Politesse
Lux Aeterna
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2018
- Messages
- 12,222
- Location
- Chochenyo Territory, US
- Gender
- nonbinary
- Basic Beliefs
- Jedi Wayseeker
Interesting qualifiers. Did you know that not all cultures consider the same features beautiful, and that fertility in humans (unlike in most animals) is neither visible to the naked eye nor predictably associated with beauty? Your culture has taught you to look for certain features and respond to them in a certain way, while treating men and "ugly" women stand-offishly. Those aren't your instincts, they are a reflection of your society.
I'll grant you that culture offers some level of flexibility (maybe a lot of flexibility), but it's absolutely not true that fertility is invisible to the naked eye. I think what you're going for is that ovulation is invisible, but fertility isn't.
In a religious society, people seek to justify their social systems by imagining that gods have endorsed them. In a secular society, it is "evolution" that must play this legitimizing role, whether or not it makes any more sense to attribute agency and purpose to the gradual shifts and turns of a gene pool than it did to attribute it to the thunder or the eclipse. It has the added benefit of making other cultures seem inhuman for falling to answer their "natural" calling, just as they used to ignore the directives of the gods.
I'm afraid you're overstating social causes and understating biological ones. I'll grant you social causes play a major factor in human societies, but you're really not doing biology justice.
We're social animals. Society and biology are synonyms.