Darkmantle said:
I'm sorry, maybe I'm taking it wrong, but your post came off as incredibly sexist :/
more to the point, I think the things you mention (ie attraction) have way more to do with nurture than you think.
A child will look to his parents for guidance. He will want to act like his father, and will look for a partner with the traits of his mother (or vice versa for girls). when a child looks at their father, unconsciously they think "that's how to be a man" when they look at their mother, it's "that's what a woman is like". since the social norm has been dominant men and subservient women for so long people have mistakenly labelled that as a normal part of nature. a woman (or man) will usually be unconsciously looking for men with the same traits that her father has, and if the 50s were anything to go buy, dominant male was the normal father figure, so girls look for dominant males. this subconscious preference can be broken by larger exposure to the world and conscious effort but it is extremely pervasive.
another way to look at it is 75% of a child personality is made up by age 5, so 75% of what he expects of woman, 75% of how he thinks a man is supposed to act, is already imprinted.
Honestly though, it will be a long time before the nature vs. nurture thing is completely figured out, because to directly test these theories is evil
There is nothing sexist about my post. What I'm stating is simply how things work from a genetic standpoint. If the term "truth hurts" is appropriate, it's here. Stating truth doesn't make me sexist.
You are giving way too much credit to a childs parents in a childs upbringing. Children aren't molded by their parents, they are molded by their environment most of the time because their parents let them out. The only times when children ARE molded are their parents is when the parents seperate the children from the outside world (as there have been cases off).
At any rate, you are mistaking what you believe to be nurture, with genetics. You say that children like to look for mates who has the same traits as their parents. This, in fact, has been proven by scientists to be genetic, by the simple fact that this included children who didn't grow up with their biological parents. Also, if that was truly nurture, then todays world would have changed that. You used the 50s as an example, but the point is that girls more or less STILL crave the same traits as the women born in the 50s did. Nice guys were out of luck back then, are still out of luck now and will still be out of luck in 50 years when our society might look entirely different.
The animal world is the perfect proof that attraction is a genetic trait. Every single animal on earth with absolutely no exceptions has mating rituals which are pre-programmed from genetics, and humans are no exception. The only difference is that we, through culture and intelligence,
can decide to ignore our instincts and go for what is culturally fit. That still doesn't make our 'cultural' choice the attractive one, and as proven, most people in the modern world (males and females) choose to heed the attraction instead, which is why nice guys is still out of luck.
The problem with your argument is that as long as nice guys are out of luck, that serves to disprove your idea. The day nice guys start getting laid én masse over the more confident men is the day that you can actually argue that culture finally won over genetics. The dominant males being the more succesfull has it roots further back from the 50s, it's the entire life story of all human beings and animals.