Brutal thermonuclear biologypill: "Even chickens prefer sexually dimorphic human faces, to the same extent as humans"

[BonesAndHarmony]

Ghirlanda, Jansson & Enquist (2002) conducted a novel study to examine the origins of the preference for attractive, sexually dimorphic faces in humans.

The researchers constructed seven male and female faces on a spectrum from moderately to strongly sexually dimorphic, obtained by 'averaging' a set of 35 facial photographs of individuals of each sex. A group of university students (N = 7 females and N = 7 males) were then requested to rate the faces in a random order, on a decile (1-10) scale for sexual attractiveness, answering the question 'how desirable would it be to go out on a date with this individual'.

Then the researchers utilized six chickens as experimental subjects (Gallus gallus domesticus; four being female chickens), which were rewarded with food for pecking at the faces of the humans that were of the sex opposite of their own (e.g hens male faces, cocks female faces) and trained to do so over a course of a few weeks. The researchers note that 'no reinforcement was given on test trials', so the chickens were only trained to peck faces of the correct sex, they weren't guided to pick at any particular target.

To test the behavior that the chickens had learned, the researchers counted the times the chicken picked at a given face within a certain time interval. Interestingly, it was discovered that human and chicken preferences for opposite sex faces were very highly correlated when varying the degree of sexual dimorphism of the presented faces (r² = 0.98); that is to say nearly identical. That means the chickens were nearly equally as likely to peck at the highly dimorphic faces as the human subjects were to prefer them as potential romantic partners. This result even generalized to when the researchers added faces with even more exaggerated dimorphism not present during training, i.e. both humans and chickens agreed on the more exaggerated faces being more attractive.

This provides evidence that any kind of sexual dimorphism tends to be exaggerated by sexual selection as it will appear are more attractive to the opposite sex (though within bounds, too much of a desirable trait also tends to reduce fitness, which is related to goldilocks principle).

Reference:
Ghirlanda S, Jansson L, Enquist M. 2002. Chickens prefer beautiful humans. Human Nature. 13(3): 383–389. [Abstract].

If both chickens and humans have the ability of recognizing and preferring more dimorphic faces this means this ability was already present in the last common ancestor of chickens and humans. It turns out the last common ancestor was a fucking reptilian creature that lived more than 310 millions of years ago.
JFL, we truly are nothing more than animals.

 

[Ascensionrequired]

 

[Deleted member 6538]

Old news

 

[anthropology pill]

take the chickenpill

Old news

dude why tf do you have a new avi every day
we already know you mog

 

[Deleted member 245]

b b but beauty is subjective