People Are Fucking Stupid
It appears that an attractive-baby-making service — BeautifulPeople.com — has drawn in a lot of dumbasses. Some 600,000 customers from 150 countries, in fact.
The concept is simple and intuitive, if you have a very rudimentary understanding of genetics: take the jizz of two very attractive people, and the resulting baby will be even more attractive.
But this is not how genetics works. This is not how real-life experiments in genetics work. There are demonstrable factors like reversions to the mean and genetic drift that make a simple mating of the most-attractive couple not necessarily likely to produce the most-attractive child. Not to mention that the theory of natural selection does not hold that the conditions that define today’s beauty/strength/child-bearing capacity/wit/smarts will define tomorrow’s beauty/strength/child-bearing capacity/wit/smarts … in fact, quite the opposite. It’s a bit of a crap-shoot.
Only dumb and pathetic dumbasses are lured by this sort of pseudo-science. And there are a lot of them out there, so my advice is to invest in BeautifulPeople.com — it’s bound to make tons of money.
Why you old cynic! Where do you get such ideas?
Don’t think the genetics are that bad. Anecdotally, I think beauty is fairly heritable. Definitely if you’re looking for particular traits like height or eye color you want to take the genes into consideration. It’s no sure thing but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take your best shot.
Science is running amok! First, it’s beautifulpeople.com, and the next thing you know, it’ll be this.
If beautiful people evolved from ugly people then why are there STILL UGLY PEOPLE??!
Yeah, real life experiments in genetics don’t work by taking a heritable trait, selecting those who express it to a greater degree than others, and then breeding those. Everyone knows that sort of experiment is best done by just leaving all the subjects alone and hoping something good comes out by chance. That’s how we got dog breeds! Besides, in the year 3000 having a club foot and hare lip might be attractive.
What happened to that intelligent-baby-making service back in the 1980s? Oh that’s right, it went tits-up.
You guys must not realize or rationaize the merits of this voluntary geneticplaning website, especially when it comes down to living in holes, caves and devoting all of soon to be spelunking mankind soon to be perfectly efficient at resource extraction and providing a supply of awesome blonde babes to supply the needed reproduction naeeds for the CEA members.
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The data itself is misleading, for an agenda based reason, but if you read far enough into it, assuming you can read more than a few words at a time, you find that the very product Red Dog produces, zinc, is considered a pollutant.
I think developing Pebble would be a good thing for the state, but apparently you represent the will of the people in SW AK, so you guys can just hang out there unemployed, sleeping til noon or later, playing lots of bingo, and screwing your daughters; gotta preserve that culture, right? And before you utter your usual RACIST!!! scream, just go read the statistics for that wonderland you’re so proud of. Oh, and I know, they’re white man statistics.
In Clear 100% grain Alcohol and Distilled Water is Veritas.
Maybe Beautifulpeople.com is a super-secret scientific experiment to see if stupidity is a heritable gene. A cunning plan to try to breed a
masterrace of Paris Hiltons.Ps. Dunno if Colonel Mustard is still on the Sadly Radar, but this is some spectacular FAIL that maybe you guys can satirize to the usual standard.
“Anecdotally, I think beauty is fairly heritable.”
Yes, but the physical structures that make one person beautiful, in conjunction with the physical structures that make a second person beautiful can easily make for one plug ugly person. That masculine jaw and strong brow that makes man X attractive are going to look very pretty with woman X’s petite facial features.
I know those are gross physical structures, which are not the units of inheritance, but the point is that ‘beauty’ is not a characteristic that can be inherited, only instructions for the formation of physical structures.
Haven’t we all seen fugly babies that come from two relatively attractive people?
I can think of at least one teenager who scrubs up OK despite her father having a face for the internet.
Cynics! All we want is to be like Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average.
Sarah+Todd=Trigg! QED
Tomorrow’s children won’t need “beauty/strength/child-bearing capacity/wit/smarts”, they’ll need good lungs to suck in all the extra O2 they can just to survive after the Gulf oil gusher kills off all the plankton.
Ironically, people became more intelligent over time and figured out it was a stupid idea.
Definitely if you’re looking for particular traits like height or eye color you want to take the genes into consideration.
Sure, but this isn’t a make-tall-offspring sperm and egg bank, it’s a make-beautiful-offspring sperm and egg bank or perhaps even a make-sexually-attractive-offspring sperm and egg bank.
Andy Bartlett does a way better job than I did of explaining why that is a pretty tough thing to do.
Yeah, real life experiments in genetics don’t work by taking a heritable trait, selecting those who express it to a greater degree than others, and then breeding those.
Yes, but is ‘beauty’ a heritable trait on the order of height or eye color? Or is it more a combination of traits that add up in some lucky people at a particular time and in a particular society where those trait expressions cause them to be considered particularly beautiful. The breeding of dogs is instructive, I think — do you personally consider those dogs bred specifically to be ‘beautiful’ actually beautiful? Dogs bred to be fast are no doubt actually fast. But are poodles and shitzus etc. the best-looking dogs?
Speaking as a pediatrician, I see lots of people having babies for even dumber reasons, or no reason at all. I delight in parents who have decided to have children because raising those children is something they’ve committed themselves to and made first priority; alas, they’re not the majority.
I will gladly help you produce beautiful children at a big discount! Just don’t tell your husband!
Ps. Dunno if Colonel Mustard is still on the Sadly Radar, but this is some spectacular FAIL that maybe you guys can satirize to the usual standard.
Colonel Mustard is getting slammed by his own commenters by at least 2 to 1.
The breeding of dogs is instructive, I think — do you personally consider those dogs bred specifically to be ‘beautiful’ actually beautiful?
Some are indeed quite beautiful. But they have hip dysplasia and various other unbeautiful traits. That’s the flaw of selective inbreeding.
Mysticdog, what’s the name of your sperm? “Formula_______?” YOu should sell that shit.
Wouldn’t the jizz of two attractive people just create a bigger puddle of jizz?
And if the baby doesn’t grow up to be pretty there’s soylentgreen.com.
It’d be a very pretty puddle though.
But this is not how genetics works.
Shit, you got that right. My parents were both very attractive people.
Other than a few basic aesthetic qualities like symmetry & neoteny, the whole “hot or not” thing is a matter of personal taste … so this outfit is guaranteed to get a lot of dissatisfied customers.
“Beauty” is whatever the current culture says it is: the “BBW” body-type was the acme of hawtness for most of human history. When Twiggy first appeared on the modeling scene, a lot of people thought she was an emaciated freak – today she’d rate as a chubster compared to the likes of Kate Moss.
Yes, people ARE fucking stupid … & even worse, stupid people are fucking.
“Haven’t we all seen fugly babies that come from two relatively attractive people?”
Why yes, we have. Incontrovertible ebbidence. Does no one remember Dr. Zhivago? The unearthly beauty of both the Doc and Lara (Omar Sharif, Julie Christie)? The exquisite perfection that ought to have resulted in dazzlingly beautiful offspring? Alas, poor Rita Tushingham sprung off. Now, I happen to think that Rita Tushingham has great presence, acting skillz, and by the way, she is prettier than me.
But a beautifulpeople.com client would want their money back. So the whole thing doesn’t work, as I have now just proved in an awesomely scientific manner.
This service is very next generation.
What?
Also, re the title: the uglies don’t actually get a crack* at the people whose good looks are their only asset*, so it’s more like people are turkey-basting stupid.
*so to speak.
One limit to human stupidity
People actually do generally quite well at not succumbing to stupid theories about genetics and inheritance, at least when it gets down to what to do about their own potential children.
Look at how marginal artifical insemination is for making human babies, as compared to its centrality in animal husbandry. The reason this technology, which has been around for generations now, has not seen widespread use on humans, is probably best explained by the fact that most people recognize that the desirable human traits are hard to define in ways that allow prediction of simple, direct, genetic inheritance. People use artificial insemination, along with other means of practicing the two principal tools of selective breeding, inbreeding desirable traits and culling (not letting undesirables breed), sensibly, to maximize milk production in dairy cows, but, sensibly, not to maximize the intelligence of their offspring. The difference can’t be that they value milk production in their dairy cows more than intelligence in their own children. The only plausible explanation is that they understand that human intelligence is not at all a simple trait, simply or directly, and wihtout risk of negative entailments, passed on through genetics.
I have to assume that most people get this concept, or I would expect many more of them to use the Nobel laureate sperm that’s out there in the artificial insemination market, rather than what nature gave them personally. In fact, that market is tiny, and largely composed of people who cannot do things the usual way, who need some sperm donor to have children. Yes, these people do tend to want sperm based on some genetic selection criteria, rather than from random donors. But my understanding of even this tiny market, is that the demand is more for Rhodes Scholar types than Nobel laureates. People are worried enough about the complexity of desirable human traits that they are willing to sacrifice the potential benefits of getting a Nobel genius, for the relative mediocrity of an at least well-rounded Rhodes Scholar. Use Einstein’s sperm and maybe you end up with someone who will revolutionize physics, but more likely you end up with someone who thinks outside the box just enough to insure a lifetime unhappiness of just not fitting in. The same concerns, squared, would apply to an Einstein clone, or, what these folks may be offering, something like Einstein donor sperm fertilising Curie donor eggs.
What you don’t see, to my understanding of the long-standing artificial insemination business, is loads of demand for donor lookers, as opposed to donor thinkers and donor athletes. Sure, the services have to do something to allay fears that the donor might have been some truly hideous-looking person, so they keep pictures of the donors, with or without eyes blacked out to preserve confidentiality. But if looks were really the deciding factor, you would think that movie star (if only B-listers because the Brad Pitts of the world think it beneath them) or fashion model donors would see the greatest demand — but they don’t.
I can’t see that this service, just because it adds donor eggs to donor sperm, would change that dynamic that has long kept artificial inseminatioin from spreading much beyond the market of people who have no choice but to rely on donated genetic material. I don’t know who the 600,000 who have signed up may be. The number sounds large only outside of internet terms, where the denominator is literally billions, so that even this 600,000 could be almost all people who are in the position of needing donated genetic material. I suspect that once this market settles down, very few will make use of this service, and few of even that few will rate looks any higher as criteria than the market for donated sperm already does.
tig – totally. And I think we need a name for the jizz people want to be impregnated by without ever getting sweaty with the actual jizz-delivery vehicle.
I suggest FILMs – Fucks I Like To Mom
Ladies! Make sure your jizz provider had the nose-job BEFORE the donation!
Hey, hey! Let’s not discourage these people, we’re already well into barbecue season and I have yet to see a decent crop of Eloi.
Oh hey — an Eloi breeding project!
I was wondering when that would get off the ground. Obviously Fox News has been working overtime on the Morlock angle…
Glen, I’m pretty sure the fact that artificial insemination costs money and effort while have sex is free and easy has more to do with it than any sort of cost-benefit analysis of heritable traits. Most people DON’T accept that intelligence is a hazy, socially-defined concept. Cue Bell Curve assholes.
having*, HAVING* god dammit.
Reversion to the mean?
Then how do you explain Podhoretz?
This will work out exactly like the last great western breeding experiment, with lots of hemophiliacs, or a whole lotta babies that look suspisiously similar to the main male doctor that oversees this operation.
CBS News:
Maybe you our, Aina. Maybe you our.
OUCH. But Aina shouldn’t lose hope; what if, as Shaw purportedly asked, they get the brainies’ looks and the cuties’ brains?
I was thinking, “But what if the child gets your brains and my alcoholism and Tourettes Syndrome?”
linky
Well they couldn’t call it Stupid Breeder Mating Service.
My dumbass Son had me frozen. I don’t know why. He’s got half my DNA yet He stunk at baseball. He stunk at fishing. The only thing he did get from me were my gracious manners, so what does numbnuts think he’s going to do with my remains? If they do figure out the unfreezing part I’m still going to be a feeble old man. Someone please tell him to turn down the thermastat, it’s freakin’ cold in here.
There was a reference to this in The Onion’s “Our Dumb World” section on Monaco. Referring to the glamorous couple, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, they discovered that beautiful genes cancel out and got a hideous half-warthog baby.
Who was, of course, adopted by Gracianne Goldberg.
Seriously, though, for sheer physical beauty, you need miscenegation.
@Andy Bartlett
… are secondary sex characteristics, developed under the influence of testosterone, and are not going to show up in your daughter at all, regardless of genetics. Seriously, people, this topic is not that hard to understand. Of course it’s possible to breed people, like animals, to get a certain look. And of course, because it’s possible, doesn’t mean YOUR particular offspring is going to get that look.
@ Glen Tompkins
Oh, come on. The reason artificial insemination has not seen widespread use in humans is that 1) making babies the old fashioned way is a lot cheaper, easier and more fun than artificial insemination, and 2) there’s a lot of justified revulsion at the idea of selectively breeding people as if they were animals. Sure, there’s some market for it, but most people think it’s creepy. But the idea that humans are somehow different from every other animal species on earth in that it’s just not possible to selectively breed us is just silly. There are a whole bunch of traits (eye color, hair color, face shape, etc) that are both highly heritable and widely agreed upon as desirable (evidence? the market for blue contact lenses and blond hair dye). But we don’t selectively breed for those traits because, again… artificial insemination is a whole lot of trouble compared to sex, and it’s also icky.
i suppose male peacocks just happen to spontaneously sprout all those tailfeathers, could happen to anyone, no heritability there!
of course two beautiful people can have an ugly child and vice versa. it’s a distribution, people!
the large number of less attractive people probably stems from the fact that beauty is not the only thing that’s valued in a mate.
I would have liked to have seen that nice Mr Schickelgruber’s seed donated to Mrs. Simpson. Months before the birth people would have paused in mid forkful to ask of each other what that awful shouting was about. “Search me..
sounds like some twat shouting” would have come the reply. Please,to all you moronic bastards out there who dont give a damn about spelling and punctuation: bear in mind that your comments are devalued by your ignorance.
Bill
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