Anyway, this morning as I was preparing for the heat, mostly by grumbling about how badly the piano needs tuning in this humidity, I started thinking about traits and how casually those are, not only discussed and talked about as if we really knew what they were and how they operated in nature but that a lot of "traits" are very likely artificial constructs that don't really exist.
When we are talking natural selection, the trait has to be related to success in leaving offspring and the numbers of offspring sharing the "trait". But, as I mentioned in passing yesterday, "traits" don't exist as separate Platonic forms having a perfect and discrete existence, though they're almost always talked about as if they do. "Traits" only exist in organisms along with other "traits" and not separately from them. Nor are they really able to be separated, especially whenever the issue of how the organism having them is being evaluated by some other organism is at issue. Since we're talking natural selection, that would be sex.
If there is one thing that the world-wide-web has done for us, it is to introduce us to how enormously diverse things that arouse people are. Things that one person finds repulsive is an absolute turn-on to other people. I mentioned tattoos the other day, something I doubt can be considered a biological "trait." If someone proposes a "tattoo gene" they deserve to be doused with ice water. Or, considering the day, Kool-aid. I won't go into those things that I find anything from unattractive to disgusting but which are natural tendencies that people can't do anything about. And, being Irish, I won't get into what I find alluring.
Consider a fetish widely, though far from universally, held in my youth, the fetish for blue eyes. In the early 60s, the "nordic" blond-haired-blue-eyed look was sold in a jillion ads, TV shows and movies. Well, blue eyes aren't all the same color, some are practically grey, some are distinctly blue, some are more blue-green. Do they all have the same attraction? And blue eyes are accompanied by different hair color. Blonde hair and blue eyes were presented as especially desirable but blue eyes are also common among people with red hair and are also known among people with very dark brown hair, among the many French Canadians around here with blue eyes, often described as black hair. Do blue eyes with different hair colors and different complexions have the same effect on people who see them? Never mind skin color, body confirmation, and other visible "traits" that accompany them? And that's not to mention the matter of how the person with the blue eyes acts. The same color of blue eyes that might seem sweet and endearing in one person on one day, when they are kind an generous, can seem cold and forbidding in another person or in the same person when they're having a bad day. I've known men who were really good looking, who had blue eyes but who I'd never want to be in the same room with. Though, in most cases it was the blue eyes in blonde women that were the focus of attention. And it was seldom considered how they saw things. As the great expert, Mae West said, "Gentlemen may prefer blonds but who said blondes prefer gentlemen?" I don't know what color Mae's eyes were because I only ever saw her in glorious black and white, back when my eyes were good enough to discern that kind of thing.
Even for the limited issue of wanting to have sex with someone in order to have children, does it really make any sense to consider a trait called "blue-eyed" A"thing" that can be talked of as having a general role in reproductive advantage? I'd guess that you'd have to come up with some kind of extremely detailed census of people with "blue eyes" and see how many offspring they had and how successful their offspring were, accounting for possible variable effects of accompanying and varied "traits." Has that ever been done? Once? Oh, and, to come to some conclusion that it was a "selective" advantage or disadvantage, you'd have to compare those for people with "brown eyes" and the even more varied "hazel eyes" accounting for some of those being called "grey" and some "green" and, as someone said as they were trying to define my eye-color "just weird". It was in my Bio-Anthropology class, an assignment. He had no erotic motives. Thank heavens.
So, while your eye-color is verified as being a matter of genetic inheritance, to talk about its "reproductive advantage" is anything from unfounded to premature to absurd. So often that and as many traits as someone wants to talk about in terms of evolutionary role is an insoluble problem knowledge of which is foolishly believed to be in hand and ready for a paper or, worse, a magazine article or story on NPR. There will be a Just-so story as well. How they polled Paleolithic folks on the eye-color issue will not be asked.
I can report that in my youth there was a guy who expressed an interest in me who I found enormously attractive, a successful lawyer. That was until I found out he'd campaigned for Nixon in 1960. Turned him into an instant troll for me.
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