanding, still… Why wouldn’t sexual selection be the primary factor in eliminating the kind of gross furriness most people consider a medical condition?
I mean, monopolies on violence keeps us fairly safe from each other, and technology keeps us even safer from pretty much everything else. What does that leave?
I’ll try to be brief: human change is gradual, on the scale of millions of years; however, the average phenotype, basically how each one of us looks from skin tone to hair type and how hirsute we are, is influenced by our genetic ancestors and can change radically in just a few generations.
Now, in human evolution the main forces for evolutionary change are adaptation to environment - survival (aka fitness) - reproduction; however, modern humans are tricky when compared to other animals because while we can provide in a rather straightforward manner for our survival (feeding and shelter) we are highly variable in our reproductive behaviour (from not reproducing at all to having multiple partners, etc).
Now, back to the hirsutism;
- Can it be bred out of the human gene pool? Sure, but it would be very difficult to occur naturally and the only possible way to ensure it would be through a massive (planetary) eugenic program.
- Can it naturally (via the other evolutionary forces) disappear from our gene pool? Sure, but it would take X millions of years or a mass extinction event that would only leave the hairless as survivors.
So, in short, it’s “easy” for a population to change it’s phenotype and, say, only produce hairless, blonde, green eye individuals but the conditions required (strict breeding) are very uncommon (to say the least) and not compatible with modern multicultural civilizations. Faced with that, it’s natural that non-fit traits, if we consider hirsutism one (which I don’t), will eventually disappear, over the course of millennia. I can link you a couple of articles regarding non-sexual-based genetic evolution currently happening and being researched, if you want.
Also, Blips, biologically speaking partner selection is the choice to breed with either one or multiple partners, sexual selection is the underlying process behind partner selection.
Sorry for being such a bore, we really shouldn’t be discussing this in a Skyrim thread anyway.
No it won’t.
Environmental conditions have nothing to do with the gene pool in the developed world.
