What is beauty?

[Tuan V Nguyen <t.nguyen@garvan.unsw.edu.au>]

Hello folks,

	Last week, I was struck by the exchange between chi. Thu.c 
Anh and Tua^'n (Japan) on the subject of youth. Their exchange 
reminds me of an article I wrote long time ago on the question of 
"what is beauty?". My idea arisen from a scientific paper by a 
Japanese group of scientists, who used computer to address the 
above question. I extract here some relevant parts for you, 
particularly those who think they are young, to comment:
 
	Many years ago, I read a book which claims that all human 
behaviours are governed by genetic factors, i.e. genes and hence 
there is a science called Behaviour Genetics. For example, for 
most men, the perfect mate is youthful and beautiful. The 
obsession with youth is due to men's genes which prefer to mate 
with a young woman; this is so because young woman has more 
reproductive years for them to exploit. Beauty, on the other hand, 
reveals a more interesting side of reasoning.

	What is beauty? Answer: it is simply average. In a recent 
issue of Nature, there was a study conducted by a group of 
ingenious researchers, who discovered this when they developed a 
computer program which "averaged" the features of a human face. It 
superimposed one randomly picked face upon another, then melded 
the two images. They produced a series of images resulting from 
the averaging of between two and nine faces, varying. When they 
asked their subjects to choose the most beautiful face, without 
exception, they considered the face with the most superimpositions 
as the most beautiful. So, beauty is THE average, folks!

	But, why should men's genes prefer the average? 

	Any ideas? thinkers and philosophers of VNSA ?

	Cheers,

	Tuan