Dr. Stefano Ghirlanda at the Zoology Institution of Stockholm University set out to disprove the mate-quality hypothesis, which states that physical attraction to others is inherited due to genes, rather than learned.
Mmm, that sounds nice and sciency, doesn't it? We're sure that's how Ghirlanda describes his work to swooning coeds, but here's the slightly less impressive reality: Ghirlanda accomplished this studious feat by gathering horny chickens and showing them photographs of people to see which ones they pecked.
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Nothing says "do me" like piercing your partner's skin.
Ghirlanda took 35 pictures of females and 35 pictures of males and mashed them together to create digitally altered average male and female faces. After cocks pecked the girl (as is their wont) and hens went after the guy, researchers then created seven different faces by morphing the average female and male ratios and showed them to the chickens again.
Elsewhere, a group of college students were asked to rate those same faces on a scale of 0 to 10, and get this: The preferences of the college students matched the chickens' a whopping 98 percent of the time!
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"You can make a deal breakers list all you want, your turn-ons are still the same as an animal that can live with no head."
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