Not Even a Thousand Googles Can Handle This

Futurologists from Duke University calculate the accumulated knowledge of the human race finally doubled by about the year 1900. A remarkable guesstimate that takes into consideration all the pictographs, books, maps, charts and works of art since recorded time. But what is truly remarkable is they guesstimate this sprawling body of knowledge then quickly doubled again by 1950. And that mass has been doubling every 10 years ever since....!

In an age when it has become commonplace to think in trillions, there are still no really workable units by which to measure this stunning exponential feat of informational growth. The law of doubling eventually brings you to your knees by the sheer weight of all you can store. Not even a thousand Googles can handle this.

In such a Lewis Carroll world, it might be best to climb out of this bottomless rabbit hole long enough to just deal with a few more manageable numbers. Say the relatively modest number 48,000. Why such a small total? To the US Army, it's neither small nor acceptable. It's the number of young Americans it has turned away since just 2005 for being over-weight. A number greater than all the US forces in Afghanistan.

Among the vast accumulated knowledge of mankind, this matter of body weight has had a quirky history. We don't need Google or the Army to quantify it, because it's pretty much all there in history's scribbled cave art, pyramid etchings, Persian and Chines drawings, Greek and Roman statuary, medieval canvasses, right down to today's movies and television.

The human form that comes down to us through centuries of expression has certain consistencies when it comes to weight. And how that weight is distributed.

The weight factor tends to evolve in inverse proportion to a culture's food supply. In times and places where that supply is thin, the preferred body weight depicted is thick (see primitive societies for caloric details). Where the food supply is thick, the anatomies glorified in art grow thin (see modern celebrities and all those yearning to emulate them for disappointing details). It's true -- body weight in times of plenty is somehow deemed the curse not the reward of its times.

Although this weight factor is open to debate, the distribution factor is not. Throughout the eons of time, anthropologists have uncovered a recurring set of requirements on this score. To be taken seriously enough to be depicted by your culture, it seems you have to meet certain unwritten -- yet undefyable -- standards. Eyes...nose....hair....tummy. Find me an example of beady eyes, bulbous nose, stringy hair and bloated tummy, and I'll find you a movie or museum with very few customers!

None of this is meant to be a value judgment, for few of us can live up to these physiological standards to make such judgments in the first place. But it does bring us to a question. How has our species arrived at such physiological standards? Darwin and his genetic successors propose that species of all kinds mate on the basis of physical attraction. Fine! But exactly which genes can they point to as defining "attraction?"

Perhaps, though, the answer is not to be found in research at all. Rather in poetry. Shakespeare put it this way, "Beauty is brought by judgment of the eye." The ancient Greeks said it even better than the Bard, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

I'm trying to imagine how the Army recruiters would use those definitions....?