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Natural selection still operates in today's developed world. People keep making this error in thinking that evolution and natural selection is about things running out of food and dying. It's not. It's about things (animals, plants, people, microbes etc) failing to have children before they die. As such, over thousands of millions of years, various traits will be selected on the basis of attraction, rather than fitness of survival. Normally, this only happens in populations that have little or no competition (birds in remote locations) and manifests itself in various plumages, behavioral displays and other outlandish mannerisms. But seeing that we've largely solved the fight-for-life struggles, our evolutionary path is likely to pay more attention to these attraction aspects.
Interestingly, since attractiveness is a much looser and more subjective concept than survival - and since attraction is a MUCH more powerful force, evolutionarily (because not only is the attractive feature being reinforced, but also the predisposition to find that feature attractive is reinforced), features that develop through this process are much more likely to explode into extremes very rapidly.
Think of the peacock, birds of paradise, or those bright-red monkey's bottoms - all of those features are likely to have evolved due to this evolutionary concept of attraction, over this older, simplistic concept of things dying off if they don't run fast enough.
There are those who believe that the human mind, as extreme as it is, probably developed more through this route of attraction than it providing any specific or particular survival benefits. The rapid evolution of man is highly irregular, except in terms of this. And don't we all find intelligent people more attractive?
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