From: Timothy Bates (tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au)
Date: Sat Jul 01 2000 - 20:30:20 MDT
On 7/2/00 11:08 AM, "Zero Powers" <zero_powers@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> From: Carl de Visser <devisser@ihug.co.nz>
>
>>> The perfect human would be:
>>> -strong
>>> -tall
>>
>> Where do you get tall from? Being tall myself I appreciate the compliment,
>> but why is tall useful? Not good for space travel, for that matter it
>> keeps air travel expensive.
>
> Tallness is valuable from a military and aesthetic perspective. Most
> females are more drawn to tall ("dark and handsome" too) males than they are
> to shorter males. To them it probably just looks better. But
> evolutionarily speaking a tall man would probably have been a better
> defender of hearth and home than a short guy. Millions of years of
> evolutionary training is hard to ignore, even when the lessons it teaches
> have been largely rendered irrelenant.
Ummm ... Read Richard Dawkins about the "tall" arms race.
Tall is not a quantity, it is a relative quantity: taller than your
conspecifics.
If the perfect human is tall ("because he gets the girls"), you will rapidly
have half-mile high humans.
Life is trade offs. We cannot, logically, all be tall. Therefore, we cannot
be "perfect".
Tim
____________________
Day was departing, and the darkening air
Called all earth's creatures to their evening quiet
While I alone was preparing as though for war...
-- The Inferno of Dante, Canto II
Dr Timothy Bates
Dept Psychology
Macquarie University
Sydney NSW 2109
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