(Photos: Peter Harrison, CBS)
Is that chicken clucking at you seductively? It's no surprise. You're hot stuff. To chickens, that matters a lot.
A study published in the journal Human Nature found that chickens preferred to look at humans who were rated as beautiful by college students:
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.
Perhaps, instead of letting a computer assess our appearance, we should have chickens serve as beauty pageant judges.
-via Marginal Revolution