Blondes vs. Brunettes - Psychological or Neurological War?

Throughout the world, west and east alike, a large chunk of the males have a distinctive preference for females with fair complexion, what we now call as the fair skin obsession. This has thus influenced females too to do everything they can within their power to get a shade lighter. For example, India has a flourishing $4oo million fairness based cosmetic industry.  According to Alley and Hildebrandt, 1998, in western cultures it is quite prominent that males have clear sexual and aesthetic preference for blondes over brunettes. That’s not uncommon in non-western cultures too as confirmed by scientific surveys like Van der Berge and Frost, 1986.

This has been subject to a lot of criticism and has been treated at par with racism and discrimination. However, from a technical point of view we can’t help but question why such discrimination anyway? What makes males drool over white cheeked girls than their dusky counterparts? And from the male perspective where do brunettes rule over blondes in a guy’s mind?

Almost all answers to these questions handle the matter from a psychological point of view, on how people have been conditioned because of past circumstances to develop these preferences; the primary causative factor being slavery and how western countries have been heavily dominant as a ruling country in the past. While all this might be true, few scientists also argue that the root of this issue has delved deep into our consciousness and has turned into more of a neurological condition that just a psychological behavior and they present their ideas on how evolution has an important role in it. Therefore we shall consider both these schools of reasoning for a better understanding.

Numerical Coincidences of the Universe

Science is an experimental, factual, measurement driven endeavor incorporating high degree of precision. There are  wide ranges of constants that form the crux of our physical theories and in many a cases translate them from theoretical assumptions to practical measuring mechanisms of numerical data in observations. So physical constants have deep implications on the strength of different phenomena we observe and experience and their values have been established with extreme precision and accuracy. 

For example, the age old Newtonian theory on gravity tells us that gravitational force between two point masses is directly proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. However this simple statement is not enough to get the actual value of the force between them. There comes in the Universal Gravitational Constant(G) without which measurement of the actual magnitude of force was quite impossible. Some other such constants are Planck's Constant(h), speed of light(c), Boltzmann's Constant(k) etc.

However, these numerical constants have been observed to be subject to certain strange coincidences and relations. Some of such coincidences even implicate that our so called constants perhaps aren't even constant. So in this article we have a look at such ideas. There are mainly two main divisions of such coincidences and we will take them up one by one.