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Personal Transformation

Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty

Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty

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.Â

InÂ 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 feminismâ‚¬"itâ‚¬s in our biology.Â

Beauty, she explains, is an essential and ineradicable part of human nature that is revered and ferociously pursued in nearly every civilizationâ‚¬"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 beautyâ‚¬"both to become beautiful ourselves and to acquire an attractive partnerâ‚¬"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.
Country USA
Brand Anchor Books
Manufacturer Anchor
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber Illustrated
Color Multicolor
ReleaseDate 2000-07-11
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780385479424

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