Portraits

What we consider marks of beauty or character are also, in many cases, marks of an advanced race, characteristics which signify the greatest possible difference from more primitive forms.

Looking at the profile of the face, we note the facial angle (the angle, relative to the horizon when a man is standing normally, of a line drawn from the greatest protuberance of the jaw to the most prominent part of the forehead). The average facial angle of the European race is the closest to vertical of any human race. We also see that non-human creatures have lower and lower facial angles as we make our way from the more advanced to the more primitive. Less-advanced and smaller-brained creatures (and races) have a lower, more sloping forehead (and hence less capacity in the frontal regions of the brain). More primitive races and creatures also tend to have larger teeth and larger jaws which jut forward, thus making this angle even closer to the horizontal.

The man or woman with a high or 'noble' forehead is better-looking to us than a man or woman with a steeply-sloping forehead, which we instinctively view as primitive and ugly, whether we use those words or not. The protruding jaw, or the underdeveloped chin and outsized nose common to some human groups, all give to the human profile a convexity and a snoutlike appearance, and hence are bars to beauty as we perceive it. We may not be conscious of the reason, but our instincts, our souls if you will, are telling us that the highly-evolved is beautiful and the primitive-looking is not.

We instinctively admire the advanced traits and shrink back from the primitive. -- Kevin Alfred Strom