A lot of kids seem to like ugly or gross-looking creatures. Grossing out mom is part of the appeal, but I think there's something else there, too.
And don't tell me the babirusa is ugly! I think it falls in the "weird but cool" category. Jane On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 6:45 AM, Allen S;lzberg <[email protected]> wrote: > August 9, 2010 > A Masterpiece of Nature? Yuck! > By NATALIE ANGIER, NY Times > A friend recently sent around an e-mail with the subject line “lost cat > bulletin.” Open the message > and — gack! — there was a head-on shot of a star-nosed mole, its “Dawn of the > Dead” digging > claws in full view and its hallmark nasal boutonniere of 22 highly sensitive > feelers looking like fresh > bits of sirloin being extruded through a meat grinder. > > “I don’t think anyone would come near that cat, much less steal it,” tittered > one respondent. > Another participant, unfamiliar with the mole, wondered whether this was a > “Photoshop project > gone bad,” while a third simply wrote, “Ugh.” > > We see images of jaguars, impalas and falcons and we praise their regal > beauty and name our > muscle cars for them. We watch a conga line of permanently tuxedoed penguins, > and our hearts > melt faster than the ice sheet beneath those adorable waddling feet. Even > creatures > phylogenetically far removed from ourselves can have an otherworldly appeal: > jellyfish, octopus, > praying mantis, horseshoe crab. > > Yet there are some animals that few would choose as wallpaper for a Web > browser — that, to the > contrary, will often provoke in a human viewer a reflexive retraction of the > nostrils accompanied by > a guttural or adenoidal vocalization: ugh, yuck, ew. > > Let’s not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals — maybe cute > ugly, more often just > ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into > the evolution of > beauty and the metrics of a supermodel’s face, a few researchers are taking a > crack at > understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don’t > threaten us with venom > or compete for our food. > > Among the all-star uglies are the star-nosed mole, whose mug in close-up, > said Nancy > Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “is > disturbing because it > looks like the animal has no face,” or as if its face has been blown away. > The blobfish, by contrast, > is practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose > large-lipped, sad-sack > expression seems to be melting toward the floor. > > “It looks like if you handled it,” said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary > psychologist at the University > of New Mexico, “at the very least you’d get some kind of rash.” > > We have the male proboscis monkey and the male elephant seal, with their > pendulous, vaguely > salacious Jimmy Durantes, and the woolly bat and the vampire bat, their > squashed snub noses > accentuating their razor-toothed gapes. The warthog’s trapezoidal skull is > straight out of > Picasso’s “Guernica,” while the warthog’s kin, the babirusa, gives new > meaning to the word > skulduggery: On occasion, one of its two pairs of curving tusks will grow up > and around and pierce > right into its skull. > > Don’t forget the gargoyles of our own creation, purebred cats and dogs that > are stump-limbed, > hairless and wrinkled, with buggy eyes and concave snouts, and ears as big as > a jack rabbit’s or > curled at the tips like rotini. We love them, we do, our dear little mutants, > not in spite of their > ugliness, but because of it. > > As scientists see it, a comparative consideration of what we find freakish or > unsettling in other > species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual > information from a > millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that > assessment into a > revealing saga of ourselves. > > “No one would find the star-nosed mole ugly if its star were iridescent > blue,” said Denis Dutton, > professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New > Zealand. “But the > resemblance of the pinkish nose to human flesh subverts our expectations and > becomes a > perverse violation of whatever values we have about what constitutes normal > or healthy human > skin.” > > Conservation researchers argue that only by being aware of our aesthetic > prejudices can we set > them aside when deciding which species cry out to be studied and saved. > Reporting recently in the > journal Conservation Biology, Morgan J. Trimble, a research fellow at the > University of Pretoria in > South Africa, and her colleagues examined the scientific literature for > roughly 2,000 animal > species in southern Africa, and uncovered evidence that scientists, like the > rest of us, may be > biased toward the beefcakes and beauty queens. > > Assessing the publication database for the years 1994 through 2008, the > researchers found 1,855 > papers about chimpanzees, 1,241 on leopards and 562 about lions — but only 14 > for that > mammalian equivalent of the blobfish, the African manatee. > > “The manatee was the least studied large mammal,” Ms. Trimble said. > Speculating on a possible > reason for the disparity, she said, “Most scientists are in it for the love > of what they do, and a lot of > them are interested in big, furry cute things.” > > Or little cute things. Humans and other mammals seem to have an innate baby > schema, an > attraction to infant cues like large, wide-set eyes, a button nose and a > mouth set low in the face, > and the universality of these cues explains why mother dogs have been known > to nurse kittens, > lionesses to take care of antelope kids. > > On a first pass, then, “ugliness would be the deviation from these > qualities,” said David Perrett, an > evolutionary psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Tiny, > close-set eyes, > prominent snout, no forehead to speak of: it sure sounds like a pig. > > A helpless baby grows into a healthy, fertile youth, which in humans is > visually characterized by > clarity of shape, sleekness of form and visibility of musculature, said Wendy > Steiner of the > University of Pennsylvania, who is author of “Venus in Exile” and “The Real, > Real Thing,” to be > published this fall. “An animal with saggy skin, whiskers and no neck will > look like some old guy > who’s lost it,” she joked. > > The more readily we can analogize between a particular animal body part and > our own, the more > likely we are to cry ugly. “We may not find an elephant’s trunk ugly because > it’s so remote,” Dr. > Dutton said. “But the proboscis on a proboscis monkey is close enough to our > own that we apply > human standards to it.” You can keep your rhinoplasty, though: the male > monkey’s bulbous > proboscis lends his mating vocalizations resonant oomph. > > People are also keenly, even obsessively vigilant for signs of ill health in > others. “That means > anything that looks seriously asymmetrical when it should be symmetrical, > that looks rough and > irregular when it should be smooth, that looks like there might be parasites > on the skin or worms > under the skin, jaundice or pallor,” Dr. Miller said. “Anything mottled is > considered unattractive. > Patchy hair is considered unattractive.” We distinguish between the signs of > an acquired illness and > those of an innate abnormality. Splotches, bumps and greasy verdigris skin > mean “possibly > infectious illness,” while asymmetry and exaggerated, stunted or incomplete > features hint of a > congenital problem. > > If we can’t help staring, well, life is nasty and brutish, but maybe a good > gander at the troubles of > others will keep it from being too short. “Deformities provide a lot of > information about what can > go wrong, and by contrast what good function is,” Dr. Miller said. “This is > not just about physical > deformities. People who seem crazy are also highly attention-grabbing.” > > And as long as we’ve been gawking and rubbernecking, we’ve felt guilty about > the urge. In his > book “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution,” Dr. Dutton > recounts a passage > from Plato in which a man passing by a pile of corpses at the feet of an > executioner wants > desperately to look, tries to resist and then finally relents, scolding his > “evil” eyes to “Take your fill > of the beautiful sight!” > > The appeal of ugly animals is that neither they nor their mothers will care > if you stare, and if you > own a pet that others find shocking or ugly, you probably won’t mind if > others stare, too. > > Joan Miller, vice president of the Cat Fanciers’ Association Inc., said she > found the hairless Sphynx > cat, with its “huge ears” and only “a minor amount of wrinkling,” to be > “absolutely marvelous > looking” and “strong as an ox,” although she conceded it sometimes needed to > wear a sweater. > > Classical beauty is easy, but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, > the ugly, has often been > seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the > artistic vanguard. > “Beauty can be present by its violation,” Dr. Steiner said, and the pinwheel > appendages of the star- > nosed mole are the rosy fingers of dawn. > -- ------------- Jane Shevtsov Ecology Ph.D. candidate, University of Georgia co-founder, <www.worldbeyondborders.org> Check out my blog, <http://perceivingwholes.blogspot.com>Perceiving Wholes "The whole person must have both the humility to nurture the Earth and the pride to go to Mars." --Wyn Wachhorst, The Dream of Spaceflight
