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Douglas Yu, a biologist at Imperial College in London,
disagrees with Dr. Singh’s hypothesis. Dr. Yu thinks that
culture, especially
culture developed through
exposure to mass entertainment and advertising,
has had the largest influence on how men judge
beauty. In order to test his theory, Dr. Yu traveled to
southeast Peru to interview
men in an isolated
community far from the reach of modern television,
movies, and magazines. Through his own survey, Dr. Yu
found that the men in this isolated community preferred
heavier women with a wider waist than the body shape
preferred by the men in Dr. Singh’s study. Because this
small community has lived apart from
western mass communication, their own
culture has not been influenced by outside standards of beauty.
In order to check the
reliability of his study, Dr. Yu surveyed two other
groups of men from this same community. However, the second and third
groups surveyed by Dr. Yu had more exposure to
western entertainment and
advertising. The results of these later surveys showed that as men from this
isolated community came into contact with western movies and magazines, their
standards of beauty began to change more toward the western standard of
beauty. Dr. Yu concluded from these findings that even
if evolution played a part
in men’s selection of mates, cultural influences are more powerful in the end and
work faster in changing men’s standards.
With both satellite communication and the Internet flooding every corner of
the world with images and information from almost every culture, it is becoming
harder and harder to find isolated communities. Soon
it may be impossible to
prove which side is correct in the genetics
versus culture debate simply because
there will be no uninfluenced groups left to ask.
Reading Time
_______ minutes _______ seconds
578 words
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exposure to --- experience of
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reliability
--- accuracy; ability to be believed
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versus --- against
