
Chickens Prefer Attractive People - lnguyen
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/animals-chickens-evolution-eggs-food/
======
meitham
"For instance, chickens can recognize up to 30 other individual chickens, and
chicks imprint the image of their mother between 24 to 36 hours of hatching"
Back in 1993 I sold a messaging Egyptian red dove, and its white dove wife
separately. The messaging dove expectedly came back within 3 weeks, but I was
surprised it couldn't distinguish its wife! It decided a newly bought white
dove, which looked like its wife, was his wife and it the bullying didn't stop
until she obliged.

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all_these_years
There is another conclusion: chicken read the mind of humans :) The original
article:
[http://cogprints.org/5272/1/ghirlanda_jansson_enquist2002.pd...](http://cogprints.org/5272/1/ghirlanda_jansson_enquist2002.pdf)

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tzahola
Hm. If only my grandma still had that chicken coop in the backyard, I could
make a chicken-based Tinder crawler and get rich.

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everdev
> The chickens pecked more at screens showing symmetrical faces—revealing the
> same preferences as the 14 people who had done the same experiment.

Basically, a tiny study claims that chickens like symmetrical faces.

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IncRnd
I don't see how this text is correct:

 _Typically breeds with white earlobes lay white eggshells, and those with red
earlobes lay brown eggshells_

followed by

 _There are exceptions, like Rhode Island reds, which have red earlobes and
brown eggs._

As far as I know, white=white and red=brown. It's that follow-on sentence that
doesn't make sense; how can restating the same thing be an exception?

Is there someone hear with more knowledge about this?

~~~
notfed
I agree, it's not an "exception". (Also, it appears that Rhode Island Reds do
indeed have red earlobes and browns eggs. [1]).

Weirdly, this article links to another article [2] which makes a very similar
statement, but instead uses the (valid) exception, "Lamona chickens have red
earlobes, but their eggshells are white."

[1] [http://www.raising-chickens.org/rhode-island-
reds.html](http://www.raising-chickens.org/rhode-island-reds.html)

[2]
[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141213-eggs...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141213-eggs-
chickens-insects-science-animals-sharks/)

~~~
IncRnd
Thank you!

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jackaroe78
They don't love me they just love my bucket of grain :(

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javitury
This article reminds me of classical history. For Greeks beauty was harmony
which they translated to mathematical terms. In the article they only equate
beauty and face symmetry. I wonder if chickens or other animals would be
attracted to canons of body proportions. Or even to non-natural objects based
on the golden ratio for instance.

Time to test if the renaissance Vitruvian man was all right!

~~~
pmlnr
> face symmetry

One of the most terrifying things was those symmetrialised (is this a word?)
faces of celebrities few years ago flooding the web. Completely inhuman look.

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tanakian
This might be because we all are relatives, there was a creature which first
had something like an eye, then an eye, and it's our common ancestor, so
perception of the relative species is to some extent common.

Or may be that's because there is a universal concept of beauty, as Feinman
was guessing, but I doubt it.

~~~
ShinTakuya
All an eye does is give optical data to the brain. It's the brain that
"decides" to interpret it a particular way. So it's interesting that the brain
decides similar qualities (symmetry for instance) are more "interesting".

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zephyrppt
Am I missing something or does the article not explain why pecking at a face
is interpreted as it is?

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randomdrake
Study: Chickens prefer beautiful humans.

Citation: Ghirlanda, S., Jansson, L. & Enquist, M. Hum Nat (2002) 13: 383.

Link:
[https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-002-1021-6](https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-002-1021-6)

DOI: 10.1007/s12110-002-1021-6

Abstract: We trained chickens to react to an average human female face but not
to an average male face (or vice versa). In a subsequent test, the animals
showed preferences for faces consistent with human sexual preferences
(obtained from university students). This suggests that human preferences
arise from general properties of nervous systems, rather than from face-
specific adaptations. We discuss this result in the light of current debate on
the meaning of sexual signals and suggest further tests of existing hypotheses
about the origin of sexual preferences.

~~~
QAPereo
I wonder what aspects of human beauty chickens are perceiving? Purely at a
guess, I would say symmetry of features and signs of health/reproductive
health. Given that they’re looking st faces, this seems most likely to me.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
If chickens are anything like a neural network (and they kinda have to be at
some level, perhaps a more complicated network than what we have in our
computers now, but a learning discriminator network nonetheless) - it sounds
like they would be reacting on the features which vary the most between male
and female faces.

They have trained chickens to discern between male and female faces. It would
be logical to assume that they have found features that allow them to put each
sample on that one-dimensional scale, and then use those features. It would
mean that a more "beautiful" face is the one that is most distinguished in
it's features from the face of another sex.

This would be the most naive interpretation, but as always in nature, there
can of course be layers of complexity on top of this.

~~~
tischler
I don’t think this is a good explanation. Having played with Poser [0] as a
kid a lot, my intuition is that extreme feature parameter settings usually
look rather disfigured and unattractive. The chicken brain more likely forms
two clusters [1] (one for each sex) and responds more strongly the closer the
sensory input is to either of the cluster means. Average faces tend to look
attractive, e.g. [2].

Another, related explanation might be Occam’s razor (the preference for simple
things [3]): Beautiful things are beautiful because they are simple. They
require fewer bits to be represented and brains prefer such representations.
This is a fact that possibly also explains intrinsic motivation and our
interest in art and science [4].

Another explanation might be that chickens have evolved abilities to recognize
symmetric body shapes and a uniform skin texture for their own intraspecies
visual (sexual) attraction. Sexual attraction to symmetry likely mainly exists
because asymmetry is reliable evidence that growth hormone signaling was not
only out of tune in some regions of the body (e.g. the face), but throughout
the entire system and this is the root cause of all kinds of diseases (e.g.
faster wearing joints) [5].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poser)

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/nipsfoundation/videos/1555427447881...](https://www.facebook.com/nipsfoundation/videos/1555427447881822/)

[2] [https://i.imgur.com/Xs4njxa.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Xs4njxa.jpg)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)

[4]
[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html)

[5]
[http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/oplan/documents/1999/1999-M...](http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/oplan/documents/1999/1999-MITECS.pdf)
(Entry "Section Sexual Attraction, Evolutionary Psychology of", p. 884. The
entire entry is well worth reading.)

~~~
jaclaz
Chickens are nice, and usually more intelligent than what most people think,
but the "attractive" people choice sounds a bit too much to be plausible. It
could be that they like simmetry, but not necessarily a simmetric face is also
"attractive".

Anecdotally however my father used to have one that not only recognized us
(all people in the family) from a distance, she would also act as a guard dog
if anyone else entered the court she lived in.

OT, and probably re-known, however here is the story of Mike, the headless
chicken:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken)

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lamarpye
I guess this explains it, my chickens have been refusing to go into the coop
at night. I knew I gained some weight over the holidays, but I didn't realize
how grotesque I became.

~~~
harimau777
I think you've got it backwards. You are so attractive that the chickens want
to stay outside the coop with you!

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pkaye
That video of the rooster pecking and eating the cobra to protect its flock is
amazing.

~~~
skilled
Yeah, it's quite something. I've been fortunate enough to live with a Balinese
(Indonesia) family in their family compound, and have learned quite a bit
about the ins and outs of chicken/rooster behavior.

One of the things that caught my attention is the endurance that roosters show
against one another. Not only do their protect their families, but also their
pride.

On one occasion, one of my friends smaller roosters (not sure of the breed)
would go against a rooster three times the size. And he won! The other rooster
(bigger one) was caged at that point.

It was amusing to me to watch the smaller rooster climb on top of the cage and
just sit there. The only other time you'll see that happening is when a
smaller chicken is seeking protection from another family of chickens.

Fascinating animals. I used to grow up with chickens all around my
neighborhood home but never paid enough attention to see their behavior
reflect instinct and some form of empathy.

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memebox3v
The writing in this article is very poor quality.

~~~
dang
Maybe so, but that's no reason to make HN threads poorer in quality by posting
unsubstantive comments.

~~~
memebox3v
I literally have no idea why you think this isnt a valid comment.

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randomname2
It can be politically incorrect to state that some people are more physically
attractive than others, but in the “is beauty objective” debate, this seems to
be at least a sign that beauty is not totally subjective?

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make3
Is it really politically incorrect? I'm pretty sure I read from multiple
credible sources that people correlate massively as for who they find
attractive. So it's subjective, but most people agree.

