Perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), famously said: the human body is the best picture of the soul.” It is profound like everything “the Witt.” said. It indicates to me that one can judge, to some degree a “book” by its cover. Horrible evil people usually look bad. Beauty usually goes with goodness, not always, but more often than not. This is the so-called science of physiognomy, said by the liberal/multicults to be discredited.
No so, argues Edward Dutton in How to Judge People by What They Look Like, (Kindle, 2018). I intend to buy the book on Kindle as it is cheaper, but unfortunately I spent today’s budget on a dental bill (wisdom tooth extraction: now I have no “wisdom”) which sunk me, so I must rely upon the review at vdare.com, which is always accurate on these matters:
https://www.vdare.com/articles/can-we-judge-people-by-what-they-look-like-in-fact-yes
“You can’t judge people by what they look like! It’s drummed into us as children,” writes Dutton, an adjunct professor of anthropology at Oulu University in northern Finland. “It is utterly false.” But Dutton makes a provocative case for resurrecting the ancient art of physiognomy—judging character from the face. He argues it should never have been dismissed as pseudo-science. Indeed, his research goes way beyond making inferences from the face. He writes: We are evolved to judge people’s psychology from what they look like; we can accurately work out people’s personality and intelligence from how they look, and (quite often) we have to if we want to survive.
Body shape, hairiness, eye width, finger length, even how big a woman’s breasts are . . . these and much else are windows into personality, intelligence or both. The Left would have you believe that this kind of research is on the extreme fringes of the academy; relegated to low-impact journals no serious scholar would read. But, as Dutton says in his book, the relevant research has been published in top psychology journals, such as Intelligence, Personality and Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychological Science, as has his own research. This includes a study asserting that atheists tend to be less physically attractive and more likely to be left-handed than religious people and that they have objectively worse skin.
Dutton, ever the evolutionist, opines that this is because we have been selected to be religious over thousands of years of evolution. Hence, those who are atheists reflect mutant genes in the brain and people with mental mutations are more likely to have physical ones. This explains their asymmetrical features and asymmetrical brains, leading to left-handedness. Dutton’s book leaves no stone unturned and could potentially offend anyone except the archetypal Mr. Perfect. But science is not meant to care about offending people, and this is rather refreshing.”
Excellent indeed, we need more politically incorrect books like this to counter the mountains of bull dust produced by our universities. And on this I was going to finish on an anti-university point, but James Reed is possessive about this issue, so he will rampage about this in another article. I will give a more detailed account of the evidence presented in the Dutton book later in the week, after payday from my dopey school, which I do not need to judge by its appearance.