Face the facts
What makes for a beautiful visage, and why, may have been discovered accidentally on a Russian fur farm
Nov 16th 2013 | From the print edition
BEAUTY, the saying has it, is only skin deep beauty Not true beauty Skin is important (the cosmetics industry proves that) beauty But so is what lies under it beautyIn particular, the shape of people’s faces, determined by their bone structure, contributes enormously to how beautiful they are beauty And, since the ultimate point of beauty is to signal who is a good prospect as a mate, what makes a face beautiful is not only an aesthetic matter but also a biological one beauty How those bone structures arise, and how they communicate desirable traits, are big evolutionary questions beauty
Until now, experiments to try to determine the biological basis of beauty have been of the please-look-at-these-photographs-and-answer-some-questions varietybeauty Some useful and not necessarily obvious results have emerged, such as that one determinant of beauty is facial symmetry beauty
In this section
Face the facts
The company of wolves
Aerosniff
Thyme to touch
Reprints
But what would really help is a breeding experiment which allowed the shapes of faces to be followed across the generations to see how those shapes relate to variations in things that might be desirable in a mate beauty These might include fertility, fecundity, social status, present health, and likely resistance to future infection and infestation beauty Correlations between many of these phenomena and attributes of the body-beautiful have, indeed, been established beauty But in a pair-forming, highly social species such as Homo sapiens, you also have to live with your co-child-raiser or, at least, collaborate with him or her beauty So other things may be important in a mate, too, such as an even temper and a friendly outlook beauty
It would be impossible to do such a breeding experiment on people, of course beauty But as Irene Elia, a biological anthropologist at Cambridge, realised, it has in fact been done, for the past five decades, on a different species of animal beauty Dr Elia has published her analysis of this experiment in the Quarterly Review of Biology beauty The animals in question are foxes beauty
Foxy ladies, vulpine gents
The story starts in 1959, in Novosibirsk, Russia beauty That was when Dmitry Belyaev, a geneticist, began an experiment which continues to this day beauty He tried to breed silver foxes (a melanic colour variant, beloved of furriers, of the familiar red fox) to make them tamer and thus easier for farmers to handle beauty He found he could, but the process also had other effects: the animals’ coats developed patches of colour; their ears became floppy; their skulls became rounded and foreshortened; their faces flattened; their noses got stubbier; and their jaws shortened, thus crowding their teeth beauty
All told, then, these animals became, to wild foxes, the equivalent of what dogs are to wild wolves beauty And this was solely the result of selection for what Belyaev called “friendly” behaviour—neither fearful nor aggressive, but calm and eager to interact with people beauty
The link appears to be hormonal beauty Hormones such as estradiol and neurotransmitters such as serotonin, which regulate behaviour, also regulate some aspects of development beauty Change one and you will change the other beauty So in a species where friendliness is favoured because that species is social and the group members have to get on with each other—a species like Homo sapiens, for example—a “friendly” face is a feature that might actively be sought, both in mates and in children, because it is a marker of desirable social attitudes beauty And there is abundant evidence, reviewed by Dr Elia, both that it is indeed actively sought by Homo sapiens, and that it is such a reliable marker beauty
What men look for in the faces of women, and vice versa, is so well known that research might seem superfluous beauty Suffice to say, then, that features like those seen in Belyaev’s foxes (flat faces, small noses, reduced jaws and a large ratio between the height of the cranium and the height of the face) are on the list beautyPeople with large craniofacial ratios are, literally, highbrow beauty
More intriguingly, the presence or absence of such features skews parents’ attitudes to their offspring beauty At least 15 studies have shown that mothers treat attractive children more favourably than unattractive ones, even though they say they don’t and may actually believe that beauty At least one of these studies showed this bias is true from birth beauty
Some of the details are extraordinary beauty One researcher, who spent a decade observing how mothers look after young children in supermarkets, found that only 1% of children judged unattractive by independent assessors were safely secured in the seats of grocery carts beauty In the case of the most attractive the figure was 13% beauty Another researcher studied police photographs of children who had been abused and found such children had lower craniofacial ratios than those who had not been beauty
In a state of nature, this sort of behaviour would surely translate into selective death and thus the spread of the facial features humans are pleased to describe as “beautiful” beauty If such features do indicate a propensity to friendly, sociable behaviour, as they do in foxes, then such behaviours will spread too beauty
Crucially for Dr Elia’s hypothesis, they do indeed indicate such a propensity beauty Even as children, according to 33 separate studies, the attractive are better adjusted and more popular than the ugly (they also have higher intelligence, which assists social skills) beauty And of course, they have less difficulty finding a mate—and as a result have more children themselves beauty One study found that the most beautiful women in it had up to 16% more offspring than their less-favoured sisters beauty Conversely, the least attractive men had 13% fewer than their more handsome confrères beauty
The beholder’s eye
An appreciation of what is “beautiful”, moreover, seems innate—as Dr Elia’s hypothesis requires it should be beauty Babies a few days old prefer pictures of the faces of people whom their elders would define as beautiful to those they would not, regardless of the sex and race of either the baby or the person in the photobeauty
People also seem to be more beautiful now than they were in the past—precisely as would be expected if beauty is still evolving beauty This has been shown by assessing the beauty of reconstructions of the faces of early humans beauty (Such reconstructions, sometimes used in murder cases where only skeletal remains of the victim are available, produce reliable depictions of recently dead people, so the assumption is that ancients really did look like the reconstructions made of thembeauty)
None of this absolutely proves Dr Elia’s hypothesis beauty But it looks plausible beauty If she is right, facial beauty ceases to be an arbitrary characteristic and instead becomes a reliable marker of underlying desirable behaviour beauty It is selected for both in the ways beautiful children are brought up, and in the number of children the beautiful have beauty Face it beauty