In "And the Country with the Most Beautiful Women Is ..." Roissy calls attention to one of those efforts at averaging together lots of pictures of people's faces. This one has 41 different nationalities of young women [click on picture to get 1370 x 1240 full size picture of 41 composite faces].
As usual, taking the average of young faces makes for a pleasing effect. Much of facial attractiveness is lacking random defects, which creating composite digital images washes out. (On the other hand, while averaging can get you pretty close to, say, Britney Spears at age 20, it doesn't seem able to get you to, say, Audrey Hepburn.)
In commenting, please keep in mind that Roissy's post is a good place for Roissyesque comments, while this is a good place for discussing the various high-minded epistemological issues I will bring up below.
Unfortunately, I can't find the source of all these pictures. (I'd guess yearbook pictures. If so, we're dealing with young women from above the dropout class. Or maybe they are beauty contest participants. Maybe one country's photos are beauty contest winners and another country's are mug shots from county jail. I don't know, so don't be too quick to decide the women of Country X are more beautiful than the women of Country Y based on these composites.)
One thing that's interesting is the difference in facial expressions, which has a lot to do with social attitudes. For example, the composite West African girl looks sweet, while the composite African-American girl looks like the cast of Waiting to Exhale is telling her, "You go, girl!" And the poor composite Afghan girl looks like she's kind of worried that the Taliban will at any moment break in and set the photography studio on fire.
On the other hand, a lot of differences in expressions may just have to do with what the individual photographers asked for, and other non-national semi-random characteristics.
Still, you can definitely see national "types:"
For example, which is the German composite, which the Greek, and which the French? (This is not a trick question.)
I'm not sure why the middle face is shorter in the vertical dimension than the other two -- this probably has more of a technical explanation involving how the pictures were taken or the images recopied than a physical anthropological explanation. I wouldn't be too excited about comparing the composites versus each other since that's so dependent upon how pictures from around the world were taken.
Instead, what I think is interesting is how much each composite is fairly recognizably traceable to relatively close to its country of origin. For example, while looking at one of the composites above, the name "Marianne" suddenly sprung into my mind:
When French artists draw Marianne, an emblem of the Republic for over 150 years, they use French girls as models. Conversely, French girls tend to try, in a wide variety of ways, to look French. (As 2Blowhards pointed out, the French get up in the morning looking forward to a whole day of being French.)
It would be an interesting experiment to do on a large number of people to see how much more accurate their national identifications are when using the 41 averaged composite faces. But also test how well people do on identifying the nationalities of 41 individual faces from the underlying samples.
The existence of types is quite unpopular in the human sciences these days. For example, the Field Museum has a stupendous collection of 104 sculptures they commissioned from sculptress Malvina Hoffman in 1930 to illustrate "The Races of Mankind." In 1999s, I asked a Field Museum official why the museum didn't treat this amazing resource with more respect. She said they weren't realistic because they were "types."
In other words, when Hoffman sculpted, for example, her Nuer tribesman of the Southern Sudan, she sculpted an extremely Nuery-looking fellow imaginable -- about 6'8" and 140 pounds. In reality, by no means is the average Nuer 6'-8". On the other hand, the Nuers, like their archrivals, the Dinkas, are among the most "elongated" people on Earth, so Hoffman definitely caught their particular tendency.
On the other hand, these newfangled composites validate the existence of types.
This is actually an important question to understand both sides of.
Taxonomists rely upon types -- typically a single stuffed animal or preserved plant (known as a holotype) in a prominent museum -- to classify creatures they find. (Any experts in this rather arcane subject, please feel free to correct me.)
For example, say you are a local homeowner and don't like your neighbor's plan to subdivide his land because it would hurt your view and lower your property value. So, you hire some biology grad students to search your neighbor's property for anything that might get him in trouble under the Endangered Species Act. They bring back a dead bird. Is it the officially endangered California gnatcatcher?!? Or is it merely the common Baja gnatcatcher? Huge amounts of money could be riding on this question. You compare it to the type for each and decide based on which it's closest to in looks.
That, however, raises the question of what type of type should be chosen: an average member of a population or a distinctively representative example of a population. Taxonomists have tended toward the latter as being more useful in settling subsequent classification quandaries. For example, a statue of a 6'8" Nuer would be more helpful than a statue of a 6'1" Nuer at helping people subsequently recognize Nuerness.
Somewhat similarly, Swedes tend to be more distinctly representative than, say, Slovenians of certain distinctive tendencies that distinguish Europeans from the rest of the human population. On the other hand, Slovenian are more likely to look like the average European than Swedes do, in part because Slovenia is more central and Sweden more peripheral in Europe.
Do you see the distinction?
Which way of thinking is right and which wrong?
Well, both ways can be useful. It's helpful to be able to remember that there are two different approaches. It's also useful to remember, however, the shortcomings of either approach.
In general, I'm not that big of a fan of the classical taxonomical approach to human beings. Instead, I prefer to think genealogically. For example, instead of trying to match, say, Tiger Woods to his closest type, you just ask him what his family tree is.
P.S. Here's Dienekes's composites of 2006 World Cup soccer players, showing that if you average enough healthy young people together, even Wayne Rooney's team comes out looking all right.
I'm not sure why the middle face is shorter in the vertical dimension than the other two -- this probably has more of a technical explanation involving how the pictures were taken or the images recopied than a physical anthropological explanation. I wouldn't be too excited about comparing the composites versus each other since that's so dependent upon how pictures from around the world were taken.
Instead, what I think is interesting is how much each composite is fairly recognizably traceable to relatively close to its country of origin. For example, while looking at one of the composites above, the name "Marianne" suddenly sprung into my mind:
It would be an interesting experiment to do on a large number of people to see how much more accurate their national identifications are when using the 41 averaged composite faces. But also test how well people do on identifying the nationalities of 41 individual faces from the underlying samples.
The existence of types is quite unpopular in the human sciences these days. For example, the Field Museum has a stupendous collection of 104 sculptures they commissioned from sculptress Malvina Hoffman in 1930 to illustrate "The Races of Mankind." In 1999s, I asked a Field Museum official why the museum didn't treat this amazing resource with more respect. She said they weren't realistic because they were "types."
In other words, when Hoffman sculpted, for example, her Nuer tribesman of the Southern Sudan, she sculpted an extremely Nuery-looking fellow imaginable -- about 6'8" and 140 pounds. In reality, by no means is the average Nuer 6'-8". On the other hand, the Nuers, like their archrivals, the Dinkas, are among the most "elongated" people on Earth, so Hoffman definitely caught their particular tendency.
On the other hand, these newfangled composites validate the existence of types.
This is actually an important question to understand both sides of.
Taxonomists rely upon types -- typically a single stuffed animal or preserved plant (known as a holotype) in a prominent museum -- to classify creatures they find. (Any experts in this rather arcane subject, please feel free to correct me.)
For example, say you are a local homeowner and don't like your neighbor's plan to subdivide his land because it would hurt your view and lower your property value. So, you hire some biology grad students to search your neighbor's property for anything that might get him in trouble under the Endangered Species Act. They bring back a dead bird. Is it the officially endangered California gnatcatcher?!? Or is it merely the common Baja gnatcatcher? Huge amounts of money could be riding on this question. You compare it to the type for each and decide based on which it's closest to in looks.
That, however, raises the question of what type of type should be chosen: an average member of a population or a distinctively representative example of a population. Taxonomists have tended toward the latter as being more useful in settling subsequent classification quandaries. For example, a statue of a 6'8" Nuer would be more helpful than a statue of a 6'1" Nuer at helping people subsequently recognize Nuerness.
Somewhat similarly, Swedes tend to be more distinctly representative than, say, Slovenians of certain distinctive tendencies that distinguish Europeans from the rest of the human population. On the other hand, Slovenian are more likely to look like the average European than Swedes do, in part because Slovenia is more central and Sweden more peripheral in Europe.
Do you see the distinction?
Which way of thinking is right and which wrong?
Well, both ways can be useful. It's helpful to be able to remember that there are two different approaches. It's also useful to remember, however, the shortcomings of either approach.
In general, I'm not that big of a fan of the classical taxonomical approach to human beings. Instead, I prefer to think genealogically. For example, instead of trying to match, say, Tiger Woods to his closest type, you just ask him what his family tree is.
P.S. Here's Dienekes's composites of 2006 World Cup soccer players, showing that if you average enough healthy young people together, even Wayne Rooney's team comes out looking all right.
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