OK, I’m sometimes accused of being prejudiced toward “stupid” people, but this is unbelievable.
Are ugly children less loved?
Report: Parents more attentive to attractive kids
Most parents would deny it, but Canadian researchers have found that physical attractiveness affects how children are treated, according to a report Tuesday in The New York Times.
Read more…
If it’s true (gasp), it speaks to what what Desmond Morris theorizes in “The Naked Ape. We’re all “
naked apes” (check out the book, and excerpt below). Survival of the fittest. You just need to define “fit” in every generation. Truly shocking “research”, if that’s what it is. But as a friend of mine who’s a professor at UCSB pointed out, “If the article really represents the study they did, then there’s a potentially big flaw in it. In the statistics, they should at least account for (or correct for) the attractiveness of the parents. That’s clearly correlated to the attractiveness of the children. The attractiveness of the parent may effect their behavior (e.g. they could have married into richer spouses historically, thus come from more moneyed families which may tend to care more for children in public spaces out of a variety of fears). The trouble with these statistical studies is that they only show correlations, not cause and effect relations. In humans there’s even an expression: “my mother drowned the stupid ones”. have you heard that? Yes, animals don’t appear to treat all their children equally similarly for humans. however, attractiveness may not be the important factor there. my guess is that it would be next to impossible to device a statistical study to test this. It would be extremely difficult to isolate (or correct for) all the other possible factors that people could think of (not to mention the ones we can’t think of yet).”
From amazon’s review of The Naked Ape, a book I read 15 years ago that still resonates in so many of my life experiences:
“A startling view of man, stripped of the facade we try so hard to hide behind.” In view of man’s awesome creativity and resourcefulness, we may be inclined to regard him as descended from the angels, yet, in his brilliant study, Desmond Morris reminds us that man is relative to the apes–is in fact, the greatest primate of all. With knowledge gleaned from primate ethnology, zoologist Morris examines sex, child-rearing, exploratory habits, fighting, feeding, and much more to establish our surprising bonds to the animal kingdom and add substance to the discussion that has provoked controversy and debate the world over. Natural History Magazine praised The Naked Ape as “stimulating . . . thought-provoking . . . [Morris] has introduced some novel and challenging ideas and speculations.” “He minces no words,” said Harper’s. ”He lets off nothing in our basic relation to the animal kingdom to which we belong. . . He is always specific, startling, but logical.”
Comments (4)
Parents a only human after all, but i thought all the parents are think all their children are beautiful and love them no matter what, My aunt have a retard child who is almost 8 now, you know how hard it is to breed up a kid like that, she even wanted to abandon him when he was 1 or 2, but she can’t do it after all. I really admire her about everything.
What you doing for the 4th? Judi
I suppose cute kids are the fittest…
Why is Independence day your least favorite holiday? Judi