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Perhaps you're a scrawny ectomorph, prone to have sand kicked in your face by beach bullies. Or maybe you're a dwarf who's a little potted in the belly. Perhaps you are big of nose, gray of hair, crossed of eye, slight of penis, or bucked of tooth. It could be that your face doesn't slavishly follow the conventions of symmetry. Is your foot clubbed? Your skin pocked? If as a result you feel that in the contest of sexual desirability, you're doomed to lose, then take heart: new scientific findings published in the journal Evolution suggest you could be an even bigger winner than those conventionally deemed beautiful.

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To be sure, few of your fellow creatures would seem to agree. Gyms are filled with men chasing the same buffed physiques. Women submit to diets and scalpels to attain slender waists showing off breasts and buttocks shaped just-so. And no wonder-- studies show that the majority find the same physical attributes attractive. The principle seems to hold for beasts of all kinds-- whether it's women favoring taller men or peahens going ga-ga over a peacock's colorful plumage, the brighter and longer the better. However a new study of mating habits among guppies (the fish, that is; not upscale gay denizens of Chelsea or Miami Beach) reveals that majority- preferences aren't the whole story. Sometimes the ugly, by the majority's lights, fare better in love's contest than the beautiful.

Swooning over spots

Were you to ask a female guppy to discourse on male beauty she would wax poetic about bright orange spots and large tails. According to Rob Brooks-- biologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney-- all female guppies find these attributes a turn-on in males. In the past, researchers into beauty stopped there. End of story. But Brooks et al. wanted to go more than skin deep: they went on to consider what else female guppies might like. A minority of them, it turned out, also fell in a big way for males with black markings.

The principle is familiar in the marketplace. Everyone loves watching "Friends" or "Dallas." A distinct minority of people prefer Shakespeare, but they like it strongly enough that Hamlet keeps getting performed.

Time to get out of the lab

That animals in a population show a diversity of erotic preference should have been obvious to any biologist who stopped dissecting frogs long enough to drink beers with his mates. Not just from life experience, diversity should have been suggested by the variability in appearance within populations, from goats to parakeets. If being beautiful is the evolutionary advantage that it seems to be, then divergence from beauty's conventions should be vanishingly rare, ironed away by the forces of natural selection-- leaving a single, echt-beautiful form to dominate in every species. Indeed, in a not-so-distant future wherein human parents choose their offspring's genes, monotonous good looks may become the order of the day.

A pity, if so. Because what's interesting about beauty, these guppies suggest, is not just the big hump of the bell curve-- signifying the area of generally agreed-upon attractiveness-- but the curve's trailing descenders of rarer, specialized preferences.

The guppy study yields "a nice result," Raoul Mulder, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Melbourne told New Scientist. "It explains why certain very rare color patterns continue to persist in guppy populations."

Persistence of rare traits is good for a population. If new guppy-chomping predators come along with a taste for orange spots, then the brown-marked guppies will have an advantage-- and help guppies live to see a new generation.

But diversity can also be good for individuals, giving them a better shot at a finding a good match. There's evidence, for instance, that humans subconsciously judge by smell a partner's complement of immune markers. A potential mate with markers that you don't yourself possess will have a desirable scent, because he or she will help make your offspring better-defended against infection. Such felicitous couplings depend on a variegated population.

So perhaps Mother Nature has given us the best of both worlds. There's a wide zone of general agreement about what's beautiful, enabling movie-goers to bond en masse in infatuation with Hollywood celebrities. But there's also enough individual diversity of taste that, when the movie's over and we've gone home to bed, we can snuggle up with-- or as-- a balding, ample-bottomed, hairy-nosed partner, and still find erotic bliss.