I was at the graduation ceremony, and it’s so fun to observe how some graduates are comfortable in their skin while others are still not. It’s normal, they are young. It comes at different times, adulthood.
Many more black students are comfortable being themselves than whites. And both much more than Asians. Men more frequently than women. How comfortable they are in their bodies has nothing whatsoever to do with weight or conventional attractiveness.
The graduates of the school of engineering are all white men with a couple of Nigerian women. One future male engineer walked across the stage with a newborn baby, giving everybody a massive cuteness attack.
There was one female name among summa cum laude graduates in computer science but when this student stepped off the stage, it became clear that he’s female like Brianna Wu.
The last name of the Dean of Business is Hayek, and he’s so cheerfully neoliberal that it’s really cute. He grades with AI and tries to get us all to do it, always provoking great sarcasm in Humanities profs.
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“comes at different times, adulthood… Many more black students are comfortable being themselves than whites. And both much more than Asians. Men more frequently than women”
You are coming dangerously close to (re)discovering neoteny…. the significance of which is usually either wildly under- or over- estimated.
women are more neotenous than men (pretty uncontroversial) and whites are more neotenous than blacks and asians are more neotenous than whites (getting into thoughtcrime territory).
neoteny as a factor of evolution (should be non-controversial but… camel’s nose) to the biggest driver of evolution (full on throughtcrime and almost certainly wrong).
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I don’t know what this is but I was definitely thinking that many of these young people were pushed into a sex life way before they are ready for it.
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“don’t know what this”
simple, neoteny is the maintainence of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. In animals, it’s a big part of the process of domestication, most dog breeds, for example, maintain puppy traits into adulthood that wolves or foxes lose. The russian guy who domesticated foxes found they maintained puppy features (floppy ears, flatter faces) into adulthood..
Some suspect a role in evolution… though exactly how it works is debated. I’m skeptical of it being a major feature of evolution per se, probably more a result of more stable and safer societies. But, as mentioned, physically at least women are more neotenous than men and the three major races have blacks as the least and East Asians as the most neotenous with whites somewhere inbetween…
Once you notice it, it’s hard to unnotice… I once pointed out that Justin Timberlake has a pretty neotenous face to a friend who’d never noticed… and could not see anything else afterward..
fun experiment: google image search ‘Tamil movie stars’ and ‘Telugu movie stars’… Tamil stars are much more neotenous on average than Telugu ones…
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Thank you for explaining, I appreciate it. I learned a new non-German word today as a result. 🙂
But where’s the controversial part?
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