The science of ugliness

The blobfish, highlighted in a New York Times slide show on ugly animals, is "practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor." An accompanying article explores the underpinnings of our aesthetic recoil: [C]omparative 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. Wildlife biologists are far from immune to prejudice against the unbeautiful. [R]researchers found 1,855 papers about...