Timothy Bates wrote:
>
> 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".
>
There are alternate ways to define tall. Such as "taller than the tallest
woman" or "taller than the average height of a woman", neither of which
would lead to a tall arms race if the woman also refrain from getting stuck
in such a race.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:33:49 MDT