Survival of the Prettiest
I'd missed the emerging body of evidence on the universality of human beauty. Researchers have actually identified a "consensus beauty" that is, they say, attractive to virtually all men. I saw this on TV tonight, and the researchers overlaid pictures showing the similarities with Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and Halle Berry.
But that's not who I saw when I first saw the drawing. Judge for yourself:
Perhaps the Sea Lord is onto something.
posted by Anonymous at 9:26 PM
2 Comments:
The Greeks had this more or less figured out 2500 years ago, seeing symmetry and mathematical relationships in human beauty; artists from time immemorial - LITERALLY - have been taught a set of ideal proportions that are indistinguishable from this kind of codification, dating back, arguably to the European female figurines of about 20,000 years ago.
But there is an obvious problem: aggregate beauty is going to be beautiful to aggregate viewers. What they are really saying is that the average of the beautiful is perceived as most beautiful when averaged.
Ah, haunting female beauty across time, that least acceptable and most popular of art concepts.
It is fascinating that some aspects even of the face change by time, fashion, and culture - nose size and shape, weight, hair, while others do not at all: symmetry, smoothness of skin, large eyes, small brow but high forehead. It's more true to say that beauty is an incredibly complex stew of inbuilt desire and cultural structures, and not only of gender.
Note that the study uses movie stars - an excellent example of what Californians have considered to photograph well since 1950.
However, I think that if pressed and better prepared, I could prove mathematically that Uma Thurman is transcendent, meets all known and future cultural and biological criteria for extraordinary perfection of appearance, and as a necessary corollary, Ethan Hawke is the biggest shmuck on the face of the earth.
Yet is Uma the genetically driven inner picture of the archtypical woman/lover, the feminine budda nature, the embodied vision of Botticelli's goddess? Sure, let's go with that.
It's my training - I have to add:
Those drawings are terrible, lacking any technical refinement, resolved observation or nuance of personality, but are pretty good for a neuroscientist.
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