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Nick_Tarleton comments on Open Thread: August 2009 - Less Wrong
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A very common belief here is that most human behaviour is based on Paleolithic genes, and only trivial variations are cultural (memetic), coming from fresh genes, or from some other sources.
But how strong is the evidence of Paleogenes vs memes vs fresh genes (vs everything else)?
Fresh genes are easy to test - different populations would have different levels of such genes, so we could test for that.
An obvious problem with Paleogenes is that there aren't really that many genes to work with. Also, do we know of any genetic variations that alter these behaviours? If preference for large breasts was genetic, surely there might be a family somewhere with some mutation which would prefer small breasts. Do we have any evidence of that?
So I suspect memes might be much more important relative to Paleogenes than we tend to assume.
On the other hand, do we have disconfirming evidence? (Would we expect to have noticed?)
All such evidence would be expected to come from different times or from isolated communities, today vast majority of the world population lives in one connected memetic soup. Unfortunately I don't know enough about anthropology to give particularly convincing evidence.
Wikipedia search suggests some cultures don't care much about breasts at all, what you can consider weak evidence against Paleogenetic explanation.
Weak, yeah. After all, Westerners consider the face to be a great part of a person's sex appeal, and it's very important in sex (kissing, oral sex, etc.) - yet they don't cover it up. Do they not care?
What's really needed is data showing that breast size or proportions are uncorrelated with reproductive success, or at least with ratings of attractiveness.