World's most beautiful baby born to Jolie and Pitt

I keep reading that this baby named Shiloh is by default the World’s most beautiful baby.
I am no expert on genetics. But I do know that just becuase the parents are attractive does not guarantee that the baby will be attractive. Or does it ?

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-01-11-jolie-pitt-attractive_x.htm

Quote from story ( I do not know how to do this properly.)

Dr. Lawrence Reed, a New York City-based plastic surgeon, said the child’s good genes will in all likelihood make his services unnecessary.

“You have a very beautiful mother with great bone structure,” said Reed. “You have a very handsome father with excellent bone structure and facial features. The genetic prediction would make this child have a greater chance by far of being what everyone would consider an attractive baby, an attractive person.”

Reed said he predicts Brangelina’s baby will be “much taller” than Pitt, who stands at 6 feet, and the 5 feet, 7 inches Jolie.

“The eyes will be incredible,” he said. “I can’t see this ever not working out.”

Dr. Stephen Marquardt, who studies human attractiveness and uses math to measure beauty ratios, disagrees, saying gene combinations can produce infinite possibilities, including less attractive results.

Nevertheless, Marquardt said he thinks there’s “probably a better chance that you can have pretty kids if you have pretty people.”

“I think if you kind of averaged their faces, you’d have a pretty reasonable looking kid,” said Marquardt. “She’s real exaggerated, he’s kind of plain.”

I don’t have a site, other then personal experience. And I’m sure millions of others have also witnessed - ugly people can have some very attractive offspring, and attractive people can have some very ugly offspring. Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all that… But the observation still stands.

Well, there are some ways that you can fairly well assume that a person will end up pretty good.

Either parent overweight?
Either parent have oilly skin?
Either parent have hair loss?
…and such

This doesn’t necessarily mean the kid will end up a raving beauty/adonis but at least you can be pretty sure they won’t have some of the greater flaws.

Though of course they could spoil Shiloh, she ends up eating all the candy she could ever want, gains weight and oilly skin, and then turns to drugs due to having famous parents and being stressed about that and her weight, and so all her hair falls out and she looks 50 by the time she is 30.

YMMV

Well, angelina, and especially Pitt have very babyish features. So the baby will probably be incredibly baby-like.

I think the question is really interesting. I have always wondered how this works. What if the mother is really big and muscular, for instance. Is that an advantage for baby boys, but a disadvantage for baby girls?

…and how long before little Shiloh’s playmates whisper to him: “Dude, your mom is HOT!”

No guarantee. However, I would probably agree with Marquardt that the baby has a somewhat greater probability than average of being attractive, simply because the parents do not have any unusual facial characteristics (e.g. very large nose, jug handle ears) aside from Jolie’s lips. I would not agree with Reed that it is a greater chance "“by far,” nor with his assessment that the baby will be taller than the parents (unless Pitt and Jolie’s parents themselves are substantially taller than average.)

Isn’t there “Regression to the mean” to consider? That is, in any roughly bell-shaped system of scores (which it would seem attractiveness is - a few really hot, a few real dogs, but most of us somewhere in the middle) - there will always be a majority of scores in the middle. That’s what makes it bell-shaped. It means that really intelligent people tend to have kids who are intelligent, but slightly less intelligent than their parents. Profoundly retarded people tend to have offspring more intelligent than themselves. Same for really tall people (offspring will tend to be shorter than parents) or really short people (offspring tend to be taller than parents).

As there is no way on earth that either Pitt-Jolie is “somewhere in the middle” of our attractiveness bell-curve, statistically speaking their child should be slightly less attractive than they are. Which is to say, still potentially drop dead gorgeous, but not, mathematically speaking, the most beautiful baby ever.

(Besides, we already know who the most beautiful baby ever is, don’t we?)

:smiley:

Quite so. However, I’m not sure that attractiveness would work quite the same way as height or intelligence. Attractiveness in large part consists of having a symmetrical face with no disproportionate features; that is, all the features are already “average” (none unusually large or small) and it is this very confluence of averageness in every feature that makes for attractiveness.

See here

Also:

http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/morphing/morphing.htm

I don’t see a General Question here, so off to MPSIMS.

samclem General Questions moderator

There’s also the fact that his (her? Is the spawn of the Jolipitt a boy or a girl?) parents are extremely wealthy, giving him access to better nutrition, better medical care, and more activities. Their success is also based largely on appearance, so the kid’s also likely to get tailored clothes, professional grooming, lessons in comportment and generally a greater sense of ease at being a center of attention.

None of this will help if his parents have recessive Ross Perot genes, but statistically it makes him more likely to photograph well than you or me.

Their baby, Shiloh Nouvel, is a girl.

Both the girls and boys.

Shiloh is a girl’s mane now?

For that matter, Shiloh is any sort of person’s name? I thought it was a place in the American South.

(I do know that it’s the name of one of Spoons and MrsSpoons’ cats, but they they often name their cats after places; another of their cats is named Denver.)

And come to think of it, if it’s a girl, shouldn’t the name be Shiloh Nouvelle? :slight_smile:

It would seem it is a Hebrew name applicable to both sexes, at least according to a few baby name sites I looked at.

The whole thing is sort of silly-- I mean, yeah, they’re attractive people, but I don’t think they’re so far beyond the rest of us that they somehow have mighty genes that will combine to create a super-human baby. Attractive people breed all the time.

I would like to point out that Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, two people whose looks I consider well above average, produced … Jamie Lee Curtis. Who was probably very cute as a baby.

This is what I was going to say. Plus, this kid’s grandfather is Jon Voight. He’s no beauty contest winner.

No mention yet of Pitt’s parents. I think they are fairly normal looking. Not bad looking.

Jon Voight was handsome when he was younger. I do not think he has aged well.

She did get the bod, though.

Personally “Shiloh” makes me think of Sean Connery talking about that thing you hide in when people shoot missles at you. :wink: