Asymmetry and Fake LinkedIn Profiles

Researchers in human evolution, and writers who present their research to a popular readership, have long known that bodily asymmetry is an indicator of general genetic health. Mutations, toxins, and disease can lead to bodily asymmetry, especially facial asymmetry. In mate selection, one mate can assess the health of the other mate by seeing his or her facial symmetry. If the left side doesn’t line up with the right, that might mean something somewhere is wrong.

People with facial symmetry are esteemed as beautiful and healthy. And these are also the faces that corporations want to present as representatives to their customers. You are much more likely to respond positively to a sales rep with a symmetrical face.

Corporations have used this fact to generate thousands of fake profiles (for example, on LinkedIn). These fake beautiful people will make you want to consider doing business with the corporations that they represent.

How do you know that an online personality is a real person? You can’t. It’s as simple as that. But there are some things you can look for. Back when I used to answer robocalls (something I no longer do; nor do I decline them, since that would tell the spammer that the number they have reached is real) I would listen to the “person” for a few seconds. Then I would say, “You are a robot.” The voice would keep talking for a couple of seconds, then say “I am not a robot.” Of course, you can program a robot to say, “I am not a robot.” I just delete all these calls without even answering them.

It is much more difficult to create a fake online personality if a portrait is involved. But, at the moment, it is possible. Researchers have found that fake LinkedIn profiles have faces that are too perfect. The facial symmetry is utterly perfect. No real human being is utterly symmetrical (see this article).

Of course, corporations will quickly learn how to insert a one percent facial asymmetry generator into their fake personalities. In the near future, we will never be able to tell if the person in the profile is real or not.

Beautiful Planet

 

Imagine yourself on an alien planet, with weird rocks and an almost barren surface. The scene can be very dramatic, as in this example:

But for most of us, a beautiful green forest as seen from a mountain top, with blue skies, or else a green tropical forest from which rain drips refreshingly, is much more beautiful. This is a photo from a forest near my home in Tulsa.

Yet there is no logical reason why the second scene should be better than the first. It is impossible to define beauty in logical terms.

But it is possible to define it in evolutionary terms. To the extent of their mental capacity, all animals have evolved to feel that their environments are beautiful. Because of our large brains, which allow a feeling of spirituality, we humans are the animals most powerfully moved by the sense of beauty. And it is our natural environments that we find most beautiful.

Why would evolution create a sense of beauty in our minds when we see our natural environment? Because if we feel inspired by the beauty of our natural environments, we are more likely to endure its occasional hardships and to live productively within it, finding all the resources we need for our fitness. Someone who thinks that their environment is ugly is unlikely to try very hard to find resources within it. More generally, if we are happy, we will be healthy and get along better in our social circumstances.

But that almost never happens with humans. No matter where people live, they find their environment beautiful. Even on the barren steppes of Siberia. I had a student once from northwest Kansas. There are beautiful parts of Kansas, but this was not one of them. Yet she said, “It is the most beautiful place on Earth.” Probably, even the poor people who search for usable garbage near the landfills in South America think that a mountain of trash can be beautiful, even as they see the peaks of the Andes in the distance.

I find that beautiful natural scenes from this planet are the scenes that move me with the greatest sense of beauty. And evolution is the reason for it.

The Nearly Infinite Capacity for Adjustment

The human brain has a nearly infinite capacity for adjustment to circumstances, so long as these circumstances are not immediately lethal. And this is not necessarily a good thing.

People often think of the environment in which they grew up as beautiful, even if such an environment is, by any objective measure, not beautiful. I keep thinking back to the student I had who considered northwestern Kansas to be the most beautiful place on Earth. To me, it seems that most of the rest of Kansas is actually more beautiful than the flat, agricultural northwest portion of the state.

And people have the ability to adjust their thinking and attitudes even to painful circumstances. They will rationalize to think of their sufferings as blessings. Without their sufferings, they claim, they would not have had certain important spiritual insights. One quick example is a book that was published, and had a very limited circulation, in the 1970s: Thank God I Have Cancer was the title. The author said that were it not for cancer, he would never have discovered the wonders of laetrile.

This is an obvious survival mechanism. We are descendants of people who considered their circumstances good enough in which to make a successful living, or at least to not give up. Even slaves developed a culture of stories and music, not allowing themselves to be turned into mere machines.

But there is a bad side to such irrepressible optimism. It doesn’t take many generations, perhaps only one, for people to forget beauty and blessings that are lost. As a botanist and lover of forests, one example I immediately think of is that we no longer notice that our American and European forests are ghosts of what they used to be. It is true that there are forests all over the place in the eastern U.S. and in the western mountains, but most of them are second-growth forests that have recovered from logging. Gone perhaps forever are the huge old trees that once dominated these forests. The two-meter-thick tulip poplar trunks that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison saw on one of their horseback trips were not all that unusual. We assume that the forests of comparatively small trees that we see today are the way these forests have always been. Our minds invest them with great beauty; the grandeur of the old forests is forgotten. This bur oak tree in Oklahoma looks big, but by the standards of an earlier century would be small for an eastern deciduous forest.

Global warming is starting to kill our forests. But there will still be forests in the next century. It is nearly certain that all of the sugar maple and beech forests in America will die; these species will persist only in Canada. Maybe most of the oaks will die also. There are oaks that can persist in relatively warm and dry conditions, such as post oaks. But post oaks cannot disperse to and grow up in dead black oak or white oak forests fast enough to keep them looking like oak forests. There are, however, trees that can grow rapidly and adjust to the fluctuations of temperature and moisture that come with global climate change. Examples include introduced mulberries (such as the white mulberry) and trees of heaven. There may be hikers in the twenty-second century who will exclaim at the beauty of the forests of mulberries and trees of heaven dominating the Appalachians, not realizing that the great, diverse forests that persisted into the twenty-first century—the ones we see today—have disappeared. They will have grown up loving the beauty of the depleted, skeletal forests around them.

Our ability to love what we see as we grow up may cause us to forget the beauty that we have lost. Oppressed people may grow up loving life despite their circumstances of poverty. Prophetic voices may arise to stir them, but unless they are actually suffering pain and starvation, they may feel that their circumstances are just fine, even beautiful, and they may not rise up to demand release from their oppression. Already the new generations are accepting the fact that they cannot aspire to improvements in life that my generation took for granted. Many people simply accept that having two jobs will barely keep them alive. The stories about well-paid unionized workers may seem like fantasy to them.

Our ability to make the best of, and find beauty in, our circumstances may lead to a world in which people accept, and even enjoy, blighted ecosystems and chronic oppression.