Population Variation: The Genetic Recipe for a Race of Supermodels

[Polak]

Here's the best argument for European integration we're ever likely to see...

Stein - like Mann, Winck and Bündchen - displays the region's historical roots in his surname and Aryan features. Rio Grande do Sul is populated largely by descendants of the German, Polish and Italian immigrants who arrived at the turn of the 20th century. The races blended to form a physical type tailor-made for modelling.

'The mixture means you get these marvellous-looking women,' says Stein. 'They are tall with long bones, which is exactly what the market is after.' They are also predominantly blondes, with blue or green eyes - European-looking compared to most people in Brazil, four in ten of whom are black.

Full article:

Genetic recipe for a race of supermodels

In January Thiago Mann was a supermarket packer in Santo Augusto, a hick town in the rural south of Brazil. He's now an international model for Christian Dior. Gracie Winck, aged 15, used to till the land near by with her farm labourer father - until a year ago when he drove her by tractor to a modelling course. She's now one of Brazil' s bright hopes for the international catwalk. Tomorrow the man who discovered Mann, Winck and the world's number one model - Gisele Bündchen - begins a 20-date tour through the agricultural hinterlands of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state, looking for new talent.

Dilson Stein expects to meet about 8,000 hopefuls from the area that is considered to have the highest concentration of beautiful people in Brazil. Rio Grande do Sul has 6 per cent of Brazil's population but between 40 to 50 per cent of its top models.

Stein - like Mann, Winck and Bündchen - displays the region's historical roots in his surname and Aryan features. Rio Grande do Sul is populated largely by descendants of the German, Polish and Italian immigrants who arrived at the turn of the 20th century. The races blended to form a physical type tailor-made for modelling.

'The mixture means you get these marvellous-looking women,' says Stein. 'They are tall with long bones, which is exactly what the market is after.' They are also predominantly blondes, with blue or green eyes - European-looking compared to most people in Brazil, four in ten of whom are black.

Stein, aged 37 and himself an ex-model, is from Horizontina, a town of 18,000 near the Argentine border - as is the best known of his protégées, Gisele Bündchen. Nine years ago, when Gisele was a gawky 13-year-old, her mother sent her to one of his modelling sessions to improve her posture. Five years later she was the world's most famous supermodel.

Stein has been running modelling courses in rural Rio Grande do Sul for eight years. He sets up in school gyms or public halls and insists that parents must come along too. So far he has 'discovered' about 200 top international models - and expects to find about five more in the current tour. The first step after this tour will be to select the best couple of hundred and bus them to São Paulo, 20 hours' drive away and the centre of Brazil's fashion industry. The country girls will need to be eased through the culture shock - some have never been in lifts before or seen a McDonald's. They will then audition with some Brazilian agencies.

'Many foreign agencies approach me directly, but I prefer to start the girls off in Brazil, so they already have some experience and are emotionally adjusted by the time they eventually leave the country,' Stein explains.

Girls - and boys (although the market is much smaller) - from Rio Grande do Sul combine European looks with a Latin American attitude. 'They may look like they are from Germany or the Czech Republic,' says Zeca de Abreu, director of São Paulo's Marilyn model agency. 'But they have been brought up in Brazil and that shows. Clients really sense this. They think Brazilians are happier and more sensual.'

De Abreu says that Gisele's prominence has been a great international advert for Brazilian models. About half his list, he estimates, comes from Rio Grande do Sul. He believes that, as well as the racial mix, the state is Brazil's largest supplier of models because of the 'gaucho' mindset. Their German ancestry and outdoor way of life, he says, gives them strong personalities. 'They are very determined girls. They are very professional.'


Source: The Observer

[cosmocreator]

I just read the September 2003 issue of Discover magazine. It has an article entitled Great Mysteries of Human Evolution. There is no mention of Steinheim or Swanscombe. Nor is there any mention of Tabun. Most of it seems to be PC supporting ideas that we all came from Africa 160,000 years ago. There is some nice skull photos though.

[Stríbog]

I just read the September 2003 issue of Discover magazine. It has an article entitled Great Mysteries of Human Evolution. There is no mention of Steinheim or Swanscombe. Nor is there any mention of Tabun. Most of it seems to be PC supporting ideas that we all came from Africa 160,000 years ago. There is some nice skull photos though.

Yeah I read the mainstream pseudoscience journals now and then just to get an idea of where PC academia stands. The conjectures provided are virtually useless.

[cosmocreator]

Do you have access to a scanner?

Access to one, yes. But I'll have to pay to use it. What did you have in mind?

[Loki]

http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ory_id=2227217

Racial prejudice

Thinking about it



OF COURSE, it is good to be polite. And, as a result, in most places these days it is impossible to know what someone is actually thinking when he meets or works with someone of another race. Politeness makes it unacceptable to express prejudice, even if those attitudes are actually there. How hard do people work to overcome a prejudice that they feel but are not allowed to express? That is the question Jennifer Richeson, of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, attempts to answer in this month's Nature Neuroscience.

In a study carried out earlier this year, she and her colleagues found that racially biased people take longer to perform tasks that require a conscious effort to control their racial responses and actions. This effort is known as cognitive control. The researchers suspected, as a result of this earlier study, that there was a physical mechanism, which they dubbed resource depletion, underlying this lag in performance. In their latest paper, they think they have proved this theory.

The idea behind the theory of resource depletion is that the effort expended on suppressing prejudice depletes the ability to use cognitive control in subsequent tasks. The researchers recruited 30 white students as volunteers, and attempted to identify their racial attitudes using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). During an IAT, volunteers match positive and negative words such as “health”, “beauty”, and “ugly”, with names traditionally associated, at least in the United States, with black (such as Latisha and Tyrone) or white (Nancy and Greg) Americans. The IAT measures response times to these uncomfortable questions, and assigns higher levels of racial bias to white participants who are slower and less accurate in matching black names to positive attributes, and vice versa. The results of the IAT were used as a baseline from which to assess each volunteer's underlying prejudice.

Two weeks later, the same participants were recruited for a seemingly unrelated experiment, and were shown photographs of black and white faces while undergoing a brain scan. The scans revealed what Dr Richeson's team had suspected. Areas of the brain associated with cognitive control flared into activity proportionate to each volunteer's level of racial bias as measured by the IAT.

Before that, but after the IAT, Dr Richeson got a black experimenter to ask the volunteers about their college fraternity systems (in which students band together into formalised and often socially exclusive groups) and also about racial profiling (the idea that since some security threats originate in particular parts of the world, people who have family connections there, or even look as though they might, should be picked out first for investigation). These are both areas that would force a biased person to exercise cognitive control, in order to give a socially acceptable reply. That done, the participants carried out a Stroop colour-naming task, an undertaking that is known to require a high level of cognitive control.

In a Stroop test, participants must identify the ink colour in which words such as “red” or “blue” are printed. Subjects have to think harder to identify the colour red, for example, if it is used as the typeface for the printed word “yellow”. As predicted, the volunteers who had scored higher levels of racial bias in the IAT test took longer to complete the Stroop test than their peers. That provided the evidence of previous resource depletion.

The bottom line, it seems, is that it is tiring to suppress racial prejudice. Furthermore, this has impact on a person's subsequent attention and performance. It is rather similar to the depletion of a muscle after intensive exercise.

What this experiment does not answer, of course, is whether the prejudiced participants were striving to overcome their prejudices, or merely to cover them up. Dr Richeson remarks of her results that, “there's a subtle, but powerful, difference between trying not to do the wrong thing, and building positive habits through friendships and cultural exchange, so that doing the right thing becomes our automatic response.”

[Rubezahl]

Just wanted to ask: In what way are heads and noses classified as being "small", "mean" or "large"? I found a lot of contradictory material on the web and wanted to be sure...

[Triglav]

Just wanted to ask: In what way are heads and noses classified as being "small", "mean" or "large"? I found a lot of contradictory material on the web and wanted to be sure...

Here you go, good sir. Thanks to Frans for this one again and to Cosmo for the sticky.

http://www.forums.skadi.net/showpost...71&postcount=4

My noggin appears to be X(X)L.

[Rubezahl]

[QUOTE=Triglav]Here you go, good sir. Thanks to Frans for this one again and to Cosmo for the sticky.

Thanks a lot, have a great day!

[Lala]

This may sound like a stupid question, but... when measuring the head and nose, which points measured? eg. the highest point of the nose.

[Lala]

AH-HA! I've just answered my own question. Never mind...