The story of love, Part II : Beauty or Brains?

[Read PartI: The Origins]

"you know my hips don't lie"
- shakira

Not so long ago, whilst enjoying a gelato, I was posed a difficult question by two female friends, "So karthik tell me, what do you look for in a woman - Beauty or Brains?". Any man who poses to be rational would give the obvious answer - "Brains, of course!" and I replied no differently. But then it wasn't as phony as it might sound, at least looking at the history of females I fell for. In hindsight, I would say the question is not as simple to answer.

What is the common gripe of women against men?, "men..men...men, idiots are total suckers for beauty. It doesn't matter how stupid the female is, all they care is how pretty she is, aaaargh!". Are these just proverbial complaints or do they have an element of truth? of course, they do, we all know that. Beauty is a necessity while brains is just a bonus. If you ask a man, who has recently fallen in love, what he has seen in the woman he loves? What would be the likely set of answers? "dude, she is intelligent", "it's her attitude", "it's her innocence", "it's her friendliness", "she's homely" and all that crap. No one truly admits the real reason - that the guy finds her beautiful and the rest niceties are all just added bonuses. If the guy doesn't find the girl beautiful, no matter what other goodies he sees in her, he won't fall in love with her.

What is beauty? has the definition of beauty been consistent over the generations, over the different races, over the people from the same region, or for that matter, has it been consistent for the same guy as he ages? The answer is no, we all know "beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder". As a teen, I used to wonder why Naomi Campbell is considered pretty. If you are fat, you cannot be a heroine in Bollywood, but I've heard and observed heroines getting intentionally fat for fame in the tamil movie industry (the trend, may be, is on the decline). If a size-zero supermodel comes to me and asks me to marry her (it's my bloody blog and I will imagine only those hypothetical situations that will please me) ,I would first ask her to eat properly. Historians say at one time, the western world considered fat women to be beautiful (not fat fat of course). May be the painting(and many such Victorian/roman era paintings), by titian circa 1550 AD, might prove that. Whereas the sculptures in medieval India (especially temples from tamilnadu) show goddesses having slim figures. European women like to bathe in the sun, Indian women like to run away from the sun - both to be in accordance to the standards of beauty currently in vogue, in their respective countries. To cut short a long story, the perception of beauty changes from man to man, race to race, generation to generation. Your perception of beauty changes with the kind of people you grow up with, kind of women you've been seeing around, or, in other words, beauty is nurtured. If I were raised in the US, may be, I would have been running after the size-zero ones, if I had been raised in tamilnadu (of yesteryears), I would have been running after plump ones. So, is there no idea of beauty ingrained in my genes? a concept that I was born with? Yes, there is such a concept. As usual, evolution holds the key.

The idea of beauty, that a man is born with, in his genes is........the immensely popular.......36-24-36 hour-glass figure with a round arse/buttocks. Of course, we are not born with those numbers but we are born to appreciate and admire the ratio, of bust/waist/hip. The measurement itself is not important but the ratio is - A big bust, slim waist and a hip wider when compared with the waist. This standard of beauty has been pretty much consistent over the generations, races and individuals. Most of the traditional clothes, be it a saree or a victorian era ball gown or a womens cut tee-shirt, try and accentuate this ratio. The hour glass figure, is pretty much liked by every man on this planet. And when something is consistent and common over the entire human population, you have got to suspect it's evolution. Let's take a bottom-up approach (pun intended). The hips- men swoon over when shakira, with the utmost ease, shakes, and does wonders with her hips. Unfortunately, we can only speculate why men evolved to appreciate a wide hip. The popular theory is that, a wider hip might have fooled men into thinking that the woman's pelvic bone is large (read my earlier post) and hence his baby is safe. It means we are still fools, our brains are hardwired to like wide hips. Men are obsessed with breasts, they really are. Ninth grade science textbook teaches you breasts are secondary sexual organs - meaning they help a woman in attracting a mate. Breasts, definitely do serve the purpose, but it has got to have a reason. When humans, thousands of years ago, still walked on fours, the act of sexual intercourse was performed only with the man penetrating the woman from behind(yes, doggy) and not in the face-to-face way. Because of the 'behind' penetration, a secondary sexual organ had to be behind a woman's body - the arse. We still have those instincts in us and hence we(men) find the arse an integral factor in assessing a woman's sexiness. After we became bipeds, watching the other gender (and penetrating them) became a more open-chested like. So now, the secondary sexual organ had to be in the front side, and breasts took over the role (This transition is evident if you observe chimps and gorillas where breasts seem to have no other purpose other than to give milk to the baby apes). So, breasts became the secondary sexual organs, but why breasts, that once were just milk ducts? Why not ears, or why not the waist become differently shaped? Either you believe something had to change and breasts were chosen or think more and say it had to have a reason. There are multiple theories but I can only remember one, the one which always catches my imagination - the one which says men are fools. The theory says, men were fooled into thinking that larger breasts mean more milk for his baby! Until I read about this theory, I thought a larger breast could indeed store more milk than a smaller one. Hence proved, men are fools! Coming to the last one, the question of why a slim waist?(as i said before, it's not the measurement that is important but the ratio. by a slim waist I mean, slimmer compared to the hip) May be a slimmer waist just helped to show how wide the hip is, may be.

I've written what a man finds attractive in a woman and why. I've tried to define beauty from a man's point of view. I said a man has to find a woman beautiful before he falls in love with her. There is still one question left unanswered - Why does a man have to find a woman beautiful? why doesn't a man share his life with the first woman that comes in his path? why does he have to be choosy - by assessing her beauty? Like I said earlier, a man finds attractive in a woman those attributes/characteristics that would help his baby. This also answers the current question, he wants a beautiful wife because his idea of beauty(that has been etched into his brain) is beneficial for his unborn baby. Why does he (or his brain) care about an unborn child so much so that he bases his entire perception of beauty on what he thinks would be great for that child? As I wrote in my earlier post, every species evolves such that its genes are well preserved into the next generation, that is why. Why is this not observed in other species - during their mating season, a peacock mates with any peahen that chooses him, a bullock will mate with any cow, a male lion will mate with any set of female lions that join his harem. Then why this extraordinary pressure on female humans to be beautiful, why human males are choosy? Love and its origins have the answers. Since humans share their entire lives with a single partner, he has to be choosy, he has only one shot at fathering a healthy set of babies because he will have those babies with only one partner. Whereas, in species that have a no concept of marriage, the males have multiples shots at becoming father to babies from multiple females - in such a case it doesn't make sense to be choosy, it makes sense to mate as much as possible to spread the male's genes. So in other species, where males need not be choosy and selective, the females are under no pressure to be beautiful.

Richard Dawkins, in his book 'The Selfish Gene', writes how we are all just slaves of our genes. Our entire existence is just to satisfy the whims of those genes. But we do have free-will, something that gives us the strength of acting against our primal instincts. Matt Ridley, in his book 'Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters', writes how, even free-will is just an illusion created by genes and we are never actually free (much like the premise of the movie, The Matrix). In a hypothetical situation, suppose you can choose to either lie(and get away) or speak the truth(and give some explanation). It might seem you have a choice, but in reality you don't, the outcome has already been decided by your genes. In the future, when the human genome is perfectly decoded, it could be possible to know what exactly you would do in a particular well-defined situation. The movie 'Gattaca' has a storyline similar to this. At the climax of that movie, the hero(with a weak set of genes) does extra-ordinary things and the movie closes with the line,"there is no human gene for courage"; I would beg to differ, there is a human gene for everything. All is not lost; Matt Ridley also says free-will is very much possible. I am not too well-versed in those aspects of genes and hence can't reproduce here what he wrote. I, personally, don't like the idea of not having a choice, of not having a free-will, I sincerely wish we do.

PS: What I have written is not the brainchild of my genius. I've only written what I have read. If you are interested in reading more about evolution and love, read this wonderful book by Matt Ridley - The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.
Next part: Time for Women to Choose

Photo1 Courtesy: Bill Watterson and his genius
Photo2 Courtesy: Titian, don't know who holds the copyrights
Photo3 Courtesy: photographersdirect.com

The story of love, Part I : The Origins.

Man: Why do I love? Why do I want to be loved?....WHAT IS LOVE?

God: The punishment for wanting to walk on two legs and not on your fours like every other creature.
Man: [&^%&**$%^&] What the......???!!!
God: lol

Love is, quintessentially, the reason why humans bond and form a pair. Would love had existed if there had not been a tendency among humans to form a sexual couple? Or am I jumbling the the cause and effect relationship here - is love the cause or the effect? Most romantics might say humans are capable of love and hence they form pairs but the actual truth is the opposite. We have an evolutionary tendency (and necessity) to form pairs and hence love exists among human beings.

Mating for life (or marriage...so to speak) is not just limited to human beings. Gibbon apes, wolves, termites, coyotes, barn owls, beavers, bald eagles, golden eagles, condors, swans, brolga cranes, French angel fish, sandhill cranes, pigeons, prions , red-tailed hawks, anglerfish, ospreys, prairie voles, and black vultures are all known to mate for life and just like humans, are adulterous too. Of the billion species, why do so few show this tendency? Even our closest relatives - gorillas/chimps/orangutans dont share this mating-for-life business. Why do we? The answer lies in the evolution of the species. Every species have evolved in a different way, adapting to different circumstances and environment. Let us just focus on humans. When humans seperated from the ape lineage, we became bipeds from knuckle-walkers. But not without a price to pay, and what a price we paid!

Ever wondered why human female labour (delivery pains) is so troublesome? Every female I know dreads the time she has to deliver her kid. For all the other creatures, this is a very (comparitively)simple process. Talking of mammals, Discovery channel keeps showing deers, rhinos, elephants etc giving birth to calfs with the utmost ease. The whole process takes few minutes and the mother doesn't seem to be in any (visible)pain. And the calf starts running just after few minutes of being delivered. Whereas human babies take, may be, not sure, 2 years to just walk. Why is this difference so huge? - delivery is painful, the baby needs so much care for so many years to come. And more importantly, what the eff has this got to do with love?

Evolution answers it. To become bipeds, our pelvic bones had to become stronger than ever to support the large upper bodies of humans (a task that would have been much simpler had we remained a species that walks on all fours). For the pelvis to become strong, the bone had to become large. Women were at a disadvantage; for they have the responsibility of delivering a baby. During childbirth, the baby passes through the hole in pelvis. If the pelvic bone became larger, the hole would become smaller. A smaller hole means the baby had to be delivered when it was still tiny. Over generations, the pelvic bone, in females, reached a critical point where the hole in the pelvis became small/big enough for a 9 month old baby to pass. The hole is small compared to other species and hence all the complications and pains in human birth. This is the price that females had to pay. My dear readers, you are mistaken if you think only females had to pay a price.

Every man dreams of multiple partners but we are largely a monogamous species. We fall in love, and stay loyal to our mate (atleast during the initial years). As I said before, giving birth to a tiny baby is crucial to reduce any complications. The newborn baby, apart from being tiny, is hapless and needs all the care in the world. It cannot talk, walk or do anything on its own. Tending for such a hapless little thing is a gigantic struggle, a single mother would always find it extremely difficult to do it on her own. The females needs help in rearing the child till it can support itself. Needless to say, the baby has a better rate of survival if the parents are together. Now, every species in this world evolves in a way that its genes are preserved and are passed well into the next generation. The goal of evolution is the safety of genes or in other words safety of the offspring. In order for the baby to survive, it is essential for the parents to stay together, share a bond. And there in lies the roots of love - humans evolved to form a sexual couple and the body evolved to generate the chemistry of love to felicitate this bond. So from being polygamous apes, we became monogamous humans. Fate, darn! Feeling incredulous? Better believe it.

PS: What I have written is not the brainchild of my genius. I've only written what I have read. If you are interested in reading more about evolution and love, read this wonderful book by Matt Ridley - The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.
Next part: Beauty or Brains?

Photo Courtesy: http://media.photobucket.com/image/love%20heart/nurnadrah/love-heart-cloud.jpg

Vegetarianism?

A few days back, in one of the orkut forums, i had a little debate with some vegetarians over the issue of why they believe people shouldn't eat meat. Here's how it went:
[Warning: long post. Jump to the final Q&A if you can't read the entire post]

ME: Hello all, i just checked my messages to see a particular message from the owner of this group whose profile says 'all you non-veggies c my new video' . So Mr.owner and all the others in this community, do you believe eating non-veg is bad? what exactly is your stance? eating non-veg is against god/ vegetarians are better than those who eat meat/non-veg tastes bad :P?
PS: I'm a strict vegetarian.

Veggie-boy1[Roughly translated to English]: As mentioned in the puranas, eating a dead animal is rakshasa culture and one who eats meat and commits sin is a rakshas. God doesn't care though if you eat meat or not. It's just that eating meat is a sin and thus one loses his way in his quest for god. More penance and devotion is required for non-veggies if they want to reach god. One can happily eat meat if one doesn't care he's committing a sin.

ME: If one follows evolutionary biology; out of the four great apes, namely, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and humans, only humans are meat eaters. In fact there is a theory that says we could have separated from the ape lineage and become humans because we had to develop skills for hunting, paving the way for intelligence development. There is no doubt that agriculture started thousands of years after we started hunting and eating meat. We descended from meat eaters or, putting it in your way, we descended from rakshasas.
What i feel is we all have instincts to kill animals and eat them. No one can deny it, it's in our nature. Nurture made us, brahmins and other born vegetarians, loathe meat. At the age of 23, I've realised it's only a matter of food choice. I would eat it if i have to. Of course i would oppose any meat that comes from cruelty towards animals.

Veggie-boy2: what do you mean by saying, "Of course i would oppose any meat that comes from cruelty towards animals"? We can't obtain meat by not killing animals. In other words, non-veg itself is cruelty towards animals. That's why i put the PETA video in my profile which shows the cruelty towards animals from which meat is obtained.

[The PETA video shows pigs, chicken, cows and other animals being cruelly treated in farms, slaughter houses, transportation etc]

ME: There are ways to killing an animal. If you castrate a pig, clip its ears and tail when its young, boil and skin it alive, smash it to the ground and then eat its meat - that's cruelty. [That's what the video shows]
You don't go to a cheetah who kills a deer and say, 'hey, you are being cruel'. We are no different from a cheetah, just that we have alternative dietary options. I see no wrong in opting for meat.

Veggie-boy3: But we have a sense for justice, sin, virtue, compassion, kindness etc. That's why we are asking people to stop eating meat and not a cheetah! :P

ME: The question is whether to eat meat or avoid it and not whether to talk with a cheetah or not. :P My obvious reply to what you said would be, "so what if we have all those?"

Veggie-boy2: If tomorrow some scientist says that eating human flesh would cure AIDS, cancer or some other disease. Can one eat human flesh thinking it is also non-veg? Or if a dinosaur-like creature comes and starts eating men, would you encourage it saying,"once we also killed animals that are smaller than us and so the creature is justified killing us?". So, in my opinion, eating non-veg shouldn't be encouraged.

ME: The instinct for one's own survival is the greatest force that drives one's existence. The instinct to kill something else for your own survival is as human as the instinct of running away from something that's trying to kill you. The strongest reason why people don't hurt each other is because of the fear of consequences. There are other reasons like compassion etc etc but they are not the strongest.
Here's a little piece of fiction that might interest you. You and another man are inside a room. Your life is in danger as you have a deadly disease. The only way you can survive is by killing the other person and eating him or whatever. The circumstances are such that you can easily dispose of the body somewhere, nobody would ever know. The other fellow is no way related to you. So guilt won't follow you in the form of weeping mothers or sisters. Law wouldn't follow you either, you can escape unscathed. Faced with such a situation, how many of you would not opt to kill him? Of course people may say they would rather choose to die than kill, but if that is the case, think again.
Anyways i am digressing from the topic. What i was trying to say is that the only reason society became civilised is because men started to fear the consequences of their actions not because they developed compassion for their fellow beings. Compassion was an after-effect. Faced with the question of survival, nobody is kind.

Veggie-boy3: Mr. Thread starter, would you like it if somebody kills you? No, right? Similarly all animals hold on to their dear lives. Each animal has life, its own desires(sexual desires included). There are so many similarities between them and us. Just because we are more intelligent and stronger, how justified is it to kill them and eat? They have a desire to live. If you see the video, each single animal tried desperately to escape from its imminent death. Even after seeing it if you ask why eating meat is wrong then what should i think of you - that you don't have the capacity to think or arguing is your hobby? Wild animals can't live without eating meat. But we can. Can't we use our intelligence and strength to make them survive better instead of killing them?
One more thing - some people keep saying that even plants have life and isn't it a sin to kill them? I say it is not because to obtain what we want, we need not kill plants. As long as the root and stem are intact they can flower again. But animals can't grow their limbs again.

ME: How many of us have not killed ants, mosquitoes, worms, roaches etc without feeling any amount of remorse? Jains, they take this compassion to a different level, they tie a cloth around their nose so that they don't kill micro-organisms by inhaling them. Do you ever think of that? not killing microbes because they too have desires, some of them are sexual btw. Jains even don't eat roots, they don't eat potatoes or onions because to eat a root they have to kill the plant. Ever think of that buddy?
Coming to your plant theory, you say we don't kill a plant. How do you get your rice? You pluck of the plant and process it in gruesome machines to extract the grains in rice mills :P. Plants reproduce sexually as well. They endure pain as well if JC Bose is to be believed. Probably detaching a fruit from a plant is like detaching a limb from an animal, causing it more pain than killing it forever. Just because we don't see it wailing or begging for its life, you can't say you are not committing a sin. Of course you are; that is if you see killing other fellow living creatures as a sin.
There are fruitarians, vegans and groups with exotic names who only eat fruits that drop from a plant. They don't pluck cause they see it as giving pain to the plant. Do you have the guts to join them? Can you imagine your food without rice, potato fry or onion sambar? Think again. It's similar to those who eat chicken, they can't imagine their food without it either. They were born and brought up in it. They are compassionate as well, they strive for animal welfare as well. I have a bird watching friend who has done things to save flamingos and other migratory birds in India. She enjoys her chicken.
To sum it up, we all have our own levels of tolerance, levels of kindness and levels of compassion etc etc. Some can't think of killing microbes, while others can't kill plants while we can't kill animals. Be happy with what we are rather than be evangelists trying to change others into believing what we believe in. I rest my case here.

Evolution.

Few days back, I had an argument with one of my batch mates. The argument was about evolution; it's hard to believe an educated fellow would rubbish evolution just like that, though i wish i could have argued better to convince him. My point was the need for GOD to explain our existence is meaningless. We don't need a magic hand to explain things we don't understand but we need patience and an open mind. His argument was that evolution is baseless it doesn't explain anything. My statements failed to have any effect on him nor did his have any on me. He thought i needed enlightenment in karmic truths whereas i thought he just needed to read more.

A month before, my professor was talking on the same subject. The discussion had ended when i asked him the question, "Sir, do you believe in a personal God?". He wanted the answer to be confidential and hence i am not writing it here. He gave some nice insights into the science of belief - why humans look up to an impersonal God because they are fed up with their personal affairs. At the end he asked me what my stance is. "I am an atheist sir, i would love it if i have only myself to blame for my failures and not believe that i didn't pray enough", i replied. Of course, agnostics don't believe in a personal God - A God who keeps track of your daily routine - either. But i personally see there is no reason why i should pray to someone whose existence i see no proof of.

Last night i had another long argument with G over evolution. Not on God but on the extent to which I stretch my evolutionary agenda. We were discussing how a woman is thrust into a different family after her marriage. "You guys have it easy, its we who have to adjust in a different family. Why is it not the other way round?", a rueful G said. For which i replied, "Actually there is evolution playing here- culture made us a patriarchal society and practicing the custom for thousands of years mutated our genes into following the same custom over the years". The reaction i got for what i said was a strong outburst one can expect from a staunch feminist facing a chauvinist. "Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? wha..wha..whaaaaaaaat? there is no gene imprinting here, it is just a custom which nobody questioned or dare go against. You always shift the blame away from society, don't justify the bloody custom". Her little tirade against me, i felt, was unjustified because i always i felt i was not a chauvinist but a feminist - at least acted like one - and i justified saying,"i am not saying we should follow the custom blindly. I personally feel expecting a girl to move to her in-laws is unjust. I am against it. All I'm saying is, because we've followed that tradition for thousands of years, our genes have evolved to follow it. We all have the tendency to push our daughters out. The tendency, how feeble it may be, is in our blood. It's just a tendency and counteracting it is as easy as opposing any of the other thousand tendencies a human being could have." More justification followed -"There are species in which males move out of their families and there are other species like gorillas where females move out of families. In the same way, humans evolved such that females move out". By the way, this happens for genetic mixing. In lions, young males move out of their prides and join other prides. In gorillas, the females move out and mix with some other family. What followed was more debate on whether there is any science to understanding the human customs. I say it is science while she says it is sociology - not a science. The question of a hard evidence came up wherein she argues there is no evidence to what i said. Human tailbone disappeared over thousands of years because there was no use for it - that is genetic mutation. What i was arguing for had no hard evidence. Finally we stopped arguing after agreeing that we both would search it up and find evidence for genetic imprinting of customs.

Evolution is not fair. Evolution favours those who develop the knack of surviving at any cost. There are evolutionary justifications to greed, treachery, deceit and all the other flaws of human nature. We all developed these traits because these are the qualities which helped men defeat others in the race of wealth, health and reproduction. A Pleistocene era man could survive better if he could fool another man and sleeping with his wife or stealing his meat. There are many such examples taking which one could argue successfully that a cheating man would have lead a better life. Of course, in the modern society one may live peacefully without ever having to cheat but one can't deny the impulses that are within us, formed for hundreds of centuries. Modern society invented God, morals and ethics to suppress these very impulses - in the quest for establishing an ideal society where things exist in harmony and people don't hurt each other. I don't know how much we succeeded in establishing one but those who observe the Indian political system know one thing - power rests in the hands of those who are the most deceitful of all human beings; not with those who are the most deserving.

If ever i have a kid who comes up to me and asks, "Dad, is there God? Would he punish me if I'm dishonest?". I would reply, "Kiddo, make up your own mind. Observe the world yourself. Don't ever follow anybody else because nothing that anybody utters in this world is an unquestionable truth. Don't follow me either. I have a set of beliefs which themselves keep changing from time to time but i don't admit that i was ever wrong. I just stuck to what i believed at that particular time. I believe there is no God. I don't need the fear of a punishing hell to do good to others. If I help somebody it would just be because of the pleasure i would gain by helping that person. Ultimately choose a lifestyle for yourself based on your own perspective of life."