Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty - Softcover

Etcoff, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385479425 ISBN 13: 9780385479424

Publisher: Anchor Books, 1900

Synopsis

A provocative and thoroughly researched inquiry into what we find beautiful and why, skewering the myth that the pursuit of beauty is a learned behavior.

In Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, argues that beauty is neither a cultural construction, an invention of the fashion industry, nor a backlash against feminism--it's in our biology.

Beauty, she explains, is an essential and ineradicable part of human nature that is revered and ferociously pursued in nearly every civilization--and for good reason. Those features to which we are most attracted are often signals of fertility and fecundity. When seen in the context of a Darwinian struggle for survival, our sometimes extreme attempts to attain beauty--both to become beautiful ourselves and to acquire an attractive partner--suddenly become much more understandable. Moreover, if we understand how the desire for beauty is innate, then we can begin to work in our own interests, and not just the interests of our genetic tendencies.

About this title

Review:

Nancy Etcoff's synthesis of up-to-the-minute evolutionary biology, neuroscience, social science and literary criticism is the very model of good popular science. So why is her account of physical beauty so damned titillating? There is nothing salacious here: Etcoff simply describes where beauty comes from, what it is for, how it is exploited and controlled today and who stands to gain and lose from its presence in the world. There is much here that is shocking, but such shocks and surprises are intellectual, rather than erotic. "In Brazil there are more Avon ladies than members of the army," Etcoff observes. "In the United States more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services ... and in 1715 riots broke out in France when the use of flour on the hair of aristocrats led to a food shortage."

Why is reading Survival of the Prettiest such an illicit pleasure? Perhaps because, in a society informed by Christian ethics and more recently by feminism, we feel uneasy with the manifest injustice of physical beauty and the way it runs roughshod over modern notions of virtue, democracy and the dignity of the individual. It's like the joke about the mother-in-law--as irresistibly funny as it is politically unacceptable. Why, then should we take beauty seriously? Because, Etcoff argues, beauty exists. It is not, like mother-in-law jokes, a product of the social fabric. It is information, there to aid procreation and species survival. We may disapprove of the ways we are manipulated at so visceral a level by so primitive a mechanism. But to deny beauty its social and political force is an act worthy of Canute. "How to live with beauty and bring it back into the realm of pleasure is a task for twenty-first century civilisation," Etcoff writes, and, thanks to her, we are off to a good start. --Simon Ings

Review:

"Authoritative and surprisingly entertaining." --Chicago Tribune

"Survival of the Prettiest is the first book to pull all of the science on beauty into one lively yet thoughtful package, showing again that it's not just ax-grinding males who believe that biology continues to play an important role in our lives." --The New York Times Book Review

"Through a series of global scientific studies, Etcoff . . . presents a compelling argument for why so many cultures are influenced by beauty." --The Boston Globe

"Nancy Etcoff . . . writes confidently that today's culture of beauty is not a backlash against feminism. She delves into why we devour fashion magazines, agonize about waist sizes, and gaze longingly at objects of desire." --Houston Chronicle

"[A] sprightly, spunky, well-written treatise on the Darwinian science of looking good." --Entertainment Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Publication date: 1900
• ISBN 10: 0385479425
• ISBN 13: 9780385479424
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336