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envirosci 1a03 midterm from 2nd years?
[1/29/2011 9:46:05 PM] Monica Oribiana: Same-race facial recognition is a more prevalent human behaviour than cross-race facial identification. What selective advantage does the ability to recognize faces within one’s racial group have to have evolved more commonly than the latter?
On the basis of physical appearance, humans are more likely to identify people of their own race than outside of their race. In psychological terms, this fact is called “other-race effect” (Meissner & Brigham, 2001). To make this evolutionarily sound, the said behaviour must then have an adaptive component to have made it so prevalent. Expectedly, research shows just this; there exists a strong relationship between the ability to recognize familiar faces and kin recognition. The most common method of identifying kin is through phenotype matching using one self as his/her prototype (Alvergne et al.,2009). One advantage of kin recognition is that it allows for one to be “fit” as it provides more opportunity to increase its genetic frequency and creates alliances via exchange of altruistic actions (Cheney & Seyfarth, 2004). This suggests that the same-race facial recognition behaviour has grown to be more common as a result of the direct evolution of kin-detecting behaviours.
Last edited by m0nica : 02-13-2011 at 11:27 PM.
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