From: Olga Bourlin (fauxever@sprynet.com)
Date: Sat Jul 05 2003 - 18:30:59 MDT
From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
>
> Continuing in this vein, we have:
> http://salmon.psy.plym.ac.uk/year3/PSY339EvolutionaryPsychology/EvolutionaryPsychology.htm#beautyandasymmetry
>
> As we all know, symmetric faces are more beautiful. Here is a thing that
> fascinates me; I can immediately see the symmetrical female face as more
> beautiful, but I don't see any difference in handsomeness between the
> symmetric and asymmetric male face. Having briefly checked a chat
> channel, I find that some men also see no difference in handsomeness,
> while others say they see the symmetric face as more handsome. I wasn't
> able to question any women.
It said: "You probably find the pictures on the left hand side of this display more attractive than those on the right. The male and female pictures on the left have been artificially constructed using a computer which is fed 32 human faces and averages them to produce an average face..."
An average face in Britain? Otherwise, it seems to me "an average face" would look Asian. (I wonder just what the "32 human faces" that were fed to the computer looked like?) The two places in the world where I've seen the most symmetrical faces have been in Africa and in Asian countries - I don't know if this is scientifically/statistically true, but it seems that way to me (and I may be biased for I did not see many "Western/European" faces until I was nearly 10 years old).
Olga
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