Bob wrote:
You are really asking me with which one I would like to mate. ← Yes. → I am 71, when I was in the dating pool, the face on the right was rare, and if I met someone like that, they were already whisked away to some modelling job or something similar. The face on the left was far more common, although not as dishevelled as the face is made to be. Both will have “bad hair days” but if the one on the left was looking for a partner, she wouldn’t go out looking like that and she would rely on more than her physical appearance.
So… it’s not that you find one more attractive than the other, it’s that the one on the right was more rare (in your dating days). How do you know she was more rare? How do you identify the type of person who is more rare? What quality does she possess, what quality from the image alone, that tells you “she’s one of those rare ones”?
greenfuse wrote:
I don’t think anyone has symmetry alone as the source of beauty. Presenting someone who looks very unhealthy who has a symmetrical is not countering a specific theory out there, but it does show the problem of single aspect definitions. That such a theory might be around online is certainly possible, but people with actual theories have multiaspect ideas. The woman looks tired, depressed, possibly malnourished, perhaps having undergone stress for a long time. We can have symmetrical gangrene or rashes or burns covering our face and we could have an even more strawmanny example. At least within science symmetry is a sign of developmental health while moving from infancy. All sorts of stuff can happen after that that do not disrupt the underlying symmetry, but leave the person unnattractive, since the health or seeming health in the face is a big factor in attraction. I do think the gorilla is beautiful, but it’s not the beauty that turns me on or stirs romance. I don’t want to have sex with a beautiful sunset or a leaf either.
Well, I could combine all 3 theories into one image:
^ Still not quite attractive for my liking. But maybe we need more theories. You seem to be offering an alternative: health. But she seems to be in tip top shape in regards to her health.
Maybe the correct approach is to keep certain theories but drop others.
greenfuse wrote:
This arose out of a marketing campaign made by a plastic surgeon. ← Genius! → And he marketed a bunch of products based on this. When scientists actually tested his idea, they found all sorts of problems with it. But even Marquardt himself never said it was the only factor in making beauty.
I’ll bet it has problems with it. Off the top of my head, it seems like the margin of error can be generous enough to include all kinds of body parts to use as anchor points. For example, take the eyes from the image about:
According to ChatGPT, the ratio of the width of each eye to the distance between the pupils of the eyes (the outer edges to be accurate) is 1:1.618, exactly the golden ratio. But that’s pretty precise. Are we saying that if the ratio was just a tiny bit off, the person would go from beautiful to ugly? Surely, there must be some acceptable margin of error. Ok, let’s give it a margin of error of around 0.1. So as long as the ratio falls within the range of 1:1.5 to 1:1.7 (with a bit of rounding), the person is beautiful. But now that range includes the center of the pupils, maybe even the inner edges. So it includes more anchor points on the body with which to mark the end points of the measurements. Allow for an even greater margin of error, and it might include the edges of the iris. Even greater, and it might include the edges of the eyes themselves. So the larger the margin of error, the more choices you have of what to measure. And the more choices you have of what to measure, the more likely it will be that there’s going to be something on the body to anchor your measurements to.
greenfuse wrote:
Strange: that woman does not have thin lips.
You noticed that too, huh?
greenfuse wrote:
Here we have a real scientific theory but your argument is making a logical error. That a healthy, adult face that leans in the direction of neotony, that is something, to a small degree in the direct of neotony is more attractive to men is actually true. This doesn’t mean that men will be more attracted the further you go in that direction.
My argument is a little more subtle than that. I’m arguing that what they are calling neotonic features might just be the average look for a woman. You would call it neotonic ONLY in relation to women on the opposite extreme, women with thin bony features, with a big nose, with big teeth, etc.. The images I posted of the old bald fat man and woman weren’t meant to show that neotonic features aren’t attractive but that where on the spectrum they become attractive is somewhere in the middle, and that in turn brings into question whether we should think of them as neotonic features at all and more as just the features of the average woman.
One good counterargument, if you’re making it, is that the most attractive women actually do fall on the more baby-ish side of the spectrum even relative to the average, even though, as you said, it’s limited by the extremes. Is that the argument you’re making?
greenfuse wrote:
Nor to men find babies more romantically and sexually attractive (not as a rule, thank God) than women.
Yes, and this is an important point. There’s a difference between sexual attraction and cuteness.
greenfuse wrote:
The woman in your strawman image not only suffers for health issues, but the neoteny theory includes includes baby skin and a tendency towards those characteristics as well. And if you think the scientists in that study were unaware of how healthy hair is attractive to me, you’d be wrong. Every single theory includes signs of health, even the marketing products theory by the plastic surgeon.
This doesn’t debunk anything I’ve said, it just adds another theory: health.
And surely, you’re not saying that if someone is ugly, they’re unhealthy. Surely, there can be people who are unhealthy looking but are, in actuality, in peek health.
greenfuse wrote:
But the main problem is assuming theories based on the positive affects of tendencies in a direction can be logically countered by taking extreme levels as demonstrating the theory is false.
Water: Absolutely required for human life and health, but drinking an extreme excess in a short timeframe leads to water intoxication (hyponatremia), brain swelling, and death.
← Yes →
Exercise: Essential for building a strong heart and healthy body, but taking exertion to a non-stop extreme causes rhabdomyolysis, muscle tissue breakdown, and acute kidney failure.
← Right →
Oxygen: Mandatory for cellular survival, but breathing hyper-extreme, high-pressure doses of pure oxygen triggers oxygen toxicity, lung damage, and violent seizures.
Ok, I get the point!
greenfuse wrote:
You can’t debunk nuanced theories - even the surgeons is more nuanced - with extreme versions. And since they are going to focus on the factor they are interested in, it doesn’t mean they actually believe there is only one factor. People online however may think one trick ponies are the greatest ponies and have no interest in nuance.
Fair enough, but sometimes theories are just wrong. You yourself said the golden ratio theory has been debunked. So even if a theory of beauty is multifaceted, it does follow that we should include [i]all[i] theories of beauty into our considerations.
greenfuse wrote:
I’m not suggesting plagiarism, but this is one of the most studied and oldest theories in science.
In 1878, Sir Francis Galton first noticed that combining multiple faces into a single composite photograph yielded a face that was more attractive than any individual component. In 1990, psychologists Judith Langlois and Lori Roggman published their famous paper, “Attractive Faces Are Average” (Psychological Science).
← Well, look at that! Great minds do think alike. →
The main problem with this theory is that it has been debunked in David Perrett’s 1994 Nature study. ← That explains why I’ve never heard of it. → Pure population averages create an “okay” face (a 7/10) he found, but peak attractiveness requires exaggerating features away from the average toward high hormonal health (supernormal stimuli). ← That could explain makeup. → So, deviations from the norm lead to more attractiveness…but before we get another reduction ad absurdum argument, not all deviations from the average or norm. ← Don’t get your panties all in a knot, greenfuse; I get it. Deviations in a very particular direction. → And not the most extreme deviations from the norm. First off, looking healthy with young skin is almost universally attractive to men especially, but women also. In other words, neoteny tendencies but not extremes, especially regarding the health of the skin, add to the baseline. Symmetry does also, and evolutionary biologists think this signals healthy development, but again a tendency outside the average, not mathematical perfection in symmetry and not alone. And sexual dimorophism - that it is less easy to mistake you for the opposite sex.
So you’ve introduced a fourth theory of beauty: healthy features are more attractive. I won’t attempt to debunk this one as I think it could actually be true. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes a lot of sense (a lot of sense). The mistake I made with my “average” theory was to assume that the species is trying to preserve itself–that may be true for some species, and it may be true of some aspects of certain species–but there’s also the tendencies for a species to want to enhance itself–make itself better–and in that case, it must aim for something better than the average.
But how can we determine what’s better than the average unless we know what the average is. So the brain, in learning how to detect beauty, must first learn what the average is, and then it can deviate from there in the direction of health. ← There’s a multifaceted theory for you.
And I already pointed out in my OP that the 3 theories I debunked (or attempted to debunk), are not actually causes of beauty but symptoms. The cause, I said, was detecting the average, and the average is going to be symmetrical (obviously), baby-faced (if baby-face is just the average between the two extremes), and meet the golden ratio (because, if that theory is even true, the average human face happens to proportion itself according to the golden ratio). They are not wrong in the sense that beautiful faces aren’t symmetrical, baby-faced, or approximate the golden ratio, but that these things don’t cause beauty, they are merely symptoms of it.
Now, your theory–that health signs are a stimulant for detecting beauty–fits perfectly with my theory of the average. Human beings, as they grow up, learn to recognize average faces within their community, and using that as a starting point, look for deviations towards health. ← Both function as causes in this case, and so neither of them need to be debunked.
TOO EVERYONE:
The disheveled hair thing keeps coming up. I didn’t include that in the images above on purpose. ChatGPT did that all on its own because it knew that if it was going to draw an image of an ugly woman, morning hair was a must, as well as some minor sickly features. I didn’t ask for it. But it shouldn’t matter. If any one theory accounted for beauty, the look of her hair isn’t a factor. You can have perfectly symmetrical messy hair. Your facial features can match the golden ratio regardless of the state of your hair. And the baby-face theory seems to disregard hair all together for obvious reasons (babies aren’t born with hair). Even if you combine all three, hair shouldn’t matter. Greenfuse’s theory of health is obviously an exception to this, but it’s not like healthy looking groomed hair makes all the difference. Look:
^ Prettier, but not pretty.
Men aren’t exempt either.
→ , based on what I have said, you can see I think it is bullshit too.
