21–30 of 39 posts
Study: Chickens prefer beautiful humans. Citation: Ghirlanda, S., Jansson, L. & Enquist, M. Hum Nat (2002) 13: 383. Link: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-002-1021-6 DOI: 10.1007/s12110-002-1021-6 Abstract: We trained chickens to react to an average human female face but not to an average male face (or vice versa). In a subsequent test, the animals showed preferences for faces consistent with human sexual preferences (…
Study: Chickens prefer beautiful humans. Citation: Ghirlanda, S., Jansson, L. & Enquist, M. Hum Nat (2002) 13: 383. Link: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-002-1021-6 DOI: 10.1007/s12110-002-1021-6 Abstract: We trained chickens to react to an average human female face but not to an average male face (or vice versa). In a subsequent test, the animals showed preferences for faces consistent with human sexual preferences (…
I wonder what aspects of human beauty chickens are perceiving? Purely at a guess, I would say symmetry of features and signs of health/reproductive health. Given that they’re looking st faces, this seems most likely to me.
They have trained chickens to discern between male and female faces. It would be logical to assume that they have found features that allow them to put each sample on that one-dimensional scale, and then use those features. It would mean that a more "beautiful" face is the one that is most distinguished in it's features from the face of another sex.
This would be the most naive interpretation, but as always in nature, there can of course be layers of complexity on top of this.
Or may be that's because there is a universal concept of beauty, as Feinman was guessing, but I doubt it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what aspects of human beauty chickens are perceiving? Purely at a guess, I would say symmetry of features and signs of health/reproductive health. Given that they’re looking st faces, this seems most likely to me.
If chickens are anything like a neural network (and they kinda have to be at some level, perhaps a more complicated network than what we have in our computers now, but a learning discriminator network nonetheless) - it sounds like they would be reacting on the features which vary the most between male and female faces. They have trained chickens to discern between male and female faces. It would be logical to assume…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what aspects of human beauty chickens are perceiving? Purely at a guess, I would say symmetry of features and signs of health/reproductive health. Given that they’re looking st faces, this seems most likely to me.
If chickens are anything like a neural network (and they kinda have to be at some level, perhaps a more complicated network than what we have in our computers now, but a learning discriminator network nonetheless) - it sounds like they would be reacting on the features which vary the most between male and female faces. They have trained chickens to discern between male and female faces. It would be logical to assume…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what aspects of human beauty chickens are perceiving? Purely at a guess, I would say symmetry of features and signs of health/reproductive health. Given that they’re looking st faces, this seems most likely to me.
If chickens are anything like a neural network (and they kinda have to be at some level, perhaps a more complicated network than what we have in our computers now, but a learning discriminator network nonetheless) - it sounds like they would be reacting on the features which vary the most between male and female faces. They have trained chickens to discern between male and female faces. It would be logical to assume…
Another, related explanation might be Occam’s razor (the preference for simple things [3]): Beautiful things are beautiful because they are simple. They require fewer bits to be represented and brains prefer such representations. This is a fact that possibly also explains intrinsic motivation and our interest in art and science [4].
Another explanation might be that chickens have evolved abilities to recognize symmetric body shapes and a uniform skin texture for their own intraspecies visual (sexual) attraction. Sexual attraction to symmetry likely mainly exists because asymmetry is reliable evidence that growth hormone signaling was not only out of tune in some regions of the body (e.g. the face), but throughout the entire system and this is the root cause of all kinds of diseases (e.g. faster wearing joints) [5].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poser
[1] https://www.facebook.com/nipsfoundation/videos/1555427447881...
[2] https://i.imgur.com/Xs4njxa.jpg
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
[4] http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html
[5] http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/oplan/documents/1999/1999-M... (Entry "Section Sexual Attraction, Evolutionary Psychology of", p. 884. The entire entry is well worth reading.)
I guess this explains it, my chickens have been refusing to go into the coop at night. I knew I gained some weight over the holidays, but I didn't realize how grotesque I became.
Time to test if the renaissance Vitruvian man was all right!
