I don’t think you can have butt ugly symmetrical faces. It’s not just simple left-right symmetry, there are all kinds of mathematical proportions that must hold.
Those unfortunate babies with bad genes are often obvious to see. Downs syndrome? Doctors even have their own little notation, “FLK” for funny looking kid. Because a funny looking kid often is a sign of something wrong. And this isn’t limited to the face. You see someone walking with a limp, they’re probably not at the top or your list.
Being attractive is an innate evolutionary benefit. You’re more likely to breed. That’s pretty much what the word attractive means.
You are also ducking the whole question about how we decide what is aestheticly pleasing. It’s not a magic word that waves away any logical thinking.
Ok here is where my simpleminded thinking shines through–I was thinking of a perfectly left-right symmetrical face thats been elongated to twice its length or something.
I cede my point.
Yes, because people can learn to recognize and classify patterns in almost anything. Besides, I think it has more to do with facial expression (or lack thereof) than actual facial structure. Arrange every little muscle in the face of a kid with downs into a brilliant, practiced, red carpet smile and see if anyone could know.
Here you have missed my point and are begging the question. Its my fault really, because I didn’t really clarify the distinction between the two types of evolutionary benefit i was talking about. In one sense I agree with you: that being attractive, well, makes you attractive. My point was, WHY? What in the world does a good lookin face have to do with making babies? Other physical features have some obvious INNATE (hence my word choice) evolutionary benefit–wide hips, healthy skin, all that. That explains WHY some things (nicely shaped boobs, hips, etc) are attractive, but there is no such satisfactory explanation to be had for nice facial structure. Hence my idea that maybe, its attractive in a purely aesthetic (not sex related) way, which granted still has an evolutionary impact (this is where you’re confused). I think that pretty faces are the same as Freddie Mercury’s voice or a sunset on the beach.
I can’t help but be a little hurt by this comment. I have put in quite a bit of logical thinking into this, perhaps you would do well to reciprocate. I made no attempt to explain why ANYTHING is aesthetically pleasing because, frankly, no one freakin knows. I HAVE however, tried to make a distinction between aesthetic and sexual beauty (yes, I realize they can coexist), and I think it might be you who’s missed my point.
I gotta disagree. You will always know, no matter how practised the facial expression. For instance, there’s the actor from Life Goes On, Chris Burke. I’m going to guess he was off the charts acting ability for a Down Syndrome person, and I’m sure everyone could instantly identify him as a Down Syndrome person.
Yes I did.
I’ll certainly agree that Freddie Mercury is awesome
I’m following you now, I did miss your point. You’re right, symmetrical faces aren’t innately better. But that doesn’t mean they are “merely” aethestic. They are an *indicator * of something that *is * innately better, good health. A good looking face is an indicator that the person is likely to be healthy and likely to produce good babies who are themselves healthy.
It’s much more complicated than that. It’s quite possible that there are regulatory genes that influence the morphology of both the skeletal system and the brain. We do know that faces that are more symmetric are more attractive, and perhaps some symmetry in the brain leads to more/less intelligence.
Anyway, if we’re going to stick to factual answers, then the correct answer is: we don’t know if there is a genetic connection between good looks and intelligence, especially since we don’t have a good way of measuring the latter.
I think it’s pretty easy to find people who have one quality without the other (Jessica Simpson, Bill Gates), I am confident in stating that there is no observable correlation and that any hypothesis that there is a correlation is rather far fetched (and not explanatory of easily observable contradictions to that thesis).
I think that anecdotal information is not data. I also think that there is rarely a 100% correlation between genetics and the expressed trait/behavior. This isn’t like Bigfoot, where we can pretty confidently say Bigfoot doesn’t exist (although science doesn’t quite work like that). We just don’t know enough about genetics yet to say one way or the other, and we are finding that genes interact with each other in ways that we never imagined before. It’s much more complicated than mapping a given gene to a given trait.
