FOR INSTANCE, MY NIGGAZ, YOU GUYS ARE PARTICULARLY ATTRACTED TO AND GET REALLY AROUSED BY SISTAS THAT LOOK LIKE THIS:
Europeans have departed from the species norm of black hair and brown eyes by evolving a wide range of bright hair and eye colors. What is the selective advantage of these new hues? Or are they merely a side effect of something else?
I’ve argued that these new colors were selected for … their newness and colorfulness. To be precise, their selective advantage lay in their novelty and brightness. These eye-catching qualities enabled women to improve their mating prospects at a time when the operational sex ratio was skewed toward a female surplus and a male shortage.
This is the logic of advertising. Visual merchandising matters most in saturated,
highly competitive markets that offer too many interesting choices (Lea-Greenwood, 1998; Oakley, 1990). Such a context rewards products that stand out because of their bright or novel look, as seen in colors for home interiors. This market has grown more competitive over the past half-century, and the novelty factor has correspondingly grown more important: preference for one paint color rises until satiated, then falls and yields to preference for another (Stansfield & Whitfield, 2005).
In the natural world, and under conditions of intense sexual selection, this same logic leads to a color polymorphism. A new color appears through mutation and spreads through the population until it is as common as the established color. This equilibrium will then last until another color variant appears. The total number of colors thus grows over time.
This aspect of sexual selection can be demonstrated under controlled conditions. In an American study, male participants were shown pictures of attractive brunettes and blondes and asked to choose, for each series, the woman they would most like to marry. One series had equal numbers of brunettes and blondes, a second series 1 brunette for every 5 blondes, and a third series 1 brunette for every 11 blondes. Result: the scarcer the brunettes were in a series, the likelier any one of them would be chosen (Thelen, 1983).
Male preference for female hair color seems to be frequency-dependent. The less common a hair color becomes, the more it is preferred. When male subjects are presented with a series of photos showing blondes and brunettes, preference for any one brunette is inversely proportional to the number of brunettes in the series (Thelen, 1983). This frequency dependence may explain why blonde hair is less strongly preferred in England than in France.
England is, however, somewhat fairer generally than most parts of Europe; so that, while it may be said that a very beautiful woman in France or Spain may belong to the blondest section of the community, a very beautiful woman in England, even though of the same degree of blondness as her Continental sister, will not belong to the extremely blonde section of the English community. (Ellis, 2007[1905], p. 160)
Hair color is normally a minor factor when men select mates. It becomes a major factor only when the level of sexual selection is intense, like the situation of a movie producer who has to choose one actress from a number of excellent candidates. Under such conditions, relatively unimportant factors can make a big difference, especially those that can attract and retain attention.
I’ve argued that such conditions once prevailed among ancestral Europeans, specifically European women (Frost, 1994, 2006, 2008). One result was an ever broader range of eye and hair colors. Whenever a new color appeared through mutation, it would be favored by sexual selection until it had become as frequent as the other colors. Although the pressure of sexual selection was on women, these changes in physical appearance spilled over on to men, thereby creating a new phenotype in both sexes.
A recent paper has confirmed that European eye color diversified through some kind of selection pressure, and not random factors like genetic drift or founder effects. Blue-eye alleles show a very strong signal of selection (Donnelly et al., 2012). Another study, however, has failed to find any preference for blue eyes over other colors, an indication that all eye colors are at selective equilibrium, at least for the German population under study. This finding may be related to the already high frequency of blue eyes in that population:
Perhaps the frequency of eye colors plays a role. In most countries, blue eyes are less prevalent than other eye colors and may have the image of something special and more valuable. If this assumption is true, brown eyes should be preferred in countries where the majority of the population has blue eyes. (Gründl et al, 2012).
In this case, sexual selection is frequency-dependent, shifting to whichever eye color is least frequent. Eventually, an equilibrium is reached where color novelty is in balance with other characteristics, such as color brightness, that may increase sexual attractiveness.
This last finding shows the opportunistic nature of sexual selection. When too many of one sex have to compete for mating opportunities with too few of the other sex, there will be selection for any traits that increase mating success. In many cases, these traits will hyperstimulate a mental algorithm that is used for sex recognition. In other cases, hyperstimulation will simply involve use of bright or novel colors that can better engage visual attention and remain longer in memory.
Long silky hair isn’t universal in our species. It exists only in those humans who are native to temperate and arctic regions or in those whose ancestors have back-migrated to the tropics, i.e., tropical Amerindians and Austronesians. Darwin noted “the extraordinary difference in the length of the hair in the different races; in the negro the hair forms a mere curly mat; with us it is of great length, and with the American natives it not rarely reaches to the ground” (Darwin, 1936 [1888], p. 906).
If long silky hair evolved outside the tropics, it must have appeared after ancestral humans had begun to spread out of Africa, some 50 thousand years ago. This point is lost on many paleoanthropologists who attribute this evolutionary change to much earlier events, like the discovery of fire or even a hypothetical aquatic phase of our hominid past.
Whatever the initial cause, there is a consensus, going back to Charles Darwin, that long silky hair is primarily ornamental and due to sexual selection: “we know that long tresses are now and were formerly much admired, as may be observed in the works of almost every poet; St. Paul says, “if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her” (Darwin, 1936 [1888], p. 906). This view was part of his more general one that “the differences between the races of man, as in colour, hairiness, form of features, &c., are of a kind which might have been expected to come under the influence of sexual selection” (Darwin, 1936 [1888], p. 556).
Darwin believed that sexual selection produced physical differences among human populations through differing notions of beauty. He even raised the possibility that “each race would possess its own innate ideal standard of beauty” (Darwin, 1936 [1888], p. 890). An alternate view, which I favor, is that innate notions of beauty are similar in all humans. To the extent that physical differences among human populations are due to sexual selection, the reason is that this selection pressure has been stronger in some populations than in others (Frost, 2008).
Why, then, did head hear grow longer as humans left the tropics?
As ancestral humans spread out of the tropics, women found it harder to gather food during the cold season and had to rely more on men to get food for themselves and their children. Polygyny accordingly became costlier for men, with the result that only the ablest hunters could take additional wives. At the same time, men had to roam over larger hunting territories because the density of wildlife was lower. Hunting-related mortality thus rose among young men.
For these two reasons—less polygyny and higher male mortality—the non-tropical zone tended to have a lower ratio of men to women on the mate market. More women had to compete for fewer available men, thus shifting the pressure of sexual selection from the latter to the former. The situation was not unlike that of actresses lining up for a part in a Hollywood movie. When all of the candidates seem perfect for the job, even little details can make a big difference.
One of those details was head hair. Men do notice long silky hair, if only as a visual input for recognition of women or infants, and such noticeability may be a dealmaker in a mate market where women are in excess supply. In such ancestral environments, head hair would have grown longer and longer with each generation.
First of all, let's ditch the idea that beauty is subjective. It's not. Studies have shown that even babies prefer attractive faces, so these preferences seem to be virtually hardwired into us - so much so that when hooked up to electrodes, people looking at beautiful female faces generated an extra electrical charge. And surveys show that there is strong agreement about whom people find attractive. Interestingly, composite pictures melding numerous faces always outscore individual faces in attractiveness and become more attractive the more faces you include, for the simple reason that a more symmetrical face is the result. As we've already seen with the female orgasm, we're big fans - albeit unwittingly - of symmetricality. Understanding why reveals the excellent evolutionary reasons for the way our desires have been shaped. In this case, being symmetrical is an excellent proxy for our general health. And how symmetrical you are is an excellent sign not just of how healthy you are now but also how healthy you have always been, since asymmetries tend to occur because of disease or illness during our fetal and childhood development. Hair is another good indicator, which helps explain the vast array of products directed at creating better-looking hair. Long, lustrous hair signals an equally long and robust good health. Skin acts as a similar signpost of health.
http://www.askabiologist.org.uk/answers/viewtopic.php?id=3782
THE REDNESS
"GEL~N~WEAVE, GEL~N~WEAVE" - FAT PAT!
Men in general prefer women with long hair. And most young women choose to grow their hair long. Once again, men’s preference for women with long hair is the reason for women’s preference to grow their hair long. The question then is: Why do men prefer women with long hair?
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How can men assess the health of their potential mates? There were no clinics in the ancestral environment; ancestral men had to judge women’s health by themselves. One accurate indicator of health is physical attractiveness, and this is the reason why men like beautiful women, as I mention in a previous post. Another good indicator of health is hair. Healthy people (men and women) have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of sickly people loses its luster. During illness, a body needs to sequester all available nutrients (like iron and protein) to fight the illness. Since hair is not essential to survival (compared to, say, bone marrow), hair is the first place to which a body turns to collect the necessary nutrients. Thus, a person’s poor health first shows up in the condition of the hair.
Further, hair grows very slowly, at about six inches per year. That means that if a woman has shoulder-length hair (two feet long), it accurately indicates her health status for the past four years, because once the hair grows there is nothing the bearer can do to change its appearance later. A woman might be healthy now, but if she was sick sometime in the past four years, her long hair would indicate her past sickly status. And there was nothing a woman could do in the ancestral environment to make her hair appear healthy and lustrous when she was not healthy. This is also why older women tend to keep their hair short, because they tend to become less healthy as they grow older, and they do not want telltale signs of their current health status hanging from their heads.
Anthony Marshall 
Humans lost their body hair, they say, to free themselves of external parasites that infest fur -- blood-sucking lice, fleas and ticks and the diseases they spread.
Why, then, do women want to look like blonde bombshells? Evolutionary psychology suggests that it is because men want to mate with women who look like them. Women’s desire to look like them is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to this desire of men. This simply leads to another question: Why do men want to mate with women who look like them? Because women who look like them have higher reproductive value and fertility and attain greater reproductive success on average. There is nothing arbitrary about the image of ideal female beauty; it has been precisely and carefully calculated by millions of years of evolution by sexual selection. Men today want to mate with women who look like blonde bombshells, and, as a result, women want to look like them, because our ancestral men who did not want to mate with women who looked like them did not leave as many offspring as those who did.
Let’s take a closer look at exactly what I mean by “blonde bombshells.” Note, first, that there has been a long line of blonde bombshells in the Western media: Pamela Anderson, Jordan, Madonna, Brigitte Bardot, Jayne Mansfield, all the way back to the iconic Marilyn Monroe and even further back in history. And there are numerous contemporary examples as well: Jessica Simpson, Cameron Diaz, Scarlett Johansson, among many others. Readers from non-Western societies can suitably substitute representatives of female beauty from their own cultures. I do not know who they are, but I can nonetheless be confident that they share many of the features with their Western counterparts.
It turns out that men prefer blonde hair for exactly the same reason that they prefer large breasts: both are accurate indicators of a woman’s age and thus reproductive value.
What distinguishes blonde hair from all other hair colors is that it changes dramatically with age. Young girls with light blonde hair usually grow up to be women with brown hair (although there are a very few women who retain their light blonde hair into adulthood). Thus, if men prefer to mate with women with blonde hair, they are unconsciously attempting to mate with younger (and hence, on average, healthier and more fecund) women with greater reproductive value and fertility. It is no coincidence that blonde hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, where it is very cold in winter. In Africa, where our ancestors evolved for most of their evolutionary history, people (men and women) mostly stayed naked. In such an environment, men could accurately assess a woman’s age by the distribution of fat on her body or by the firmness of her breasts (as I discuss in a previous post). Men in cold climates did not have this option, because women (and men) bundled up in such environments. This is probably why blonde hair evolved in cold climates as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth. Men then evolved a predisposition to prefer to mate with women with blonde hair in response; those who did on average had greater reproductive success than those who did not, because, unbeknownst to them, they ended up mating with younger, healthier women with greater reproductive value and fertility.
"I B Tippin' Thru The Mall In La Jolla And Get Action From Blonde Haired, Blue-Eyed, Bigg Butt Lawyers!" - Mitch!
"Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes...She Comin' Home Wit Me!" - Silky Slim The MothaFuccin' Pimp
The Lat-Tina To The Right Got One Of Them BIG Mayan Heads. You Know, Like Them Mayan Statues Of Just The Head!
Think of the typical ideal for a man's face - a large, square, "manly" jaw and chin. This ideal is so dominant that it is almost a visual cliche in our culture, and you would be hard-pressed to find a Hollywood leading man who doesn't have that look. It turns out that women's preferences for that particular face is not merely some arbitrary aesthetic whim. You need a lot of testosterone during puberty to produce a face like that. The problem is that testosterone also suppresses the immune system and makes a young man more vulnerable to disease, so the ability to have such a face serves as a high cost signal of genetic fitness . Only extremely fit individuals can afford that face and remain disease free.
Women have their own bodily signals. For instance, there is a very good reason men prefer full lips and why someone like Angelina Jolie is almost freakishly genetically fit. Although not a high-cost signal, those full lips require a woman to be hyperfeminine - at least when it comes to sex hormones. During puberty, the woman must experience both a surge of estrogen and a low level of testosterone. This also will give her a shorter, lower face, which will further feminize her look...
Deconding Love: Why It Takes Twelve Frogs to Find a Prince, and Other Revelations from the Science of Attraction. Trees, p. 78-80.
