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.<<
Link?
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.
So if the example you give later (walking past a friend at the mall and not recognizing them) is the sort of thing that actually happens, then I’d guess general recognition without the extra facial recognition just isn’t good enough.
Assuming the friend is an actual friend, not just a friendly acquantaince (inside the dunbar group?), I think not recognizing them automatically would matter.
If we can do a little evolutionary speculation here, in the ancestral environment, telling whether the guy you just saw in the forest is in your band, or a stranger, or the particular guy in the band who would really benefit if you weren’t around is a matter of life and death.
And for babies, recognizing your mother does seem pretty important.
Not sure about the link. I’d have to dig it out. If you want to siikr for it maybe try neanderthal or eusocial or something.
>>Assuming the friend is an actual friend, not just a friendly acquantaince (inside the dunbar group?), I think not recognizing them automatically would matter.<<
Well, whenever I hear people draw a distinction between “friend” and “friendly acquaintance”, they almost always define “friend” so strictly that I have had maybe one or two friends in the past decade, and no friends whose faces I saw frequently. (honestly, where do the friend-vs-acquaintance people *find* so many people who don’t respond to interpersonal problems by contemptuously brushing them off)
I can reliably recognise housemates at the mall, and have nobody else whose faces I have as much experience with as one would have with one’s band members. I can *suspect* that a person at the mall is my boss, but not with confidence; however, I’ve only been around him ~[3 gradually increasing to 8]† hours/week for 1.5 years, so it’s to be expected that I’m only in the middle stages of learning his face.
(He is not faceblind–or at least, he’s significantly better at keeping track of which customers are regulars than I am–but he still didn’t spot me. I asked about how his Boxing Day went a couple days later and confirmed that he was at the mall that day, so it probably *was* him I saw.)
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>>If we can do a little evolutionary speculation here, in the ancestral environment, telling whether the guy you just saw in the forest is in your band, or a stranger, or the particular guy in the band who would really benefit if you weren’t around is a matter of life and death.<<
While this isn’t all that different from what I said, it does make it more clear why, if someone *did* mutate an unusually good facial-recognition ability, it would get selected for and eventually become the norm. If you don’t know whether someone’s an enemy *and neither do they*, that’s far less dangerous than if they know you’re enemies and you don’t.
Also, not knowing by the face whether someone’s in your tribe is something even mezzoprosopons or whatever the hell we’re calling them have to deal with these days, and they deal with it by simply making tribe members wear distinctive clothing when there’s a chance they might encounter an enemy [link].
(and I feel like a lot of the reasons that *I* refrain from murdering people would still apply to the stalking-a-rival-in-the-forest thing, but perhaps my threshold for “I am willing to accept X risk of Y-severity punishment†† in order to get the benefits of committing this crime” is unusually strict; probably an anxiety thing)
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†I work more hours than this, but these are specifically the hours that overlap with the hours he’s there.
††note: if you assault someone and they fight back and hurt *you*, that also counts as a punishment for this purpose
Tags:
#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #prosopagnosia #evolution #murder mention
Brinens and Things 
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