I suspected it might be Abraham Lincoln when I could only see around the edge, but the more they revealed, the less sure I got, until by the end I was convinced it wasn’t him. You tagged the post “Abraham Lincoln”, so I guess I should’ve gone with my first thought.
I note that when I took one of those online facial recognition quizzes, I had a similar experience with Barack Obama: my first thought was that it was him, but then I thought “no, that can’t be him, he isn’t that old” and failed the question (like I did every other question on that quiz). I’d forgotten how much politics ages you. (Though in Lincoln’s case, the “no, that can’t be him” was because this face looks too wide to be him.)
(Who says there has to be an evolutionary advantage? All a trait really has to do to stick around is not get you killed too often.)
Same- I only needed 4 tiles taken away before I knew who it was. Personally, I’m familiar with that picture, so I didn’t have any doubts as more was revealed.
And no, there doesn’t have to be an evolutionary advantage, though it could be argued since it’s a pretty large subpopulation. And if it prevents you from not being killed too often, couldn’t that be considered an evolutionary advantage? I’m hardly an evolutionary psychologist, but I love hearing the arguments for or against certain traits to exist due to evolution.
It’s not that it prevents you from being killed too often, it’s that it doesn’t actively get you killed enough to have been weeded out of the gene pool.
Adverse mutations can stick around for a long time if they’re bundled with genes that otherwise do well. This happens a lot with populations that go through bottlenecks – whatever’s left afterwards is going to stick around for a while.
e.g. the whole vitamin c thing seems like a loss for no good reason and we’re all stuck with it.
As a sidenote, given the population boom in the last few hundred years there’s gotta be a whole bunch of weird mutations that exist in greater numbers than you ever would have expected.
Anyway have you heard the whole neanderthal / autism idea? @slartibartfastibast has a whole ancient aliens slideshow + youtube video on it.
As a further side note, I wonder what the trade off for lactase persistence is. It must be something, if lactase stopped persisting at some point.
>>It’s not that it prevents you from being killed too often, it’s that it doesn’t actively get you killed enough to have been weeded out of the gene pool.<<
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say, but I think she misunderstood and I didn’t bother trying to clarify.
Come to think of it, why *do* specialised facial-recognition modules exist? If you’re living in a band society, interacting with the same small group of people over and over, you can just use your general-object-recognition module for that. Yeah, it’ll take a few years to start getting the hang of it, but those’ll be childhood years in which you aren’t expected to be very competent at stuff anyway.
A lot of the life problems caused by prosopagnosia are not so much from “being bad at faces” as from “being *worse at faces than others expect you to be*”, and if people’s expectations were lower it would be much less of a problem. There’s a possible universe in which the default reaction to walking past a friend at the mall and they act like they’ve never met you is not “how rude, what did I ever do to them” but “yeah, the human brain’s not built to deal with crowds, makes sense that they didn’t recognise me. TBH, I only knew for sure it was them because they had that backpack with the hole patched with denim”.
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>>Anyway have you heard the whole neanderthal / autism idea? @slartibartfastibast has a whole ancient aliens slideshow + youtube video on it.<<
Brinens and Things 
2 thoughts on “Can you tell who this is?”