A Natural History of Love (31 page)

Close your eyes and picture the face of someone you love. Without meaning to, you will begin to smile, your eyes will squint a little as you savor the image, and a warmth will flood your heart. As poets have said, one face is enough to launch a thousand ships, another to stock a private armada of rejection and woe.
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Lovers can sit and stare for hours, soldering their hearts together with a white-hot gaze, finding in the other’s face a view of paradise. This is likely to happen, too, when a mother looks at her child. Hypnotized by the baby’s face, gladdened by the tonic of her love, she could happily sit and stare at it for days on end. The baby smiles at her, and she melts. The smile triggers her devotion and it’s absolute in its subtle tyranny. A newborn baby is the most powerful pitchman on earth. Although it can’t walk, or even roll over by itself, it controls the lives of all around it. Even children born blind know how to smile.

Visitors to foreign lands, who know nothing of the customs or language, know instinctively how to flirt with the natives. It doesn’t matter if they’re in Holland, Taiwan, Indonesia, or Amazonia. When humans feel, they register emotion on their faces, and to do that they use the same bag of tricks. People all over the world use nearly identical facial idioms when they flirt. Practice isn’t necessary. They know just how to tempt an onlooker with a glance. For children, flirting elicits care from adults. For adults, flirting begins the mad tango of romance. But the technique is the same. To flirt with a man, classically, a woman lifts her eyebrows a little and flashes him an eager, wide-eyed look. When she has his attention, she shyly turns her head away, lowering her eyes and lifting her cheeks into an almost imperceptible smile. Then she tilts her head back toward him again, seeming to touch him once more with her eyes. Sometimes she giggles while she does this, or grins, or hides her face in her hands. This flirting drama—a combination of modesty and blunt sexual interest—is a universal behavior, one that women apparently evolved long ago to alert men that they were available for sex.

The face is usually the first thing we notice about a person. A face reminds us of our parents, or an old lover, or someone who hurt us. A face sometimes tells us how a person feels, whether they’re anxious, playful, confident, or sullen. Eventually, a face records in its fine lines a lifetime of easy laughter or stubborness. Character may come from within, but a face gives one a sense of identity. Other animals can recognize and greet their kin and friends by smell, but we recognize a person by face. When a new baby is born, the first question asked is: Whom does he or she look like? We have to be able to recognize faces quickly to weave through all the relationships in our complex society, and we’re especially good at spotting a face in a sea of warring stimuli, of recognizing a familiar person from just a few lines of caricature. Actually, we’re better with caricatures. Robert Munro and Michael Kubovy, researchers at the University of Oregon, showed drawings of faces to a group of students. When the students saw the same faces again later, they recognized them, but were faster and more certain about it if the faces were distorted, the features elongated or exaggerated. “Why should a distortion of a face be remembered better than the face itself?” Munro asked. He and Kubovy believe it’s because the brain remembers faces in the same shorthand way, fixing on the features that make one face different from another. Because a caricature is closer to the brain’s version of a person, it’s easier to recognize than a complete portrait. Some brain-injured people suffer from a condition known as prosopagnosia, which leaves them unable to recognize faces. In severe cases, they cannot even recognize their own reflections in a mirror.

A fascination with faces is a human trait. Portraiture goes back at least sixteen thousand years, to the days of the Cro-Magnons, who carved the profile of one of their people on a limestone plaque, which was discovered in a cave at La Marche, France. Pliny thought that the first painting was probably a silhouette made by tracing someone’s shadow on the wall; and he may have been right. Throughout history, humans have associated identity with faces—the faces we find on ancient coins, in Ice Age carvings, in death masks, on the shrunken heads of enemies, outlined in ocher on Paleolithic walls, painted in three-quarter view (known as “eye and a half”) on canvas by fifteenth-century Venetians, carved in gems as cameos, etched on copper to make cheap daguerreotypes, collected in photo albums. In his portraits, Leonardo da Vinci strove to reveal what he referred to as “the motions of the mind.”

The word
face
probably came from the Latin
facere
, to make or shape, and the Indo-European root
dhe-k-
, to set or put. The etymology hints at artifice. A face is something we revise to fit the occasion. Or, as T. S. Eliot writes in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”
The Oxford English Dictionary
records the word
face
being used first in
A.D.
1290, to denote the front part of the head. By the fifteenth century, it could also be used as a verb, meaning to brag. In the English Midlands, I once heard a woman in her eighties refuse a second helping of cake by saying: “Don’t overface me.” We face off, face the music, interface, lose face, do an about-face, face up to, fall flat on our faces, talk face-to-face. We regard the face of the clock or of a building, and remark how the face of the city has changed, and how life may vanish from the face of the earth. On the face of it, we are obsessed with faces.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FACE

Look at a child less than a year old, and you’ll see a face that’s ancient. Every bone in it can be traced back through the fossil record to a creature that roamed the primitive seas. The human face began 350 million years ago with the Crossopterygii, a lunged fish that was driven by drought or hunger to leave its ocean home and leap into the thinly linked realms of air and water, flopping from pond to pond. As it settled along riverbanks and streams, it evolved strong fins with which to propel itself, a larger brain, better lungs. In time its gills became excess baggage that, along with the gill muscles, evolved into a jaw and the rudest beginnings of a face. Every face we now meet on land, whether it belongs to a pet cat, or our grandmother, or this new child, can trace its ancestry to that one species of fish.

Amphibians evolved much later, then reptiles, and at last mammals, the class to which humans and many land animals belong. As each developed its own needs and habitat, its face changed. At home on the jungle floor, the first mammals hunted insects and had whiskers and long sharp noses. Over a period of thirty million years, they evolved into horses, elephants, whales, and other higher mammals. As discussed earlier, those with widely spaced eyes had a better chance of survival, bore more young, and passed along their vigilance to their offspring. Predators, on the other hand, needed eyes set right in the front of their faces, for good depth perception and stereoscopic vision. One glance at a human face tells all about our origins: we were not the prey but the predator.

When our primate ancestors began living in trees, about sixty-five million years ago, their eyes changed. Swinging from branch to branch required even better depth perception. Color vision made it possible to judge ripening fruit, and to recognize dangerous plants and animals. Their teeth became larger and blunter, good for grinding plants. At first the primate face was almost expressionless, a mask that could only show fear or rage by rolling back the lips and baring the teeth, but in time the eye sockets migrated around to the center of the face, the mouth developed an arching roof, and the lower jaw widened into a sweeping curve. A long caravan of hominids rose and fell, with some lines dying out and others prevailing. Then, two million years ago, a small-bodied, brainy ape appeared,
Homo habilis
(“handy man”), who made simple tools. A social being,
Homo habilis
probably had a range of facial expressions. Because
Homo habilis
switched from a strict vegetarian life to the habits of an omnivore, its teeth changed—a diet of plants requires teeth with large grinding surfaces and strong muscles and jaws to hold them. But meat-eaters can have more delicate faces. Then, about a million years ago,
Homo erectus
appeared, an upright hominid with small teeth, a big brain, and prominent eyes. After they tamed fire, they not only cooked food (making it easier to chew), they gathered around fires to eat and keep warm, sat and looked at one another face-to-face, engaged in social activities. Cro-Magnon man, the next stage in human evolution, appeared on the scene around 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, with a large forehead that housed a colossal brain, a rounded cranium, a rather delicate jaw, and a tongue, mouth, and larynx capable of speech. The original Cro-Magnons were a relatively small group of people and, as they grew and split up and migrated to different parts of the world, each group adapted to a new environment and passed along unique traits through natural selection. For example, some African blacks developed a gene that protects them against malaria (unfortunately, it also causes sickle-cell anemia); some northern Asians developed stout, squat bodies to prevent heat loss and slitted eyes to keep out glare from the snow; some tribes living in hot, humid regions grew tall, lanky bodies with greater skin area to prevent overheating.

Extrapolating from such evidence, our common sense, our science, and our folk wisdom all tell us that people have evolved different “looks” as a way of adapting to the rigors of their environment. People who live in the tropics are said to need more melanin, a dark brown or black pigment that helps them withstand the brutal onslaught of the tropical sun, which can cause skin cancer. Some scientists even claim that dark skin acts as better camouflage in the jungle, or prevents beryllium poisoning, or helps to maintain the right level of folic acid. Kinky hair is said to protect the head and allow it to perspire more freely. The plump, padded skin on the faces of the Inuit supposedly helps to provide insulation in subzero temperatures. Desert dwellers are said to have large hooked noses that serve to humidify the dry air before it enters the lungs, Scandinavians to have pale skin so that they can absorb more sunlight and vitamin D.

But does this make sense? Living as far north as they do, Inuits should have ultra-pale skin, but they don’t. Although Tasmania receives little light, which should result in fair skin, its peoples have very dark skin. None of the original inhabitants of the Americas had black skin, even those who lived at the equator. In the Solomon Islands, people with black skin and white skin live on islands close by. Although one sees much blond hair among Scandinavians, one also finds it among Australian aborigines. Blue eyes supposedly see better in the dim light of northern climates, but the peoples of regions with even lower light levels, such as the mist-shrouded mountains of New Guinea, have dark eyes. If we consider skin and eye color in connection with the amount of sunlight received, it becomes clear that no simple correlations can be made. Over a hundred years ago, Charles Darwin said the same thing. In
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
, he points out that there are many human traits—especially facial ones—that natural selection cannot explain fully. It is more likely that hair and eye color, shape of lips and eyelids, skin color, amount of facial hair in men, the form of the penis, and the color of a woman’s nipples and shape of her buttocks have nothing to do with adaptation to environment, but, instead, have evolved through “sexual selection.” According to this line of reasoning, only the sexiest survive. People choose mates they find attractive, and we find people most attractive if they look like us. This may be because children imprint on the people they see around them—especially their parents and siblings, the people they see most. So, fair-skinned, brown-eyed brunets, who grew up in a family of people who looked the same, would find fair-skinned, brown-eyed brunets beautiful and be attracted to them as mates. This narcissism could work on quite a large scale: in a group of curly haired people, people with straight hair would have fewer mates and fewer offspring. In time, the gene for straight hair would either die out or the curly-haired people would tend to mate with their own kind and the straight-haired people with theirs, thus forming distinct groups and creating separate gene pools.

SURVIVAL OF THE CUTEST

Small children naturally develop plump, bulging cheeks, a large forehead, big eyes, a small round chin, and, often, dimples. Just looking at them makes the heart melt, and studies strongly suggest that such a response is biologically based. Cuter babies are handled more, and smile more often, which elicits even more smiles and affectionate touching from adults. Cuteness triggers a protective response in both adults and children. Studies show that when adults retain these childlike features, they’re also thought to have attractive personalities. As researchers Diane S. Berry and Leslie Zebrowitz-McArthur report: “People with an infantile craniofacial profile, low vertical placement of features, a small, and rounded chin, large round eyes, high eyebrows, smooth skin, or a short nose are perceived as warmer and more submissive, weaker, more naïve, and less threatening than those with more mature versions of the same features.” This may help to explain society’s double standard of beauty when it comes to aging. People who are shown photographs of men and women choose younger women but older men as the most attractive. As Konrad Lorenz first argued, this is because men are attracted to women in their childbearing years, knowing that they will be healthy enough to bear children and raise them; whereas women are attracted to men who have the status and power to protect those children.
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What physical features of a woman’s face do we find attractive? Society reads childlike, even infantile, facial features as “cute.” Women tend to retain those features as adults, and that works well at first. In order to find a woman attractive, we need to see her as feminine, and a key ingredient of femininity is being a little childlike in appearance. Unfortunately for a woman, those facial features change as she grows older. So aging hits women harder than men, because older women can sometimes seem less feminine-looking to us, while older men tend to grow more masculine-looking as they age. This contributes heavily to the double standard of beauty we find so unjust.