Time says your mother didn't love you

You know how people often describe ugly people as having "a face only a mother could love"? Well it turns out that such a statement is actually fallacious, as scientists have done a study suggesting that mothers love ugly babies less. Oh Time magazine, fill our hearts with joy...

It's never been a secret that beautiful people get more breaks than everyone else, nor that the bias may start in the nursery. An oft cited — and deeply disturbing — Israeli study once showed that 70% of abused or abandoned children had at least one apparent flaw in their appearance, which otherwise had no impact on their health or educability. McLean psychiatrist Dr. Igor Elman and postdoctoral student Rinah Yamamoto devised a study to explore that phenomenon more closely.

“Your parents beat you because you’re ugly” Yes, that’ll will work very nicely when I head down, as I do every Friday, to hurl insults at the kids in the foster home down the street. But moving on to Elman's study:

Elman and Yamamoto recruited 27 volunteers — 13 men and 14 women — and sat them at computer screens where they were randomly shown pictures of 50 healthy and attractive babies and 30 others with distinct facial irregularities such as a cleft palate or a skin condition...The men in the study were less likely than women to click off photos of unattractive babies — viewing them for the full four seconds — but clicked quite a bit to hold on to the images of the pretty ones. Their reactions were the same whether they had children of their own or not. Women, conversely, left the keyboard alone when they were looking at pretty babies but hurried away from the less attractive ones — with the results again not seeming to be influenced by whether or not they were mothers themselves. Of all the things driving that response, the most primal one may be evolution. Parents devote a lot of resources to raising a child — food, time, money, love — and those assets are usually in finite supply. All animals, humans included, are hardwired to spend wisely, devoting the most energy to the offspring most likely to yield the highest genetic payoff; healthy, beautiful offspring are the best bet of all...Still, the fact that both parents and nonparents in Elman's study reacted the same way to the pictures suggests that their responses are deeply ingrained and that they may be hard to mitigate simply by having children of their own [Source: www.time.com].

To be fair, this study doesn't suggest that mothers will love ugly babies less, so much as pointing out that people don't like staring at ugly babies. This did not require a study. Ugly babies make everyone uncomfortable. It's unnatural. We expect them to be cute and then "Holy shit! How did Kuato separate himself from your gut?!". Plus there's the pressure to pretend that the child is attractive for the sake of the parents. No one wants to know they shouldn't mate. Really just thinking about pig-faced infants makes me sick.