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Speaking of Science
Why do human faces look so different? Evolution made us that way.
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By Elahe Izadi September 18, 2014
(Courtesy of the University of California at Berkeley)
(Courtesy of the University of California at Berkeley)
You probably don't spend much time thinking about how curious it is that your mother looks dramatically different from your boss, whose face doesn't at all resemble your mail carrier's, let alone your fourth grade teacher's or your prom date's or that barista's at the coffee shop.
But in the grand scheme of things, the massive variation among human faces is quite extraordinary when compared to animals that pretty much all look the same.
As it turns out, evolutionary pressures for individuals to be easily recognizable pushed us toward having widely different faces, according to a new study published in Nature Communications and funded by the National Institutes of Health.
"Individual recognition is really important, in some ways so important that sometimes we don't realize how we recognize individuals," said study co-author Michael Sheehan, a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. "It's so ingrained within us."
The study found that there's more variation in human facial traits -- such as the distance between eyes or the length of a nose -- than there is for other body traits. And facial traits aren't connected to each other the way other body traits are; someone with long legs tends to have long arms. But you can have close-set eyes and either a wide nose or a small nose. Faces are unpredictable like that.