Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy Etcoff

Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy Etcoff

In this provocative, witty, and thoroughly researched inquiry into what we find beautiful and why, Nancy Etcoff skewers one of our culture's most enduring myths, that the pursuit of beauty is a learned behavior. Etcoff, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, skewers the enduring myth that the pursuit of beauty is a learned behavior.
Etcoff puts forth that beauty is neither a cultural construction, an invention of the fashion industry, nor a backlash against feminism, but instead is in our biology. It's an essential and ineradicable part of human nature that is revered and ferociously pursued in nearly every civilizatoin--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 beauty--both to become beautiful ourselves and to acquire an attractive partner--become understandable. Moreover, if we come to understand how the desire for beauty is innate, then we can begin to work in our interests, and not soley for the interests of our genetic tendencies.

Nancy Etcoff has an M.Ed. from Harvard, a Ph.D. in psychology from Boston University, and has held a post-doctoral fellowship in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. She is currently a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385479424
ISBN 10	0385479425
Title	Survival of the Prettiest
Author	Nancy Etcoff
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc
Year published	2000-07-11
Number of pages	336
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.