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Beauty handicap

Source: TW

An acquaintance showed me AI-generated perfect human faces. They were more attractive/better-looking than real-life humans; thus, it was capturing a “Platonic ideal” for at least a subset of humans. Why is this ideal never/v.rarely achieved in real life?

There seem to be two forces acting against.

The most obvious is the environment: even if you had the genetic potential for it, various environmental factors can damage it during development and maturity.

The second, which is less obvious, is genetic trade-offs. There is a cost in some other department for achieving perfect beauty. Natural selection balances the costs and benefits to reach some kind of quasi-stable state, which due to the trade-off is at best an approximation of the ideal.

Thus, the “Platonic ideal’s” expression in flesh and blood is limited. This dovetails with the handicap principle, where handicaps are often exaggerated displays of beauty.