flynn23 wrote:

It is noteworthy that a combination of features as depicted on these morphed photographs is impossible to find in any of living people. A human face can be wrinkless if only it is a digitalized picture. There are no perfect eyebrows, eyes or lips either. One may thus conclude that the woman on this picture is an absolutely unnatural, albeit a beautiful individual. Natural beauty cannot compete with digital perfection: the latter always wins, although it does not exist in reality. The top five of the computer pageant was made of only digital pictures. Furthermore, 79 percent of original male faces and 70 percent of original female faces were described as "not pretty" or even "ugly."

This is interesting not only from the child-adult combo (I think humans are programmed to think that babies are beautiful otherwise you'd have very little impulse to take care of them), but also the social consequence of this instinctual "feature". If we continue to develop a society where images and media is bombarded into our conscience with unreasonable or impossible physical specimens, what impact will that have on mating, psychology, and productive society?

Actually, sexual selection is something discussed by Darwin, but never taken to its natural conclusions. One of which is, on some levels we may have reached the pinicle of human evolution. The idea is that sexual selection can end up overriding natural selection, meaning "survival of the fittest" may no longer apply, and instead cause long term problems.

The general improvement in such things as height, physical ability, and infant mortality in the last few hundred years can be traced to diet and medicine, not any improvement in the genestock, and actually circumventing improvement in the genestock.

Now on to other scary ideas...

RE: Underestimating their own beauty, humans fall victims to glossy magazine covers