NANCY ETCOFF

¿Por qué preferimos a los guapos? ¿Por qué damos importancia a nuestro aspecto físico? ¿Es realmente importante la belleza física? Este libro defiende una polémica tesis sobre la importancia de la belleza en el ser humano. Una obra valiente y provocativa

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 feminismits in our biology. Beauty, she explains, is an essential and ineradicable part of human nature that is revered and ferociously pursued in nearly every civilizationand 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 beautyboth to become beautiful ourselves and to acquire an attractive partnersuddenly 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.