BIG SCIENCE

So...midgets. Little people, if you like. Like most folks of average height or above (I'm 6'2"), I'm somewhat fascinated by them. Not as much as some other people I know, for whom the only thing with more inherent comedy value than a little person is a monkey wearing clothes, but somewhat. Well, the other night I was watching a reality show on the Discovery Channel about a family of little people and their teenaged son's difficulties in becoming social with females. It made me wonder about how, exactly, we're wired w/r/t sexual attraction.

I have this theory that back before there was much intercontinental travel, all the people in various parts of the world pretty much looked like each other. Africans looked like Africans, with slight regional variations; Scandinavians looked like Scandinavians, with even slighter regional variations; South American Indians the same; etc., etc., etc. So it seems logical to me that human beings back then would have been hard-wired to find people who looked like them sexually attractive, because otherwise the race would die out. No fucking, no new members of the tribe.

So it seems to me, evolution being a slow process and all, that a fairly large element of that hard-wiring is probably still in our brains. Isn't it? Or has it been scrubbed away by a few centuries of human migration and consequent interbreeding between populations of various regions? I think there's a little bit of both going on. I'll use myself as an example - I am, as I said, about 6'2". I am blond (though my hair's gradually getting darker as the years go on), with blue eyes. My wife is pretty much the opposite of me, physically - she's 5'3", with dark brown hair and brown eyes and olive/cinnamon skin.

Though I've found women of almost every ethnicity sexually attractive at one point or another, from giggling Japanese girls to the imperious black beauties of NYC, from Audrey Tautou to Salma Hayek, I've never been very into blond girls. So am I an aberration for disregarding my own physical type when it comes to sexuality, or am I the norm? And if I am the norm, when and how, evolutionarily speaking, did that become the norm?

And to bring this around to little people: are they hard-wired to find other little people sexually attractive, thus propagating the little-person gene? Or is it a crapshoot - could a little person find him/herself only attracted to tall/normal-sized people?

I have no answers, because I've done no research. This is just something that popped into my head the other day. I'm considering tracking down an anthropologist or someone who can help me figure it out.