The Biology of Beauty
"Throughout the animal world
attractiveness certifies biological
quality."
• There's no reason to think that any of
these creatures understands its
motivations, but there's a clear pattern to
their preferences.
Beauty is Timeless
• It's widely assumed that ideals of beauty
vary from era to era and from culture to
culture. But a harvest of new research is
confounding that idea.
• Studies have established that people
everywhere--regardless of race, class or
age--share a sense of what's attractive.
• And though no one knows just how our
minds translate the sight of a face or a
body into rapture, new studies suggest
that we judge each other by rules we're
not even aware of. We may consciously
admire Kate Moss's legs or Arnold's
biceps, but we're also viscerally attuned to
small variations in the size and symmetry
of facial bones and the placement of
weight on the body.
Golden Ratio
• In an attempt to answer this question, the
philosophers of the day devoted a great
deal of time to this conundrum. Plato wrote
of so-called "golden proportions," in which,
amongst other things, the width of an ideal
face would be two-thirds its length, while a
nose would be no longer than the distance
between the eyes.
The origins of the divine
proportion
• In the Elements, the most influential
mathematics textbook ever written, Euclid of
Alexandria (ca. 300 BC) defines a proportion
derived from a division of a line into what he
calls its "extreme and mean ratio." Euclid's
definition reads:
• A straight line is said to have been cut in
extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line
is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the
lesser.
• In other words, in the diagram above, point C
divides the line in such a way that the ratio of AC
to CB is equal to the ratio of AB to AC. Some
elementary algebra shows that in this case the
ratio of AC to CB is equal to the irrational
number 1.618 (precisely half the sum of 1 and
the square root of 5).
• C divides the line segment AB according to the
Golden Ratio
• Who could have guessed that this
innocent-looking line division would have
implications for numerous natural
phenomena ranging from the leaf and
seed arrangements of plants to the
structure of the crystals of some
aluminium alloys, and from the arts to the
stock market?
Sunflower seeds
• In fact, with the increasing realization of
the astonishing properties of this number
over the centuries since Euclid's definition,
the number was given the honorifics
"Divine Proportion" and "Golden Ratio."
The golden ratio in the arts
• Many books claim that if you draw a
rectangle around the face of Leonardo da
Vinci's Mona Lisa, the ratio of the height to
width of that rectangle is equal to the
Golden Ratio. No documentation exists to
indicate that Leonardo consciously used
the Golden Ratio in the Mona Lisa's
composition, nor to where precisely the
rectangle should be drawn.
• Standards of beauty may be related to
natural mathematical proportions which
have captivated humans across cultures
since the beginning of time, such as the
golden ratio (approximately 1.618:1).
Some beautiful faces do seem to exhibit
such geometric proportions.
• Science writer Eric Haseltine claimed (in an article in
Discover magazine in September 2002) to have found
that the distance from the chin to the eyebrows in
Langlois's 32-composite faces divides the face in a
Golden Ratio. A similar claim was made in 1994 by
orthodontist Mark Lowey, then at University College
Hospital in London. Lowey made detailed measurements
of fashion models' faces. He asserted that the reason we
classify certain people as beautiful is because they come
closer to Golden Ratio proportions in the face than the
rest of the population.
Cross-cultural Attractiveness
Ratings
(Langlois 1990, 1994, 2000)
• Participants were gathered from various
countries, ethnicities and racial groups to
rate the physical attractiveness of
photographs of equally diverse people.
Surprisingly, the perception of beauty is
uniform across cultures.
 To support the hypothesis that there is an
evolutionary basis for attraction, infants
across cultures were also tested, and they
prefer the same photographs that adults
prefer.
• Newborn babies come fully equipped with
built-in preferences, including a preference
for an attractive face, that help them make
sense of their new environment,
• Researchers showed more than 100 infants two
images that were placed side by side.
• One was of an attractive face, while the other
was a less attractive face. The babies, ranging in
age from five hours old to two days old, spent
about 80 percent of the time looking at the
attractive face, while barely glancing at the
unattractive face.
• "You can show them pair after pair of faces
that are matched for everything other than
attractiveness. This leads to the
conclusion that babies are born with a very
detailed representation of the human
face,"
• Dr. Alan Slater, a psychologist at Exeter,
explained to the BBC News.
• Attractiveness is not simply in the eye of
the beholder, it is in the brain of the
newborn infant right from the moment of
birth and possibly prior to birth," he added.
• When those babies grow up, the preference for
pretty faces doesn't change. And it crosses all
cultures and geography as well. When an insular
European is shown the faces of two Africans, the
one he chooses as most attractive is also the
same one an African chooses. And it works the
other way around when an African is shown the
faces of two Europeans.
• "Although we think that standards of facial
beauty vary over time and culture, they
don't actually change that much," Slater
explained to Newsweek. The evidence
indicates that there is a biological and
universal standard."
So don't blame a man when he can't help
but look at a pretty face! He's biologically
programmed that way.
• http://www.crystalinks.com/sacred_geometry.html
• http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF7/716.ht
ml
• http://www.markwahl.com/golden-ratio.htm
• http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hd/abouthele
n.htm
• Newsweek, June 3, 1996 v127 n23 p60(7)
The
biology of beauty. (Cover Story) Geoffrey Cowley.
• http://channels.netscape.com/men/package.jsp?name=ft
e/prettyfaces/prettyfaces&floc=wn-ns
• Page 46 -47 N Alchin “Theory of
Knowledge”
• Is ‘beauty’ just ‘biology’?