The science of love. Face Research » Demos » Make An Average. Hybrid Images @ MIT. Westerblog & Blog Archive & Pretties We. Pretties comes out on November 1, just over a week away, so it’s time to begin the celebrations!
For those of you who don’t know, Uglies and Pretties are set in a world in which cosmetic surgery is not optional. The society has lots of theories about what makes a face the right kind of pretty, and this week I’ll be discussing the science behind those theories. So let’s start with . . . face averaging! One of the ways scientists generate fake pretty faces is to visually average the general population. Basically, you stick a lot of pictures of faces into a computerized blender and morph the results together. It is believed that averaged faces tend to be more attractive because it’s good to have a wide variety of genes from across the local population. So how do we know what’s average? The faces above are from a German University, which is why they’re white.
A definite hottie. Anyway, averaging faces is only one technique that the Pretty Committee in Uglies uses to create beauty. Welcome. The Evolutionary Psychology of Human Sex a. By Daniel Pouzzner, 2000-Apr-11/12 Sexuality is an indispensable mechanism whereby biological evolution bridged the immense gap between asexual/Lamarckian unicellular organisms, and the now plainly preeminent humans.
For tens of millions of generations, the lineage leading to humanity has been formed and continued exclusively by sexual procreation. The precise microbiological mechanics of sexuality vary widely from species to species, while the functional consequences - strictly sexual procreation, in which each individual has precisely two parents, each contributing roughly half of the individual's genome - is absolutely conserved. This evidences the overwhelming evolutionary pressure in favor of the sexual mechanism. In this essay, I give an overview of the differences between the male and female human phenotypes, concentrating on mental distinctions. The basic evolutionary pressures on males and females are identical. Female procreative organs implement the mechanics of pregnancy. Seed: Beauty is in the Processing-Time of. Average of 15 “attractive” female faces.
Credit: The Face Research Lab In the late 1870s, scientist and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton developed an image of the prototypical “face of crime” by creating composite photos of men convicted of serious offenses. Though Galton failed to discover anything abnormal in his composite criminal faces, he did find that the resulting visages were shockingly handsome. (The middle face here is the product of 14 criminals.) Studies have since established that people find prototypical faces—those with average features—to be attractive. A paper published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science proposes a new explanation for this phenomenon: Prototypical faces are pleasing because they’re easy for the brain to process. To test this hypothesis, Winkielman and his team created a geometric pattern. The researchers found that the response was more positive to patterns that were close to the prototypical pattern. Www-psych.nmsu.edu/~vic/faceprints/
Facial beauty and the late positive compon.