Jill Helms, - The evolution of beauty

Good afternoon. I suppose if you're starting a talk about the evolution of beauty, you better start with a definition. So when I say "evolution," of course, immediately probably comes to mind the picture of Darwin, or natural selection. In its broadest sense, we can define "evolution" as a gradual development of something. Now, defining beauty - that's a much bigger challenge. In part, it's because we use the word "beauty" to describe so many different things. For example, we use it to describe a baby's face, a California landscape, an act of incredible physical prowess. All of these things are beautiful to us. How is that possible? It boils down to this: an appreciation for beauty is an essential part of our DNA. If I put it the simplest way: things that support our existence are beautiful to us. So perhaps that's best personified in the appearance of the human face. And I want to do an experiment now that was done with a kindergarten class. When the children were shown - so I want you to participate now - were shown the following pictures and asked, "what do you see?" Oh come on! This cannot be hard. What do you see? Tell me what you see. Feet! Hands! You're doing great. Ear! Get ready for medical school. When they were shown a picture of themselves, their face, they said "That's me!" And here's the truth: that the face is unlike any other organ. It's how we see ourselves and how others see us. And so you can imagine that when whether we perceive ourselves as beautiful or not, impacts our sense of well being. So I'm going to start off by telling you a little bit about the evolution of the human face. We didn't always look like this. So I want you to meet the grandparents. This handsome fellow wandered the earth seven million years ago. And what I want you to draw your attention to is a particular region of his face and it's outlined here with this triangle. So what you see is a depressed nasal bridge, upturned nostrils, and a very flat space between his nose and his upper lip. This is where evolution will have its greatest impact on our face. Here you see *** errectus - I should tell you: these are recreations from human skulls made by forensic anthropologist using computer generated technology. So this is how the faces were developed. Now you can see how evolution has shaped the bridge of the nose, now it's coming out a little. The nostrils are no longer upturned and now you see a small depression between the nose and the upper lip. It's called the philtrum. These features are what define a human face to us today. They are the essential features that alert us so we know when we're looking at a truly beautiful face like the face of this person, my husband. He figures into a lot of these talks. Here's a discovery that was made just two years ago, and the thing I find most surprising when I look at this is the same area of the face, I outlined it here, doesn't it look like the bridge of the nose - I thought this was photoshopped - the bridge of the nose is coming out and there's the hint of a philtrum. Now, this little one is not as cute as my husband but it really is true - isn't it? - that we protect that which we find beautiful. So evolution occurs on multiple timescales. I've showed you one that occurs over millennia, but evolution can also occur over, say, the period of the gestation. 266 days from the time we're an embryo until we're a baby. And here's a picture of our human face, but from a developmental biologist perspective, I've color coded the bits. They come together almost like puzzle pieces. And now, I showed this next to the face of an embryo with the same bits color coded so the middle of you forehead and the nose and that philtrum - they all arise from that blue piece in the middle. The sides of your face arise from the red pieces on the side. Your lower jaw from the yellow pieces. And this process of coming together occurs not only in a human embryo, but in embryos of all kinds of vertebrates. Here are two pictures of embryos, and I've color coded the same bits, can you tell which one is the human? I don't think so. The one on the left is a mouse. The one on the right is a human. What this tells us in no uncertain terms is that our faces are built from a common blue print that we share with all vertebrates. So I took this morph from the BBC and what I want to illustrate is how the pieces come together. They grow individually then they approximate one another and then they have to fuse together. And it's that process that is so highly synchronized, so you can imagine that with a process so precise that when there's a mistake, it can have devastating consequences. Here's the face of an adorable little girl. She has a cleft lip and palate and that happens when this red piece doesn't fuse properly with the blue piece. Now we can surgically correct this and you can see it's a wonderful result. But there's something that remains. Just in that philtrum area, there's a little scar. That little scar will have a profound impact on how her face develops. So even though the first surgery was successful, she will have to undergo, in the US at least, five to seven more corrective surgery's just to repair the defect because the face doesn't grow because of that scar tissue. At Stanford, we're working on ways to reduce the scarring and replace it with skin regeneration. Not just for little boys and girls with clefts, but also for individuals who have scars in their skin, their brains, and their heart. This leads me to my last little story that I want to tell you about. And this is evolution of beauty that occurs over a lifetime. This gentleman, his name is James Partridge. This picture was taken when he was eighteen years old on his way to University at Oxford. On his way their, he was involved in a terrible car crash. The car caught fire and he was part of it. He survived that accident, but just. For three months he was in the hospital and he wouldn't look at himself in the mirror. He said because he knew from the reaction of his visitors just how bad it was going to be. And he said when he first looked at his face, I was shocked to the core. Five years and fifty constructive surgery's later, James said I realized that it was no longer a medical issue, it was an issue of emotional and social understanding. He said, "I had to learn how to walk down the street." James founded an organization, he called it "Changing faces", and this organization in London has as its goal, developing coping strategies for people with facial and body disfigurements. I was fortunate enough to be part of the Bing overseas seminar programs sponsored by Peter and Helen Bing, and I brought sixteen students, Stanford undergrads with me, to meet James and visit Changing Faces. And there they spent a day with this remarkable man. I've got to tell you what happened to the students. So after we spent the day we had a long conversation over diner and they said it was what they described as a mind altering experience. I would say career altering, too, because of the sixteen - fourteen are in medical school, dental school, or graduate school today. They told me probably the most important thing that I heard from them about this visit. They said after seeing and being with James Partridge, "you know, he didn't have a disfigurement though." And this is where I'll end. Because the fact is: who is beautiful? There are taste makers in every culture and every society. But the person who is truly beautiful is the one that we respect, we love, and admire. A famous artist once said, "What is a face, really? Its own photo? Or is it a face as painted by such and such a painter. Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way?" "Deformations", Pablo Picasso said, "do not exist."