Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty By Dr. Nancy Etcoff From the show Hooked on Plastic Surgery at Age 28 From The Publisher: 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: the pursuit of beauty is a learned behavior. Etcoff, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, puts forth that beauty is neither a cultural construction, an invention of the fashion industry, nor a backlash against feminism—it is in our biology. It's an essential and ineradicable part of human nature that is revered and ferociously pursued in nearly every civilization 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.		E-mail to a friend